"The View" co-hosts agreed that many of the most hateful comments on social media are hurled by users who describe themselves as Christian.
During a discussion on the ongoing epidemic of gun violence, including a recent series of shootings of victims who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, co-host Sara Haines blamed a variety of factors -- including a basic lack of empathy.
"This instinct to shoot first is a really complicated problem with a lot of different branches," Haines said.
"I think the obsession with social media, time spent on social media, the kind of numbing of something social that's antisocial, I think consumption of porn, now we're getting into some of the lane of a lot of males of all ages, video games. A lot of these things are removing that humanity, that empathy, that connection."
Haines said churchgoing would help society, but her co-hosts seemed to think the opposite.
"We're also watching the degradation of church," said Haines. "I am not an institutional church person. I was raised in the church, I've got a lot of issues, but one thing across religions and churches, there's a morality component, a duty to serve your community, your families, to people that are different from you. There's a lot of lessons there of giving, loving, not judging. We're seeing major reduction in attendance and membership in that, then we get to his point."
But Co-host Ana Navarro said the corrosive effects of conservative media and a general decline in morality showed up in other ways.
"You talk about the degradation of church, it's always ironic to me and amazing," Navarro said, "how many of the people who say the most hateful things on social media have 'Christian' on their profile."
"'Christian grandma' sometimes," agreed co-host Sunny Hostin. "I get a lot of those."
"Yes," Navarro added. "Christian grandmas. I think all those things you said are true, but I also think it is gross inaction in Washington, D.C. from our cowardly legislators who are beholden to the NRA and care more about donations than they do about their children."
The grandson of an elderly white man who shot a 16-year-old Black boy in the head for mistakenly ringing his doorbell said his grandfather was an avid consumer of Fox News and other conservative media -- cranked loud -- and Haines said that was to blame for a number of present-day problems.
"We're on the other side of a defamation suit where it was proven, not just talked about, the proof came out about Fox admitting and showing evidence of all the misleading things and the problem there and in D.C. is that when they perpetuated this lie of one election that led to Jan. 6, the only people that actually believed it were the people consuming their information, so the audience and the people who elected some of these officials, they never once believed it. We know that Donald Trump never believed it."
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