Bonus: Demons in QAnon & Beyond (w/Professor Jonathan O’Donnell)
For our inaugural bonus episode of Conspirituality Podcast, we feature a single interview: a deep dive into the demonology of QAnon and Xtian evangelicalism with Dublin-based Religious Studies scholar Jonathan O’Donnell (pronouns: they/them).O’Donnell took Matthew through a tour of modern demons: how they show up and how believers relate to them. They also explore the amazing world of “spiritual warfare handbooks,” which have a history in US evangelicalism, are bestsellers in Q-land, and in some ways resemble new-age self-help manuals. They discuss prophecy, speaking in tongues, and the impacts of demonology on marginalized identities. Professor O’Donnell specializes in American Religious and Cultural Studies, with a focus on the religious right and systems of dehumanization. They study Islamophobia, antisemitism, transphobia, and religious nationalism. Their current research analyses the relation between evangelical demonology, authoritarianism, and “post-truth politics” in Trump’s America.
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Hello everyone and welcome to the first of our bonus episode Conspirituality Podcast Drops.
The main episode podcasts usually run long and we always have more data than we know what to do with, so we're going to be spacing things out a little for breathing room.
And some of these mini episodes will be short and sweet and others will be more laid back and lengthy.
They'll all be hosted by us individually.
Today, I've got a deep dive into the demonology of QAnon and Christian evangelicalism with Dublin-based religious studies scholar Jonathan O'Donnell, pronouns they-them.
Professor O'Donnell takes me through a tour of modern demons and how they appear, and how believers relate to them.
They also explore the amazing world of spiritual warfare handbooks, which have a history in US evangelicalism and some overlaps with New Age self-help manuals.
You'll hear about the fact that I have a demon story of my own, but it's from my Catholic childhood and somewhat different.
I had the tools at the time to interpret that experience in terms of My internal psychology and I was able to see that the dream of the vampire was telling me something about my internal self.
So it was really amazing to spend time with someone who studies and understands the more paranormal interpretations of demons and how these impact those who have them.
This is part of why I think this is a good extra segment to launch our short episodes with.
Professor O'Donnell goes slowly here and we cover the issue in depth.
And as I remark at the end, it feels really good to let the slow pace of scholarship modulate the speed of the news cycle.
I really love good scholarship that way because it always gives me the sense that people are willing to take time with things and understand them with empathy.
Professor O'Donnell specializes in American religious and cultural studies with a focus on the religious right and systems of dehumanization.
They study Islamophobia, antisemitism, transphobia, and religious nationalism.
Their current research analyzes the relation between evangelical demonology, authoritarianism, and post-truth politics in Trump's America.
Hello, Jonathan.
Welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast.
Thanks so much for taking the time.
Pleasure to be here, Matthew.
So what, in a nutshell, if this is possible, is demonology?
So there's kind of a narrow and a broad answer to that question.
I generally in my work define demonology very broadly as discourse about demons wherever it happens to be around.
Right.
There is, and we can kind of talk in a second about what a demon classifies as in this context,
There is a more narrow definition that treats it very specifically as a school of Christian theology, either very formalized like it was in, say, the Middle Ages and particularly early modernity, where you had a very kind of rigid, formulaic form of traditional demonology, or what I study today, which is similar but much more fluid and much more, like, less formalized than it used to be.
Does that mean that the demons themselves can wander into and out of religious discourses, they can secularize, or they can appear in different contexts?
Yeah, I mean very much so.
I mean you could look at the entire kind of post-Miltonic, post-Milton use of the devil and demons like in as literary figures for that context.
Yeah.
Like I myself would include that kind of in the broader cultural discourse of demonology of like discourses about demons.
This is a point of contention like many scholars would disagree with me.
Right.
But I generally see I guess this is kind of like the big distinction with demonology, is whether you consider it to be like discourses about specific demons, so say you could trace Lucifer, to use the quintessential example, both in his traditional theological context but also this kind of post-theological literary or artistic culture context.
Or there is the other use of demonology that sometimes gets used where it's specifically just a discourse of othering, That is essentially separated from traditional theological discourses of demonology, and this is the way that secular scholars often use the term.
