A Deep Cut from our Patreon archive (July 2023)
What do we mean when we say that we believe something? When the QAnon Shaman got dressed on the morning of January 6, he put on his red, white, and blue face paint, his postmodern quasi-Native American horned fur hat, and grabbed the spear to which he had attached an American flag. In performance mode, this cosplay persona had already garnered him a taste of the attention that would soon increase exponentially as he became the most recognizable figure of the Capitol Riot.
In today’s Bonus, Julian argues that his costume, as well as his ritual actions on that day were also an expression of a political worldview, run through with deeply held spiritual beliefs about the world and his role in it. The history of political religion, propagandistic conspiracies, and progressive spiritual convictions may show that—far from being trivial—belief is at the heart of the American, and perhaps the human, story.
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Hello listeners, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Julian Walker and this is a Deep Cut titled On Belief.
We release bonus episodes like this onto the main feed from time to time when the topic is relevant to current events and usually also because our Patreon community has responded to the episode by urging us to get it out to a wider audience.
In this episode, then, from July of 2023, I argue that in pluralist societies, we've been lulled into the illusion that one special class of beliefs is simultaneously too sacred to criticize, yet too inconsequential to have any impact on the world.
After all, it's just metaphors about the mystery, right?
Well, I hope the work we've done on this podcast might serve to underline that spiritual beliefs are a powerful individual and collective organizing principle for how people relate to reality.
While it may be a minority who tip over into extremist application of those beliefs, they have an outsized impact.
When those supernatural or metaphysical beliefs are braided into false conspiracy theories, they can collide with the real world in dangerous and destructive ways.
We're releasing this deep cut in the midst of 2024's election year, which happens to coincide with the Trump trials.
We also stand this week on the brink of a potentially calamitous escalation of the conflict between Iran and Israel.
And I published a bonus episode to our Patreon feed this past Monday that examines the role of supposedly sacred red cows in apocalyptic prophecies about the most contested holy site in Jerusalem and how this may have motivated the October 7th attacks, as well as the actions of Jewish religious extremists who want those red cows so as to be able to build a third temple in place of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
So is to bring their Messiah to earth, as well as the American Christian evangelicals who found and transported those same cows from Texas, driven by their belief that war in the Holy Land will hasten the second coming of Jesus.
The episode you're about to hear starts, though, with the QAnon shaman, Jacob Chansley, who famously said prayers with his compatriot Christian nationalist insurrectionists and chanted mantras after having invaded the Senate floor on January 6th so as to ritually cleanse the ley lines around the Capitol from evil.
At the quantum level, of course.
Other rioters that day blew the Hebrew shofar in reference to the Bible's Joshua 6 story about the Battle of Jericho.
They stopped frequently to engage in fervent prayer as they drew closer to the besieged and terrified lawmakers.
In this piece, I argue that the insurrection was not just about Trump's cult of personality and the manipulation of his big lie regarding election fraud.
It was also an explicit ritual performance of Christian nationalist faith and QAnon belief in the need to take action against the blood-drinking, pedophile, Democrat cabal.
I draw on comments from religious scholars Bradley Onishi and Peter Monceau to support this line of argumentation.
Oh, and I also talk about people's beliefs regarding pit bulls in relationship to our dog Kenobi and his interactions with our newborn baby daughter, as well as a harrowing story from much longer ago.
In which my father stood up for his beliefs in the face of racist thugs on an apartheid South African backstreet.
Here then is today's deep cut on belief.
When Jacob Chansley got dressed on the morning of January 6th, Thanks.
He put on his red, white, and blue face paint, his postmodern, quasi-Native American horned fur hat, and grabbed the spear to which he had attached an American flag.
Then he headed out to join his fellow warriors of light at the Capitol.
Okay, wait.
He may have had a nourishing organic breakfast first.
By the look of his lean, shirtless, Norse pagan tattooed physique, it was probably low carb.
I'm going to think out loud today about the concept of belief, more generally, and specifically about the relationship between religious or spiritual beliefs and our actions in the world.
