Comment by davi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davi | Hacker News Reader

I was at a family gathering of my in-laws last weekend. A bunch of older men, aged 50-75, were sitting around the table with beers and scotches, and talking about the decline of the newspaper, what it meant, etc. One had an iPhone and read the New York Times using their iPhone app. It was interesting to see the web reaching these men, who came of age in the pre-PC era.

My contribution to the conversation was exactly this idea: that the subtler problem with web-based news was how easy it becomes for like-minded kooks to come together and confirm each others' realities. In some cases, this is a good thing -- like how D&D players or startup founders can find each other and form communities. But in the case of semi-delusional, 911-was-an-inside-job, birther, we-didn't-go-to-the-moon types, or even Rush Limbaugh's misinformed dittoheads, what we have is a fragmentation of reality, in which each subculture occupies a different narrative about what is happening in the world. It's like a Philip K. Dick novel.

After I disgorged my profound insight, the 75-year-old told me it has always been that way. :)

But it does seem plausible that the web is accelerating and amplifying the tendency.

Oh, very clearly, and not just recently, either. I think the ability of people to connect peer-to-peer via the Internet is one of the forces driving the rise of evangelical Christianity in the US. Those forces were always there, but they were deliberately suppressed back when the media was dominated by a few big companies.

I remember once watching an NFL football game on TV, probably in the 90s, where at some point a group of players spontaneously knelt in prayer. They switched cameras off them instantly. It occurred to me that this probably happened quite a lot during games, and that the network probably had a deliberate policy of not showing it.

Didn't know that Evangelicals were "rising." Seems like an interesting thing to say. Even more interesting is the assertion that somehow the media used to deliberately suppress this.

Football and prayer has gone together (as with other sports in America) since their inception. Same goes for politics. I remember reading a guy who studies political speeches. He said that only recently has it become commonplace not to mention god or some kind of faith in a political speech. Up until now, state of the union addresses, senatorial speeches, stump speeches, etc. well full of religious imagery. (Still quite a bit of it)

None of this was ever "suppressed"

I wonder how much of this is not only clustering and selection bias by various groups, but also quite a bit of "us versus them" going on. I'm sure in some evangelical group somewhere they're probably lamenting how the internet is causing the rise of atheists and how, up until now, the media was helping keep a lid on these kooks.

Didn't know that Evangelicals were "rising." Seems like an interesting thing to say.

It doesn't "seem" like you really mean "interesting", but there's nothing controversial here. From the most recent survey of American religious identification:

"Another notable finding is the rise in the preference to self-identify as 'Born Again' or 'Evangelical'" (emphasis added)

http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/reports/ARIS_Repo... (pdf)

There's also the fact that evangelicals just came off an unprecedented 8-year run of political power, surely the apex of their influence in US history to date. So they've been rising in at least two senses.

On the other point, I don't know about the influence of the internet, but it's pretty clear that until some time in the late 90s, or perhaps with the advent of GWB, evangelicals were almost exclusively treated as an unseemly species of white trash by the media and mainstream US culture. It isn't far-fetched to say that expressions of that faith were suppressed. In fact, it used to bother me that they were treated with such knee-jerk contempt. (It now bothers me less, after observing what they did with their newfound influence.)

Great report -- thanks.

Sorry if the word "interesting" sounded suspicious to you. I made a concentrated effort to try to find an adjective that was non-pejorative. PG's comment DID interest me, so that's the one I used.

Speaking of terms, we must have some problem with definitions here. The report you cite actually makes the opposite point than you desire: The U. S. population continues to show signs of becoming less religious, with one out of every five Americans failing to indicate a religious identity in 2008. If you count whatever they define as just evangelicals, it IS growing, but that's just a default category and a very,very small slice for people unaffiliated with other major branches -- and it's surely not the folks you mean. Not if you're bringing up GWB (who wouldn't fit there)

GWB, once you get the demonization out of your system, is certainly no example of evangelical political power. He's just another religious person who became president. there's a long line of them: Jimmy Carter taught Sunday School in a Baptist church (and still teaches there). Reagan was supported by the Moral Majority. Kennedy was a practicing Catholic. Indeed, every president that's ever sent troops into battle has heavily used religious rhetoric as part of that, no matter what their religious personal beliefs. And it's all been televised and covered copiously by the media.

Evangelicals, if they're the ones in your study, are like .8 percent of the population. That's hardly a base to exercise an "unprecedented 8-year run of political power"

Oh dear. Are we having a religious and political argument? We'll both get banned!

1. When they say "evangelicals" they don't mean 0.8%. They mean "people who self-identify as born-again or evangelical" and it says right on the first page (under "Highlights") that this is 34% of the US. The confusion arises because they use the term in a much more specialized sense in two places. But if you look through all the uses of "evangelical" in the study, as I did, there's no doubt that everywhere else they're referring to the 34% definition.

2. GWB obviously fits in this 34%. Kennedy and Reagan obviously would not. Carter is an interesting hybrid.

3. Yes, atheists are rising as well. But this isn't any "opposite point" to what I "desire". Two things can be rising at the same time. (Indeed, my comment originally mentioned how the US is becoming more religiously polarized, with atheists and evangelicals growing and mainline Protestantism dwindling. But I deleted it for brevity.)

4. There are many examples of evangelicals exercising political power under GWB. Think of all the appointments that were made of people from evangelical law schools (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Goodling). I'm sure they did not exercise as much political power as they would have liked. But GWB went far further in this direction than ever before. That is all.

I think we're hidden deep enough it's okay.

Let's agree to postpone this discussion for a better time and place. I've got problems with the term "evangelical law school" You do realize that almost every old college on the east coast was originally some sort of Christian institution, right? Which means there had to have been loads of folks trained at religious institutions in the past.

I started to do some research on this, but BDS is currently so bad it made the process painful. Better to wait a while.

There's a bit of a difference between east coast schools being historically Christian institutions that have gradually shifted towards secularism over a few centuries and colleges that were founded in the last 30 years by politically active televangelists.

My dad grew up in a communist country, and always pointed out the rare case on TV where a newswoman would wear a crucifix necklace. His point was both that this was very explicitly suppressed when he was growing up, and that it was implicitly suppressed here.

One thing we can all rest assured of is that every Obama voter, in fact, every liberal voter of our modern times is an enlightened, fair minded, and informed individual making the best choices possible, and have risen above base human instincts like psychological biases.

Can I get a hip internet liberal high five?

Hey man, don't lump me in. I'm a hungry hominid and I know it. Back to my previously programmed reality...

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

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