Right, well, I can see how, I mean, you know, I've reached out to you and I invited you for this interview because, of course, we're going to be talking about demonology as it pertains to QAnon, and I can see how we kind of have almost a mixing bowl or a pastiche of all of these themes and usages in current culture.
Yeah, very much so.
That's kind of why I don't personally make the distinction quite as rigidly, because they tend to feed off each other.
Especially when you're dealing with literary pop cultural representations of demons will feed back into more formalized demonologies, particularly on the evangelical right.
So I think maintaining a rigid distinction while useful in some contexts often works to obscure far more than it illuminates.
Right.
Well, speaking of evangelicalism, and we'll get to its impact on QAnon land in a bit, but you've done a lot of study on something called the Spiritual Warfare Manual, which, as I take it, is an influential genre in American evangelicalism.
Can you talk generally about what these manuals are, how popular they are, and how influential they might be for today's QAnon digital warriors?
Yeah, okay.
So initially, what a Spiritual Warfare Manual is, is essentially, I guess as the name would suggest, it is a manual or a handbook for advising readers on how to participate in spiritual warfare.
Spiritual warfare being the war against demonic forces in daily life and the world.
Specifically in terms of genre, they tend to vary slightly widely.
Most of them will be very similar to self-help manuals.
They'll be advising people on how to deal with troubles in their daily life, in their work, in their marriages, and their friendships.
But by placing the blame for these on demonic entities that have perhaps entered the life of the individual through Either a personal sin or sometimes a kind of ancestral sin or familial sin.
Right.
The genre does kind of vary from this though.
On the other end of a kind of spectrum, you'll have more conspiratorial or like prophecy manuals.
It will take that same worldview of demons as the kind of hidden forces behind daily life.
But we'll focus more specifically on politics, on On world affairs, world politics, national discourses, broader cultural discourses within a society.
This is often how they overlap with, say, the QAnon manuals.
There are several spiritual warfare manuals written by people involved in QAnon.
Praying Medic has written several.
For example, I think David Hayes is the actual name.
Other figures like Mark Taylor started off in spiritual warfare and has kind of become more of a QAnon figure in the last couple of years.
But it sounds like he had some preparation, some background that the manual format actually puts a person into a zone in which they're giving instruction in this landscape.
You know, this is how to overcome.
Yeah, definitely.
And this is kind of one of the specific things with the manuals is they vary in what they're trying to do.
Um, some of them will be, a lot of them will be aimed at convincing Christians, uh, that demons are real and are like part of everyday life.
Right.
Um, and generally in terms of how popular they are, uh, I mean, it varies.
It's difficult to, there's been no, no data directly on the figures of these manuals, but they are sold generally in like most Christian bookshops.
for example.
Right.
Several of them will be.
So if you're in a Christian bookstore, there will be at least several spiritual warfare manuals of varying descriptions like on, on offer there.
Now, what kind of, I mean, it, it sounds, you can inform me on this, but it sounds just right off the bat that a spiritual warfare manual would be ideally situated for digital warriorship in the sense that, you know, its techniques would be sort of things that you would do at home things, how you would organize your internal, you know, landscape and hygiene, how you would pray and so on.
It's, Am I on the right track there?
Yeah, you're definitely on the right track with that.
There's a lot of overlap with general self-help discourse, it's very internally focused.
There are other manuals that are more collective.
They'll advocate for things like prayer walks, for example, where groups of Christians will get together and they'll usually circumambulate a specific location while reciting prayers, in a way of driving out the evil spiritual force that's seen as kind of indwelling in that specific place.
But this kind of is the division whether the manuals are focused specifically on demons connected to place and location, or institutions, or demons mostly related to the individual.
Or like family life, where the space, if there is one, will be like the home, for example, or the local church that will be the space you need to cleanse or guard against.
Is there a point at which the Spiritual Warfare Manual trips over into, you know, actual planned incitement of violence?
Because, of course, that's what the analysts are really concerned about with QAnon is that, you know, what seems for many people to be a viral, racist, anti-Semitic brain worm is actually going to incite large-scale violence.
But do the Warfare Manuals usually stop short of, you know... Yeah.
The big division that Spiritual Warfare Manuals tend to draw is, they borrow this line from, I believe it's from Ephesians, the idea that we battle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, the forces of this dark world, and the spiritual forces of wickedness in heavenly places.
