So how does that work with Trump supporters? Why do they believe Trump himself, or misinformation that favors him, over other sources of information? And what about white evangelicals, Trump's more steadfast supporters?
A recent Pew study, reported in Christianity Today, shows that white evangelicals assess their coronavirus news in ways directly opposed to the rest of us. While few members of the general public trust Trump to tell the truth, white evangelicals trust Trump above all other sources.
Moreover, "Around two-thirds of white evangelicals said the news media had greatly or slightly exaggerated the risks posed by COVID-19."
I have some thoughts about that. First, the evangelical movement is historically entangled with resistance to critical biblical scholarship and evolutionary science. Simply, many evangelicals have been trained to regard mainstream expertise--like climate change--as fake news. This segment of the population judges information according to its alignment with their worldview, and they have a long history of doing so.
Case in point: the Museum of the Bible.
But there's a second factor. I've been reading sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry. Their recent book Taking America Back for God demonstrates the links among white Christian nationalism, support for Donald Trump, and--well, let's say it, xenophobia. Factor out all the variables, and racism animates Trump's evangelical supporters more than any other single factor.
Along with Joseph O. Baker, Perry and Whitehead have a brand new article in the prestigious journal, Sociology of Religion. Here's how Perry summarizes the piece: "We show #ChristianNationalism still predicts intent to vote Trump in 2020, but it's become even more racialized & connected to fear of ethnoracial outsiders." In other words, white Christian nationalist sentiment is growing even more racist and xenophobic.
I'll share the abstract here, emphasizing key items in bold.
Some of the strongest predictors of voting for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election were Christian nationalism and antipathy toward Muslims and immigrants. We examine the interrelated influence of these three factors on Americans’ intentions to vote for Trump in 2020. Consistent with previous research, Christian nationalism and Islamophobia remained strong and significant predictors of intention to vote for Trump; however, the effect of xenophobia was stronger. Further, xenophobia and Islamophobia significantly and substantially mediated the effects of Christian nationalism. Consequently, though Christian nationalism remains theoretically and empirically distinct as a cultural framework, its influence on intending to vote for Trump in 2020 is intimately connected to fears about ethnoracial outsiders. In the penultimate year before Trump’s reelection campaign, the strongest predictors of supporting Trump, in order of magnitude, were political party, xenophobia, identifying as African American (negative), political ideology, Christian nationalism, and Islamophobia.
I'll leave it to you to parse the difference between racism and xenophobia. Let's just say they're related.
Thus, we should be alert to the ways in which Trump and his supporters promote disinformation. The Daily Beast has just reported that Trump and his administration are pressuring CDC officials to downgrade coronavirus death counts.
I've seen this disinformation out there on social media: friends posting goofy sources that say the death count is too high because hospitals make more money by attributing deaths to the pandemic. These friends have no idea where the information comes from--I had to dig it up--but it says what they're predisposed to believe, namely that Trump is getting a bad rap. (Just this week Anthony Fauci testified that we have a likely undercount.)
Far as I can tell, it's the white evangelicals who are most likely to fall for it. Prone to circle their cultural wagons, they trust information by loyalty more than the rest of us do.
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