If anyone's interested, Jonny's completed his PhD, and his thesis is downloadable from UCL ...
The first PhD on Accelerated Christian Education this century is online nowSystems of Indoctrination: Accelerated Christian Education in England - UCL DiscoveryJonny and his mother were also in this Radio 4 doc a few months ago, which can still be streamed or downloaded ...
BBC Radio 4 - Out of the Ordinary, Series 5, A Righteous Education?
A lot of this stuff comes out of the Evangelical Christian movements of which 25% of the population of the US belong to.
When you look at the studies on religious demographics and break downs of political and social opinions, there is a pattern that very closely matches the recent phenomenon of 'fake news', 'media bias', 'climate change denial' and undermining experts and science.
When you have such a large and relatively unified group of people to whom science, evidence and experts are mistrusted because of conflicts over beliefs, you also have an audience that is far more likely to buy into other social and political ideas that are packaged in with the evangelical message even if they are questioned by science and evidence ... and often strengthened because of it.
The money, messages, propaganda and appologists for the Evangelicals then have a diluted but still noticeable impact on the rest of the population in the US and elsewhere, because a percentage of people are always succeptible to the conspiracy theories, internet memes, fake news items etc spread across social media and websites.
Other political and ideological groups have either jumped on the bandwagon or developed their own approach to information control, like the Russians who control their own media with and iron fist while creating propaganda and misinformation about the quality, bias and legitamacy of News Organisations of other countries.
Then of course there is the Middle East and Islam, with Oil rich Saudi Arabia funding and propagating it's fundamental beliefs across the Muslim world and into secular nations as well.
At a time when we face global problems like Climate Change, over population, international conflicts and fundamental terrorism, it's hardly surprising that we are struggling to find common ground or come together when significant numbers of the human population are being fed a diet of mistrust of each other, science, evidence and anything else that conflicts with their beliefs.