Right.
So the idea there is that, and the idea that they'll recite is like, we're not about attacking people, we're about attacking these spiritual forces that kind of lie behind people at institutions, which is why they focus specifically on prayer, like prayer is a big...
Part of that.
That said, when they're using this prayer and this political activism to, and the activism often goes along with it, to change institutional policy or affect kind of widespread like governmental level structures or institutional policies, these end up having severe material ramifications on individuals that are marked as in league with demonic powers, either knowingly or unknowingly.
Right.
Well, it's very interesting that you say that, you know, the target isn't people, because in, I guess, couldn't we say the demonology of QAnon, people are targeted, but they are abstract, they're symbolic, they're but they are abstract, they're symbolic, they're celebrities.
I mean, I don't think, Bill Gates seems to be a person in the world, and certainly to his family he is, and to those he works with, but I mean, in QAnon discourse, he takes on an altogether sort of iconic status, and I'm wondering, is Bill Gates a demon in the QAnon mythos?
I mean, Bill Gates is a demon kind of similarly, I mean, I guess not directly, but, like, yes.
I mean, in a sense, Bill Gates, though, operates similarly to the way that a lot of evangelical discourse is around, say, Hillary Clinton have operated since the 1990s.
Right.
Like, obviously, Hillary Clinton, like, is an actual person who exists in the world and has various political stances that people can either agree or disagree with.
But within right-wing discourse, she kind of adopted this, like, symbolic role as representative of Things like the changing role of women in public life, specifically forms of feminist activism that were very big in the 90s.
Ideas of political corruption, especially around her connection to Bill.
But, like, this is one of the things that I think was missing from maybe some of the discussion around the 2016 election, is that, like, for a lot of conservative discourse, like, Hillary Clinton existed more as a symbol than an actual person.
Right.
And Bill Gates in QAnon discourse, as well as other figures like George Soros, for example, and a lot of these just kind of operate similarly.
Like, yes, these are real people, but they're operating as kind of stand-ins for broader cultural discourses and systems, which is not to say that they can't individually be targeted.
They like frequently are, like either directly or indirectly. - It's also just occurring to me that I'm wondering if we're now living in an age of spectacle in which we can actually have more specifically defined demons and more like either directly or indirectly. - It's also just occurring to me that I'm wondering if we're now living in Demons, and more demons in total than at any other time in history.
Because, I mean, we can just name them off.
There's Gates, there's Soros, there's Chrissy Teigen, and there's like the whole raft of Hollywood personalities that turn into these abstract targets about which people have all these fantasies about what they're doing on some ethereal plane.
Yeah, I mean, that's actually kind of an interesting point that deals with the broader issue of spectacle and the broader issue of, yeah.
See, it's kind of interesting because a lot of these discussions will, I mean, they might claim that these celebrities are possessed, for example, but usually what they'll come up with are narratives in which these individuals are acting as agents of literal demonic forces who exist.
One of the lines from a particular evangelical book that I analyzed is the deeper state, the idea of the state behind the deep state.
Oh, so there's the regular government, then there's the deep state.
So there's the regular government, then there's the deep state, which is like the conspiracy.
So that's like Soros and Bill Gates and the kind of conspirators.
Then there's the deeper state, which is like the actual demons who are Either communing with the Deep State, either directly through narratives of occult rituals, or indirectly through whispering thoughts and the other ways that demons are seen as constructions communicating with people.
Does the Deeper State have a place that it meets?
Is it in three-dimensional reality?
No, the Deeper State is entirely spiritual in this construction.
It might intersect with the material.
Demons intersect with the material realm in spiritual warfare discourses through individuals or through places.
They become kind of emblems of demonic presence in a lot of ways.
But on a technical level, the deeper state here would exist entirely in an abstract spiritual realm.
Yeah, I mean… It is understood as real.
I think that's kind of an important point.
It's not just like a symbolic realm.
The demonic realm within spiritual warfare is understood to literally exist and to interface with material reality.
Now, does it require, therefore, prophets or shamans or interpreters who have mystical vision into the deeper state in order to verify that it's there and what it's doing?
Kind of yes and no.
