TV Has Informed The American Tumble Into Trumpery Not Christianity Not Even Conservative Evangelical Religion

The Washington Post published a number of charts that make my point.

Here's now many MINUTES. not hours, but minutes the average American spends in "religious activities, including going to church.



Here's how many HOURS they spend watching TV per day



In their graphs, the only other activity measured in hours is sleeping.   They don't even bother to give a chart for how much time Americans spend in reading.  My guess would be that if they distinguished between reading fiction, most of it crap fiction, and reading good reporting or scholarship per day the minutes spent informing themselves instead of entertaining themselves would be about the same as they are for religion.

There is a mystification among the media babblers about how evangelicals can vote for a man of such flagrant immorality, a multi-married, multi-mistressed, gambling tycoon and all around total sleaze, as Donald Trump.  The fact is that people who declare themselves as the kinds of evangelicals who are so interested in other poeples' sex lives are as much devoted to the idol of the screen as anyone.   It is clear that for many of them, what they see on TV is far more influential on their voting and thinking than what's in the Bible.   It's not as if Ted Cruz, the alleged hero of the Evangelicals wasn't a TV era phony as much as Trump is.  If they were serious about The Bible they'd vote for someone who championed feeding the hungry, doing justice to the widow and orphan and loving the alien as one of their own community.   Their "christianity" is the as seen on TV variety just as their notions of justice are more informed by horse and cop operas than it is The Bible.

Update;  RMJ has an excellent post up with a long, revealing  passage from Dickens about American exceptionalism.  He relates it to Bernie Sanders in a way I hadn't considered before.   There is a faith in leftist exceptionalism which is as delusional as American exceptionalism which explains how leftists are both amazed when people don't just agree with them - the self-appointed always correct side - and how they can't believe it when people, over and over and over again, don't agree with them. Or as they see it, fail to agree with them.