Monster in the Mirror: Ep. 1 - Christian Nationalism's Gothic Genesis
Monster in the Mirror is a limited audio series produced by Straight White American Jesus, and created and written by Dr. Lucas Kwong.
Monster in the Mirror is a series about monsters. It's about how the fantastical beasts who stalk the imagination of contemporary Christian nationalists were birthed in another white God fearing empire. It's about how Christian nationalism's past and the clues to its future line, the pages of some of the most popular novels in English.
Christian nationalism isn't just a set of policies or a material network of influencers. It's a story, a story that seduces the imagination, one that's been told over and over, but that is now enjoying a renaissance. And if we wanna trace today's reboot back to its source material, we have to go back further than the Reagan eighties or even the Billy Graham fifties.
We have to go back to another time and place where the script that MAGA religion has now revived first entered white Christian consciousness, not as an explicit political ideology, but as entertainment. That time and place is late 19th century Britain. Monster in the Mirror explores how at the height of its powers, the British Empire began to suffer nightmares, visions of an apocalyptic future, of a decline.
That in some sense, actually is happening today in our place in time. And we're gonna see how the monsters that today's Christian right blames for that decline originated in the stories that the late Victorians told themselves about Christianity's enemies and protectors.
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Axis Mundy You're listening to an irreverent podcast.
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Hello friends and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Today we are thrilled to launch our brand new limited series, Monster in the Mirror, created and written by Dr. Lucas Kwong.
Monster in the Mirror explores the Gothic genesis of Christian nationalism, and it's a little bit unique for our platform.
What you're going to hear is a mix of sound collages and original music mixed with Lucas's narration of certain histories and texts, along with dramatic readings of various books and other events.
I'm incredibly proud to present it to you, and I hope you really not only enjoy it, but learn a lot from it.
Thanks for being here.
Here is our series, Monster in the Mirror.
And now, this week's episode of The Monster in the Mirror.
Mr. Wells, Mr. Wells, Mr. Wells.
Whining ill becomes you, Mr. Wells.
Silence!
I know you have questions.
We'll lift your gag to let you ask, were I not confident you would instead.
The last time you saw me, I'd overpowered you in your laboratory and stolen your attention.
You saw me pass into the future.
- George Bell and Garner are the two highest.
December 7, 1941.
- Has not escaped the Nazi reign of the sea.
- The battleship between Elizabeth and the Commonwealth.
- To uphold the aggression or separation.
- President John F. Kennedy, mark it here, Beatles fans are running the...
- I have a treat.
- What? You are asking...
- How far?
- The immigrants in this country.
Well, that was the question.
I traveled through the decades, searching for a suitable destination.
A garden of delights.
A garden of delights.
An unborn paradise.
And what do you know, Mr. Wells?
I found it.
If I'm elected president, we will, and very quickly, make America great again.
We're a sensitive, oh, oh, oh.
But you've got a good girl in your spine.
I'm coming, oh, oh, oh.
I see you're bleeding from my eyes.
Let's go, oh, oh.
This is a docu-series about monsters.
It's about how the fantastical beasts who stalk the imagination of contemporary Christian nationalists were birthed in another white, God-fearing empire.
It's about how Christian nationalism's past, and the clues to its future, line the pages of some of the most popular novels in English.
It's about whether we're doomed to keep resurrecting these monsters until they wipe us out, Or whether we can finally drive a stake into the heart of the beast.
And like any good monster story, it starts with a deceptively peaceful opening.
Of course he is going to lose.
You're confident?
Oh yeah.
I'm not scared of Bill Clinton being first gentleman.
We will defend all our rights.
Civil rights, human rights.
The first female ever in the history of the United States.
On the morning of November 8th, 2016, I strolled into work at the City University of New York.
Like many Obama era blue stater, confident that Hillary Clinton would be the next president of the United States.
During a lull in advisement, I scrolled through the early returns, heeding my co-worker's assurance that the large red splotches on the map denoted, in his words, a lot of empty farmland.
Over dinner that night, a friend and I commiserated about the fraud on the GOP ticket and our shared certainty that Hillary would prevail.
Returning to my apartment that night, I passed what I now think of as an omen.
A quickly walking woman, praying for Trump's loss on her cell phone, exclaiming, Back in my apartment, my wife and I watched, shocked, as the devil received his due.
We staggered to bed eventually, hoping the next morning we'd find it all a bad dream, dispelled by the right side of history.
70-year-old Donald J. Trump will be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States on January... He's banning an unprecedented rule in security discussions.
Well, we were wrong.
In the aftermath, chasten liberals like me groped for answers, fueling the cottage industry of pieces examining the psyche of Trump voters, highlighting their economic anxieties, their fears of demographic change, and their excitement that there was someone in the White House like them.
He said he's the Tommy Lee of politics.
He's making bad hair great again, and I love it.
Sorting through all this information, I kept coming back to the faith that seemed to underpin this whole worldview.
The faith I thought I understood.
We're going to protect Christianity, and I can say that.
Give President Trump strength to bring forth his destiny.
I'm a lifelong Christian.
I grew up listening to bilingual sermons at my Chinese Canadian church.
It was theologically conservative, but we rarely have ever talked about the gay agenda or the right to life.
