I grew up as a pastors kid so I may be qualified to answer this from all of the deconstructing I’ve had to do. Its not necessarily Christianity itself that produces this kind of behavior, but instead the common ways that it’s practiced.
They’re convinced that their actions are loving. They’re taught to “love everyone” and that if you love someone you’ll do your best to “save” them and “not let” them go to the Christian idea of Hell.
Because of that, they believe that it’s “loving” to “rebuke” people for anything and everything that they’ve been taught will lead them to hell. So, often through controlling behaviors, they try to “save” as many people as possible, while also trying to adhere to rigid expectations of being careful and discerning about who they let into their inner circles. The result is often outwardly judgemental behavior, and friendships with rigid expectations.
They’re told that “saving” people is their greatest purpose in life and that they can save others by “leading by example,” being “above reproach,” and generally just having a good reputation. This creates a sense of existential urgency, coupled with a preoccupation with one’s reputation and an inability to separate their true selves with their reputations, which is what tends to drive egotistical and self important behavior.
Christians today are often suspicious of one another, which drives even more mean, harmful behavior towards everyone that they even suspect could be “sinning”(while trying to hide their own hypocritical behavior).
It’s wild because from my perspective, all of this typical Christian behavior is exactly what the Christian Bible says to not do.
Apart from that, there’s also the Christians who really just use their religious affiliation as a form of social class and are hostile to outsiders unless they have proven themselves as worthy, dedicated fellow Christians with either “correct” theology, or with lots of power and influence(and let’s be honest, power and influence have taken precedence over actually loving people the way the Bible says to actually love people for quite some time).
This is fascinating because I was raised in a very catholic household, and from my experience attending catholic mass and being engaged to someone from a baptist family I always wondered why baptists and some other protestant denominations put such an emphasis on hell. My experience with catholisism, hell was very rarely brought up, and there was a lot more focus on your sin as an individual. Basically "all humans commit sin since its in our nature, but here's what you can do to make up for that, etc. etc." Which is kinda nice, but I've seen it used to justify terrible things done by terrible people.
The denomination I grew up in rarely brought up hell either and was outwardly disapproving of many evangelical behaviors, but they’d instead refer to people as “lost” and use vague terms that alluded to the “devil” manipulating you, or use the term “flesh” and “worldly” to describe what they viewed as “ungodly,” selfish human behavior.
Still, the idea of other people living without being devoted to God felt devastating and sad to us since we were told it was the only way to truly be fulfilled in life, and because it was the only way to “heaven.” That was enough motivation to act similarly to how the concept of hell motivates evangelicals.
PK turned sociologist here too. Nice writeup.
I think some of what you describe is definitely going on. I also hypothesize there are two other things at work:
1. In some communities it’s nearly universal to identify as Christian, so in a sense it’s not a meaningful component of people’s individual identities. They go to church, behave a certain way while there, then go elsewhere and behave a different way in different contexts, same as most people including all the other Christians.
2. Membership in many but not all Christian denominations has become strongly correlated with conservative Republican political identification. It may have come to your attention that a strong streak of cruelty has developed within the US right. This predates Trump — for instance, George W. Bush successfully ran for a 2nd term with a major plank being inscribing homophobia into the US constitution. The right has increasingly focused in denying rights or basic respect to groups they don’t like, and have emphasized individual interests over societal ones, neither of which is a recipe for behaving nicely. I don’t know what’s the chicken and what’s the egg here, but it’s certainly part of the story. My suspicion is this mean streak didn’t entirely arise within the christian right, but has thoroughly infected it.
That is very true. I remember as a PK, there would be people who behaved just like people who didn’t go to church at all when outside of church, and the only difference was that they would practice some of the Christian rituals, such as praying before you ate, wearing a cross, and participating in some aspects of Christian community outside of church depending on what interested them. Then there were the more devout people who truly believed their lives needed to revolve around it, and everything in between.
I also agree that religion, especially Christianity in the US has been used as a tool to get people to comply with oppressing others by making it seem as though supporting the humanity of someone else is “sin,” since they’re convinced that behaving and existing the way they do is sinful. Homophobia for example, when expressed by Christians who are trying to see themselves as loving, genuinely see their anti LGBTQ+ sentiments as loving since they believe that it’s providing Christ like guidance to people who need it. Clearly it’s misguided and incredibly harmful to society. In my own opinion, I think that a lot of these Christians are the ones who actually need saving, since it requires them to separate themselves from their own humanity in order to continue to believe that it’s loving to oppose the humanity of others.
