A Worsening Culture War

Well of course. A man who lives in a literal gold covered Condo, with a history of not paying his subcontractors, vendors and who hired undocumented workers, was certainly going to stick up for the working man.

He said the needed lines, gave them a villain in immigrants (stealing yur jerbs) and then did nothing of the sort for WORKERS. He certainly did go all in on cracking down on immigration, of non-white people, as that matched the narratives of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.

Meanwhile, Oligarchs here are richer than ever, and workers are holding on for dear life. And 72 million plus, voted to keep him in office.

What is their percentage of asset ownership worldwide?

Nice to see that there are some genuinely bread-pilled Americans out there.

> evangelical Christianity has been one of the primary tools used to advance and justify segregation and slavery throughout western history

This is right if you say "America" instead of "the west". And then you're talking about a timescale of maybe 200 years, tops.

But when you say "the west" you're talking about a longer history of Christianity in Europe. You're talking about the Catholic Church, the Protestant Reformation, all that.

And on long historical timescales, Christianity's record is quite a bit more complicated than that. You can certainly associate it with various sins -- it suppressed the pagans, it launched the crusades, in Spain it justified conquest in the New World, and (though it was its own team) it often sided with royalty and aristocracy. And yet it was not an essentially "pro-slavery" religion. That would be to project relatively recent American evangelicalism backwards onto the rest of Christianity in a totally ahistorical way.

> There was notable involvement in the abolitionist movement among northern Protestants, and civil rights activism among catholics, Jews, and northern Protestants - but acting as though that is in any way representative of American religion is missing 99% of the history.

There used to be a phrase, "mainline Protestant", used to distinguish "normal" Protestants from evangelicals. They're dying now, but those churches used to have huge membership. The kind of Christianity that was "centered" in the past in America (at least in the North) was //not at all// the southern Evangelical variety that so often claims the word "Christian" these days. You're missing the amount of change that has occurred. The Evangelicals were "weird".

Your discussion of "Catholics and Jews" in the context of "abolitionism" is also confused. Catholics and Jews were not //totally absent// from America at that time, but it really wasn't until later that they came over in large numbers. Like, Irish were just arriving around the time of the Civil War (and hadn't even won respect for themselves yet, let alone taking up the political cause of others), and Jews started to really show up later around the turn of the century. You're ignoring the timeline of immigration.

Finally -- your whole dichotomy of "American religion" vs... atheism(?) is confused. In the past, atheism was taboo -- "everyone" was religious to some extent -- and //even so// things like the Civil War happened. Why? Because it was religion that //animated// those movements, particularly within the emerging "white" ethnic group (whose material interests they did not necessarily serve in an obvious way).

Mostly, American history has not been "religious people vs nonreligious people". It's been different kinds of religious people fighting over the contents of their religions. Mostly, the battle lines have been drawn right //through// Christianity in America.

This article seems to imply that the wealthy don't have any stake in the culture war, and stand to benefit most by maintaining the status quo. But that seems to ignore the fact that two of the issues at the heart of the culture war are taxation and government regulations - and one side's stance on these issues is far more beneficial to the wealthy than the other's.

One of the few major pieces of legislation that Republicans actually passed while in power over the past four years were tax reforms which were very beneficial to the wealthy. And the Trump administration changed several of the EPA's environmental policies to be more business friendly (and less friendly to the environment).

Democrats, on the other hand, are in broadly favor of increasing taxes on the wealthy. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in particular had some policy proposals that would have taxed the wealthy quite significantly. Democrats in recent history also passed the Dodd-Frank act, which imposed a number of regulations on the finance industry (and was partially repealed by Republicans in 2018).

These issues are front and center in the culture war. Remember Joe the Plumber and "Drill baby, drill" in 2008? Or Trump's vows to save the coal industry in 2016? And how many times did Pence bring up the subject of fracking in the 2020 vice presidential debate?