I could easily ramble for hours on this subject but I'm not an expert in either field, so I want to make clear that much of what I say is my own.
American politics are a diasaster and most people in the country probably don't know why, but those outside of the US can often tell if they have any political inclinations. Not to say that our country isn't divided, but that divide is less political and more cultural. American politics are, in large part, one big cultural battle, with other aspects simply... left out. You ask an American how the parties fall on the "Political Spectrum," and you'll almost certainly see the Republics on the right of the center and Democrats on the left. From their persective, this is obvious, but from a global perspective, Republicans and Democrats are
both right-wing parties! Hilarious, right? It's awful.
I only learned this because I took a politics class in college and my professor was a Turkish immigrant, who almost certainly left her home country because her views (and those of her family as well) were not 100% in line with God-Emporer Edroğan. Her perspective was a mixture of European and Middle-East/Near East and as a result she has a very in-depth understanding of political theory and respective ideologies. So when she came to the States to teach at the college I attended, she was, no joke, completely baffled at the state of American Politics. To her, the parties were pretty much the exact same: she couldn't figure out why everyone saw them as polar opposites.
American Politics are largely defined by cultural values, since no party wants to deface Democratic values and the lauded "freedom" Americans need to stay nourished. Capitalism is also beyond question as the public sees it as integral to America's idenitity, while political parties are never, in their current state, going to reform the system that keeps their wealthiest donors afloat. Because American's don't like the term "corruption" and are more partial to "lobbying." So with system of government set-in-stone and none of the major parties wanting to sever ties with their income, the Democrats and Republicans end up quite similar.
I have seen some more radical leftists view this dynamic as an effort to push the United States further right and keep Socialism out of the country. Personally I associate this phenomena to two things:
- This country is largely run/persuaded by morons and people who care only for their own success, maybe at the same time.
- The United States is inherently right-wing, so this is sorta inevitable.
The 2nd reason is the main attachment to this thread: the country being so skewed to the right is at least partially a result of Christian influence over the past hundreds of years. It's funny, though; depending on one's perspective the status of Christianity in the US is vastly different. You go to practically any church service in the United States and I guarantee you'll hear something about how far the state has "turned away from God." Meanwhile as I wander the internet all I have hear from its endless supply of millenials and zoomers is how insufferably religious the country is. Cool, isn't it? Two opposing viewpoints look at the same thing and come up with different conclusions of its nature.
My belief is that this is because the United States has adapted itself into the mold of being a nation built upon Christian doctrine, without actually ever having been one as we would like to think today. Because Christianity itself is practicing the teachings of the New Testament, which is different from what said works actually teaches. The form, and understanding of Christianity of the first Europeans to set foot in the Americans, of the founding fathers, of the North and South during the Civil War, and of today, are quite different. As such, the social and cultural aspects of the United States have a lot of roots in Christianity, some more obvious and some more subtle, but the core of the nation has never truly been Christian. I feel like this partially explains how some people can see a nation losing its religion as others see it only digging itself further inwards. Really, this makes sense: someone who's a devout Christian will be acutely tuned to anything which is against their beliefs, and from my perspective the more "Christian" a person is, the less they see others as so (this obv sounds conceited but trust me when i say this is overwhelmingly true). Conversely, someone who's been disillusioned from Christianity and holds a negative perspective on it is going to have problems when their beliefs are on the line.
Adding to all this, religion (and lack thereof) has been found to be the #1 thing people tend to identify with the most, and with the greatest passion. I sadly am basing this mostly off of memory from a class I took, but people tend to be much more lax on identifiers like race, gender, nationality, etc. than to religion. This isn't too hard to undersrand; race is already sort of a made-up old world thing people used to gratify themselves. Quick history lesson: "whiteness" as a concept in the US used to exclude Irish people until enough Irish writers asserted themselves as white that the people just assumed they always were. At least it was either the Irish or the Jews, maybe both. Either way, it paints the picture of how race is basically a social construct, even if I'm exaggerating a bit.