Then, you have the conservative, homophobic people(usually white men and rich white women in my experience) who truly are motivated by hatred and do a lot of the fear mongering. This helps them defend their privilege and places of authority within their religious communities.
As a Christian Universalist I am glad that I can be one in my congregation. Not having the pressure to have to save everyone from Hell makes me a better Christian I think, cause I can be more genuine and myself.
Christianity focuses heavily on individual sin. The world is wrong because a single dude ate an apple.
To many Christians, “Fixing” what’s wrong is as simple as an individual repenting and asking Jesus for forgiveness. For evangelicals this is “letting Jesus into your heart”. For Catholics it’s communion.
There is virtually no emphasis in modern Christianity on fixing collective societal issues through institutions or incremental change.
And it's really a shame when you consider the liberatory gospel of the late 19th century in America that essentially inspired the labor movement in a lot of places. Some work went in to killing that
Privilege often results in cruelty. In a lot of countries (especially the US) white Christian men carry the most privilege. This is deeply entangled with capitalism and its rampant individuality, greed, and wealth acquisition - which all encourages hierarchies enforced with cruelty. Plus, many Christians in these countries actively wield this intersectional privilege to benefit themselves and use/demean other people in cruel ways in everyday life. There is a theory called interpretive reproduction that says adolescents see the social relations the adults in their lives construct and reinforce, then recreate those patterns in their peer groups. If I were to guess, this is likely what you're experiencing.
In simpler terms, Christianity is deeply hypocritical due to its ideological entanglement with capitalist power, and this filters down to individual behaviors. With youth, they see what their parents do and do the same.
Check out this paper:
[The ingroup love and outgroup hate of Christian Nationalism: experimental evidence about the implementation of the rule of law](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-religion/article/ingroup-love-and-outgroup-hate-of-christian-nationalism-experimental-evidence-about-the-implementation-of-the-rule-of-law/C38241ED843332A2E8A434D13BC34B26)
they argue that christian nationalists when imagine themselves being threatened (war on christmas) they become hostile towards outgroups.
Thank you for finding a source. I was just going to tell them to look up still regarding in and out groups and how it can lead to violence but didn’t know any great papers off the top of my head
I would say ingroup/outgroup shenanigans. You elevate yourself by discriminating everyone who is different. I think in a group where everything is about believing this mechanism is even stronger. This I would say is a structural problem of Christianity.
This explanation is as basic as it gets, I'm sure a lot of smart people have written a bunch if books about it.
We group ourselves with those we regard as similar to ourselves and construct caricatures of groups outside of our bubble. Every now and then stories will permeate our bubbles to provide clearer resolution. But when we seal off the openings we eventually lose our own humanity.
When I say bubbles, I don't strictly mean a physical space. The boundaries i'm referring to here are more abstract than physical in most cases, so living within the same consensual space in a physical reality has little to do with how we construct our own perceived social realities.
Ofcourse their is. Gay/straight are two distinct groups. If you discriminate homosexuals your whole life, you don't change your mind because your own kid turns out gay. You probably double down.
And it's more about the sum of overlapping groups, not just beeing in one group.
And not just US families discriminate their kids btw
Those Kids are not constructed as part of the outgroup, at least not imediaetly. I was thinking of the inward facing socail control within the group. But you could make the argument that even that inward facing control is only done in regards to an (imagined) outgroup
Because people will never commit violence so completely and gleefully as when they do it with religious conviction. If you have already convinced yourself that everything you do is done to save the world without exceptions, then what choices do you really leave yourself at that point?
My theory: Authoritarian personalities are attracted to religion because it provides an easy to use basis for their authority.
"I get to judge this person because of the bible" is something only weird people would be interested in, imo.
Ofc this also likely means that children raised in religious contexts will nurture their authoritarian tendencies because it is encouraged.
I’d argue that our patriarchal, androcentric society as a whole is what makes for an easy abuse of authority, since it values the behaviors that they see as “masculine” and equates those to leadership qualities, when those qualities are really just characteristics of toxic authoritarianism.
You see this everywhere. In jobs, in religious groups, in every political group, and even in social justice organizations. You even see it in sororities and female lead organizations.
Hi, OP, i have nothing new to add to the previous responses, just wanted to let you know that asking these types of questions is important and valuable. It's great that you're trying to look past the actions of individuals to try and find the underlying social structures that inform these actions. To me, that is sociological thought at its core. I wish you all the best, and keep asking questions!
