Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America

by Jane Borden

an anti-fascist activist named Jim Stewartson sourced the prayer: it had been cribbed almost verbatim from Elizabeth Clare Prophet at the Church Universal and Triumphant. Under a side-by-side video comparison of the two prayers, one user responded wryly, “She recited it from memory. He had to read it.” (In fact, she spoke extemporaneously… unless you believe the archangel Michael delivered it through her.) Flynn’s evangelical and QAnon contingents accused him of occultism and Satanic collusion. Whether or not Flynn had knowledge of the prayers’s origin, he and Prophet do share an agenda: theocracy.

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.”

unlike most myths, which support the foundational philosophies of their host communities, the American Monomyth undermines our nation’s founding ideology, democracy. It subconsciously encourages the public to forgo the messy, laborious, and painstaking process of cooperation and compromise by instead waiting for a superhero—and then granting that figure unlimited and unchecked power. It creates a passive public desiring a totalitarian leader.

In the 1980s National Security Council member Oliver North schemed to sell weapons illegally to Iran in order to fund the Contras in a guerrilla war against Nicaragua’s socialist Sandinistas. Although Congress had voted against it, North and his NSA and CIA collaborators decided they knew better. During his testimony to Congress, which he agreed to in exchange for immunity, North basically explained he had been willing to get the job done and by any means necessary. He seemed disdainful of inefficient and menacing government oversight, scornful of checks and balances against the executive branch, and proud of his crusading role. He even cribbed a line from a Clint Eastwood Western while under oath when he said, “I came here to tell you the truth—the good, the bad, and the ugly.”27 Viewers ate it up. USA Today hosted a hotline on the topic. While 1,756 callers wanted North in jail, 58,863 said he should receive another medal.28

When teenage vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted in 2021 on all charges after shooting three people and killing two of them at a police-brutality protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin—with an AR-15 the prosecution argued he wasn’t legally allowed to possess—the far right lionized him as a hero who had taken the law into his own hands to protect and defend innocent Kenoshans from marauding rioters. At least four Republican lawmakers said they’d like to give him an internship.31 Tucker Carlson wondered on air why people were surprised that “seventeen-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would.”32

Our latent indoctrination into Puritan doomsday ideology is a pilot light that flares into extremism. Polling in 2023 of GOP caucus goers determined that Trump’s most autocratic statements make some voters more likely to support him, including 19 percent in response to his claim that he’d have “no choice” but to jail his opponents if reelected. (And 43 percent said that statement didn’t matter to them one way or the other.) Also, 55 percent increased their support in response to his interest in rooting out the “radical left thugs that live like vermin.”34

We’re conditioned to believe violent punishment will solve our problems—is the only way to solve our problems.

People want a strongman to punish those they believe have taken what was rightfully theirs: power. The book of Revelation and the American Monomyth are grievance narratives. In the former, the Romans are ruining everything. In the latter, it’s usually corrupt bureaucrats or women. Michael Flynn’s ReAwaken America Tour also demonizes immigrants, homosexuals, and medical care professionals supporting vaccines. They must be demonized in order for us to stomach the violence against them.

the monomyth “offers a moral confirmation of the audience’s righteousness, since only the virtuous survive.”

There’s an attraction to being chosen. It comes with honor and pride, sure, righteousness. But, perhaps more tantalizingly, it comes with the promise of reward. We are chosen to receive something. When one feels special, or is told they are special, or soaks up four hundred years of cultural identity as special, one expects to receive.

But always, the promise is assumed to have come from elsewhere, to have been bestowed on us by some greater power, whether country or God. When the prophecy fails, when there is no reward, we perceive a grave injustice. We believe someone robbed us. They must be punished. So we empower a strongman, who shows up, promising to cleanse us of the threat and thereby deliver that original reward, whether it’s wealth, safety, power, or superiority.

Apocalyptic ideology makes us fearful, ready to believe that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a bigger gun. But vigilantism increases violence, never diminishes it.

!!!

On one hand, the records that remain are voluminous, and remaining diaries and letters declare all manner of other nontraditional behavior occurring between the 1841 founding of the group and its dissolution, in 1880. So it seems we’d know if sibling incest happened. On the other hand, in 1947, officers of the Oneida Limited Company—by then a $3.5 million silverware corporation and respected national brand trying to bury its cult origins—secretly filled a truck with the community’s collected archives and burned them at the dump.3 Considering how much of their freaky activity has not been lost to history, it’s tempting to assume the nature of what was destroyed.

A strain of theology bubbled at the time, aptly titled perfectionism. The Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening had inspired believers away from the helplessness and pessimism of predestination (the idea that God had already chosen whom he would and wouldn’t save) and toward the promise and optimism of grace by human agency (the idea that people could save themselves by accepting God).

Inherent in the belief of being chosen is the promise of perfection. As Americans, we have often felt it our purpose and duty to achieve perfection within ourselves, our nation, and the world. We feel we are required to impose this vision.

