Geoffrey W. Sutton PhD, Psychology and Culture

  9/11 and Religious Fundamentalism Thoughts on the Legacy of 9/11   As is our custom in the United States, national tragedies become the focus of a wide ranging study. Such was the case with the attacks 20 years ago on 11 September 2001 known now as 9/11.   In this post I look at the powerful role of religion in framing the transnational narrative for select Muslims in their war to rid their world of American culture. In the United States, where there is a shifting and porous wall between Christianity and governance, we see a visible rise in the influence of fundamentalist Christian values controlling the narrative of judges and lawmakers. Under threat, people become conservative and many turn to their faith. This phenomenon is well-documented in studies of Terror Management Theory . The attacks of 9/11 and subsequent war on terror triggered an intensity in faith for many who were not already highly devoted. As long as people have been spiritual or religious, a...

  QAnon offers a religious worldview, that has won the minds of some conservative American Christians. Katelyn Beaty ( 2020, August 17 ) opines “Once the fascination of far-right commentators and their followers, QAnon is no longer fringe.” Argentino calculates a huge increase in QAnon content ( 2020, July 8 ). I have been researching the QAnon movement since 2018. Based on my most recent social media analysis, QAnon has seen a 71 per cent increase in Twitter content and a 651 per cent increase on Facebook since March 2020. New Religious Movements (NRMs) used to be called cults, but behavioral scientists have dropped the term cult because of its negative connotation. Religious scholars remind us that at one time Christianity was considered a cult. QAnon appears to be an NRM with a strong attraction for some evangelical Christians concerned about their faith and their country. Hypotheses about the growth of QAnon are not in short supply . Pastor Jon Thorngate of Wiscons...

Mexican arrested by border patrol, from capsweb On the Psychology of Politics “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” The forgoing quote is from John Ehrlichman in 1994. Dan Baum includes it in his April 2016  Harper's   article: "Legalize It All: How to win t...