But this MAGA religion, with its fear of immigrants, and Black Lives Matter, and women who make their own reproductive choices, and LGBT people, it... It was a world away from the staid, reformed Protestantism I grew up with.
It was almost like some kind of horror movie.
A thriller about creatures of the night preying upon an innocent, close-knit community, that is, white Christian America, whose peace and stability is interrupted by an invading evil.
A demonic force threatening to destroy and corrupt the fundamentally good and kind-hearted people it preys upon.
And in the midst of that crisis, there's only one thing that will save them.
A band of elect heroes, perhaps flawed, but dedicated nonetheless to doing whatever it takes, including say, inciting a coup, to defeat the evil and rescue the ones that they love.
This gothic train of thought led me to this podcast's core thesis.
That Christian nationalism isn't just a set of policies or a material network of influencers.
It's a story.
A story that seduces the imagination.
One that's been told over and over, but that is now enjoying a renaissance.
And if we want to trace today's reboot back to its source material, we have to go back further than the Reagan 80s, or even the Billy Graham 50s.
We have to go back to another time and place, where the script that MAGA Religion has now revived, first entered white Christian consciousness, not as an explicit political ideology, but as entertainment.
I'm talking about late 19th century Britain.
We're going to explore how, at the height of its powers, the British Empire began to suffer nightmarish visions of an apocalyptic future, of a decline that, in some sense, actually is happening today, in our place and time.
And we're going to see how the monsters that today's Christian right blames for that decline originated in the stories that the late Victorians told themselves about Christendom's enemies and his protectors.
For years, the story of religion in the Victorian era went like this.
In the beginning, there was faith.
And lo, at the end of the age, there was doubt.
Somewhere in the middle, the Victorians discovered evolution, historical criticism of the Bible, Marx's thesis about religion being the opiate of the masses, so that however many respectable citizens turned up on Sundays, in their hearts they were churning with skepticism and outright apostasy.
In other words, the Victorians fulfilled the prophecy of Matthew Arnold's 1867 poem, Dover Beach.
The sea of faith was once, too, at the full and round earth's shore, lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear its melancholy long withdrawing roar, retreating to the breath of the night wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world.
This is a neat, simple story.
One that flatters the power of books and learning.
It's also just not true.
Most scholars now agree that while some educated Victorians might have heard the sea of faith's long-withdrawing roar, the majority seem to have only imagined it.
For the most part, the world's largest Christian empire wasn't about to abandon God anytime soon.
Religion in the Victorian era didn't dissipate so much as diversify.
It was a key period for fermenting the kinds of Christianities we know today.
From liturgical Anglo-Catholicism of the high church, to the riotous revival meetings of the so-called low church.
And in the middle, the seeds of what would become the mainline liberal church of the 20th century.
Focused not on abandoning faith, but reconciling it with modernity.
Here I'm going to focus on the strain of Christianity that loomed largest in this period, pervading various confessions and factions in the church.
In many ways, this dominant type of Christianity would strike us today as distinctively evangelical, and in fact the Victorians used that term, although it didn't really come into vogue in America until the 20th century.
Like today's evangelicals, they tended to emphasize transformative and visible salvation both within and beyond Britain's borders.
Tracts, magazines, and pamphlets exhorted the faithful to avoid alcoholism, gambling, lechery, and all the other signs of a godless life.
I probably don't need to point out that this brand of Christianity revolved almost entirely around white people.
In racially homogenous Britain, the idea of non-white Christians was practically a curiosity, even granting the imperative to evangelize the non-European peoples of the world.
However many converts could be pulled from the ranks, there was no doubt who the faith's standard bearers were.
But don't take my word for it.
Here's famed preacher Charles Spurgeon.
I judge that God has blessed the great nations of the Anglo-Saxon race, England and the United States, and given them preeminence in commerce and in liberty, that in such a time as this they may spread abroad the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
Unlike today's evangelicals, however, Victorian believers weren't necessarily hell-bent on enforcing their faith by law.
When evangelicals like William Wilberforce supported the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, they specifically rejected arguments that slavery would facilitate the conversion of the Africans.
Meanwhile, Jewish civil liberties found strong support from non-Anglican Protestants, who were keenly aware of what it was like to worship outside the bounds of the official state religion.
Even colonial administrators at the forefront of the so-called civilizing mission understood the importance of some form of tolerance.
The Viceroy of British India, John Lawrence, was hailed as a supporter of missionaries.
But Lawrence actually opposed, instructing Indian children in the Bible without parental consent, saying, When Christian things are done in an un-Christian way, mischief and danger are occasioned.
You could argue that this limited form of tolerance was just a sign of how powerful White Western Christianity was.
Given that power, some form of protection for Hindus and Jews didn't really threaten Christian supremacy at all.
The value of religious tolerance became especially important after the 1857 insurrection in British India, partially sparked by the British Army's insensitivity to Hindu and Muslim customs.
At that point, even ardent imperialists began to feel that maybe the gospel wasn't in need of harsh legislation to ensure its spread.
Maybe the sheer strength of the gospel coupled with the obvious benefits of the British Empire would be sufficient to secure the triumph of Anglo-Christianity.
By the end of the century though, this confidence was starting to look a little shaky in light of some striking social and technological transformations.