Cultlike thinking demands and lives off expediency. If the work can be done whenever, what’s to stop followers from procrastinating? A cult agenda is like a fire sale at a mattress store: you must act now.

The powerful characteristically assume that rules don’t apply to them.

To a certain degree, a lot of American Protestants were playing God in the nineteenth century, especially in the North, in that they were rabid social reformers: think the abolition, temperance, and anti-poverty movements. Collectively, these efforts became known as the Social Gospel. It’s almost the opposite of Puritan doomsday belief and yet directly descends from it. This theological one-eighty resulted from three circumstances.

First was the gradual, Great Awakening–fueled shift I already mentioned from powerless predestination toward the agency of saving oneself via grace. Second, although early Puritans thought they had to wait for Judgment Day, following generations viewed the rewards they had since received—a new nation and unimaginable prosperity and comfort—as evidence that God wanted humans to help him bring about the end of the world. The third part of this theological turnaround resulted from a contemporary shift in prophecy interpretation.

This belief system is known as premillennialism (Jesus comes before the thousand years), a doctrine alive and well among fundamentalist and evangelical Christians today.

This belief system is postmillennialism (Jesus comes after the millennium) and became dominant in liberal Protestant churches, think Episcopalian and Presbyterian.

Premillennialists don’t care about progress because the world is about to end anyway. But postmillennialists think progress is nothing short of a path to heaven.

The abolition movement, the temperance movement, the anti-poverty movement, efforts to improve technology for the masses, and public education—whether funded and instituted by churches or governments—all have roots in postmillennialism, in efforts not only to help those in need and right egregious wrongs, but literally to accelerate the return of Christ.

Social reform leader and protestant clergyman Josiah Strong wrote, “Science, which is a revelation of God’s laws and methods, enables us to fall into his plans intentionally and to co-operate with him intelligently for the perfecting of mankind, thus hastening forward the coming of the kingdom.”

This nation’s duty, reformers believed, was nothing short of redeeming the world, and progress was the means. But they faced a major hurdle. How could God’s nation erase global sin when it hadn’t absolved itself of the glaring sin of slavery? How could God bring heaven to earth when the Antichrist was still in the American South? This was part of the motivation behind the call for abolition. Many in the Social Gospel movement assumed slavery was the last hindrance to Jesus’s return—and that the Civil War would be the battle of Armageddon itself.

The Civil War was a failure of prophecy. So, as always happens in that scenario, the prophecy shifted and morphed. Enter World War I—the war to end all wars, an unmistakable reference to Armageddon, full stop, no matter how numb we have become to the phrase.

Small thing, though: World War I didn’t save the world either. Neither did World War II, or any conflict the nation has involved itself in while paternalistically claiming to rid or save the world from evil. The prophecy always fails. Yet the prophecy endures, shifting and morphing as it sheds its skin and slithers on.

Of North America’s physical features, wrote some Anglo-Saxon, “It is a wonderful provision for the intelligence, sagacity, energy, restlessness, and indomitable will of such a race as the Anglo-Saxon—a race that masters physical nature without being mastered by it—a race in which the intensest home-feelings combine with a love of enterprise, advent, and colonization—a race that fears nothing, claims every thing within reach, enjoys the future more than the present, and believes in a destiny of incomparable and immeasurable grandeur.”

Now, add to this another convenient justification masquerading as genetic proof: the Anglo-Saxon myth. As the idea goes, Germanic people are naturally conquerors, and therefore, God chose them specifically to spread his word.

This consequence of American millennialism would ultimately result in the development of another uniquely American messianism. In 1889 a member of the Paiute nation named Wovoka fell into a coma and saw a vision.

In Wovoka’s vision, he died, met with God, and received a revelation: in two years, God would return the land to its prior state before white men arrived. Native people’s ancestors would resurrect, game buffalo would return to the plains, and white people would be buried thirty feet underground. He also learned how to bring this all about, by practicing a ritual called the Ghost Dance. During his vision, God asked Wovoka to share the message and dance with others.

Apocalyptic thinking typically blooms among the persecuted,

And, I imagine, those who believe they are being persecuted. *cough cough*

All of this concerned white settlers, particularly those near the Lakota in South Dakota, where the movement had grown especially intense and somewhat less restrained. Although the Lakota’s approach was not militant—they believed God wanted them to wait in piety until he removed the white man himself—it was particularly fervent. And they did believe their ceremonial white shirts could later be worn as armor in battle, since the Ghost Dance made clothing impervious to bullets. Settlers understood this to be a hostile attitude, and the phrase hostile Indian had been European Americans’ most motivating fear since the sixteenth century.

For decades afterward, historians argued that the day’s aggression had been fueled by the 7th Cavalry’s desire to avenge Custer’s death fourteen years prior and, more generally, fears of Native insurrection. But recent scholars have noticed in the events patterns of certain Christian orthodoxy that seeks to eradicate heresy wherever it exists. This argument suggests settlers aimed to extinguish the Ghost Dance movement and assimilate its practitioners for the same reason the Puritans hung Quakers and expelled Roger Williams, and for the same reason they criticized the Church of England, leading them to flee to America in the first place.