So one of the big discourses regarding Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity since it arose in the early 20th century onwards has been a generalization of notions of prophethood.
There's a lot of complexity to this, but on a basic level, the traditional mainline Christian perspective is that prophethood is something that existed in the past and stopped.
There are no contemporary prophets.
Within charismatic Christianity, that's not a tenet.
Prophethood is considered to be present in the contemporary world.
So you'll get a broad range of people who will either claim or be positioned as prophets who have divine insight and are given visions by God.
Like Mark Taylor, who I mentioned before, he's kind of big in the QAnon circles these days.
I wrote a book called The Trump Prophecy, where he was literally given prophetic visions by God that Trump was going to be president and various things that would happen during the Trump presidency, many of which haven't come true.
It's worth noting.
Right, now the threshold for belief in what Mark Taylor is writing amongst his followers, does it have to be, well we know that Mark Taylor went into a trance state, or that he had some kind of peak experience, or that he Is there, are there any of the sort of sainthood characteristics that, you know, we would find in, in hagiographies?
Like, you know, they were born in grace and then they, you know, had a, they had an alienated teenage life, but then they had an awakening moment.
Is that starting to build up too around, around personality?
I mean, Taylor definitely has parts of that narrative.
Not so much the born in grace, but definitely the kind of conversion narrative, like the moment of awakening.
His personal narrative is often tied up with his history as a firefighter, that he essentially developed PTSD and then was kind of healed.
By divine grace and given visions of Trump's election as a result of this.
Side note, was he injured and was he opiated for pain as a firefighter?
I don't know if he was injured, I believe.
I don't know if he was opiated.
Although it's worth noting that the visions that he claims are not related specifically to his injury, they're more related to his narrative of recovery.
Yeah, right, because I'm just thinking of the guy who, the stuntman who produced Out of Shadows, who directly connects his spiritual transformation to a time post-injury where he was heavily medicated, and I think that's a really interesting...
I can't remember the exact details.
I can't remember the exact details of Taylor's account at the moment.
There must be a lot of details.
Yeah, so that's possible, but I don't know for certain.
So I'm going to err on the side of caution here.
Okay.
Now, in one of the essays that we'll post in the show notes, you cite an eye-popping statistic that, I mean, QAnon aside, 54 Americans believe that demons, quote, absolutely, unquote, exist.
So, what does that mean in everyday practice for people?
I think this is kind of an interesting point, because the amount of people in America who may believe in demons, even absolutely believe in demons, is not the same as the number of Americans who are participating in spiritual warfare, for example.
A lot of people believe, and this kind of gets back to what you mean by demon.
For a lot of people, demon is just a general word for an evil spirit.
In which case, do you believe in demons?
Do you believe in evil spirits that hang out in quite a few traditions?
Not just Protestant Christianity, or even Catholic Christianity.
A lot of those people, like a lot of new age people, believe in malevolent spirits, for example.
So in terms of everyday practice, it might not impact as broadly as you might think.
Like a general belief that like malevolent spiritual forces exist in the world, like, like doesn't necessarily have a direct impact on how you live your life on a day-to-day level.
Right.
So, so even that like absolutely might and absolute belief is really still going to be further nuanced by, you know, do you have, do you have regular nightmares or do you have, um, You know, are there instructions that you feel that you receive versus do you have a general sense of malaise that forces beyond your control are causing harm?
Pretty much.
So I think it is important to nuance that perspective because there are a lot of different views that can stem from a belief in demons.
Now, in your study of all of this, is the basic Jungian perspective that the demon as an internal experience or as a symbol is actually part of the unreconciled or unintegrated self.
Does that ever come up?
Because when I try to really connect with this personally, I'm ex-Catholic and I think about this very powerful dream I once had of being in church and having this cold wind blow through the church and it was packed.
And I turned around and I realized that this very ominous figure cloaked in black was stalking up the center aisle and he was glaring at everybody and I understood that he was vampiric and that just by looking at somebody, he was going to infect them and I could feel this terror that, you know, the effect of his gaze was going to sweep up to me.
But as he passed me, I realized, oh, he kind of looks like me.
And I also had, you know, a high school teacher at that point who, you know, gave me his dream interpretation on Jungian lines, but is that whole sort of capacity to analyze these feelings and these sensations, these premonitions as being parts of the self, is that just off the table in the demonology that you study?