For one thing, the Empire seemed to be reaching the limit of its expansion, especially after British forces suffered a spectacular defeat in Egypt in 1884.
Even successes in other parts of the world inspired sadness that there weren't enough uncharted territories anymore, not enough opportunity for adventure.
In one particularly melodramatic moment, The British travel writer Frederick Harrison sighed in 1887.
We go abroad, but we travel no more.
Along with these changes came the increased visibility of non-white minorities, independent women, and foreign religions.
In the closing years of the century, Britain annually received 10,000 to 12,000 Lascars, sailors from South Asia and Africa.
The emergence of a Chinatown in London's gritty Limehouse district sparked accusations that the Chinese were taking jobs and women, while bringing crime and the scourge of opium, the very drug that Britain had used to profit off China in the first place.
As these colonial populations trickled into Britain, they brought religions Brighton's had only heard about, like Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, with the first mosque in London being founded in 1889.
Meanwhile, new alternative movements came into being, like Theosophy.
Helena Blavatsky, the eccentric founder of the Theosophical Society, horrified Orthodox Christians with her radical reinterpretations of scripture.
Here's Blavatsky getting a leg up on the Rolling Stones by expressing a little sympathy for the devil in 1888.
It is but natural to view Satan, the serpent of Genesis, as the real creator and benefactor, the father of spiritual mankind.
For it is he who was the harbinger of light, bright, radiant Lucifer, who opened the eyes of the automaton created by Jehovah.
And it was he who was the first to whisper, in the day thereof ye shall be as Elohim, knowing good and evil.
Blavatsky was amused by just how disturbed Orthodox Christians were by her views, once jokingly referring to herself as Antichrist in petticoats.
Part of the problem was that Blavatsky was a woman, leading other women astray.
Not only did many women join the Theosophical Society, others became leaders in the Spiritualist movement, holding seances to contact the dead.
To ask a young lady out, report to her and tell her who's with us.
Now I have a feeling that you've had an operation of some kind.
Is this a man?
In fact, alternative spirituality was driven by women, by a whole generation chafing against the rigid expectations of patriarchy, and inspired by gains in women's rights.
The first college for women at Oxford was founded in 1871.
The 1880 Education Act made schooling more widely available for girls.
And new technology meant new jobs for women, who made a living as telephone operators, or typists.
And there were just too many women in Britain for them all to find a husband.
According to one estimate by historian Joan Perkin, late Victorian Britain had 1.5 million more women than men.
The growing sight of bicycle-riding, cigarette-smoking, short-haired young women on the streets of London occasioned a flood of think pieces on the so-called new woman, a type of modern femininity that seemed to have cast off traditional gender roles.
You can imagine just how threatening many Victorian men found this prospect.
It's important to break in here with a caveat.
These changes did spark a spate of decline-ism.
But that doesn't mean that Britain underwent actual decline.
In his recent book, The Future of Decline, sociologist Jed Esty explains this difference.
Decline is a material fact.
A shrinking economy, an aging population.
Declinism, on the other hand, is what Esty calls a problem of rhetoric or belief.
It's a story, a kind of myth, about a once great superpower looking down the barrel of cultural decay and outright ruin.
This distinction between decline and declinism is key to understanding late Victorian Britain.
Life in the cities was generally much safer than 30 or 40 years prior, with the notable exception of the case of Jack the Ripper.
The introduction of compulsory education in the 1870s also had a positive impact on urban life.
And as for the empire at large, it entered the 20th century governing as much as a fifth of the world's population.
It's true that British economists in the late 19th century started to panic about American and German competition, and that the UK's industrial output took a hit in the midst of a global depression from the 1870s to 1890s.
But during this period, coal output, ship tonnage, bank deposits, and a range of other economic activities continued to boom.
Meanwhile, the technological advances were more exciting than frightening.
In 1889 saw the first telephone exchange in the UK.
"You are my friend, Alexander LeMond." In the 1880s, the spread of undersea telegram cables connected the UK with the furthest reaches of the empire.
In 1890, Edison's magical cylinder phonograph went on sale in London, allowing Londoners to capture their voices on record.
In addition to these astonishing new sound technologies, the first cinema opened in London in 1896.
To say that the world's largest and most technologically advanced empire was on the brink of decline and fall seems, in retrospect, a bit hyperbolic.
In the heat of the moment, though, a lot of disoriented Brightons, confused by the pace of change, didn't see it that way.
Instead, these changes seemed to foreshadow the end of civilization itself for many of the era's writers and thinkers, who were, not coincidentally, mostly white, male, and Christian.
To be clear, it wasn't just the English, or just Christians who got into the era's habit of doomscrolling.
Degeneration theory, the supposed science of decline, actually originated in continental Europe, from people like Hungarian Jewish doctor Max Nordau, Italian psychologist Cesare Lombroso, and French-Austrian psychiatrist Benedict Morel.
Still, Britain managed the largest power on the planet.
So British decline seemed to carry much higher stakes than French or German decline.
Degeneration theorists in Britain brooded over the theory that criminality was innate and could be passed down from generation to generation.
Books with titles like The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain obsessed over how the nation might avoid the fate of previous empires, notably Rome.