My thesis is that beliefs are the opposite of trivial and beliefs that carry enculturated ultimate truth valences around morality, politics and spirituality have powerful implications on how we see the world and how we act upon it.
When it comes to the common pluralist objection that critiquing or debunking other people's beliefs is impolite and besides, so what if someone believes something you think is false or silly?
Live and let live.
The formulation I've come up with goes something like this.
Spiritual beliefs cannot simultaneously be too sacred to criticize, but too inconsequential to have any impact on the world.
Now, Jake Angeli, as he sometimes calls himself, held beliefs that had an impact on the world that day.
By looking at him, he certainly was in performance mode.
So we have to consider that perhaps he's just a showman looking for an audience, and his signature performance of conspirituality is incidental.
Maybe it's purely opportunistic.
Certainly his costume had already garnered him an existing fame both amongst the MAGA faithful and amongst those of us following the QAnon phenomenon.
But I think it is safe to say that the costume that would render him the most instantly recognizable figure on January 6th and his prominent role and ritual actions were also an expression of a political worldview, run through with deeply held spiritual beliefs about his destined role in a global conflict of biblical proportions.
When the appointed date arrived, he put his money where his face-painted mouth was.
Later on, when he put his bullhorn where his mouth was, Jake led insurrectionists in a long and ornamented prayer to the Christian God.
Now was this merely for the photo op and the clout?
What about when he said the following to an Austrian news outlet in the heady months prior to the insurrection?
I'm quoting here, "...as a shaman, I'm like a multidimensional or hyperdimensional being.
I'm able to perceive multiple different frequencies of light beyond my five senses, and it allows me to see into these other, higher dimensions where These entities, these pedophiles, these rapists, these murderers, these really high up people that they almost like hide in the shadows.
Nobody can see that because their third eye ain't open.
Of course, all of this could be an act.
But if so, we know now that his commitment to staying in character landed him in jail for 27 of the 41 months to which he would be later sentenced.
But here are some questions.
What do we mean when we say that we believe something?
Do our beliefs shape our worldview and our actions in the world?
Or might they exist in a kind of separate abstract compartment?
To what extent does the sacred nature of certain special beliefs predispose us to think about and act in the world in ways faithful to them?
For instance, was Martin Luther King Jr.
expressing a political worldview rooted in his religious beliefs as he pursued civil rights via the activism that would lead, eventually, to his assassination?
Was his willingness to sit in that famous Birmingham jail and to risk his life against a brutally bigoted white majority based in his metaphysical conviction?
I think so.
arc of the moral universe bending toward justice? I think so. Now we often get emails here at the
podcast from people that ask a question along the lines of this, do you guys just not believe
in anything? And the reflexive answer is of course we believe in things, just for good reasons.
But generally, as you probably know, this type of question tends to conflate the general concept of belief with having faith in popular New Age concepts of spirit, Or the paranormal, some kind of god, or alternative medicine which proposes non-scientific diagnosis and treatment protocols that rely on immaterial, faith-based or experiential metaphorical models of how the body works.
To speak for myself, no.
I don't believe in anything like that being literally true.
Beliefs in general, though, exist in great variety.
They have all sorts of implications and differing levels of impact.
What we believe about any number of topics inevitably informs our worldview and the actions we take in the world we believe we inhabit.
For example, I have a dog.
He's a pit bull mix named Kenobi.
Yes, after Star Wars, but there's a longer story about why.
He's a super sweet, gentle dog.
When one of my longtime friends heard that my wife and I were pregnant, she was aghast that we would be bringing a helpless infant into the home of an, at that time, less than one-year-old pit bull.
She likes Kenobi a lot, but always waits at the gate for me to let her in when she comes to visit.
It's sensible.
But the truth about this fierce looking animal is that the only risk an intruder would likely face would be that of being licked to death.
Now that's probably not fair.
He's a good boy.
His gruff but excited baritone bark might scare an intruder off and his madly wagging tail and prodigiously gyrating hips and ribs might knock them over in the dark.
He does weigh almost 90 pounds.
