Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America

by Jane Borden

A 2022 poll conducted by the University of Maryland found that 61 percent of Republicans agreed: they supported declaring the United States a Christian nation.25 Jewett and Lawrence could have predicted both of these movements—because, they argue, the American Monomyth has a tranquilizing effect on those who consume it, which leads to a lethargic approach to democracy. Drawing on psychological understandings of how myth affects the unconscious, they argue that the story of the selfless violent redeemer exerts tangible behavioral effects on its audiences, teaching them to “applaud passively from the grandstand, convinced they are too impotent to cope with evil.” In effect, the myth exchanges “a sense of communal alarm and obligation for a fantasy of Edenic resolution achievable only by superhumans.”