Cultural critics ranted about the supposed amorality of the new decadent movement, and racial scientists warned of the evils of miscegenation.
In fact, even as men worried about the consequences of feminism, feminists themselves worried about the future deterioration of the white race.
At least one influential feminist thought that some women should be barred from becoming mothers altogether.
In her book Galia, the British author Minnie Muriel Dowey wrote, How can we wonder that only one person in ten is handsome and well made, when you reflect that they were most likely haps of hazards, that they were unintended, the offspring of people quite unfitted to have children at all?
Melancholy crept even into the most fervent of late Victorian imperial propaganda.
Rudyard Kipling, whom we'll return to, is famous for his deeply racist poem, The White Man's Burden.
Despite his belief in the necessity for white people to shoulder that burden, though, he's pretty pessimistic about the outcome of Empire, claiming it'll be undone by the people he calls, When even Rudyard Kipling has this bleak a view of the Empire's future, you know declinist fears are in full swing.
It's worth noting that Kipling's poem doesn't describe the white man's burden as dark, but as devilish and heathen.
That's because white and Christian were practically synonymous terms at this point.
So that concern about the rise of the darker nations amounted to concern about the extinction of the church itself.
And even the empire's enormous material prosperity couldn't erase those fears.
In other words, much of the public needed a strong dose of escapism at this time.
A respite from all the doom and gloom.
And the most accessible and cost-effective form of that escape was the novel.
So by the final decades of the century, the quest for immersive and all-enveloping forms of escape led authors, quite literally, out of this world.
No one would have believed in the last years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligence greater than man's.
By the 1880s, a new crop of novelists began to display considerable impatience with the conventional wisdom that great literature had to be about so-called real life.
The stuff of marriages and inheritances and births and passive-aggressive neighbors and, well, more marriages.
This new generation prioritized adventure and wonder, far from the world of mundane concerns.
Simultaneously though, these writers wanted audiences to feel that the impossible was really happening to them.
Not just in a distant fairyland like Narnia or Middle Earth, but in familiar settings that they knew and recognized.
The ambitions of these literary entertainers resembled those of the era's giant moving panoramas, another popular form of Victorian entertainment.
These panoramas set the template for Disney's simulations of Paris or Japan at Epcot Center.
Awestruck Visitors experienced an early version of virtual reality through giant scrolling paintings that approximated the feeling of traveling up the Ganges or the Mississippi.
Likewise, Stoker Kipling and company schemed on how to immerse the reader in incredible situations.
Forget the Mississippi.
How about a London whose recognizable landmarks were defiled and even destroyed by an array of fantastical creatures?
How about plots that defied logic itself, but that unfolded in the midst of a physical and social environment that readers knew?
In this way, you could take the era's jaded, skeptical rationalists and bring them face-to-face with the sublime, the mythological, the unreal.
Ironically though, doing that required revisiting the cultural anxieties of the real world.
If you wanted to load your fantasy with dramatic weight, you needed a realistic menace that readers wanted to be rescued from.
In other words, authors had to appeal to their readers' almost primal desire for salvation.
Which, as we just discussed, their audiences had in abundant supply.
What happens when this desire for racial, national, and spiritual salvation meets the desire for spectacle?
For one thing, you get the crowd-pleasing effusions of flag-waving religiosity in popular novels of the period.
Dracula is so saturated in Christianity that its protagonist's weapon of choice is literally a crucifix.
The yellow dangerous hero is a kind of warrior saint who's literally sent by God to help the nation defeat the nefarious Chinese.
And in its story The Mark of the Beast, Rudyard Kipling has colonial police literally torture a local leper in the name of what Kipling calls the Church of England Providence.
This belligerent religiosity has no time for hand-wringing about Christian things done in unchristian ways.
Who can afford such nuance in the face of threats spawned by hell itself?
Which brings us to the nature of those threats, without which there'd be no need for salvation or spectacle in the first place.
For the triumph of white Christian heroes to feel as cathartic as possible, novelists needed a sufficiently menacing villain to oppose them.
How do you make that opposing force feel plausible, realistic, even in its surrealistic strangeness?
Maybe you could do it just by slightly tweaking and exaggerating all that fear, all that panic about racial, national, and spiritual decline.
In these authors' efforts to channel those fears, the birth of the Victorian monster was at hand.
The monster stands at the gates of difference.
This simple but provocative thesis comes from cultural critic Jeffrey Cohen's influential essay, Monster Culture.
According to Cohen, monsters reflect real-world fears of what's different.
Whatever transgresses traditional understandings of race, sexuality, gender, biology, whatever destabilizes the unwritten rules that govern social norms, are embodied in the figure of the monster.
The thing under the porch, the shadowy figure in the forest, the sound scratching at the door, all suggest that what's normal is about to go extinct.
Maybe forever.
Now, the term horror wasn't really used as a genre category in the 1880s and 90s.
But today, authors like Kipling and Stoker are recognized as masters of the genre.
Unfortunately, the works they produced, which we'll explore in this podcast, also exemplify Cohen's thesis about the monster standing at the gates of difference.
Dracula is infused with anti-Semitic stereotypes.
The novel The Beetle leans into homophobia.
The yellow dangerous villain, Yan Hao, precursor to Fu Manchu, is an almost absurdly evil Asiatic villain.