Religion often supercedes these other identifiers and becomes the sole thing a person values about themselves. Try to have a person committed to their religious beliefs do something which doesn't conform to said values, and you'll find it extremely hard if not impossible for some. Insult a person's gender or ethnicity and you're bound to face retaliation, but not to the extremes taken with religion. The range of action goes from setting yourself on fire and dying as protest to government persecution all the way over to Charlie Hebdo being attacked because they drew Islam's most sacred prophet.
With all that in mind, it's no shock that religion plays a huge role in American political theatre, as most of the main cultural issues have some connection to biblical teachings. Right now the big three for Christians are abortion, religious freedom, and the entirety of LGBTQ+ related topics. Abortion is pretty straightforward and has lots of fun side-branches like neurodiverse people feeling discriminated against, eugenics, and America once again focusing on the outcome of a problem (unwanted pregnancy) instead of the problem itself (oversexualization, lack of education, lack of responsibility, generally shitty women's rights). Religious freedom is the result of Covid-19 shutting down churches who proceed to complain about left-wing protests being allowed as usual. I could say more but all of the Covid-19 controversy is really stupid and constantly mired by double standards. Look at the Governers of California and New York for examples. The last one is also pretty obvious and is essentially divided into three camps: "gay is morally based," "gay is morally cringe," and "gay is morally cringe but holy shit let people exist for fucking once, do you even know what they've gone through."
I would say that Christianity is on the downward trend right now, in part due to the boomer generation being super unpopular for a variety of reasons, and the political boogeyman that is Donald Trump certainly didn't do any favors after he fractured the Republican Party and accordingly pissed off or radicalized a lot of Christians. In fact this may be the lowest point it's ever had. Historically however this is to be expected: the state of Christianity in the United States has usually be sinusoidal in nature, as there's a reason we had two Great Awakening events. Theologically such a pattern lines up with the events of Judges, where the Israelite's would obey the commands of God until their respective Judge died, after which the people would start doing their own thing until a new Judge was raised up. AFAIK there's no exact time frame for this, the way it's written makes it seem like the moment a Judge died everyone immediately started worshipping Satan or something, but realistically I imagine it was a generational process much like it seems to work today.
I've talked about the United States enough, I think we can all agree that things are sorta depressing over here despite how wealthy we are in comparison to much of the world. I remembered how the OP mentioned persecution and the more general topic of religious extremism. Islam gets the worst of this, I cannot say why because I'm not an expert, probably has something to do with easily misinterpreted doctrine or the Middle East getting exploited by the West and hating everything about them or something. Even then some Islamic terrorist groups are basically just drug and munitions and oil cartels but with the guise of religious brotherhood.
I feel like people aren't aware of the extent of persecution arcoss the world. Western society isn't free from discrimination in both private and public sectors, but it gets REALLY bad in some places. China is one of the worst offenders: I don't think a lot of people know about how badly Christians are persecuted there, but it's serious. More and more churches are becoming underground societies as the government will gladly destroy and detain anything which goes against them. The reason you don't hear about this as much largely comes down to the media outlets you use (partly bias and related issues, partly most media outlets barely mentioning anything global) and China not really wanting people to know. Not to mention how the Muslim Uyghur population has things way worse as they're essentially being ethnically cleansed. Normally secularism/atheism is sort of a "neutralization" of religious practice and, as a political power, tends to not care what religions do so long as it's not, you know, causing problems. I think China serves as a strong reminder that atheism can become just as extreme, when it stops being "not having religious beliefs" and becomes "there shouldn't be religious beliefs."
The main takeaway is that religion and politics are heavily intertwined. There's no motivating factor greater than religious values and their place in society, and politics is all about motivating people to support your cause.
Ffs I spent like 4 hours typing this hopefully it makes some semblance of sense, if not don't worry I never said I wasn't a confusing person
