The best Church & State Religious Studies books: Reddit reviews

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Understanding what leads to political polarization is a first step in building bridges. The moral psychology research exploring the moral differences between political and religious ideologies is explored in the book <em>The Righteous Mind</em> by Jonathan Haidt, and it is often used by non-partisan citizen groups (such as Citizens' Climate Lobby) as a model for building multipartisan coalitions.

eta: links, author of book

It started even earlier than that. This is essential reading to understand how they took over and smothered the government in religion: https://www.amazon.com/One-Nation-Under-God-Corporate/dp/1501238213

Check out The Righteous Mind, a great and deep analysis of morality.

One of the takeaways I found fascinating is not that liberals and conservatives align differently on morality -- that's not really a surprise -- but that conservatives overall consider multiple different categories very important (e.g. sanctity, authority), while liberals HEAVILY consider fairness as a category that far outweighs the other moralities.

The short version is, it may feel satisfying to say that "Democrats will be fine with all that shit" and just sweep it under the rug, but I don't think that statement is true. I think the Democratic approach to leadership has plenty of its own flaws, but fairness is not one of them. I think Democrats tend to hold their own to higher expectations of fairness behavior than what we're seeing in the GOP.

(mods, please remove if my source is bad)

I like the book The Righteous Mind and its discussion of morality. One of the points it makes is that being loyal to one's tribe and obeying authority are deeply moral matters for some people - and that those are more important then being nice, or being fair. The President is the head of a group they identify with and thus they are loyal.

This is not about thinking. There have been studies showing that education can make you better at defending incorrect information.

We spread and defend incorrect information because it reinforces a pre-existing bias, often subconscious. Information that is shared virally tends to align with one of humanity's trigger points:

• Tribalism (racism, they tuk me jobs)
• Authority (support for police, borders, force)
• Purity ("dirty" immigrants, "bleeding from her whatever")
• Sexual dominance ("I just didn't like Hillary", "Pelosi is a bitch")
• Fairness ("Republicans are hypocrites", welfare queen myths)
• Loyalty (ok for my guy to break the law)

When we focus on intelligence, we are demonstrating the Democratic bias toward rules. Education = competence = success. The Republican brain wants to reward personal exceptionalism. "I succeeded, not because of how hard I worked, but because of who I am."

If we don't understand these triggers, we will continue to be manipulated by them.

Edit: thanks very much to my anonymous gilder, but the ideas are cribbed from Jonathan Haidt's work. Highly recommend you check out either his book or his TED talk.

https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind

https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777/ref=asc_df_0307455777/

You might be interested in The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt which has to do with the moral psychology of the left and right.

The main gist of the book is that people have several different hard wired foundations for morality... things that we are predisposed by human psychology to see as good vs. evil. He tentatively identified five of them as: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation (and he later added another: Liberty/Oppression). He ran a variety of studies to get people to rank how important each of these foundations were to them and discovered that people on the left prioritized Care/Harm over all others (Fairness/Cheating was also important to leftists but less so... the other three were not important at all). The right surprisingly was almost as compassionate ranking Care/Harm only slightly lower than the left did but they ranked all others much higher to the point where all five (and later six) moral foundations are ranked roughly equally in the right wing world view. In instances where left and right disagree there is almost always one or more of the other moral foundations which the right is balancing against compassion and which the left is disregarding as unimportant.

The book is of course much more involved that that discussing where and how he came up with his thesis, the experiments he did and his speculation about the social utility of each of the moral foundations and why they appear to be hard-wired in our heads and changes he made to his theory along the way. It's definitely worth reading.

I mean, over 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from that land, with over 500 villages razed to the ground, many of them completely massacred. It's not really a radical thing to want your land back.

Read The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe. Its quite an eye opener. Most Palestinians were actually ethnically cleansed before the war started, so saying its the arab countries fault is completely inaccurate. https://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553

Hey, no problem: Here's a couple I really enjoyed that helped me learn how to really articulate what I think and understand what others were saying about politics in those sorts of discussions:

1. The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. This contrasts how liberals and conservatives think about politics in a way that I think makes sense of what can often be really frustrating arguments.
2. Justice by Michael Sandel. This walks you through different ways you can reason about politics so that you can develop sharper and more consistent opinions.