I'd say yes and no.
A lot of it has to do with the way that sin is constructed in these narratives.
One of the common aspects of spiritual warfare discourse is that demons gain access to people and places through sin.
And sin can vary wildly in what it is.
It can be anything from From histories of substance abuse to, quote unquote, idolatry, which is essentially like practicing any form of non-evangelical Christianity, to sinful thoughts, you know, the traditional sins of like pride or lust or wrath, for example.
So there will be this element of internal construction and internal narrative that will be about identifying and healing from whatever you've identified as the sins that permit the demon access to you.
Right.
But the demon itself will always be externalized.
It is a separate entity that exists outside of the individual.
And is just gaining access to the individual through a flaw in the person's spiritual life.
It brings up something that I haven't thought about before with regard to QAnon is that there's such a fixation upon the innocence of the devotee.
I actually haven't heard any QAnon Language around, well, we brought this on ourselves or God is punishing us or, you know, once we purify ourselves, the cabal will be destroyed or everybody will be released.
Q himself in the drops doesn't seem to advocate for any kind of like, you know, personal spiritual renewal.
I might be mistaken about that, but what's your take on that?
Yeah, that kind of ties into, I guess I would consider it an extension of the externalization of demonic forces.
But also part of the way that, in terms of the broad range of spiritual warfare discourse and language, and the manuals themselves, QAnon discourse falls very concertedly on the end that's closer to general conspiracist discourse, general kind of prophecy writing about evil malevolent forces ushering in the end times, and far less on the kind of more self-help
end of the spiritual warfare spectrum, which tends to be much more individual and personalized and about cleansing the individual or the family or your immediate environment.
QAnon is very much focused on the area that's far more about world systems, national cultural discourses,
Yeah, and like politics and it's kind of capital P. Well, I guess, and I guess the body politic too, because I mean, there is one of, I think one of the attractions of QAnon to wellness influencers is the notion of purification and, you know, vibrating more highly, whatever that means or however it works out.
But, You know, it really does seem like the shared body of the QAnon devotees is something that's to be politically purified, also morally purified, but there's never any sense, I mean, this is kind of a clue, I think, psychologically, there's never any sense that, you know, the devotee has to take some kind of ownership over the state of the world.
They really seem to speak as though they are uniformly oppressed.
Yeah, and that ties broadly into evangelical discourses of the righteous remnant, the idea that they are separate from but in the world, this idea of separation that needs to be both Constructed, but also constantly enforced.
The idea that you are separate from the world is not simply a statement, it's an act of being.
An act of being in the world.
And QAnon very much builds on that narrative of the innocence of the in-group and the malevolence of the out-group.
Which ties into the general, I guess, more popular or secular uses of demonology as As the rigid construction of outgroups that are irredeemably other, and therefore either need to be...
Illuminated or expelled, depending on the particular territorial metaphor you're working with.
Right, and they can be, yeah, and they can be so close to home.
I'm just thinking of Trump coming down his golden elevator and talking about Mexicans being rapists and murderers, when it's mainly Mexicans working in the hotel that polished the fucking golden elevator.
So, it's, it's, there's no space between
Yeah, I mean, the issue here is that the forms of demonization here, both literal and metaphoric, that run through discourses like QAnon, but also the QAnon-adjacent evangelical right over the last few years, have fallen generally along existing
Divisions within US society along lines of immigration and citizenship, racial divides, gender and sexuality.
They're spiritualizing, in a lot of ways, existing political divisions within America and raising these to a cosmic level.
Islamophobia would be the other huge one, but that is kind of, yeah.
Speaking of marginalization and the impacts of QAnon, you identify as non-binary, and I imagine that this has been influential in your scholarly interests.
For my limited cis understanding, I wonder whether this often misunderstood and targeted and othered identity gives a certain felt sense of what it means for a dominant culture to need and to fantasize about demons.
Is this something that you can speak to?
Oh, absolutely.
So there's kind of like a number of levels that operate here.
There's the level of embodied research, in which it is important to recognize that no No research is ever produced from a neutral standpoint.
The kind of classic principle of feminist epistemology.
