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Fundamentalism and Authoritarianism – must-read book


silvia

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In recent discussions on this board, it's become crystal-clear that when people have a fundamentalist or authoritarian mindset, supplying them with logic, reason, and facts tends to have little effect on changing this mindset. In fact, even after they find out some of the things the God of their holy book actually advocated (i.e. killing enemies' children), they typically remain convinced that what their leaders have told them about the Bible (it's inerrant in every instance and the best guide to faith and life) is correct.

So what makes some people this way? Why do they go to such lengths to submit to authority, religious or otherwise, and why do they follow authority even when it is dishonest, misleading, or morally repugnant?

I recently happened upon a book online that features an in-depth analysis of questions like these. The Authoritarians, written by retired University of Manitoba psychologist Bob Altemeyer for a general audience, showcases the results of decades of research Altemeyer has done on the ins and outs of the authoritarian personality. It can be accessed for free at http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/.

Some of the interesting points that have emerged from Altemeyer's studies:

- Authoritarian followers are more likely than others to recommend long jail sentences for people who commit crimes like robbery. However, they are less willing than others to hold those in power responsible for wrongdoing, regardless of the nature of that wrongdoing. As Altemeyer reports, “they proved less likely than most people to punish a police officer who beat up a handcuffed demonstrator, or a chief of detectives who assaulted an accused child molester being held in jail.†(And presumably, less likely to punish a religious official who embezzles money from a church treasury or advocates child abuse [ahem, Michael Pearl].)

- Authoritarian followers tend to feel more threatened in potentially dangerous situations than other people do, and are also more likely to react with aggression in those situations.

- When Altemeyer investigated how his experimental subjects' past experiences led to the extent of their authoritarian attitudes later in life, he found that authoritarian followers said that they “had simply missed many of the experiences that might have lowered their authoritarianism... They hadn’t known any unpatriotic people, nor had they broken many rules. They simply had not met many different kinds of people or done their share of wild and crazy things. Instead they had grown up in an enclosed, rather homogeneous environment--with their friends, their schools, their readings, their amusements all controlled to keep them out of harm’s way and Satan’s evil clutches. They had contentedly traveled around on short leashes in relatively small, tight, safe circles all their lives.†Ding! Ding! Ding! So many of the people we discuss here completely fit this bill. In contrast, people who have had higher education tend to be less authoritarian in outlook than average, likely one reason the Duggars are determined to keep their kids out of 'real' college.

- In experimental settings, people who score high on authoritarian-follower scales have more difficulty than others picking out logical inconsistencies. For instance, when presented with the syllogism, “All fish live in the sea. Sharks live in the sea. Therefore, sharks are fish,†they are more likely to think it is logically correct than non-authoritarians are. (This may help explain why they also tend to swallow what's served up by Doug Phillips and Bill Gothard.)

- Unsurprisingly, religious fundamentalists—regardless of whether they are Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or anything else—are extremely likely to be authoritarian followers; there is a high degree of correlation between the two groups. Fundamentalists of any religion “are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority, and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide.†Religious fundamentalists also have more racial prejudices than non-fundamentalists.

- Finally, in studies, most Christian fundamentalists continue to insist that the Bible is divinely inspired and completely free of errors even after presented with direct evidence to the contrary, like the divergent accounts in the four Gospels of what happened on Easter morning. They're willing to go out on this limb even though, on average, they report having read only about a third of all the books in the Bible.

There's much more. Anyway, give it a read. I'd love to hear what y'all think—and if the book gave you insight into your authoritarian/ fundamentalist friends or family members, as it did me! (I'm not a shill, I just think the book is directly relevant to much of what we discuss here on Free Jinger, even though the loooong end-notes after each chapter are a bit annoying.)

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Great commentary! While reading you post I kept nodding my head and saying to myself, "Wow, this sounds so familiar. This reflects what we read on the fundie blogs!"

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This is a minor detail, but I'm struck by the statement that most Christian fundamentalists "report having read only about a third of all the books in the Bible." This actually really surprises me, as most if not all the evangelical fundies that I and my friends grew up with place absolutely enormous emphasis on reading the Bible in its entirety, repeatedly. We may not have understood it, but, believe you me, we had to read it all. Leviticus and Numbers and the minor prophets and everything.