When these 19th century devils found their way into 20th century film adaptations, they sparked a whole century of waxing and waning fascination with monstrosity.
Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing together.
In Count Dracula and his Vampire Bride.
The king of the undead marries the queen of the zombies.
The end of the human race appeared certain.
We know now that we can't beat their machines.
Gene Barry stars.
- The war's got to be then.
The ultimate confrontation. - The war of the world. - In his book, Dance Macabre, Stephen King argues that horror movies go through 10 to 20 years cycles of Stephen King argues that horror movies go through 10 to 20 In his telling, revivals of horror, quote, seem to coincide with periods of fairly serious economic and or political strain.
And the books and films seem to reflect those free-floating anxieties.
During periods like the era of Watergate in Vietnam, stability and chaos found potent illustration in a demon-possessed young girl.
The one hope.
The only hope.
The exorcist.
We should here note that horror doesn't have to serve reactionary fears of difference.
So, Sometimes that fear of difference is itself the source of the horror.
Take The Night of the Living Dead, for example.
The original zombie blockbuster hit screens just a few months after Martin Luther King Jr.' 's April 1968 assassination.
Night of the Living Dead stars a Black hero, Ben, who valiantly protects his fellow citizens from the undead.
As generations of viewers have noted, the relentless violence of these zombies, combined with the movie's historical context, inevitably brings to mind racist vigilantes of the Jim Crow South.
And at the risk of spoiling a 50-year-old movie, the film's conclusion makes this analogy explicit.
In the end, the ultimate monster is white supremacy itself.
And the difference it embodies is the opposite of Ben's intelligence, courage, and resourcefulness.
Some might argue that horror has no political purpose.
In fact, it only has one thing on its mind.
To scare the ever-living daylights out of you.
From this point of view, the whole genre boils down to the immense feeling of relief that King identifies at the heart of the genre.
King writes, We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
For now, the worst has been faced, and it wasn't so bad.
There was that magic feeling of safety and reintegration at the end.
That same feeling that comes when the roller coaster stops at the end of its run, and you get off whole and unhurt.
In this model, when horror enthusiasts lose themselves in a zombie apocalypse or a hunt for vampires, the point is just to take a break.
To ride the roller coaster of fear, terror, apprehension, panic, and then come out on the other side, having left your burdens somewhere on the coaster tracks.
All that stuff about the monster dwelling at the Gates of Difference, that's just a little extra subtext, maybe even accidental symbolism.
Now there's something to be said for this view of horror.
It reminds you of how some gamers talk about their chosen form of escape.
As any coke-sipping kid at an arcade will tell you, video games are addictive, fun, and above all, not an occasion to philosophize about cultural anxiety.
Yet even video games, the form of media most widely considered to be synonymous with mindless escape, aren't just about whiling away a Saturday afternoon, are they?
Today, soldiers train their actual responses to combat scenarios by practicing with a program that simulates those conditions.
If you learn to make kill shots in a sufficiently realistic game, you increase your chances of doing the same in real life.
These types of games aren't just about escapism.
They're about training people mentally, emotionally, and even physically to respond to the real-life versions of those imaginary threats.
Just like video game designers, authors of the late Victorian fantastic also enticed readers to escape into an alternate dimension.
A simulation of the real so engrossing they'd forget to leave.
But at the same time, whether deliberately or not, these novels also performed a function much akin to those army games we just talked about.
Simulating crises that really were freaking out the reading public.
H.G.
Wells, Bram Stoker, and company didn't just offer spooky, mindless fun.
They also trained readers' mental, emotional, and physiological responses to those scenarios.
Through reading Dracula or War of the Worlds, readers hypothesized and gamed out how they'd respond to situations even more frightening I knew I must reach the body for the key, so I raised the lid and laid it back against the wall.
Christian, Britain.
Injected with a heavy dose of action and supernatural wonder, these Gothic simulations of apocalypse thus prepared readers to face their fears.
- I knew I must reach the body for the key, so I raised the lid and laid it back against the wall.
And then I saw something which filled my very soul with horror. - I saw someone in front of me lying in a bed.
I could not at once decide if it was a man or a woman.
Indeed, at first, I doubted it was anything human.
You shall be sorry yet, each one of you.
You think you have left me without a place to rest?
Well, I have more.
My revenge has just begun.
I spread it out over centuries, and time is on my side.
These quotes illustrate the sense of mounting horror that authors from this period hope to elicit.
But mounting horror, while core, isn't the only emotion that these works seek to draw out of readers.
Instead, they rely on a dynamic I refer to as the terror-triumph complex, in which the terror of facing a racialized and gendered antichrist makes the triumph of white Christendom all the more glorious.
You could say that one purpose of these texts is to train readers to identify with the triumphant Christian heroes who always prevail.
Critically though, these emotional training exercises prepped Victorians for a battle that didn't actually happen in their lifetime.
Late Victorian Britain remained overwhelmingly white and Christian.
Today, however, the hypothetical trends over which the late Victorians obsessed really are underway.
And in the United States particularly, the citizens of the world's preeminent white Christian empire are ripe for another thrill ride through a gallery of satanic monsters.