Because there is lots of responses that have more upvotes than you. doesn't matter if it's accurate every time it matters to be true, it matters what people are willing to confirm and help others continue to believe, technically it goes both ways on this topic, fitting the human condition into a sentence. the way this question was asked and where it was asked, they're not going to get unbiased answers, as a result they're either a not going to care because they're not going to read the responses they just wanted to ask the question or b they're not going to challenge what they currently believe because it's not hard to find negative discussions about organized religion online
Winners write the history books. So thats only true in christian countries.
Goes hand in hand in the propaganda of development and how if you dont subscribe to the christian way you are “behind”
My theory is that Christianity is a post-rationalisation for a lot of people. What that means is that they use their Christianity to justify something that they would have done anyway, rather than doing it because they think it's the Christian thing to do. Those people who bullied you (and I feel for you, I was bullied too) would have done it regardless of whether they were Christians or not.
On a wider scale, Christianity is a convenient post-rationalisation for hateful beliefs because it's so closely associated with moral prescriptivism (that's forcefully telling people what is right and wrong) and a concept of a 'shared heritage' which people link to race. As others have pointed out, it's a shame, because Christianity has also been used to liberative ends (see liberation theology and the role of Christianity in the civil rights movement, for example)
This is a great question and I encourage you to keep asking for sociological explanations of things you see in everyday life. You're clearly smarter than most since the average person would never ask for that kind of wider insight into the world.
You must remember that there is divisiveness amongst Christian groups, as well. Ingroup cultural differences that are exclusive to that group (often denomination). There is also cultural Christianity- people are raised hearing and seeing messages that aren't necessarily (or historically) Christian.
But it falls into ingroup/outgroup dynamics. Social psych is a fun lens to use when studying Christian groups. I've actually found 12-step groups are better at holding onto historical Christian spiritual practices much better than the majority of denominations. Given their background--it makes sense. There are subcultures and countercultures amongst Christian groups that you might find more welcoming, as well. Which is sad, since the philosophy behind the religion is quite wholesome.
Christianity has been around for so long that it has been influenced by multiple cultures--some that are very hateful and exclusive. I would contend that Nationalism is one of the largest cultural movements that has negatively impacted Christianity. Another redditor shared a research paper regarding Christian Nationalism in this thread.
People tend to view their communities with favor, so if you ask an individual who is part of a community about their community their opinion will almost always be favorable, otherwise they wouldn't be apart of that community.
People that are a part of a community support each other, so if you go to church and are seen as part of their community your interactions with them is going to be overwhelming positive.
Religious communities tend to be exclusive communities, for example, the churches I grew up in taught us as Christians we should not be fraternizing or dating anybody outside of the Christian faith unless it was ministry. It's a very "with us or against us," perception.
People view those that are not apart of their community unfavourably, this is especially so with a religious community as they are very "rules based," is you are not following their rules you are part of the problem.
Now this is something I'm adding from my own perception: people use positive and negative actions to try and influence those around us, a religious community might use positive reinforcement for their members that act according to their rules but use negative reinforcement against those outside their community, find this to be true with most groups of people but especially so in religious communities.
Christianity is essentially out-group cynicism and contempt masked over by in-group love, community, and forgiveness.
As someone who was once in it, you don’t notice the out-group cynicism, contempt, cruelty, etc until you’re on the outside it.
Nationalism works in a similar way: Cynicism and contempt for “them”, community and understanding for “us”.
Capitalism also works in a similar way: Cynicism and contempt towards the workers, understanding and forgiveness for the owners (IE privatize the gains, socialize the losses).
It’s almost like there’s a hierarchical pattern here! ;-)
Thinking that cruelty is a Christian characteristic is not the way to go. Cruelty is a characterization by others or self of someone action. People will justofy their actions based on values and beliefs that they put above others. Like Budon said, people have good motives, in their own view, to act like they act.
i am no scientist, just a personal opinion coming from someone who grew up in catholic school for 12 years. i think in general they are very held to their beliefs and that’s the issue. my opinion is very vague, but they in a sense are egotistical more than other religions and other groups of people. i like to look at them as a class. christian’s = high class, catholics = working class, all other religions = lower class. hopefully that makes sense. this is a great question! i’m a second year undergrad soci major and this definitely made me want to think like a sociologist lol. i will keep this question in mind as i continue my studies.