It probably doesn't mean too much in the bigger picture, given how they treat the parts they DO read. I'm surprised, is all. Carry on.

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This is a minor detail, but I'm struck by the statement that most Christian fundamentalists "report having read only about a third of all the books in the Bible." This actually really surprises me, as most if not all the evangelical fundies that I and my friends grew up with place absolutely enormous emphasis on reading the Bible in its entirety, repeatedly. We may not have understood it, but, believe you me, we had to read it all. Leviticus and Numbers and the minor prophets and everything.

It probably doesn't mean too much in the bigger picture, given how they treat the parts they DO read. I'm surprised, is all. Carry on.

From what I've seen in churches, and based on surveys, there is a lot of lip-service given to it. I read something a while back on a blog that claimed only 5% of (some group of) Christians had read the whole Bible (the blogger is an SBC pastor, so I'm thinking the survey was either of evangelicals or Southern Baptists). Most Christians have probably read the New Testament, or at least one of the Gospels, and some of the major stories in the Old Testament, but not the whole thing. A lot of people try to read it all straight through on a timeline (Bible in a Year, etc), and that sort of reading tends to make people either skim over a lot of the harder to understand parts, lists of rules, and genealogical stuff or get frustrated and quit before they get very far into it.

I was pretty surprised a few years ago when a guy I know told me he'd never read through the minor prophets - he'd been pastoring a church for 2 years at the time, had graduated Bible college, had been preaching revivals and meetings for about 6 years at the time. He also did a lot of reading on theology and read and commented on a lot of the newer Christian books and things, but had somehow not made the time to read the Bible the rest of the way through.

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Heh - when my sister was about 5 or 6, we were working on having family Bible time, and she decided that we needed to read Amos. We'd learned our books of the Bible, and we'd never read that one, which bothered her. So my parents said ok (I mean, how could they turn that down) and we read Amos. After we finished it, we all realized why that particular book doesn't get much attention in church! :lol:

(if memory serves, it's all about God smiting people...so not really uplifting)

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This is a minor detail, but I'm struck by the statement that most Christian fundamentalists "report having read only about a third of all the books in the Bible." This actually really surprises me, as most if not all the evangelical fundies that I and my friends grew up with place absolutely enormous emphasis on reading the Bible in its entirety, repeatedly. We may not have understood it, but, believe you me, we had to read it all. Leviticus and Numbers and the minor prophets and everything.

It probably doesn't mean too much in the bigger picture, given how they treat the parts they DO read. I'm surprised, is all. Carry on.

That surprised me a little too, kaetrin. This was what Altemeyer found in his sample group (see p. 136 of The Authoritarians), but I'm sure it fluctuates depending on which particular fundamentalists are being surveyed. Altemeyer mentions that his subjects showed a lot of variation: "Nineteen percent of the Christian High fundamentalists said they had never read any of the books from beginning to end, which was neatly counterbalanced by twenty percent (but only twenty percent) who said they had read all sixty-six."

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Heh - when my sister was about 5 or 6, we were working on having family Bible time, and she decided that we needed to read Amos. We'd learned our books of the Bible, and we'd never read that one, which bothered her. So my parents said ok (I mean, how could they turn that down) and we read Amos. After we finished it, we all realized why that particular book doesn't get much attention in church! :lol:

(if memory serves, it's all about God smiting people...so not really uplifting)

That's great. :)

I have vivid memories of going out and running errands in our van while playing cassette tapes of Alexander Scourby reading Leviticus (in the KJV, no less!), when we were on a read-through-the-Bible kick.

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For instance, when presented with the syllogism, “All fish live in the sea. Sharks live in the sea. Therefore, sharks are fish,†they are more likely to think it is logically correct than non-authoritarians are.

This is actually a bit of a tricky syllogism because all sharks ARE fish. Really large, evil fish (Selachimorpha are a suborder of Chondrichthyes).

So I could totally see looking at those statements and thinking "Sharks ARE fish so concluding that is correct". Yes the reasoning is incorrect but it's a lot less obvious there than if they had said something like "All fish swim in the sea. Submarines swim in the sea. Therefore, submarines are fish."

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This is actually a bit of a tricky syllogism because all sharks ARE fish. Really large, evil fish (Selachimorpha are a suborder of Chondrichthyes).