It's incredibly rare for people to be reasonable nowadays, especially on the internet.

Being reasonable and measured makes it very difficult to feel/signal virtuous and self-righteous and better than anyone else - and people do seek that sort of reward, especially in increasingly emotional societies. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Prof. Jonathan Haidt addresses this and why that addictive feeling of self-righteousness often drives people to zealotry and extreme positions - they want to be seen as "pure" and "uncompromising". It used to be typical adolescent/teenager behaviour but it's becoming increasingly generalized in adults.

> because we don’t have a mass fascist movement in the US.

Eh... The Evangelical movement lets be real is basically in every way a Fascist movement cloaked in a very thin mask of theology. Reaction of the middle classes, worshipping the nation as god, worshipping Capitalism, hero narratives and hero idol worship, Class collaboration, extreme reaction against "Degeneracy", very thinly veiled white supremacy. They don't call themselves Fascists, but they're basically a Fascist movement.

Religion probably served a really important evolutionary function, as well, by ensuring social cohesion around a shared set of beliefs and identities, allowing for tight group bonding which gave some groups a selective advantage. Of course, in today's world this can actually become harmful- particularly when the shared beliefs require a suspension of the sort of objective and reasoned thinking necessary to function in this modern society, or when they inform or motivate antisocial economic or political activities- but I'm not sure it's fair to say that humanity would be better off without it. Maybe on net today, but it's also possible that we may have relied on it in our evolutionary past.

Source, a wonderful book which can really aid in understanding those with whom our worldviews disagree.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307455777/

> In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Qyestionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

> The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or ”Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen to the Reagan [i.e., conservative] narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people, and gay people. He’s more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex lives.

I'd recommend the recent book by Edward Feser and Joseph Bessette, By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed, a historical and philosophical defense of the traditional Catholic view on capital punishment.

> If we all just fuck off to do our own thing and leave idiotic and/or dangerous claims undisputed, shit's going to hit the fan even sooner and harder.

I have a book recommendation for you:

THE RIGHTEOUS MIND by Jonathan Haidt

https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777/

This image gives sort of the essential idea of what has happened. I'd advise the book "the ethnic cleansing of Palestine" by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe to start understanding the history.

> But Muslims represent only 2% of our country so I am opposed to the specific attention that one group gets, when I personally feel more harmful effect from much larger groups that resist negative attention.

I agree, I despise Islam as an ideology, but I think American Evangelicals are actually a bigger threat to the world. Evangelicals are a fucking deathcult that basically currently controls the worlds most powerful nuclear arsenal, the worlds largest economy and military. I also believe that the American Evangelical movement is largely a Fascist movement that cloaks itself under theism.. If it wasn't for Evangelicals as well, we likely would not be Iraq or Afghanistan today or at all.

That being said, It still drives me up the wall the amount of handwringing leftists do to defend Islam and the absolute eggshells you have to walk on when discussing Islam in leftists spaces.

>Is it just a knee jerk reaction to the right?

Part third worldist orientalism, part reaction to the fact that you rarely hear criticisms of Islam done in good faith because it's mostly just right wing dogwhistles.

That's an acceptable view, but not one that is consistent with the tradition of the Catholic Church on the subject. Check out this book for more information:

https://www.amazon.com/Man-Shall-His-Blood-Shed/dp/1621641260

He also has a website with many articles written on the subject that you can read for free.

If someone came into your house and told you that their God told them that your house is now theirs, everyone in this sub would take up arms to protect themselves and their property. But since the conflict is targeted towards Muslims, everyone in this sub (and this political party) turns a blind eye.

What if it was Christian Palestinians? Who side would you be on? It’s irrelevant since Israel already killed all the Christians in Palestine in the 1940s......

If you want to educate yourself, here’s a book written by a former Israeli official, former Zionist about what happened in Palestine and Israel during the 1940s https://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Palestine-Ilan-Pappe/dp/1851685553

If you don’t believe that guy, you might believe the survivors of the USS Liberty, which was attacked by unmarked Israeli planes in 1967. They were threatened with death and treason charges to stay quiet on the matter until Lyndon Johnson died. Lyndon Johnson, during the incident, called off the reinforcements while the attack carried on for another 3 hours. But don’t worry, Israel apologized for killing 34 of our soldiers, saying it was an accident. https://www.amazon.com/Remember-Liberty-Almost-Sunk-Treason/dp/1634241088

Or just stay uninformed and blindly support your government, it’s your choice.