So my research into demonology, and particularly into evangelical demonology, stems specifically from the fact that I am, in many ways, a living embodiment of the discourses of the demonologies that they are constructing.
I am with demons in the sense of both affliction and affiliation from these people's view.
And this kind of has generally had a pretty broad impact on my research and the way that I view both the demonology itself but also its intersections with broader cultural society and the way that these divisions like fall along existing fault lines.
So you're dealing with the kind of, I mean recently we've had a lot of discourse and a lot of Demonization, both literal and figurative, of trans and non-binary people, gender non-conforming people broadly, queer people generally, especially in the context of QAnon and the way that it plays into very, very old tropes about protecting children from
Threatening, deviant others, most of which historically have been aligned with sexual and gender minorities, also foreigners, but that overlaps with the demonizing construction of the foreigner as the bringer of kind of alien or strange cultural and sexual habits that often falls in with this.
Right.
Well, and then it seems to reach a kind of peak escalation with the construction in QAnon fantasy land of Michelle Obama as actually being male as well as demonic and, you know, involved in ritual sacrifice.
It seems like there's I don't think there would be an end point to the absurdity or that there can be and maybe that's the point of othering is that it's to continually push the boundary of unacceptability farther and farther so that you never really have to look at the person in front of you.
Definitely, although I'd also point out there that I think it's really important that the specific construction of Michelle Obama is specifically also related very intimately to the history of anti-blackness in America and the construction of black women specifically as unfeminine, which then like very much, and the general construction of femininity and masculinity broadly as it falls along racial lines in America.
It's amazing stuff.
Well, just a few more questions.
You know, at a recent Save the Children event in Hollywood, there was a group of evangelical Christians who broke out into full-on speaking in tongues.
And I found that fascinating.
Basic question first, how do evangelicals distinguish Speaking in tongues as a form of, you know, inspiration or channeling from demonic possession.
How do they know that they're in the spirit?
I mean, to a significant extent, it's internal.
I've never spoken in tongues, so I can't comment on how that feels.
However, it's worth noting here that there is a lot of discourse within spiritual warfare manuals, generally, of the distinction between not just speaking in tongues, but kind of charismatic inspiration broadly, and witchcraft.
And often the division is drawn along lines of what is God's will or what is seen as God's will.
Are you operating in the spirit or are you operating like with another spirit?
Right.
But how those get identified varies quite wildly and often falls along lines of sometimes of institutional power hierarchies.
Like, if there is a pastor, for example, and a congregant starts speaking in tongues but ends up speaking a message that is Considered not amenable to the pastor's authority or whatever it happens to be?
Right.
How do you police that boundary?
It's very easy for someone in a position of institutional power to be like, this person was not praying in the spirit, they were praying with the spirit of witchcraft.
Wow.
And then ultimately push them out of the church.
So they're walking very... You see this narrative actually crop up quite frequently in some spiritual warfare manuals.
But the actual content of the people who are being accused of speaking in a spirit of witchcraft is very rarely repeated in these texts.
You're just kind of expected to take it like on faith from the individual.
That this was an ungodly message of some description.
But exactly how?
Who knows?
So there's something very energizing and appealing and sort of peak experience-y about speaking in tongues but the person who does it really has to walk a fine line because it's uncertain how they're going to be understood.
Yeah.
Right.
Pretty much.
This kind of talks to the general issue with a lot of charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity and is in fact why a lot of Christians who are, maybe not a lot, but a substantial number of Christians who are not part of those modes of Christianity often accuse them of being demonically possessed, or practicing witchcraft, or sorcery of some description.
There's a lot of boundary policing that goes on both within evangelical Christianity broadly, between these modes, But also within these modes of Christianity itself in terms of how do you decide what is witchcraft and what is charismatic practice.
There's a lot of attention paid to.
To the boundaries of that, and all the policing that goes on around that.
Right.
You know, the one, I don't have experience with speaking in tongues either, except when, you know, with my young children, there's, you know, sort of Jazzy, goofy talk, which carries a quality of that, right?
Especially if there's a lot of laughter or a lot of emoting around it.
But I did study Jyotish or East Indian astrology for a number of years and the teacher that I had would assign mantras for us to recite and there were a lot.