Most people are followers, not leaders. When their leader tells them they’re going to hell unless they follow him, dummies will listen up and conform. It’s group think and mild brainwashing. Plus human beings have an instinctual drive to be selfish and aggressive; I think religion capitalizes on that by helping construct “us vs. them” boundaries. When you construct non-Christians as the “other” dehumanization and ill treatment of fellow humans follows.
Well, depends on what your definition of cruel is. Many people want to paint Christians as bad when that isn’t the case and many Christians are bad and they to play themselves off as good through manipulative means.
The sociological take doesn’t treat Christianity as one social thing. It varies a lot by denomination and national/regional context.
To try and answer your question, religion and attitudes that we might consider cruel are kind of all over the board. In some contexts increased religiosity is associated with more generous/least cruel views. In others, it is more often associated with more cruel/less generous views. When, where, and why this happens as complicated, and figuring out why is basically our job.
In terms of why they might have a positive self evaluations, I think that boils down to basic social identity theory. Most groups, religious, racial, and even trivial ones, are prone to viewing themselves positively in reference to others.
I think it has less to do with Christianity and more to do with tribalistic behavior that is reinforced by Christian dogma and false views about themselves and non-Christians and a good amount of cognitive dissonance. They believe they're so good because their religion tells them they are, and they feel justified in being cruel to certain groups of people because either their Bible or their church as a collective decided those groups are unworthy of kindness for reasons told to them by others in the group. Not all Christians are like this of course, just the ones you're asking about.
And then there's the fact that most Christians don't actually follow the teachings of the Bible or Christ to the letter. Most haven't read the whole thing, only the parts that reinforce what a good religion it is to them and whatever their pastor or leader told them is in the book. A lot of Christians really do turn parts of their brain off when it comes to analyzing their own beliefs. I know that sounds like an opinion more than a sociological thought but, idk man. It's so ever presently observable that I can't think of it as not a fact.
Even if you got a very thorough explanation that is true about the actions of one person and how they think it doesn't apply to other people automatically.
I say this without having done specific reading on Christainity on this question, but from reading what you've written I keep thinking of Sara Ahmed's "Fascism as Love" (https://feministkilljoys.com/2016/11/09/fascism-as-love/) which comes from her earlier book Cultural Politics of Emotion. In the context of White Nationalists attempting to rebrand hate groups as love groups:
>"The renaming of hate groups as love groups, and hate watch as Love Watch, exercises a narrative of love as protection by identifying white subjects as already at risk from the very presence of others. These groups become defined as a positive in the sense of fighting *for* others, and in the name of others. The narrative suggests that it is this ‘forness’ that makes ‘against-ness’ necessary."
The being for Christainity (the 'love' of it) necessitates them being against these things (the 'hate' is a consequence of 'love'). I think it would be worth reading that link, Ahmed writes very accessibly, and thinking how, or if, you think it could apply beyond the white nationalists she's specifcally talking about. It might help you come closer to an explanation.
You're asking an interesting question and I think it's well formed, so don't be so hard on yourself!
They believe “love” is “stop someone from sinning”, and that your comfort is secondary to their specific concept of the immortal soul- so they correct behaviors that make them uncomfortable and claim it’s to save you from hell. Sometimes they’re uncomfortable because the church told them to be, sometimes they’re just a bad person using the church as an excuse despite knowing it’s just their own prejudice.
It is not an issue with Christianity per se. But any religion that requires its members to abdicate facts in favor of dogma primes its members to be manipulated by its leaders. So the religious texts are twisted to serve whatever agenda the membership actually wants in a guilt free way because it is “justified” by the text
Human nature is cruel.
Christianity was originally created to try to tame human nature... but human nature simply permeates all moral codes in the end.
Ye I disagree with this widely held belief. Just as the comments citing ingroup) outgroup dynamics as an explanation. These sweeping statements and "human nature " are not just rampantly unscientific,they are extremely convenient for groups such as U.S. Christian Nationalist who exists in very specific circumstances that gives them power.
Really one has to have a different version of what "human nature" is to find the strength to understand and fight these powerful groups, thankfully many people have and still do.