I recently read the book "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt. He's a social psychologist and tries to answer your question: how can a rational individual vote conservative, when that vote seems to go against one's self-interest? He answers the question by analyzing people's morality systems, and goes on to say that people don't vote based on rationality (active thinking), but based on morality (feelings). The book is very well written and meticulously built up -- I strongly recommend giving it a read! Amazon link here

I feel like reciting the usual tropes about viewing 'others' as a threat rather than extended family, hierarchy & authority vs individual expression, resistance to change & so on is unhelpful at this point. Are you looking for something in a particular direction? Jonathan Haidt wrote the book on this, although I tend to get dragged if I bring him up around liberals.

Since everyone is saying everyone else is wrong, both you and /u/TheBlackBear are wrong (well, sort of). They (the party, not necessarily Republican voters) only care about two core things:

1. Making the rich richer.
2. Pushing white evangelical Christian nationalism.

Not everyone in the party cares equally about these two things, but those are the two core drivers that the modern Republican party are built upon. Everything else-- including all the things that /u/TheBlackBear refers to, as well as the racism, homophobia, and misogyny-- follow from those core ideals.

I'm just reading the book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation and it really does a good job of tracing both the history of white evangelical Christian nationalism and shows the effect that they have had and are having on our national policies. Their ultimate goal is to make the US a Christian theocracy. Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States is another good book on the subject.

While nothing these two books cover started with Trump (Jesus and John Wayne traces it's roots back to the Eisenhower administration), it's hard to truly understand the Trump presidency without understanding these forces. It's really far more terrifying then it even appears on the surface.

I haven’t been vague.

“Right side of history” is the gaping hole that lets bias flood into the room. Everyone can be convinced god is on their side, just as everyone can be convinced they are on the right side history..

FYI, another sign or bias is when someone is intent on treating their collaborators as opponents.

For much more on this cancer in American society, look up Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has been covering this for decades now. He's even written a book on the subject;

https://www.amazon.com/American-Fascists-Christian-Right-America/dp/0743284461

He's written many other books on the failing state of America, as well. He's not an optimist but he has a knack for seeing his predictions become fact.

Because the whole country was taken away from them in a series of atrocities and evictions in the past 70 years.

Just imagine a house. If the house is yours and I slaughtered your family and evicted you. You would want the whole house back, not parts of it, right? Same thing with Palestine.

Hope that helps 🙃

If you wish to understand more about atrocities and evictions, then see https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1851685553/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_SEH1J4B822XQH1ZYMCJR

Ben Shapiro saying rap isn't music

I don't have a twitter but in his twitter, you can see him defending multiple times West x Muslim rethoric and here is a link to his book on &quot;how reason and moral purpose made the west great&quot;

Some one should tell conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro that he used a 'commie phrase' for the title of this book.

Yes. We had to lock it because the conservative shitstains at the prolife community are were coming in droves to comment stupid shit. Every one of them that comments is now directly paying for abortions.

Typical right wing dirtbags. They coopt the language of the progressive left (they even reference anti-speciesism) but it is all code for literal Christian Fascism. If they aren't Christian Fascists they are low-thought Libertarians. Neither are allowed to post here and will be banned.

Some make headlines for obvious reasons but come on, most?

I don't doubt that some homophobes are closeted, but most is an exaggeration.

Read &quot;The Righteous Mind&quot;. Our perceptions of right and wrong frequently stem from our upbringing, and they rarely make sense.

Conservative lurker here: Assume conservatives are reasonable people with rational reasons for believing the things they believe. Listen to those reasons and debate them from there. Don't assume your ideas are self-evidently true and that only people who are stupid or have bad motives can disagree.

Also realize that a lot of political debate is driven by disagreements that go deeper than policy to moral values or beliefs about human nature. Disagreements over such fundamental premises bubble up into disagreements about particular policies but can't be resolved at that level because the real disagreement is about something deeper.

I recently read Jesus and John Wayne and it brought all kinds of flashbacks from growing up in Baptist churches.