Like, for the sun mantra, you would do 40,000 repetitions until you gained a certain type of familiarity with the meanings and the principles of the sun and its movements and so on.
But the ultimate goal was something called Vahksiddhi in Sanskrit, which is the gift of transcendent speech.
The principle actually was if you had purified yourself enough through prayer, especially by using your voice to praise a particular force or deity, that anything that came out of your mouth would be true.
Whatever you just, I mean, very bad for, you know, fact-based discourse, but pretty kind of interesting with regard to a person's self-conception of being authentic, right?
Like you could do a spiritual practice that allowed you to just open your mouth and trust that whatever came out was useful and true and productive and inspired.
Is there anything like that going on in speaking in tongues as well?
I mean, there is definitely the element of this idea that you are full of the Spirit, like the Spirit of the Lord has kind of descended upon you and you are speaking
um you're speaking truth kind of with a capital T uh in its kind of cosmic sense like within that state right so like that is similar but like exactly like like the like there's a certain element to which It's less kind of practice-based, I guess, in that context.
There's less sense of, like, you perform these specific rituals or ways of speaking and you get to a state where this occurs.
It's more like, it kind of ties into narratives of grace, the idea that grace is this kind of gift.
Yeah, I guess it's very Protestant, right?
Where you're not going to have to work, you shouldn't have to work so hard on 40,000 mantras, that's kind of delusional actually, when God is all around you and, you know, everybody has access.
Yeah, sometimes it's kind of interesting when this sometimes goes around narratives of institutional power in these movements, because sometimes it will come out that a particular charismatic creature was maybe not quite as holy as was depicted in their public persona.
And there's a lot of debate about whether this
Invalidates or complicates like the messages they gave kind of maybe while channeling the spirit and basically like which side of the divide about whether it's all fine because it was God speaking through them and whether they were like an unworthy individual is essentially immaterial to this kind of act of divine grace that is for both for that individual but also for the believers generally.
Or whether this is kind of seen as an invalidating event, like varies depending on who you read and who you ask.
Right.
Well, two last questions that kind of like push at the boundaries of religious studies, I think at this point, but I think you're well suited to look at them.
You know, QAnon has leapt out of the chans on the power of memes.
And, you know, as I was reading your work and thinking about this interview, I wanted to ask you whether you saw an overlap between the meme as an instantly recognizable and potent communicator of meaning and the traditional religious icon.
That's a really, really interesting question.
Because they definitely operate similarly in some description.
I mean, as we've kind of seen this particularly over the last few years, but you think of the rise of the alt-right, like, previous to QAnon, this, like, co-option of specific images to convey specific, like, covert and overt ideological messages.
As collective symbols of identity and communal belonging.
Right.
I'd say it's kind of interesting in that it depends a lot on what you mean by objects of ritual power, essentially.
Right.
So there is, on the one hand, there is a sense in which certain memes are imbued with spiritual power.
Are imbued with conveying specific ideological messages either covertly or overtly But there's also the sense of kind of communal effervescence, you might call it, you know, to use a Durkheimian phrase.
Right.
Or just general communal belonging the idea that And this kind of ties into the broader politics of dog whistle, and the way that memes often operate as dog whistles.
Right.
Not just within Q, but also within online discourse, broadly.
And this sense of religion as community, and of religion as communal belonging, like this idea that these memes are operating as Maybe not points of devotion per se, but points of continuity and connection between people that bind them into something that is larger than the individual.
Yeah, that's an amazing way of looking at it.
I mean, just going back to referencing my ex-Catholicism, I'm thinking about how the iconography that I grew up with in, you know, mid-century Toronto was both instantly recognizable, but also quite different and culturally nuanced when I would go to Europe or to, you know, Mexico or what have you.
And I'm getting this feeling that the memes of QAnon are going to have both a unifying quality trans-globally, but also they're also going to absorb local meanings and local aesthetics and local mysteries, really.
Yeah, no, very much so.
And that ties actually back into Spiritual Warfare broadly, just as a brief point.
Spiritual Warfare as a movement is global, but it's also very localized.
It's often very focused on Specific regional cosmologies and mythologies and folklore or architecture like in specific places.
I focus on it primarily like within the United States in my research, but it often adopts a very local flavor.
And I see QAnon like as an outgrowth or adjacent to that broader movement.
