
Evangelicals are looking for answers online. They’re finding QAnon instead - mjangle1985
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/26/1007611/how-qanon-is-targeting-evangelicals/
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soupbowl
"Evangelicals" is large group of people with a lot of different backgrounds.
As with all groups let us take this with a grain of salt. I do know a dozen
evangelicals that know about Qanon but I know far more that don't have a clue
what Qanon is.

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cvhashim
The term seems to be used as a catch all for trump’s base

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mercer
Which is not entirely fair, speaking as an ex-evangelical. Plenty of fully
dedicated evangelicals disapprove of Trump. And while a disappointing number
of them do approve, it's by no means a unified base.

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weare138
I've met both kinds of Evangelicals. I think we need to figure out a term to
differentiate between the normal Evangelicals and this strange subset of
American Evangelicalism.

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krapp
Support for Trump among Evangelicals has always remained steady at or slightly
above 80%. The "strange subset" of Evangelicals are the ones who don't support
him, the "normal" ones are the ones who do, by a wide margin.

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kohtatsu
Perhaps they meant normal relative to themselves (and presumably the reader),
not normal relative to the group.

The word "subset" did trip me up for a second though.

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spaetzleesser
It's pretty sad how underdeveloped the BS detectors of a lot of people are. I
find it hard to understand how people can fall for QAnon but then I also find
it hard to understand how anybody can be swayed by campaign speeches or
political advertising but obviously these things work.

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williamstein
The foundational principle of Christianity (in America at least, in my
experience) is _believe something with no evidence it is true_. They call it
"faith". I was raised in small town Oregon and Texas going to Christian
private schools and church for years, and that "faith" thing is absolutely
their central belief. I remember clearly once when I was 9 finding the whole
thing deeply illogical. Later in life I got a PhD in math, partly motivated by
wanting to better heal my brain from how I was raised.

I'm not at all surprised Christians fall for Trump's lies and Qanon.

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orestarod
Every religion is based on faith, in the exact way you portrayed it. Faith by
definition regards things that cannot be proven. If they could be proven, it
would be knowledge, not faith.

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squarefoot
Exactly, but I wonder how does affect the mind of a child, being raised for
years into believing something that cannot be proved and getting reprimanded
(often punished in the past) for questioning it.

Would an atheist be a better leader? In my opinion yes, but cannot prove it.
What I'm sure about is that being educated into not questioning beliefs
imposed from above makes people more easy to herd by bad leaders. I wish
someone could do some independent unbiased research in this field, then make
sure the results remain independent and unbiased even after publication.

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mercer
I was in my early twenties before I stopped believing in things that, in
hindsight, seem utterly unbelievable to me.

What I've struggled with for a long time is the realization that the person I
was, believing all of that, wasn't some brainwashed religious nutjob. I was
just as 'rational' then as I am now.

Even worse, if I'm fully honest with myself the paradigm shift wasn't
primarily a result of my own rational thinking, but significantly affected by
social issues that made it hard for me to keep sweeping various realizations
under the rug. If not for the non-rational issues, I might've still been
convinced born-again evangelical christian.

I don't think that, day to day, an atheist is a better leader than, say, a
born-again evangelical christian. In my experience the quality of a leader is
largely unrelated to the 'paradigm' they buy into. There are so many aspects
to being a 'good' leader that are entirely unrelated to the version of reality
one ascribes to.

Where I /do/ think there's a really issue, is that by and large born-again
evangelical christians are less 'anarchic' than atheists in their approach to
leadership, and that they tend to operate in environments that are more
homogenous. So it's possible that a terrible evangelical leader gets away with
it because they keep moving within a very homogenous environment.

but I'd argue that this problem is possibly just as much the case with
particular SV-style leaders. Or C-level people in a broader sense. I more than
once felt that the processes that led to certain people occupying high-level
positions in the companies I worked it were not that different from what I
experienced back when I was 'in the fold'.

Perhaps it's not the same, but I'd definitely argue that it's a blind spot for
'atheists'. The idea that somehow they are not as susceptible to the dynamics
of, among others, the Evanglicals.

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im3w1l
It's only a sidenote in the article but I'm kind of interested in the part
where facebook are taking qanon pages down. Which ones and with what
justification?

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timbit42
Wouldn't the justification be that it is their platform and they are not
required to permit free speech?

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im3w1l
Bans normally come with a reasoning beyond "I do what I want lol". I'm curious
what it might be.

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ykevinator
Qanon is just another religion gullible people believe something without proof
because it feels good.

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smitty1e
QAnon is fueled by quite a bit of hinky stuff that has gone on over decades.

There is a need to discuss restoring confidence in institutions.

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senectus1
in my experience QAnon is the political arm of 4Chan.

certainly its roots a and strength is/was 4chan based.

The fact that people who's social and even fiscal success is based in the
circles of the evangelicals, are finding themselves very comfortable in the
QAnon world just seems like a natural fit.

But it stretches much further than that. I know people that are Deep QAnon
consumers that are non religious, living in very secular countries and have
logic based (read IT), white collar type jobs.

Don't let yourself forget that gullible and willfully misled comes from all
shapes and sizes and from all sectors in society.

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mcgt
>in my experience QAnon is the political arm of 4Chan

This is a spurious claim to make. Do you have any evidence of this? 4chan and
8kun have different owners who both hate each other.

Spreading gossip about problems as big as this does nothing good.

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ffggvv
i see misinformation from BLM etc every single day on twitter. how come now
one cares about this misinformation or gets upset or writes articles about it?

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rbecker
Could you give some examples?

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ffggvv
during the riots there was some video going around where it was dark and you
could here gunshots. the caption of the video said a 12 year old unarmed girl
was killed by police. prominent people were spreading it...

it turned out later that it was a 30 year old man who had just murderer
someone and had a gun in his hand