Now, I've described to her how gentle Kenobi was in the very carefully choreographed first meetings with our infant daughter.
And also that he insisted on sleeping protectively beside her crib, watching over her for her first six months of life.
I've shared photos and videos of their sibling love affair, her curious fingers nestled between his teeth and his tongue as he looked at the camera sheepishly to make sure he wasn't getting in trouble.
But my friend believes something about pit bulls.
They're all dangerous, they're bred for fighting, and they could turn their powerful jaws on you in an instant.
I'm not here really to argue the statistical merits of her belief or to say that she is wrong.
I've seen the different articles and studies on this topic so no need to send them to me.
You may be hearing this and feeling alarmed.
All I can say is that we know our dog and my daughter is now five and has experienced not a single moment of fear or danger to her safety from him.
My friend's beliefs have shaped her behavior.
And they may be based on data, or anecdotes, or some kind of cultural knowledge within her family or community, but there it is.
And those beliefs drive how she thinks about pitbulls, and about small children, and also how she acts to protect her own safety.
Which I totally respect.
But I have to say it's the chihuahuas I'm much more careful around.
Here's another example.
My father has a lot of wild stories from his 40-plus years in apartheid-era South Africa.
Like all white boys under that regime, he was drafted into two years of military service right out of high school, and he suffered terribly during that period.
His commanding officer took him aside early on and feigned a kind of sympathetic, off-the-record inquiry into my dad's true political beliefs.
From then on, in addition to even more abusive treatment from his peers, at roll call each day, my father found he had to answer to a new Afrikaans nickname.
Komines.
Translation, unnecessary.
About 20 years later, when I was a teenager, I remember my dad coming home shaken up.
He told us how he had taken a slight detour to avoid traffic and rolled up on a disturbing scene.
Local young men in our middle-class but quite rough whites-only neighborhood sometimes banded together to attack any black interlopers they might run across on the street.
In this case, it was three guys from a feared tow truck gang.
They'd blocked off the road in front of a black man in a car, and they signaled for my father to turn around and get the hell out of there.
He didn't.
Instead, he put the car in park, with the engine still running, and opened the door to stand and look squarely at the hoodlums.
In response, one of them vaulted over the front of the black man's car and smashed the windshield with an acrobatic double-legged kick before coming back neatly to standing in the road.
Startled, as you can imagine, my father stood his ground nonetheless, bearing witness to their disgraceful behavior.
There was a young black man in the passenger seat who, as the glass was still falling, took off running.
My dad speculated that this was to draw them away from the older driver.
It worked, but my dad gave chase as the tow truck pursued the guy on foot and the car with the shattered windshield tore off in the opposite direction.
Once convinced that the passenger had eluded them, my father stopped following the tow truck and turned around to come home.
Now, those gang members were acting out of their belief that black people were a threat to the purity of their neighborhood, that they should be policed and intimidated and were acceptable targets for violence because apartheid categorized them as almost subhuman.
But they also knew that a white witness to activity that was nonetheless criminal put them in danger.
And that attacking my white father would draw the kind of focused police scrutiny they would rather avoid.
For his part, my father was acting out of his conviction that racial violence was morally unacceptable and that he had a responsibility to intervene to do what we would identify today as using his privilege.
Now this may seem weird, but hear me out.
To me, although my father was at that time an atheist, he's become more religious as he's gotten older, that kind of conviction has a spiritual quality.
It need not have any supernatural reference point to carry a kind of prime, directive, internal importance.
There's a reason that as I recall and recount this now, there's a reason I'm close to tears.
My dad is a complicated and imperfect person, but I admire his spiritual resolve and moral clarity when the stakes are this high.
In the strictly poetic and emotive sense of the word, This would be where his soul really shines through.
When I got up this morning, I too got ready for my day.
Okay.
No face paint, horned fur bonnet or spear flag, but I must admit that like Chansley, I am shirtless and in comfortable pants.
I'm writing these words right now.
Well, I was when I wrote what I'm now reading.
I believe I'm sitting at my desk.
