As someone who grew immersed up in American Christian culture (and I do think “American Christianity” should be considered meaningfully distinct from global Christianity, but I digress) I can confirm that this is pretty much what it is from the inside.
I can only speak to the culture I was raised in, and it may not be representative of broader American Christianity, but I feel like it’s fairly representative of those who view “being a Christian” as a big part of their identity or sense of self. My experience involved religious private schooling from 4th-12th grade, so there was very little exposure to outside views. On one hand this makes my experience non-representative, on the other hand I feel like it let me see what the undiluted worldview looks like from the inside with very little noise to distort the signal.
The culture I was raised In indoctrinated the following ideas as facts, plain and simple, without nuance and largely unquestioned:
1. America has only flourished with God’s blessing because the majority of founding fathers and American culture historically has been predominantly Christian, despite separation of Church and State. IE, American can (and in their view, should) be “A Christian Nation” via most people being Christian, without it necessarily being a state religion
2. The devil hates this and is constantly trying to tear down the Christian culture that exists today. So I’m a real sense, they genuinely view any inroads or progress by any non-Christian faction as an actual attack, since they attribute ANY view or set of values that denies or ignores the moral norms of modern American Christianity as ENEMY ACTION by the literal devil and/or demons.
3. This leads to a mindset of American Christians being in a walled city, defending against a siege of attackers from all sides, both secular and non-Christian religious in origin.
There’s also a large degree of “purity test” mentality about what one believes and how fervently and deeply one believes it, and how much they are willing to passively/independently deviate from and/or resist wider cultural norms because of it. “Love your neighbor as yourself” gets distorted into “Convince your neighbor of the error of their ways so they can join you on the Christian lifeboat and not go to hell”.
nostr:npub1xtscya34g58tk0z605fvr788k263gsu6cy9x0mhnm87echrgufzsevkk5s Is there any chance of Damus (and Nostr clients in general) using something with RFID like a Yubikey to store private the one’s Nostr private key and sign messages? AFAIK Yubikey only does 2FA, but it would be nice to have something like that or a Satsigner to keep the key off the mobile device while still keeping it handy. I’m still waiting for my Nostr Signing Device from LNBits (https://shop.lnbits.com/product/nostr-signing-device) to arrive before I really try to establish a long-term identity, but it sounds like I’ll only be able to use that with desktop or web based Nostr clients.
This podcast episode caused me to re-evaluate the narrative context (i.e., the story I told myself about what was happening in the world) of the entire time I’ve been alive. I heard someone on another podcast call it “probably the best podcast episode of the year”, and after listening to it, I have to agree it’s at least a strong contender for that title.
Eye opening. Highly recommend.
Worth the time (it’s loooong, I broke it up over several days)