“There were all of these questions around their support for Donald Trump,” McCammon says. “How would they deal with the cognitive dissonance, the apparent conflict between everything Trump seemed to stand for and what the movement said it stood for?”
Those questions came to a head for McCammon on Jan. 6, 2021, when she saw people with crosses and “Jesus saves” signs participating in the insurrection on the Capitol. “That was the moment that I really wanted and needed to say something,” she says.
On Kellyanne Conway saying the Trump team had “alternative facts” about the 2017 inauguration crowd: What it reminded me of was sort of the refusal to absorb or incorporate information that contradicted the narrative that we believed in that contradicted our ideology. I thought about the approach to science that I saw growing up and the refusal to accept the overwhelming consensus around the history of the world and the age of the Earth. And there is really interesting research around this, that evangelicals report fewer factually correct answers about, for example, the history of religion in the U.S. and, there’s other polling that indicates a greater openness to conspiracy theory thinking. And I think some of it may be rooted in simply an approach to knowledge and an approach to secular knowledge in particular.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
NPR political correspondent Sarah McCammon grew up in Kansas City, Mo., in the 1980s and '90s in an evangelical Christian community that taught her to fear God and never question her faith.
Then, in high school, McCammon participated in the Senate Page Program, which meant moving away from home and living in Washington, D.C., for half a year.
One day Sina, a Muslim friend and fellow page, asked her something that shook her belief: Did she believe he was going to hell because he wasn’t Christian?
But the fundamental belief among a lot of evangelical Christians is that from the moment of conception, a child is a human life and should have the same rights as any other person.
And there is really interesting research around this, that evangelicals report fewer factually correct answers about, for example, the history of religion in the U.S. and, there’s other polling that indicates a greater openness to conspiracy theory thinking.
And it was this really cool story about these this fossil of these two ice age mammoths that had been found in western Nebraska underground, like, locked together, fighting over a female.
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