A simulation of the battle between ultimate good and ultimate evil that has real, devastating consequences.
Well, well, well.
What if we hear a new manuscript from the great mind of Herbert George Wells?
No one would have believed in the last years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's.
and yet as mortal as his own.
There's your first mistake.
You assume, like my foes in the era of 4chan and Truth Social, that creatures like me are mortal.
Exercise that prodigious imagination of yours, Mr. Wells, and ask yourself, What am I really?
This thing of darkness that stole upon you in your workshop of secrets and has now returned to haunt your bedchamber?
Now that is the query a learned scientist like yourself is really interested in, isn't it?
You should know, Mr. Wells, there is no easy way of defining my species.
Your kind is called as Proteus Kelpie, Loki.
But more recently, we have adopted other monikers.
Mr. Hyde, The Beetle, Dracula, the so-called Native Savage.
Or perhaps, if you're really paying attention...
You may know me as Abraham Van Helsing.
I'm the true founder of the East India Company.
We've covered a lot of ground so far on this episode.
We've talked about how 19th century Britain moved from a culture of supreme confidence in its own power to paranoia about the imminent destruction of white Christian civilization.
We've talked about the social transformations that sparked that paranoia.
How, at the same time that white Christian men were fretting about the rise of feminism and the influx of non-white minorities into Britain itself, authors such as Bram Stoker and Rudyard Kipling promised a new literary era in which readers would be transported into adventures more thrilling and more spectacular than they could imagine.
And we've talked about how at the heart of a lot of these adventures was the figure of the monster, the being who incarnated all the fears of racial and sexual difference that haunted many Victorians.
At this point, you might have a very reasonable question.
What does any of this have to do with Christian nationalism?
The contemporary movement that seeks to infuse a reactionary brand of Christianity into virtually every aspect of public life.
Isn't it a stretch to blame it on the Victorians?
Well, to answer that, we need to answer an even more basic question.
What is Christian nationalism?
We are going to build a coalition of Christian nationalists, of Christians, of Christian candidates at the state, local, and federal levels, and we're going to take this country back for the glory of God.
To hear some people tell it, Christian nationalism doesn't exist.
It's a fake problem invented by the woke liberal media to tar and feather God-fearing Americans who only want to live in a nation that puts their most sacred beliefs first.
But for people like Gab founder Andrew Torba, whose voice you just heard, Christian nationalism is real and good.
The notoriously anti-Semitic Torba, in fact, literally just released a book titled Christian Nationalism, a biblical guide for taking dominion and discipling nations.
Meanwhile, Stephen Wolf's The Case for Christian Nationalism just debuted at number one on Amazon's History of Religion and Politics list.
Apologists for Christian Nationalism are, of course, responding to a spate of scholarship conducted in recent years by people like Andrew Whitehead, Samuel Perry, Bradley Onishi, Chrissy Stroop, Kristin Kobiz-Dumé, Anthea Butler, and a host of others.
Here's Dr. Andrew Whitehead talking about the origins of his and Dr. Samuel Perry's interest in Christian Nationalism.
So we started researching Christian nationalism in 2013 or 2014 and we had some national survey data and what we found over and over, if we looked at attitudes towards same-sex marriage or attitudes towards interracial marriage or transracial adoption, we found that these measures of Christian nationalism were really strongly associated with those different
Policy views, political views, over and above, like, how often people went to church, or if they identified as Evangelical Protestant, or if they identified as Republican, or, you know, socio-demographic characteristics.
So, at that point, we realized we were on to something.
Dr. Whitehead points out that Christian nationalism is a coherent set of beliefs in which advocating for the fusion of Christianity and civic life is bound up with a reactionary approach to immigration, law enforcement, LGBT rights, and the place of women in society.
But what binds together as much as a third of the American public is the story behind those beliefs.
It's been with us for centuries.
Before the dawn of the US, the Europeans that were coming here were thinking in terms of a Christian community and nation, and that this would be the bounds of who they are, and it would bind them together.
And so that was very clear, and it fell along those religious lines, but also those essentially racial and ethnic lines, too.
Because as they came to these shores, they had to define those who were already here as the other in order to take their land.
And then two, to assuage and to explain why they were enslaving from Africa.
And so again, those racial and ethnic lines were drawn.
In other words, Christian nationalism does have a distinctively American heritage.
Ever since the Pilgrims, pious white colonizers in the New World have imagined themselves to be fighting an apocalyptic battle against Satan's minions, who just happen to take the shape of Native Americans, rebellious slaves, Catholics, Chinese gold miners, and eventually, Communists.
In the beginning, God gave America to the settlers.
In the present, the settlers are fighting God's enemies.
But in the future, those enemies will ultimately face destruction.
In their book The Flag and the Cross, Samuel Perry and fellow scholar Philip Gorski argue that almost 400 years of this narrative has produced what they call the deep story of Christian nationalism.
It's deep because of how deeply rooted it's become in U.S.
culture.
Despite its historical inaccuracies, Christian nationalist mythology has, quote, been told and retold so many times across so many generations that it feels natural and true.
Moreover, they write, this mythology functions like a bare-bones movie script.
It includes a cast of heroes and villains and well-worn and familiar plots that events are supposed to follow.
And like many classic scripts, they're made and remade with tweaked storylines and new leading men.