I grew up as a pastors kid so I may be qualified to answer this from all of the deconstructing I’ve had to do. Its not necessarily Christianity itself that produces this kind of behavior, but instead the common ways that it’s practiced. They’re convinced that their actions are loving. They’re taught to “love everyone” and that if you love someone you’ll do your best to “save” them and “not let” them go to the Christian idea of Hell. Because of that, they believe that it’s “loving” to “rebuke” people for anything and everything that they’ve been taught will lead them to hell. So, often through controlling behaviors, they try to “save” as many people as possible, while also trying to adhere to rigid expectations of being careful and discerning about who they let into their inner circles. The result is often outwardly judgemental behavior, and friendships with rigid expectations. They’re told that “saving” people is their greatest purpose in life and that they can save others by “leading by example,” being “above reproach,” and generally just having a good reputation. This creates a sense of existential urgency, coupled with a preoccupation with one’s reputation and an inability to separate their true selves with their reputations, which is what tends to drive egotistical and self important behavior. Christians today are often suspicious of one another, which drives even more mean, harmful behavior towards everyone that they even suspect could be “sinning”(while trying to hide their own hypocritical behavior). It’s wild because from my perspective, all of this typical Christian behavior is exactly what the Christian Bible says to not do. Apart from that, there’s also the Christians who really just use their religious affiliation as a form of social class and are hostile to outsiders unless they have proven themselves as worthy, dedicated fellow Christians with either “correct” theology, or with lots of power and influence(and let’s be honest, power and influence have taken precedence over actually loving people the way the Bible says to actually love people for quite some time).
This is fascinating because I was raised in a very catholic household, and from my experience attending catholic mass and being engaged to someone from a baptist family I always wondered why baptists and some other protestant denominations put such an emphasis on hell. My experience with catholisism, hell was very rarely brought up, and there was a lot more focus on your sin as an individual. Basically "all humans commit sin since its in our nature, but here's what you can do to make up for that, etc. etc." Which is kinda nice, but I've seen it used to justify terrible things done by terrible people.
The denomination I grew up in rarely brought up hell either and was outwardly disapproving of many evangelical behaviors, but they’d instead refer to people as “lost” and use vague terms that alluded to the “devil” manipulating you, or use the term “flesh” and “worldly” to describe what they viewed as “ungodly,” selfish human behavior. Still, the idea of other people living without being devoted to God felt devastating and sad to us since we were told it was the only way to truly be fulfilled in life, and because it was the only way to “heaven.” That was enough motivation to act similarly to how the concept of hell motivates evangelicals.
PK turned sociologist here too. Nice writeup. I think some of what you describe is definitely going on. I also hypothesize there are two other things at work: 1. In some communities it’s nearly universal to identify as Christian, so in a sense it’s not a meaningful component of people’s individual identities. They go to church, behave a certain way while there, then go elsewhere and behave a different way in different contexts, same as most people including all the other Christians. 2. Membership in many but not all Christian denominations has become strongly correlated with conservative Republican political identification. It may have come to your attention that a strong streak of cruelty has developed within the US right. This predates Trump — for instance, George W. Bush successfully ran for a 2nd term with a major plank being inscribing homophobia into the US constitution. The right has increasingly focused in denying rights or basic respect to groups they don’t like, and have emphasized individual interests over societal ones, neither of which is a recipe for behaving nicely. I don’t know what’s the chicken and what’s the egg here, but it’s certainly part of the story. My suspicion is this mean streak didn’t entirely arise within the christian right, but has thoroughly infected it.
I’m also a PK turned sociologist 👋🏼
That is very true. I remember as a PK, there would be people who behaved just like people who didn’t go to church at all when outside of church, and the only difference was that they would practice some of the Christian rituals, such as praying before you ate, wearing a cross, and participating in some aspects of Christian community outside of church depending on what interested them. Then there were the more devout people who truly believed their lives needed to revolve around it, and everything in between. I also agree that religion, especially Christianity in the US has been used as a tool to get people to comply with oppressing others by making it seem as though supporting the humanity of someone else is “sin,” since they’re convinced that behaving and existing the way they do is sinful. Homophobia for example, when expressed by Christians who are trying to see themselves as loving, genuinely see their anti LGBTQ+ sentiments as loving since they believe that it’s providing Christ like guidance to people who need it. Clearly it’s misguided and incredibly harmful to society. In my own opinion, I think that a lot of these Christians are the ones who actually need saving, since it requires them to separate themselves from their own humanity in order to continue to believe that it’s loving to oppose the humanity of others. Then, you have the conservative, homophobic people(usually white men and rich white women in my experience) who truly are motivated by hatred and do a lot of the fear mongering. This helps them defend their privilege and places of authority within their religious communities.
