this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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United States | News & Politics

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Why do so many evangelical Christians support former President Donald Trump despite his decades of documented ungodly behavior?

An in-depth report from The Economist shows that it has a simple explanation: They believe that God personally appointed him to rule the United States.

In fact, the report cites a survey conducted by Denison University political scientist Paul Djupe that around 30 percent of Americans believe Trump "was anointed by God to become president."

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

He would prefer to think it's just the media reporting that a sizeable percentage of the country not only disagrees with him but would probably smile as the person you're responding to was jailed or harmed.

Can't totally blame him. "OMG u fuktard itz tthu mediaz making cheeto poplar!!1!" is much easier to deal with than reckoning with the fact that a) he was elected once, and b) based on current polling, he's likely to be elected again.

It's quite literally the same problem of the right, just reversed. The media are the problem, let's not look at the reality that is quite apparent all around us because it's scary.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Rawstory is not the media you want to stake a hill out for. This is sensationalist on its face. And the study actually concluded that ~~~28% of Americans ~~ 21 percent of weekly church going Protestants believed he was anointed to win the 2020 election. That was all. Not that he's some kind of modern day Moses.

Edited because I found the author talking about the study.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Well if we are going based on what they said, its likely they havent read the actual source material and/or they have a problem with polling methodology.

Again, I am looking forward to a substantial statistical and or methodological criticism of the polls and studies referenced.

Its always fun watching people who have no idea how statistics or polling or scientific studies work try to criticize such things.

EDIT; Your explanation is possible as well. A lot of people have kneejerk reactions to things that clash with their worldview. See uh, nearly all of the entire history of politics and societies for all of history.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

So I do tend to find these kinds of claims sensational, so I decided to look into the article and it's sources. First the article quotes an economists article which is referencing a survey from a Poly Sci associate professor from Denosian (sp?) Univeristy. That's not a good start, quoting a quote.

Sadly the economist article was paywalled, but I was able to find this article based off of the facts in the posted article https://religioninpublic.blog/2019/11/25/was-donald-trump-anointed-by-god-are-all-presidents-anointed-by-god/. This article seems to be what is being quoted, but not 100% sure (actually it's an updated post to what looks like the original survey). In this article, by the professor being quoted in the posted article, we see that they surveyed 1000 Protestant Christians and found 30% of those surveyed, that went to church weekly, believed that Trump was appointed by God.

So really not a good article at all. Not only are they not quoting original sources, but they get the facts horribly wrong. On top of that the original survey doesn't post information about how they conducted their survey, so not even a good job by the original source.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

Lmao, it's always some far more reasonable slice of society than the sensationalist headline says.