Geoffrey W. Sutton PhD, Psychology and Culture

  Spring Flowers/ Kew Gardens, London/ Geoff Sutton 2016 It's Easter weekend in 2021. I haven’t gone to church in a year due to COVID-19 but I read and hear Christians preaching on Facebook and Twitter. I don’t see much about denial and cross-bearing.  Christ carrying the cross/ El Greco/ c1541-1614 I wonder what the text means-- deny yourself and take up your cross . Here’s the Authorised Version . 24 Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. 25 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. 26 For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? (Matthew 16). It’s a common text for Christians who have been in church for years. I don’t remember it being emphasized in churches I attended as a boy or in evangelical circles. I take it, it isn’t too p...

  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...