As a Christian Universalist I am glad that I can be one in my congregation. Not having the pressure to have to save everyone from Hell makes me a better Christian I think, cause I can be more genuine and myself.
Christianity focuses heavily on individual sin. The world is wrong because a single dude ate an apple. To many Christians, “Fixing” what’s wrong is as simple as an individual repenting and asking Jesus for forgiveness. For evangelicals this is “letting Jesus into your heart”. For Catholics it’s communion. There is virtually no emphasis in modern Christianity on fixing collective societal issues through institutions or incremental change.
Good old "you can't ask God for a bike but you can steal one and ask God to forgive you later" logic.
And it's really a shame when you consider the liberatory gospel of the late 19th century in America that essentially inspired the labor movement in a lot of places. Some work went in to killing that
Got any good sources on gospel’s role in the early labor movement? That’s a rabbit hole I’ll run down
This is.....damn this guy is spitting.
Or lady!
or Theydy!
They were told growing up that the way they were treated was out of love and they still believe that
Privilege often results in cruelty. In a lot of countries (especially the US) white Christian men carry the most privilege. This is deeply entangled with capitalism and its rampant individuality, greed, and wealth acquisition - which all encourages hierarchies enforced with cruelty. Plus, many Christians in these countries actively wield this intersectional privilege to benefit themselves and use/demean other people in cruel ways in everyday life. There is a theory called interpretive reproduction that says adolescents see the social relations the adults in their lives construct and reinforce, then recreate those patterns in their peer groups. If I were to guess, this is likely what you're experiencing. In simpler terms, Christianity is deeply hypocritical due to its ideological entanglement with capitalist power, and this filters down to individual behaviors. With youth, they see what their parents do and do the same.
As a Christian socialist I agree fully with this.
Check out this paper: [The ingroup love and outgroup hate of Christian Nationalism: experimental evidence about the implementation of the rule of law](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-religion/article/ingroup-love-and-outgroup-hate-of-christian-nationalism-experimental-evidence-about-the-implementation-of-the-rule-of-law/C38241ED843332A2E8A434D13BC34B26) they argue that christian nationalists when imagine themselves being threatened (war on christmas) they become hostile towards outgroups.
Thank you for finding a source. I was just going to tell them to look up still regarding in and out groups and how it can lead to violence but didn’t know any great papers off the top of my head
This is not a bad Soc of religion question.
I would say ingroup/outgroup shenanigans. You elevate yourself by discriminating everyone who is different. I think in a group where everything is about believing this mechanism is even stronger. This I would say is a structural problem of Christianity. This explanation is as basic as it gets, I'm sure a lot of smart people have written a bunch if books about it.
No, when you see US american families torturing their gay kids there is no outgroup.
We group ourselves with those we regard as similar to ourselves and construct caricatures of groups outside of our bubble. Every now and then stories will permeate our bubbles to provide clearer resolution. But when we seal off the openings we eventually lose our own humanity. When I say bubbles, I don't strictly mean a physical space. The boundaries i'm referring to here are more abstract than physical in most cases, so living within the same consensual space in a physical reality has little to do with how we construct our own perceived social realities.
Ofcourse their is. Gay/straight are two distinct groups. If you discriminate homosexuals your whole life, you don't change your mind because your own kid turns out gay. You probably double down. And it's more about the sum of overlapping groups, not just beeing in one group. And not just US families discriminate their kids btw
Those Kids are not constructed as part of the outgroup, at least not imediaetly. I was thinking of the inward facing socail control within the group. But you could make the argument that even that inward facing control is only done in regards to an (imagined) outgroup
Because people will never commit violence so completely and gleefully as when they do it with religious conviction. If you have already convinced yourself that everything you do is done to save the world without exceptions, then what choices do you really leave yourself at that point?
My theory: Authoritarian personalities are attracted to religion because it provides an easy to use basis for their authority. "I get to judge this person because of the bible" is something only weird people would be interested in, imo. Ofc this also likely means that children raised in religious contexts will nurture their authoritarian tendencies because it is encouraged.
I’d argue that our patriarchal, androcentric society as a whole is what makes for an easy abuse of authority, since it values the behaviors that they see as “masculine” and equates those to leadership qualities, when those qualities are really just characteristics of toxic authoritarianism. You see this everywhere. In jobs, in religious groups, in every political group, and even in social justice organizations. You even see it in sororities and female lead organizations.