So I could totally see looking at those statements and thinking "Sharks ARE fish so concluding that is correct". Yes the reasoning is incorrect but it's a lot less obvious there than if they had said something like "All fish swim in the sea. Submarines swim in the sea. Therefore, submarines are fish."

I submit that not all sharks are large and that no sharks are evil :) Also that no submarines swim, but rather are propelled.

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This is actually a bit of a tricky syllogism because all sharks ARE fish. Really large, evil fish (Selachimorpha are a suborder of Chondrichthyes).

So I could totally see looking at those statements and thinking "Sharks ARE fish so concluding that is correct". Yes the reasoning is incorrect but it's a lot less obvious there than if they had said something like "All fish swim in the sea. Submarines swim in the sea. Therefore, submarines are fish."

Yeah, I think part of the point is that authoritarian followers will tend to say the logic is correct simply because they recognize that the last statement is correct--many don't seem to be bothered about the logical inconsistencies that precede it. Here's Altemeyer's commentary on it: "If you ask them why it seems right, they would likely tell you, “Because sharks are fish.†In other words, they thought the reasoning was sound because they agreed with the last statement. If the conclusion is right, they figure, then the reasoning must have been right. Or to put it another way, they don’t “get it†that the reasoning matters--especially on a reasoning test."

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I've bookmarked this page. The book should be required reading at FJ.

I submit that not all sharks are large and that no sharks are evil :) Also that no submarines swim, but rather are propelled.

But fundies justify and promote their ideas using logic only; they don't have actual evidence that confirms creation 'science' or supports their social policy ('abortion will totally stop altogether if we criminalise it!'). I think this point is pretty relevant - just think of some of Jim Boob's arguments for quiverful against real proof of overpopulation and the consequences for society.

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This is actually a bit of a tricky syllogism because all sharks ARE fish. Really large, evil fish (Selachimorpha are a suborder of Chondrichthyes).

So I could totally see looking at those statements and thinking "Sharks ARE fish so concluding that is correct". Yes the reasoning is incorrect but it's a lot less obvious there than if they had said something like "All fish swim in the sea. Submarines swim in the sea. Therefore, submarines are fish."

My first thought was sponges aren't fish but they live in the sea. Also, all fish don't live in the sea, some live in freshwater. I would have said that it was false but I don't know if my rational is correct or not.

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However, they are less willing than others to hold those in power responsible for wrongdoing, regardless of the nature of that wrongdoing.

This makes it sound like they idolize authority figures. Could this be behind the reason that some fundie textbooks present an overly glowing view of American history? They can't admit that the founders were imperfect and still admire those same men's accomplishments.

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My first thought was sponges aren't fish but they live in the sea. Also, all fish don't live in the sea, some live in freshwater. I would have said that it was false but I don't know if my rational is correct or not.

It's been a while since I took a logic course, and logic scholars, feel free to chime in, but I believe the syllogism example above contains what's called fallacy of the undistributed middle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of ... ted_middle. Basically, just because you have two classes of things that share a characteristic (fish live in the sea, sharks live in the sea), it does not follow that members of the second class must be members of the first class. Another (more obviously wrong) example of this fallacy would be: All Christians worship one God. Muslims worship one God. Therefore, Muslims are Christians.

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It's been a while since I took a logic course, and logic scholars, feel free to chime in, but I believe the syllogism example above contains what's called fallacy of the undistributed middle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of ... ted_middle. Basically, just because you have two classes of things that share a characteristic (fish live in the sea, sharks live in the sea), it does not follow that members of the second class must be members of the first class. Another (more obviously wrong) example of this fallacy would be: All Christians worship one God. Muslims worship one God. Therefore, Muslims are Christians.

Thanks. Your example makes a lot of sense.

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This makes it sound like they idolize authority figures. Could this be behind the reason that some fundie textbooks present an overly glowing view of American history? They can't admit that the founders were imperfect and still admire those same men's accomplishments.

I definitely think so. Along the same lines, how many fundamentalists do you find who blame George W. Bush for waging the Iraq war on a false premise (that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction)? Not a whole lot. GWB is a Golden Boy in the minds of many fundamentalists, so they are reluctant to hold him responsible for his missteps, however glaring.

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