to me the unfortunate tie in between Christian evangelicals and MAGA smooth brains is the way they so readily completely abandoned the need for critical thinking.
I’m going to use a Mormon example, so maybe not evangelical but it perhaps shows the example better. Even though Joseph Smith was not writing things down 2000 years ago, but during a time of Americans knew him and wrote about him and what he said and did, the need to believe in an inherent truth of his teachings is the same as need “The Bible says it, I believe it, that ends it! “
for LDS people, they are absolutely prohibited from going online or reading books that discuss some of the verified truths about the book of Mormon. For example, they have the original one, and they have the one they hand out today. There have been hundreds and hundreds of changes. One of the biggest ones is removing some of the plurals when Smith talked about “Gods” - where the reference is now singular. Mormons are essentially a polytheist religion, but that is not emphasized because it’s hard to get someone from another Christian denomination to accept that.
My small point is that when you are simply not allowed to read other sources to determine what you think is true, then you cannot be said to be a critical thinker. All of the MAGA people who refused to read a word of the Washington Post or the New York Times or anything other than a few select conservative news sources leads to the same problem. When your leader tells you, you are not allowed to read other things, it is impossible to be a critical thinker.
Evangelical religions and conservative GOP politics right now are hand-in-hand in adamantly prohibiting and discouraging their followers from seeking out other sources to determine what is true on their own.
TL; DR. We are fucked