For the evangelical world more generally, the state plays the role once performed by the diabolic financial arachnid of nineteenth-century Populist dramaturgy: it is a demonic beast, ravenous for power, working in league with global finance including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and Beck’s favorite, the Federal Reserve. It manipulates and extirpates the remnants of democratic individualism. And it must be said that minus the satanic imagery, they have a point.19