In 1911, Davenport published Heredity and Eugenics, writing, “The fundamental fact [is] that all men are created bound by their protoplasmic make-up and unequal in their powers and responsibilities.”43 From this conclusion grew a movement dedicated to the removal of unequal protoplasm, achieved by marriage restriction, quarantine during reproductive years, or sterilization. All of these were considered preventative medicine. In addition to protecting future generations from “imbeciles” (scientific term) eugenicists felt that such “morons” (scientific term) needed our help, simple-minded as they were. It was really for their own benefit that “idiots” (scientific term) be put in homes and kept from breeding.

Eugenics was not just a science but a fad and a household word. It had powerful supporters, such as Alexander Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Margaret Sanger, and Teddy Roosevelt (some early supporters, including Bell, later renounced their affiliation, but Roosevelt was a long-hauler).

See! Just because he gave us National Parks, people try to give Teddy a pass. Guys - he kinda sucked.

Scholars tend to agree the eugenics campaign grew out of that secular-millennial reform movement we discussed earlier. The Social Gospel began as an investigation into the causes of social ills, then shifted from focusing on individuals (in this case, “social degenerates,” who, if their nature was genetic, couldn’t even be reformed) to focusing on society (which could be reformed by removing certain genes from the pool). Many saw such goals as additionally helping “defects” themselves, in a this-is-for-your-own-good kind of way.

that a savior will separate the wheat from the chaff. Turn-of-the-century scientists—the superheroes of their day—played God’s part for him, removing the supposedly unfit with literal surgical precision.

Further, just as the American Monomyth—along with all cult ideology—leads to autocratic thinking, so did eugenics. Leaders of the crusade found naïve “the popular notion that everyone ought to participate in government.” They found unscientific and dangerous the hope that “the American environment and education would open opportunities so that even the lowliest could rise.”45 Ultimately, even if unconsciously, the eugenics movement was about power and not wanting to share it.

Francis A. Walker, a Civil War general and census director, noticed the birth rate among so-called “native” (read: Anglo-Saxon) Americans had declined during the same period in which more than 5 million immigrants had arrived. He did some math, freaked out, and told anyone who’d listen that if these trends continued, immigration “amounted not to a reinforcement of our population, but to a replacement of native by foreign stock.”

A 2022 poll found the replacement theory was believed by half of Americans.

New intelligence tests—the precursors to IQ tests—allowed eugenicists to assess and label anyone.

!!!

Still, it’s never gone away, because neither has the desire among the powerful to “perfect” society, that is, conform it to their own narrow views of righteousness. Paternalism is the exercise of power but also an effect of power, in that power literally disables people from seeing perspectives other than their own. The psychological effects of power are key to understanding our nation’s obsession with achieving perfection.

Still, it's (eugenics) never...

studies suggest power diminishes empathy. The experience of feeling power causes a person to focus attention on themself. Since attention is a limited resource, that person necessarily focuses less on others.

When we focus less on others, as a result of power, we literally lose the ability to connect with each other.

The experience of feeling power lowers one’s inhibitions, concurrently expanding the spectrum of what one considers appropriate behavior and leading one to act more impulsively. Since the powerful are rarely checked, they get away with this behavior, which makes them feel more powerful, a self-perpetuating cycle.

If power affects humans physiologically, you better believe its absence does. Powerlessness attacks the nervous system. It triggers the stress response and its resultant release of cortisol. When such a response becomes chronic, it damages veins and arteries, the nervous system, immune response, the digestive tract, and DNA. It also results in literal brain damage, particularly to the parts we use to help us plan and pursue goals.

during the eugenics movement, those relegated to reformatories, prisons, hospitals, and asylums were typically not genetic “defects” but simply poor and powerless. Meanwhile, the eugenicists—that is, people who believed they were chosen by God, whether God is a paternal figure in the sky or a genetic twist of fortune—wanted to replicate traits that ultimately resulted from power, not genetics. That is, eugenicists only replicated their own power, which of course they were already doing in a variety of other ways. The practice of eugenics has only ever been redundant. But the effect was the extermination of people deemed unchosen, all under the legitimizing veils of secularism and science.

Pronatalists are, generally, pro birth. They worry about declining birth rates in industrialized countries. They want to ensure the next generation contains enough taxable workers to pay for future retirees. They fear that smaller generations will result in less innovation and global competitiveness, and ultimately economic and cultural stagnation. But while some in the movement lobby for child tax credits and affordable childcare, others challenge rights to abortion and contraception, and try to pull women from the workplace.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a large overlap between pronatalists and adherents of longtermism, the purportedly humanitarian movement arguing that as important as it is to care for the people of today, it’s also and maybe more important to care for humans of the future—like, hundreds of thousands of years into the future.