And in the past decade or so, that storyline has been rebooted once more following the election of Barack Obama.
In 2008, with Obama being elected, as health care was passed for folks, for white Americans, they would rather there not be widespread access to health care if they feel as though it's benefiting those that, quote unquote, don't deserve it, which a lot of times is racial minorities.
The re-election, he gets re-elected, is closer, but then this is really when You know, birtherism and Trump comes on the scene and really lays into, you could say they were, you know, dog whistles, but they were pretty blatant racist appeals, given how our political structures are organized in the U.S.
If you have a very, you could have a minority of white voters, but if they all support you over a couple counties, over a couple states, he was able to pull out a win.
With this all-American history of Christian nationalism in mind, one might wonder whether the MAGA iteration of Christian nationalism owes anything to Victorian Britain at all.
Hasn't there been enough paranoia and twisted religious fervor on this side of the Atlantic?
It's true that Americans were nursing a soft spot for theocracy long before Bram Stoker cooked up Dracula.
But this series argues, nonetheless, that today's brand of Anglo-Saxon warrior religion, its movie script as it were, owes a special debt to the nightmares of late 19th century Britain.
The late Victorian Gothic was predicated on a very familiar set of preoccupations.
Preoccupations that have roared to life in our time and place.
MAGA Religion retains the sense that America is God's chosen nation.
As Ronald Reagan put it, the last great hope of Earth.
But today's Christian nationalism is also defined, to a frightening degree, by an obsession with the enemies of Christ and of the nation, who've somehow infected Hollywood, nurseries, universities, the military, the media, the Democratic Party, the FBI, and even the church with the anti-gospel of wokeness.
This obsession is what makes today's Christian nationalism not just a story, but a fantasy.
And not just a fantasy, but a Victorian Gothic fantasy.
Especially in its obsession with regulating the bodies of non-white people, queer people, and independent women.
Conspiratorial speculation that fuses actual places and people into the wildest and most convoluted of scenarios.
A science fiction-tinged apocalypticism in which the good and bad guys both rely on up-to-date technology to wage an ancient holy war.
And above all, a revival of the Terror-Triumph complex.
In which the victory of the world's preeminent white Christian nation is made all the sweeter, all the nobler, by its defeat of outright monsters.
When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best.
We will see many refugees from Afghanistan resettle in our country in coming months, probably in your neighborhood.
First we invade, and then we're invaded.
I'll get their funding from, most of them, from one main source.
Isn't it like a Scooby-Doo episode?
He's like George Soros, he's like the guy they take the monsters, the costume monster, they take the head off, and it's George Soros.
Hollywood, let's begin the ride.
Transition of children.
Pagan sacrifice of children to the god Moloch.
That is all that is.
Talking about transitioning.
Small children.
China's feeding on us.
Majority of Muslims in America think that Sharia should supersede the constant.
So that if a person wakes up in the morning and they feel like they're a woman, that's a man, and he wants to go into a lady's restroom, then they can do that.
The clips you just heard refer to villains that have been kicking around in evangelical discourse for a while.
In the Christian nationalist imagination, these bad guys are shadowy figures who exist at the fringes of the so-called modern world.
They possess an almost supernatural power to be everywhere and nowhere all at once, planning to transport the rest of us either into a dystopian future or back into a barbarous pagan past.
Variations of these monsters have lurked in the reactionary psyche since at least the 19th century.
Today, they seem to loom larger than ever.
Why?
It's easy to blame it on Trump, but as Dr. Whitehead reminded us, these resentments were disturbingly visible already in the Obama era.
And the reason for that is that the demographic changes that the Victorians erroneously predicted would come to pass in their time and place are actually coming to pass now, on the other side of the Atlantic.
The preeminent white Christian nation in the world really is becoming more diverse.
Women and LGBT people really have gained considerable political agency.
And the long-feared rise of China really is set to eclipse the American economy in coming years.
Meanwhile, white majority churches really are seeing a decline in numbers.
According to Robert P. Jones, the last time that white Protestants constituted a majority in the United States was 1993.
And when it comes to the evangelical bloc within white Protestantism, a 2021 study by the Public Religion Research Institute found that between 2006 and 2020, white evangelicals' share of the overall U.S.
population declined by 37%.
Along with these trends have arisen a host of genuinely alarming phenomena, crises that the right may wildly misread, but that are increasingly impossible to deny.
Destructive weather wrought by climate change, the looming recession, the increased likelihood of future pandemics, the escalated risk of nuclear war.
These signs of decline are really hard to ignore, no matter how much the right might misinterpret their causes or effects.
To be clear, that 2021 Public Religion Research Institute study found that there are still 144 million white evangelicals in America.
Still, the trends unmistakably point away from the hegemony of light-skinned, God-fearing patriots, even as problems that should concern them and everybody else are on the rise.
Faced with these facts, many white Christian conservatives have turned to a myth in which they can play the hero facing unspeakable terrors.
In other words, they've given the Victorian nightmare machine a new life, or living death.
The 19th century bloodsuckers and extraterrestrials who have survived 120 years of pop culture now stalk the imagination of Christian nationalists.
Sometimes, accusations of monstrosity are hurled in a more metaphorical register, as in the clips you just heard.
