this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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As a West Virginian, this rips my heart out.
They’ve done a damn good job making the right the “Christian” side.
People take their damn religion seriously (usually the leaders, not the text), and when you’re told every single day in an ultra religious community that being accepting of and protecting other religions is the same as a deal with the devil, it is easy to make you serve any master using your indoctrination against you. Every advance for the gays was an advance for Satan too and further solidified the demonization of the left to these people. Not long after 1921, deeply religious rural communities were introduced to an explosion of evangelical leaders and tent revivals whose preachers were all influenced by right wing Christian radio and that shit spread like wildfire. Any social advance was an advance for communism and therefore the devil.
I love my people, and you won’t find a more giving and loving people, but my god are they indoctrinated.
When driving through West “by God” Virginia, you will encounter 15 churches for every dollar general. No shit.
Around 2016 I went to several churches with my uncle, and all but one of them was politicking in the pulpit. ONLY ONE focused on the love of Christ and spiritual growth.
According the people who went to his little church, he just wasn’t “fired up” enough. To me he was the only worthwhile leader there.
I don’t know. I tell people all the time around home that their ancestors fought and died for their rights as workers. They’d all willingly walk into fire before forsaking the religious leaders in the community though.
Another big part of it is that their only source of income is coal. The left wants to end coal use. In all honesty it has starved and destroyed the place because it is so engrained in the culture that no one bothered to look for alternatives. It could have been manufacturing, and West Virginia would gladly accept lower wages than the rest of the US for such work, but it ain’t China cheap. So we’re doomed here. Everyone believes that the only hope is coal because it’s the only place to make a living.
My brother was making 30 bucks and hour when minimum wage was 5.15 (what the rest of us were making with no hope of anything better).
I don’t know. I get worked up thinking about all of this. Especially right now with my hometown under water likely due to climate change. The current flooding is the worst on record, but you can’t convince folks even while they’re drowning.
Somewhere I heard someone say something like we don't vote for Biden or Trump, we vote for coal. It's hard to convince single-issue voters when that single issue is the only thing they see every day.
The problem is the government doesn't want to help the people who will be out of a job, because that would be a "handout", and everybody knows that handouts are bad. We really have to pull out all the stops and spare no expense to stop this climate catastrophe.
And the problem with the area is that there isn't a good fall back to rely on. And, since the land isn't valuable for commercial farming, people aren't as likely to sell the family farm for opportunities elsewhere.