Willful Ignorance
Christianity, Racism, Xenophobia and the Venn Diagram
Willful Ignorance
Christianity, Racism, Xenophobia and the Venn Diagram
I’m from the southern U.S., so it’s probably no surprise that I’ve run across a lot of Evangelicals as well as racist bigots during my life.
These two types seem to overlap more often than not, and I think it’s because they have a key factor in common. Willful ignorance.
It’s not they’re all stupid, they have the hardware there in most cases to come to a rational conclusion if they actually used their grey matter. They are ignorant and uninformed, but they choose to stay that way in the vast majority of cases, only exposing themselves to sources that confirm their biases.
Sure they are surrounded, willingly or unwillingly, by an echo-chamber of family and friends who all get the same information from the same sources. But just like with Evangelicals, they choose not to peer past the veil, because deep down I think they know that their beliefs aren’t true, or that there is at least a chance that they aren’t.
They are afraid that if they think too hard they will have to deal with the disillusionment that their entire belief structure is horse shit.
They rather just follow the herd and repeat the same talking points, never analyzing their beliefs.
My most recent run-in was with a woman who may not fully have the grey matter left to come to a rational conclusion since she sounds like she may have cooked her brain with alcohol. She kept repeating that immigrants are taking all the houses, and jobs, and are going to be getting social security while the government is not taking care of veterans…
She couldn’t explain how any of this is actually happening due to immigrants, or even give me an example of anyone she’s ever known who lost a job or house to an “illegal immigrant”.
This is the same sort of response that you get from Evangelicals when you point out the numerous contradictions in their Bible, or why they believe that certain perceived rules from the Old Testament should be enforced and hammered away at while they ignore the rest.