This piece about the merging of QAnon and white, conservative evangelical Christianity is very disturbing:
It’s Trump’s refusal to acknowledge reality, combined with the increasingly intricate nature of Republican conspiracy mythology — theories that are becoming more intertwined with the flavor of evangelical Christianity that dominates the GOP — that have extremism experts and former Republicans warning the violent movement centered on the 45th president is not going away. In fact, they say, it will most likely become more violent.
Colin Clarke, a senior research fellow at The Soufan Center who studies extremist violence, said the upheaval wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, the recent presidential election, and the continued prosecution of several overseas wars has created a confluence of circumstances that scholars would consider a perfect incubator for belief in conspiracy theories and apocalyptic mass delusions.
“It’s not going to get better anytime soon, unfortunately… Conspiratorial thinking is very closely associated with high-anxiety situations and endless wars, elections and national tragedies,” he said.
“Religious terrorism tends to be more lethal, because people believe they’re serving a higher purpose by committing acts of violence, as opposed to secular groups or ethno-nationalists who are fighting over territory or land,” he explained. “You can’t negotiate with these people, and you especially can’t negotiate with QAnon, because how do you assuage grievances that don’t exist?”
Clarke also posited that synergies between QAnon and the American anti-abortion movement — another religiously inspired faction that dominates the GOP — could spark extremist violence in the mould of the string of bombings carried out by Eric Robert Rudolph between 1996 and 1998.
Another prominent researcher of extremist movements and disinformation, former GOP Representative Denver Riggleman, said the connections between QAnon and white evangelical Christianity have “metastasized” into something else that is both “messianic” and “apocalyptic”.
“This has grown well beyond just something that we can categorize as QAnon,” said Riggleman, who was defeated by a far-right primary challenger after officiating a same-sex wedding and is now chief strategist with the Network Contagion Research Institute. “It’s almost become a conspiracy industry that is evangelical.”
Like Clarke, Riggleman said there are parallels between the radicalization process that is being driven by QAnon in the evangelical community and the Islamic radicalism that the US has been trying to combat since 2001: “There certainly is radical Islam, but there’s now radicalism on certain evangelical sides, and I think people have been afraid to call it for what it is.”
But Joe Walsh, the former GOP congressman and conservative radio host who mounted a brief primary challenge to Trump during the 2020 election cycle, said such problems go far beyond QAnon believers in the Republican Party.
Walsh said Trump’s insistence that he, not Biden, won the 2020 election, has been eagerly adopted by a Republican base that is more primed for conspiratorial thinking than ever. “When I ask people specifically about QAnon, it’s only a rare Trump supporter that can give me any specifics, but damn near all of them are just general conspiracists,” he added. “There’s just a huge general overlap in that most of the Republican Party base voters now are conspiracy believers… Because the base is evangelical, the base is now conspiratorial, and they are one and the same.”
Walsh adds:
“Any religion, the more fundamentalist and extreme they become, the more prone they are to violence. I don’t know if we’re there yet, but when we enter the era when the FBI or whoever can say that fundamentalist evangelical extremism is a domestic terror threat, then our government can do what it has to do,” he said. “If we continue down this road, it’s coming… and we’re gonna fall into the world where all of the people like me — all of these conservative Republicans who demanded that the government do what it has to do to weed out radical Islam in our country — they are going to be the ones standing at the church door, telling the government to stay out.”
I don’t even want to think about how that would go. The idea of trying to fight militant, Christian,extremists is something out of the middle ages.
This faction in the GOP is huge and they are, apparently, accustomed to following authority and subject to conspiracy theories. They for the core of MAGA and they have been radicalized.