It's actually a different desk where I record, but you get the idea.
The morning sky outside my window is gray and overcast.
Now, there's a really, really tiny possibility that I'm dreaming right now, or I'm in a virtual reality simulation.
But if we're honest, those updates on foundational Cartesian philosophical thought experiments and skepticism, like how do we know what is real, they're mostly the province of cool science fiction movies these days.
So, for all practical purposes, we can set that aside.
I intend to read what I'm writing into a microphone attached to my computer and then share that file via the internet with you, dear listener.
Most likely, you're hearing me say this sometime later through earbuds connected to your phone.
I read these words now in what will then be the past, believing that the listening experience you are having now, which is the future as I type and now read this via technology, will follow from a course of action that I and then you will take in a world that we believe functions in quite specific ways.
So here's a digression.
Magic.
Do you believe in magic?
There's a famous quote from science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke which says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
It's a quote beloved by many people like us, people whose temperament carries that special combination of curiosity, imagination, and openness to new experience.
I've often heard the quote used by New Age believers to imply that claims of special powers, paranormal abilities, or esoteric knowledge are really just manifestations of a domain of reality that will one day be mapped out and understood in the coming new paradigm.
I'm sure you're familiar with this idea.
It's like a television might seem to be mind-blowing sorcery to an indigenous person with no previous contact with electronics, but over time it will come to be normalized to them via familiarity.
Now just wait until we try to explain smartphones, satellites, vaccines, In this analogy, synchronicity or psychic abilities or say the as yet undemonstrated efficacy of homeopathy is positioned as a kind of advanced technology.
And this posits a next level of evolution in which what seems like magic to the uninitiated is actually just a technology of consciousness familiar to those who have awakened.
This is why the seeming magical implications of quantum mechanics appeal so much to new-agers, along with equally mangled hyper-relativist and social-constructivist interpretations of postmodern philosophy.
Jake Chansley's quote that I shared above is a perfect example.
Others can't perceive what he sees as a multidimensional shaman because their third eye ain't open.
Perhaps yet.
After the insurrection, he was quoted as saying he believed that he and his compatriots had affected the quantum realm by marching along the ley lines around the Capitol and chanting patriotic slogans.
Now us citizens of the modern world obviously have gaps in our understanding of the technology we use every day.
In this sense it is like magic in that there are processes we rely upon but cannot ourselves adequately explain.
We press a button here and something happens over there.
Case in point, what we're doing right now.
All pre-scientific cultures naturally filled gaps like these in the world around them with imagined paranormal phenomena and supernatural agency.
How else to explain the volcanic eruption, the failed hunt, the stillborn child, the stars in the night sky, or the reason the divinely ordained royal family held all the power and wealth?
Though the science fiction-inspired comparison of paranormal claims to new technology is perhaps unique to New Age spirituality over the last 40 years, the idea of a special class of humans who, through the gift of enhanced perceptual abilities, know the higher truth is much older.
Whether it is the prophecies derived in trance by the ancient Greek oracle at Delphi, or Moses in the Old Testament descending the mountain with the Ten Commandments handed down from God on stone tablets, or the Brahmins of the Indian subcontinent believed traditionally to be twice born, to therefore have karmically earned an innately spiritual higher status and access to religious truths.
The technologies in earlier times might have been knowledge of specific rituals or practices believed to purify the body and mind so as to reveal knowledge of the divine.
They might later have had to do with the ability to read, to memorize, To make reference to sacred scriptures that themselves were believed to contain divine instruction on the nature of reality itself, the purpose of human life, and how to live in accordance with inviolable moral laws and perhaps prophecies for the future.
But here's the thing.
Advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic only to the extent which how it works is not sufficiently understood.
In the everyday sense, the word magic can be used to describe phenomena in the natural world, human creativity, wonder, or love.
But it's also a kind of a shrug.
It's like, who knows?
Even when invoked with an inspired twinkle in the eye, it's a kind of placeholder.
Maybe it means some process that I don't yet understand renders this remarkable or beautiful outcome.
Like magic.