Like, we'll adopt a very similar framing, I think.
Right.
Okay, well, last sort of religious studies boundary question.
You know, if QAnon is a religion, as a number of scholars have started to point out, but it's also gamified in the sense that participants are given jobs to do, you know, they can interpret the scriptures, they can become prophets themselves, they can become seers, they can become digital warriors.
Is there any religious history precedent for this?
I mean, I don't know of any, personally, any specific history of Gamified.
I personally would push back against the idea that QAnon is a religion.
I would say that it was religious, but I see it in a lot of ways as an outgrowth of existing trends within American religiosity that is primarily either Christian or influenced by Christianity in a lot of ways.
Although QAnon is kind of broader than that, so it's not just Christian.
But I would not identify QAnon specifically as something that is separate from other religions in America.
Right, but it's certainly, what do you say, combinatory, or it's a master appropriator.
There is a distinct syncretic element.
Right, right.
It's imperialistic in a way.
It's imperialistic in a way.
It's absorptive.
That's kind of often how Spiritual Warfare... This is kind of why I see it as an overlap with Spiritual Warfare broadly.
Spiritual Warfare is also like that.
It goes through its missionary discourses, it goes to local cultures, it goes to spaces, it absorbs local elements into itself, and it subordinates them to its overarching demonologies.
Right.
But it uses...
In that imperialistic way it extracts intellectual and sometimes material, often material resources from places as a way of feeding itself.
Right.
The gamified element though, beyond religion, I think is very central to QAnon and I think ties into the broader way that it's interfaced with online culture.
Specifically around ideas of fandom and ideas of alternate reality games or augmented reality games, the ARG universe.
I think this is central to why it exploded on the Chan boards and other places like that, places where these were Very common forms of discourse that were occurring in these kinds of spaces.
Right.
Its general participatory element is, I think, incredibly crucial to its success or to the explosion that QAnon has gone through.
And in a way, Although the direct gamified elements are not necessarily replicated in broader religious discourses that I'm aware of, a lot of spiritual warfare discourses are very participatory.
They're all about the individual Participating either individually or more often collectively within this kind of broader narrative of cosmic war that is occurring around you.
Right.
And QAnon very much feeds off that, but I think is also very much geared around the specific configurations of online communities that have developed over the last decade, say.
Right.
Well, you know, I said that that was the last question, but now something's in my brain that's a little bit more personal and maybe it's a bit of a confession as well.
As I'm listening to you, I'm thinking of how relieving it is To engage with a scholarly view, but I think it's also relieving because it gives me, or I think it's relieving in part because it gives me a sense that, you know, history is long and things unfold in time and they can be understood over time.
And, but I also know that, you know, I also know that there's like really day-to-day stressful and horrifying aspects to what we're discussing.
And so I'm wondering, so first of all, thank you for letting me relax a little bit into this.
But I guess my personal question is, do you have to personally struggle with the tension or the stress of the material that you cover versus the adoption of this kind of long view perspective?
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of tension that goes into my work like both the material itself is often incredibly stressful and incredibly unpleasant to read to a point where like sometimes I become somewhat inured to it and this is one reason I like to discuss the work with other people Because there'll be points where I'll just bring up something and someone will be, wow, that's really, really horrific.
But I've seen it so much in so many books that its horror has kind of been recognized but somewhat lessened in my worldview.
Right.
But also just having a longer view.
It does help with contextualizing some of these crises as these emerge, within broader histories.
But that can also be incredibly Not relieving in the sense that these are, these can sometimes manifest as like reiterations or repetitions of existing discourses and problems and like narratives of crisis around identity and power that have been playing out for decades, centuries, but at least decades.
In that sense that like, Like, nothing may be new under the sun, but that's not always good.
Right.
Right, exactly.
Yeah.
What's the top thing that you do to take care of yourself?
I draw, I play video games occasionally, I watch movies, I go for walks in nature.
Nice.
I do lots of things that are self-care practices because with this material you need to step away and have other spaces.
I tend to do things that don't involve me being at my computer, because my computer is a space I use for work, increasingly in the pandemic for relaxation.
But when I need a serious break and some self-care, I'll do other things that are not.
Not digitally mediated.
Right.
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