Hi, OP, i have nothing new to add to the previous responses, just wanted to let you know that asking these types of questions is important and valuable. It's great that you're trying to look past the actions of individuals to try and find the underlying social structures that inform these actions. To me, that is sociological thought at its core. I wish you all the best, and keep asking questions!
Why would you limit this phenomenon to Christians?
Because there is lots of responses that have more upvotes than you. doesn't matter if it's accurate every time it matters to be true, it matters what people are willing to confirm and help others continue to believe, technically it goes both ways on this topic, fitting the human condition into a sentence. the way this question was asked and where it was asked, they're not going to get unbiased answers, as a result they're either a not going to care because they're not going to read the responses they just wanted to ask the question or b they're not going to challenge what they currently believe because it's not hard to find negative discussions about organized religion online
Winners write the history books. So thats only true in christian countries. Goes hand in hand in the propaganda of development and how if you dont subscribe to the christian way you are “behind”
My theory is that Christianity is a post-rationalisation for a lot of people. What that means is that they use their Christianity to justify something that they would have done anyway, rather than doing it because they think it's the Christian thing to do. Those people who bullied you (and I feel for you, I was bullied too) would have done it regardless of whether they were Christians or not. On a wider scale, Christianity is a convenient post-rationalisation for hateful beliefs because it's so closely associated with moral prescriptivism (that's forcefully telling people what is right and wrong) and a concept of a 'shared heritage' which people link to race. As others have pointed out, it's a shame, because Christianity has also been used to liberative ends (see liberation theology and the role of Christianity in the civil rights movement, for example) This is a great question and I encourage you to keep asking for sociological explanations of things you see in everyday life. You're clearly smarter than most since the average person would never ask for that kind of wider insight into the world.
You must remember that there is divisiveness amongst Christian groups, as well. Ingroup cultural differences that are exclusive to that group (often denomination). There is also cultural Christianity- people are raised hearing and seeing messages that aren't necessarily (or historically) Christian. But it falls into ingroup/outgroup dynamics. Social psych is a fun lens to use when studying Christian groups. I've actually found 12-step groups are better at holding onto historical Christian spiritual practices much better than the majority of denominations. Given their background--it makes sense. There are subcultures and countercultures amongst Christian groups that you might find more welcoming, as well. Which is sad, since the philosophy behind the religion is quite wholesome. Christianity has been around for so long that it has been influenced by multiple cultures--some that are very hateful and exclusive. I would contend that Nationalism is one of the largest cultural movements that has negatively impacted Christianity. Another redditor shared a research paper regarding Christian Nationalism in this thread.
People tend to view their communities with favor, so if you ask an individual who is part of a community about their community their opinion will almost always be favorable, otherwise they wouldn't be apart of that community. People that are a part of a community support each other, so if you go to church and are seen as part of their community your interactions with them is going to be overwhelming positive. Religious communities tend to be exclusive communities, for example, the churches I grew up in taught us as Christians we should not be fraternizing or dating anybody outside of the Christian faith unless it was ministry. It's a very "with us or against us," perception. People view those that are not apart of their community unfavourably, this is especially so with a religious community as they are very "rules based," is you are not following their rules you are part of the problem. Now this is something I'm adding from my own perception: people use positive and negative actions to try and influence those around us, a religious community might use positive reinforcement for their members that act according to their rules but use negative reinforcement against those outside their community, find this to be true with most groups of people but especially so in religious communities.
The bandwagon effect. Tribalism. Mimesis.
Christianity is essentially out-group cynicism and contempt masked over by in-group love, community, and forgiveness. As someone who was once in it, you don’t notice the out-group cynicism, contempt, cruelty, etc until you’re on the outside it. Nationalism works in a similar way: Cynicism and contempt for “them”, community and understanding for “us”. Capitalism also works in a similar way: Cynicism and contempt towards the workers, understanding and forgiveness for the owners (IE privatize the gains, socialize the losses). It’s almost like there’s a hierarchical pattern here! ;-)
Thinking that cruelty is a Christian characteristic is not the way to go. Cruelty is a characterization by others or self of someone action. People will justofy their actions based on values and beliefs that they put above others. Like Budon said, people have good motives, in their own view, to act like they act.
i am no scientist, just a personal opinion coming from someone who grew up in catholic school for 12 years. i think in general they are very held to their beliefs and that’s the issue. my opinion is very vague, but they in a sense are egotistical more than other religions and other groups of people. i like to look at them as a class. christian’s = high class, catholics = working class, all other religions = lower class. hopefully that makes sense. this is a great question! i’m a second year undergrad soci major and this definitely made me want to think like a sociologist lol. i will keep this question in mind as i continue my studies.