Now philosophers might correctly point out that this quite accurately describes consciousness or life itself.
Invoking the word magic, sometimes interchangeably with the word mystery, can also in this sense be an assertion that the process simply can't.
Ever be understood.
It can only be revered and interacted with via humility and perhaps to go a step further as many do by trusting that its benevolent intelligence will be on our side if we adhere to certain beliefs or ritual practices.
But technology?
Is not really like that, is it?
Technology is the product of ingenuity, of discovering truths about how the world works and then building upon that knowledge to create reliable, predictable machines whose work depends upon that knowledge being accurate every single time.
So while I may not know exactly how posting an audio file to the internet from my computer results in it being accessible to your phone, the engineers who design and build and then sell these machines have to know.
And they rely upon the discoveries of physicists who identified the mechanisms that underlie electronic and digital technology, and some of that has to do with really strange quantum mechanics.
But as many times as my yoga friends send me that amazing video of the first robotic arm being controlled wirelessly via an implanted electrode in a paralyzed person's brain, that's really just not at all the same as telepathy.
The real difference between magic and science is that science is a process which relies upon layers of evidence established through rigorous experimentation which generates knowledge about the world and can then make predictions which can be further verified or refuted.
The so-called magic of actual science-based technology works because of this spectacularly effective and successful human endeavor, while the claims of paranormal or supernatural magic have always only ever failed to stand up in the face of scientific rigor.
But let's go back to the start.
When Jacob Chansley got up on the morning of January 6, 2021, he believed in magic.
He told us that as a multidimensional being, he has special shamanic abilities to perceive frequencies beyond the five senses.
He believes, or certainly seemed to believe, the QAnon conspiracy theory, which contains aspects of the fantastical and supernatural.
He has said that he believed Trump's big lie about the election and that he believed he would be granted a pardon by his president for his justifiable actions on that day if necessary.
I would argue that acting on his beliefs, following his moral compass, and being true
to his faith led him to the course of action he followed on January 6th.
When Chansley arrived on the dais of the Senate chamber, having penetrated the inner sanctum
of American democracy, he did something very specific.
The QAnon shaman, as he's been known around the world ever since, invited his fellow insurrectionists to join him in a prayer.
Let's all say a prayer in the sacred space, he said.
Thank you, Heavenly Father, for the opportunity to stand up for our God-given inalienable rights.
To all the tyrants, the communists, and the globalists, this is our nation, not theirs.
We will not allow the American way to go down.
Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you.
Shortly thereafter, Chansley would leave a note for Mike Pence that said, it's only a matter of time, justice is coming.
As Bradley Onishi writes in his book, Preparing for War, each time those who breached the Capitol crossed a new security barrier on their way towards the Senate floor, some would stop to pray.
They would thank God and reaffirm the divine mandate for their righteous mission.
Religious symbols were everywhere on that day.
Banners and flags with messages like, Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president, or God guts and guns.
Or the medieval crusader red cross on a white background called Deus Vult.
These were interspersed with regular Trump flags or the yellow Gadsden flag with the snake on it, even the Confederate flag.
Onishi describes how some even carried religious statues and paintings into the building.
And of course how the gallows set up to hang Mike Pence were covered in handwritten inscriptions like, God Bless America, In God We Trust, and Amen.
Evangelical worship songs were sung throughout the chaos of that day and impromptu moments of shared fervent prayer punctuated the movement of different clans within the mob.
As they attempted to overturn democracy, many insurrectionists repeatedly reaffirmed in these explicit ways that they believed their actions were in service to the Christian God.
They sought to dismantle a false temple, to disrupt a cursed ritual of illegitimate political power, and to reconsecrate sacred space in the name of their far-right religious vision.
But however shaped this was by the paranoid horrors of QAnon, Trump's habitual self-serving dishonesty, and the amoral reality distortions of Fox News, their beliefs continued a white supremacist apocalypticism that we can trace back to the 1640s.
By embracing Trump as its imperfect hero, the religious right had rail-politicked their way into recapturing the Supreme Court that we now see endorsing their agenda in a string of radically regressive decisions.
