I recently discovered a book that every lover of democracy should read. It is called “The Authoritarians” by Bob Altemeyer, a leading academic researcher into the psychology of the authoritarian personality. He wrote this popularization of his research at the behest of John Dean, who discovered his work while researching his book “Conservatives Without Conscience”.
Altemeyer’s book is available free at
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ .
By the time I reached the summary at the end of Chapter 4 ‘Authoritarian Followers and Religious Fundamentalism‘ (pp 139-141), I had a clear understanding of why we are in serious danger of losing our democracy to the fundamentalists. The danger is not merely from the Dominionist extremists, but from just about everybody entrapped in the fundamentalist cults. I will quote below Altemeyer’s research results on fundamentalists and right-wing authoritarianism. Note that Altemeyer uses the term “fundamentalist” to cover the broad spectrum of evangelicals and conservative Christians, a group that showed the same traits in his tests.
This chapter has presented my main research findings on religious fundamentalists. The first thing I want to emphasize, in light of the rest of this book, is that they are highly likely to be authoritarian followers. They are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority, and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups. They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason, and rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs. They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use a lot of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times, and are often hypocrites.
But they are also Teflon-coated when it comes to guilt. They are blind to themselves, ethnocentric and prejudiced, and as closed-minded as they are narrow-minded. They can be woefully uninformed about things they oppose, but they prefer ignorance and want to make others become as ignorant as they. They are also surprisingly uninformed about the things they say they believe in, and deep, deep, deep down inside many of them have secret doubts about their core belief. But they are very happy, highly giving, and quite zealous. In fact, they are about the only zealous people around nowadays in North America, which explains a lot of their success in their endless (and necessary) pursuit of converts.
I want to emphasize also that all of the above is based on studies in which, if the opposite were true instead, that would have been shown. This is not just “somebody’s opinion.” It’s what the fundamentalists themselves said and did. And it adds up to a truly depressing bottom line. Read the two paragraphs above again and consider how much of it would also apply to the people who filled the stadium at the Nuremberg Rallies. I know this comparison will strike some as outrageous, and I’m NOT saying religion turns people into Nazis. But does anybody believe the ardent Nazi followers in Germany, or Mussolini’s faithful in Italy, or Franco’s legions in Spain were a bunch of atheists? Being “religious” does not automatically build a firewall against accepting totalitarianism, and when fundamentalist religions teach authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism, they help create the problem. Can we not see how easily religious fundamentalists would lift a would-be dictator aloft as part of a “great movement,” and give it their all?
You and I know these people personally. We work with them; they live next door; they are members of our own families. We even meet them on internet forums. If “it can happen here”, these are the storm troopers who will make it happen, given the right demagogue.
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