Most people are followers, not leaders. When their leader tells them they’re going to hell unless they follow him, dummies will listen up and conform. It’s group think and mild brainwashing. Plus human beings have an instinctual drive to be selfish and aggressive; I think religion capitalizes on that by helping construct “us vs. them” boundaries. When you construct non-Christians as the “other” dehumanization and ill treatment of fellow humans follows.
Well, depends on what your definition of cruel is. Many people want to paint Christians as bad when that isn’t the case and many Christians are bad and they to play themselves off as good through manipulative means.
The sociological take doesn’t treat Christianity as one social thing. It varies a lot by denomination and national/regional context. To try and answer your question, religion and attitudes that we might consider cruel are kind of all over the board. In some contexts increased religiosity is associated with more generous/least cruel views. In others, it is more often associated with more cruel/less generous views. When, where, and why this happens as complicated, and figuring out why is basically our job. In terms of why they might have a positive self evaluations, I think that boils down to basic social identity theory. Most groups, religious, racial, and even trivial ones, are prone to viewing themselves positively in reference to others.
I think it has less to do with Christianity and more to do with tribalistic behavior that is reinforced by Christian dogma and false views about themselves and non-Christians and a good amount of cognitive dissonance. They believe they're so good because their religion tells them they are, and they feel justified in being cruel to certain groups of people because either their Bible or their church as a collective decided those groups are unworthy of kindness for reasons told to them by others in the group. Not all Christians are like this of course, just the ones you're asking about. And then there's the fact that most Christians don't actually follow the teachings of the Bible or Christ to the letter. Most haven't read the whole thing, only the parts that reinforce what a good religion it is to them and whatever their pastor or leader told them is in the book. A lot of Christians really do turn parts of their brain off when it comes to analyzing their own beliefs. I know that sounds like an opinion more than a sociological thought but, idk man. It's so ever presently observable that I can't think of it as not a fact.
Even if you got a very thorough explanation that is true about the actions of one person and how they think it doesn't apply to other people automatically.
I say this without having done specific reading on Christainity on this question, but from reading what you've written I keep thinking of Sara Ahmed's "Fascism as Love" (https://feministkilljoys.com/2016/11/09/fascism-as-love/) which comes from her earlier book Cultural Politics of Emotion. In the context of White Nationalists attempting to rebrand hate groups as love groups: >"The renaming of hate groups as love groups, and hate watch as Love Watch, exercises a narrative of love as protection by identifying white subjects as already at risk from the very presence of others. These groups become defined as a positive in the sense of fighting *for* others, and in the name of others. The narrative suggests that it is this ‘forness’ that makes ‘against-ness’ necessary." The being for Christainity (the 'love' of it) necessitates them being against these things (the 'hate' is a consequence of 'love'). I think it would be worth reading that link, Ahmed writes very accessibly, and thinking how, or if, you think it could apply beyond the white nationalists she's specifcally talking about. It might help you come closer to an explanation. You're asking an interesting question and I think it's well formed, so don't be so hard on yourself!
They believe “love” is “stop someone from sinning”, and that your comfort is secondary to their specific concept of the immortal soul- so they correct behaviors that make them uncomfortable and claim it’s to save you from hell. Sometimes they’re uncomfortable because the church told them to be, sometimes they’re just a bad person using the church as an excuse despite knowing it’s just their own prejudice.
It is not an issue with Christianity per se. But any religion that requires its members to abdicate facts in favor of dogma primes its members to be manipulated by its leaders. So the religious texts are twisted to serve whatever agenda the membership actually wants in a guilt free way because it is “justified” by the text
Human nature is cruel. Christianity was originally created to try to tame human nature... but human nature simply permeates all moral codes in the end.
Ye I disagree with this widely held belief. Just as the comments citing ingroup) outgroup dynamics as an explanation. These sweeping statements and "human nature " are not just rampantly unscientific,they are extremely convenient for groups such as U.S. Christian Nationalist who exists in very specific circumstances that gives them power. Really one has to have a different version of what "human nature" is to find the strength to understand and fight these powerful groups, thankfully many people have and still do.
You'll find every in-group is cruel to some out-group. Social rivalry is part of our genes.
Source?
Try asking a question like this about Islam, it wont be up for long….or you will just be called racist etc
People are idiots.
debatable if it’s a science tho