And on that day, in 2021, they were ready to violently install Trump as a divinely anointed Commander-in-Chief.
Like the Old Testament Israelites who conquered the city of Jericho in Joshua 6, some January 6 insurrectionist leaders blew the Hebrew shofar.
This is that ritual ram's horn sounded to announce war.
Now from Joshua 6 in the Bible, God said to Joshua, And when they make a long blast with the ram's horn, when you hear the sound of the trumpet, then all the people shall shout with a great shout, and the wall of the city will fall down flat.
The people shall go up, everyone straight before him.
Now, I'll thank Bradley Onishi again for that last connection, as well as the guest on his podcast, Straight White American Jesus, the religious scholar Peter Monceau, who described all of this religious display as creating what he refers to as a permission structure, a kind of psychological safety net that serves to justify or even sacralize violence in the name of patriotism and God.
Alongside the five Capitol Police dead in the wake of the riots and the 140 injured by the mob, two insurrectionists died that day from heart attacks.
One from an amphetamine overdose, and another, Ashley Babbitt, was shot dead while attempting to gain forcible entry into an area dangerously close to the terrified legislators.
She is now revered in the MAGA world as a martyr and her jailed comrades from January 6th as political prisoners.
As I covered for another bonus episode, Trump's first official 2024 presidential campaign speech on March 25th of this year was scheduled in Waco, Texas, the spiritual home of right-wing anti-government militia movements.
The speech coincided with the 30th anniversary of the climactic fire that ended the standoff between heavily armed followers of breakaway Adventist cult leader David Koresh and the ATF and FBI.
Those events left four officers and 82 Branch Davidians dead, including 28 children.
Valid allegations that the government mishandled that 51-day siege in 1993 and the one at Ruby Ridge some six months earlier are often cited as seminal to the ballooning membership of armed militia groups during the following decade.
Armed militia groups, you know, like the Oath Keepers, who had a strong and tactically organized presence at the Capitol alongside the Proud Boys.
Trump's 2023 Waco speech was preceded by a recording played for the crowd and for the cameras of the jailed January 6th Insurrectionist Choir singing the Star Spangled Banner.
And it included what has now become an oft-repeated phrase in his rhetoric, that this is the final battle.
During an atmospheric pause in the song, which was released commercially and briefly topped some charts, Trump himself dramatically recites the Pledge of Allegiance.
One of the few things I look forward to about getting older is perhaps having his awful voice fade from current events and my own mind.
Far from being derailed by the infamy of the Capitol riots, the former president's campaign is a brazen celebration of it and of the religious political extremism it represents.
But what about those jailed insurrectionists?
Well, several of the lawyers representing the over 1,000 of them at various stages of trial and sentencing have tried to argue that they were sincere patriots who were misled by their lying president.
Jacob Chansley's lawyer said Trump had routinely groomed him and millions of other followers into an overwhelming conspiratorial fixation.
Many charged reportedly believed that Trump would pardon them for their service.
It seems reasonable to assume that they may have given little thought to the negative consequences of their actions, given that January 6th was for them the longed-for climax to a disappointingly failed set of prophecies in which the lines blurred.
Between real-world politics, fantastical religion, and live-action roleplay, as the cryptic ersatz koans of QAnon were willed into being visible.
They had done their own research.
They were acting out of a radicalized worldview rooted in a stigmatized set of knowledge claims that leveraged apophenia, bigotry, and susceptibility to seeing the real world as a staging ground for the war between supernatural forces.
Chansley tried to gain pre-sentencing release for his own safety based on the argument that his religious beliefs prevented receiving the COVID vaccine in prison.
He would later go on a hunger strike to demand organic food, which is perhaps unsurprising
given his particularly new age shamanistic slant on evangelical Christianity
combined with appropriated Native American and even Nordic symbols and costumery.
There is a ubiquitous and somewhat contested quote from Voltaire famous for its pithiness.
I know you've heard it.
It says, those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
But we know, of course, that on their own, religious beliefs do not make people violent.