Dana Loish, the person who likened George Soros to a Scooby-Doo monster, can claim she was just using a vivid simile.
But other times the charge of monstrosity is much more literal.
Outlandish horror tales are becoming more and more commonplace on the right.
On Jim Bager's show you can hear warnings about zombies possessed by demons.
On Stu Peter's show, you can hear the right-wing radio personality rant about the reptilians among us.
Lizard species.
This is a reptilian species.
And at the megachurch Influence in sunny California, you can hear Pastor Phil Hodson-Biller arguing that China will somehow produce the demonically empowered armies of the Antichrist.
Napoleon said when China awakens, the world will tremble.
Let's take us back to the book of Isaiah now and look at the identity of the kings of the East.
Think this is all fringe?
Think again.
These campfire tales have made their way into the center of today's conservative movement.
While he was in office, Trump boosted the profile of Stella Emanuel, a doctor who claims that many women's gynecological problems are attributable to demons planting stolen sperm inside them.
I could spend a whole episode dissecting the ideology behind that particular theory.
For now, I'll just say that's not the only time that Trump boosted an outright fantasist.
Remember the theory that Arizona's 2020 ballots were printed on bamboo from China?
That came from self-styled treasure hunter Jovan Pulitzer, who went looking for the Ark of the Covenant on Nova Scotia's Oak Island.
The Ark of the Covenant?
His adventures led to employment as a paid consultant for the Trump campaign.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania's gubernatorial candidate, Doug Mastriano, recently touted an endorsement from the ultra-Orthodox rabbi Joseph Kulakowski, who has stated his theory that Adolf Hitler was partially a reptilian alien.
And as Rolling Stone uncovered this summer, the shocking reversal of Roe vs. Wade was partially due to the efforts of a Christian right-wing organization called Faith and Liberty.
Whose vice president, Peggy Nienaber, was caught on a hot mic bragging about her group praying with Supreme Court justices.
In Nienaber's newsletters for Faith and Liberty, this highly influential lobbyist has accused witches of trying to steer the Supreme Court towards supporting abortion.
Look, I'm not arguing that the hunt for the lizard people started with Christian conservatives reading War of the Worlds.
I am saying, though, that art is powerful, and it can take on life of its own.
Like Dr. Frankenstein's reanimated corpse, books, movies, television, and music have a nasty habit of escaping their creators' intentions, becoming so important that their more sinister undercurrents end up influencing people in ways their authors didn't expect.
And even when a piece of art isn't that influential, it can still be powerful enough to anticipate, with eerie accuracy, future cultural trends.
Throughout this series, we'll see how the last century of Anglo-American entertainment has preserved the monsters of the late Victorian period.
And we'll see how the right combination of declinism, showmanship, and technology has rebooted them as boogeymen for a new era.
But we're not just going to be talking about how the monsters of the 2020s mirror those of the 1890s.
Remember what I said about Night of the Living Dead earlier?
How it illustrates the way that reactionary fears can themselves offer a source of terror?
We'll also explore how this possibility leads to the second meaning of the mirror in this series title.
The way that the monsters of the Christian nationalist imagination ultimately mirror its heroes.
Here it's worth returning to Jeffrey Cohen's monster culture to heed another one of his theses.
Fear of the monster is a kind of desire.
The monsters in these works often embody transgressions and crimes that their supposed victims, secretly and not so secretly, aspire to commit themselves.
In their prognostications of how their readers might or should react to Christian Britain's nightmarish future, these works, perhaps inadvertently, suggest that the real monster might be the shape-shifting spirit of Christian nationalism itself.
Frederick Nietzsche once declared, whoever fights monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster.
Today's flag-waving faithful effectively reverse this dictum.
Whoever fights the monsters must become a monster.
If you're interested in understanding the forces that have made this attitude seem natural, even holy, I hope you'll join us as we replay Christian Nationalism's late Victorian prequels.
Be warned though, the latest entry in the franchise doesn't necessarily have a happy conclusion.
How it ends, whether it ends, is up to us.
We'll be right back.
And that's me at a Florida rally.
Me at a Ohio rally.
Me at a Californian rally.
Me at a Kid Rock concert.
Oh, and here's me taking a selfie with Kevin Sorbo and Clint Eastwood.
Adorable.
I could keep swiping through these images all day.
At least until the battery runs out.
You know, Mr. Wells, in the end, the reason I hijacked your machine boils down to a simple fact.
It was in my nature.
You see, a shapeshifter lives to feed off the game.
The game we have played since the beginning of time.
It's the game of masks and voices, Mr. Wells.
Of dangling boogie men in front of you, frightening you into becoming the worst versions of yourselves.
And then morphing into your anointed ones, your saviors, your protectors.
And then transforming back into the boogeyman that somehow, against all odds, survives.
It's a wonderful game.
You always lose.
I always win.
So here's the deal.
I will unbind your hands and dictate the tale of my journey to the 21st century.
You will do for me what you did for your precious time machine.
Write a fanciful account that lightly veils the truth.
But do not erase the truth, Mr. Wells.
I should like to leave a record for the monsters who will come after me, eager to play the game.
Oh, rest assured, Mr. Wells, I'm not going to kill you.