The types of religious extremism associated with violence seem to also require cultural, political, even psychological synergy.
The specifics of the religious beliefs in question clearly matter.
Devout faith invoked in support of compassionate social justice and peaceful disobedience fueled MLK's civil rights movement.
He envisioned that famous arc of the moral universe bending toward justice by making a powerful argument for equality and unprejudiced human dignity as sacred principles of political progress.
That movement positioned righteous protest and activism as spiritually justifiable in the face of an oppressive government and garnered national and even global support from believers and non-believers alike because of its principled moral clarity.
By leaning on a message more liberatory than apocalyptic, MLK inspired a generation of mostly privileged white people to sacralize the cause of civil rights for blacks as self-evidently good.
He spoke not of a holy war, but of a dignifying breaking of chains that would liberate the oppressor as well as the oppressed.
And that's the progressive face of religious beliefs that are nonetheless rooted in an old world conception of reality.
A different branch from that root is represented by the early American colonists who battled amongst themselves over who was more puritanical than whom and famously enacted the country's prototypical satanic panic, the Salem Witch Trials.
On this account of reality, Manifest Destiny sanctified colonial genocide and slavery.
Morality was handed down by an all-powerful eternal creator deity whose prophets told followers how that god wants them to live.
And whose justice was more often than not harsh, retributive, and based on principles from those times that express a misogynistic, homophobic, child-abusive, and slavery-friendly perspective despite claiming to be ultimate truths about the universe.
Now this belief system about the relationship between God and political power underpins today's white Christian nationalism.
But as I learned when I interviewed Gorski and Perry about their book, The Flag and the Cross, I found there was another congregation from the earliest days of the colonies established by Roger Williams in Providence, Rhode Island.
He had lost his faith in puritanism and he would go on to advocate for and risk his own safety acting on behalf of more fair and peaceful relations with the native people, separation of church and state, and abolition of slavery.
His was the first Baptist church in America and it gained a massive following during the first great awakening of the 1730s especially among enslaved blacks.
It would also turn out to be the denomination to which Martin Luther King Jr.
would belong.
The second Great Awakening, some 50 years later, is believed to have played a significant role in the further rise of the abolitionist movement.
In this case, the call to a more God-infused life included recognizing the immorality of slavery.
So, it's ironic.
That the Great Awakening memes around the 2020 pandemic focused a lot more on far-right conspiracy paranoia and the Pentecostal style of seeing the everyday world as a battleground between reactionary angels and liberal demons, often in anticipation of a prophesied apocalypse.
That apocalyptic preoccupation is, however, central to the Adventist movement that grew out of the Great Disappointment as the failed Second Coming prophesied by William Miller during the Second Great Awakening came to be called.
Believers at that time abandoned farms, gave away their belongings, put on specially woven white tunics and prepared for Jesus to appear and the cleansing fire to descend.
Adventism would eventually produce David Koresh, who investigators concluded ordered the fires
be lit in the compound where his followers died at the climax of the Waco siege.
So the specifics of religious beliefs, the cultural and political context clearly matter
a great deal.
At the same time, as an atheist, I can't shake the perception that if you just know that the foundational tenets of all magical thinking, all supernatural authority, all mythic literalism are just plain false, That's a rather good starting point from which to engage more honestly and reasonably with reality and to avoid a lot of ideas that are just not good for your health and sanity.
On this view, the puzzle is solved by understanding that ethics can be arrived at via reason and human empathy, knowledge about the universe can be established using science, existential anxiety can be addressed by an array of self-reflective and dialogical methods like philosophy, meditation, psychotherapy, and Absolutely everything good about the valid needs religions have met for community, meaning, ritual, comfort, and contemplative states of being are diminished not one iota by disentangling them from supernatural authority.
In fact, I would argue that only problematic vestigial baggage is lost in the process.
The passionate faith of progressives who have wanted to extend love to the most oppressed and marginalized and who have sought to reimagine, to reinterpret their traditions in more ecumenical and even interfaith ways to move away from literalism, punitive messages and divisive doctrines have of course been immensely valuable to humanity.
But it is the literalist, fundamentalist, fire-and-brimstone religion that is so often tied to conservative, supremacist, and even fascist movements because reactionary politics leverages the willingness to believe claims of a necessarily old-world patriarchal and tribal religious authority as the primordial basis for a lost social and political order.
That inclusive and tolerant progressivism has perverted.
It is precisely that progress in the form of separation of church and state, pluralistic, secular, moral, and legal values, and education in science and reason that inevitably leads to religion, especially fundamentalist religion, waning in its influence.
It is perhaps no accident, then, that many of the arguably most progressive countries in the world also have the highest percentage of non-believers.
I should say that the fly in the atheist ointment I'm cooking up here is that religion is also persecuted in authoritarian communist regimes.
So this means that North Korea actually rivals Sweden's percentage of non-believers.
And also on the other side of the spectrum, 13 of the countries that show 100% belief in God via Gallup's 2023 poll All of which are Islamic theocracies, by the way, happen to punish atheism with a death sentence, so actual numbers on non-believers there are blurred given the danger of responding honestly to the question.
I'm not sure that negates the point, though, if we think it through carefully.
Previous large-scale polling in these and other Muslim-majority countries seems to show overwhelming support for socially conservative tenets of Sharia law that would make Fox News and the Daily Wire look like a bunch of Unitarians.
And when given the democratic choice in recent years, the policies of who gets elected in these countries seems to support that polling data.
Then there's the birthplace of yoga, where Narendra Modi's ultra-conservative regime all but endorses violence against Muslims in the name of a Hindu ethnostate.
But what of America?
Who were those Christians at the Capitol?
According to research done by Jupe and Denon, over 50% of non-denominational Christians believed in some aspects of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
But 73% of those who also responded positively to the set of questions that aligned them with Christian nationalism also believed in the QAnon conspiracy theory.
It should go without saying that all Christians, Hindus, or Muslims are not fundamentalist nationalists.
Many are inspired by their faith to seek social justice and pluralism.
Likewise, not all New Agers got red-pilled into QAnon and the belief that Trump was a lightworker.
During the pandemic, I watched the most committed true believers in the wellness community put their money where their mouths were, in the same way that Pentecostal Christian churches did.
And in those moments, the power of ardent fundamentalist belief, at odds with reality and with medical science, transcended the obvious cultural and doctrinal differences.
Belief in the gifts of the spirit, speaking in tongues, current events as symbolic of a deeper metaphysical battle between good and evil, rejecting vaccines, channeling the galactic federation, being healed through prayer or laying on of hands, prioritizing ritual practice in community above government regulations, chanting or singing the names of God, and being free to worship and generate revenue in the name of your most passionately
held beliefs about the intersection of spirit and body, belief in reality, faith and medicine,
all of this kind of blends together.
The COVID dissidents who would find otherwise strange bedfellows started to warm their hands
together around the QAnon fire and became part of the fundamentalist but syncretic movement
that perhaps Jacob Chansley leading Christian prayers on the senate floor dressed as a
postmodern shaman who also spouted quantum magic represented most clearly. So what of our mascot?
out.
He's out of prison now.
When Jacob Chansley woke up about a month ago to make his first video as a recently free man, he put on a radiantly white suit, like a camera-ready televangelist.
He's rebranded himself now as the American Shaman, as evidenced by the Stars and Stripes flag beneath his buttoned-up white suit jacket and matching bandana wrapped piously around his bald head in place of the horns.
No more face paint!
But on the wall behind him, we still see his link to the New Age.
There's a large Native American dreamcatcher, which is almost positioned like a big halo behind his head, and it's adorned with large feathers and a beautiful painting of a buffalo and a long-haired brave.
Hello, United States of America and the world, he says with bold enthusiasm.
I would like to start this official statement by thanking God Almighty for providing protection
and blessings along this arduous journey of mine.
An arduous journey indeed.
Thank you so much for listening and thanks for all of your support along the way.
It means the world to us and it makes everything that we're working on possible.
