Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

all have hunches we can’t prove and superstitions that make no sense. What’s problematic is going overboard, letting the subjective entirely override the objective, people thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings were just as true as facts. The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, every individual free to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams, sometimes epic fantasies—every American one of God’s chosen people building a custom-made utopia, each of us free to reinvent himself by imagination and will. In America those more exciting parts of the Enlightenment idea have swamped the sober, rational, empirical parts.

People tend to regard the Trump moment—this post-truth, alternative facts moment—as some inexplicable and crazy new American phenomenon. In fact, what’s happening is just the ultimate extrapolation and expression of attitudes and instincts that have made America exceptional for its entire history—and really, from its prehistory. What I’m trying to do with this book is define and pin down our condition, to portray its scale and scope, to offer some fresh explanations of how our national journey deposited us here.

He insisted that clergymen have no special access to God or Jesus or truth. Everything a Christian needed to know was in the Bible. So every individual Christian believer could and should read and interpret Scripture for him- or herself. Every believer, Protestants said, was now a priest. This would have been a doomed, quixotic dream any earlier. According to the Vatican’s long-standing regulation, only priests were permitted to own Bibles, particularly Bibles translated from Latin into modern languages. It was a rule easy to enforce, because Bibles were extremely rare and expensive. In the 1450s, when Johannes Gutenberg printed the first book—a Latin Bible—there were only thirty thousand books of any kind in all of Europe, about one for every twenty-five hundred people. But by the time Luther launched the Reformation in 1517, sixty years later, twenty million books had been printed—and more of them were Bibles than anything else.

During the century after printed English Bibles appeared, the literacy rate among English people tripled. Now millions of Christians were able to make good on Luther’s DIY Christianity. The Catholic Church and its priestly elite were disintermediated. Disruptive innovation? No new technology, during the thousand years between gunpowder and the steam engine, was as disruptive as the printing press, and Protestantism was its first viral cultural phenomenon.

other big idea was that belief in the Bible’s supernatural stories, especially those concerning Jesus, was the only prerequisite for being a good Christian. You couldn’t earn your way into Heaven by performing virtuous deeds. Having a particular set of beliefs was all that mattered. (And in strict early Protestantism, even those didn’t guarantee you entry.)

What really distinguished the Puritans from the mainstream were matters of personality, demeanor. To be a Puritan was to embody uncompromising zeal. (They were analogous to certain American political zealots today, who more than disagreeing with their Establishment’s ideas just can’t stand their reasonable-seeming manner.) Moreover, a good Christian life, the Puritans believed, was one consumed by Christianity.

Puritan scholar at Cambridge University published Key of the Revelation Searched and Demonstrated in 1627. He explained that the Antichrist’s big move had not already occurred, as Protestant conventional wisdom had it, taking over the Vatican. No, it was going to happen in the future—the near future. Plus, Christ’s return and reign wouldn’t be some airy-fairy symbolic spiritual thing but a real kingdom on real Earth. And ground zero of the coming Apocalypse, God versus Satan, would be in America.

If one has enough belief in the supernatural plan, if one’s personal faith is strong enough, false prophecies are just unfortunate miscalculations that don’t falsify anything. If you’re fanatical enough about enacting and enforcing your fiction, it becomes indistinguishable from nonfiction.

The God-crazed Puritans and gold-crazed Virginians might have founded the place in the seventeenth century, but the people we call the Founders all came along in the eighteenth. They were rationalists and pragmatists, men who liked money and fine living but didn’t expect to get rich overnight by stumbling into some North American El Dorado. They produced our national mission statement (the Declaration of Independence) and operating manual (the Constitution). The war those documents book-ended was a modern one, concerning politics rather than religion, to replace a monarchy with a republic. The steamboat, the cotton gin, bifocals, a newspaper that still publishes today—all American innovations of the late 1700s.

In post-Puritan America of the 1700s, the great Christian thinker was the Massachusetts minister Jonathan Edwards.

He was, Mark Twain wrote to a pastor friend, a “resplendent intellect gone mad.”*1

Edwards’s best-known sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is

George Whitefield, his cofounder of the Methodist movement. Unless you’re a scholar or serious Methodist, you’ve probably never heard of him. But the subtitle of a recent biography—America’s Spiritual Founding Father—isn’t an overstatement. Whitefield was born to be an American.

Edwards, Wesley, and Whitefield were all ordained Anglican priests. Their success was due in part to the fact that they weren’t freelance crackpots but men of the Establishment who challenged that Establishment, like America’s political founders. Their new, ultrademocratic American Christianity incorporated the founding Protestant antagonisms—to official holy men, stable doctrine, and fixed protocols—but went much further. As this mode became the norm among Baptists and other new denominations, it got even more extreme. Anybody could become a preacher. A preacher could preach anywhere, in any way he wanted. The more evident the passion, the better. And all believers could find or start a sect or congregation that permitted them to express their faith in any way they wished—to achieve what felt like the optimal “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” “The most distinctive characteristic of early American Methodism,” according to one of its modern historians, was “this quest for the supernatural in everyday life.”

As we let a hundred dogmatic iterations of reality bloom, the eventual result was an anything-goes relativism that extends beyond religion to almost every kind of passionate belief: If I think it’s true, no matter why or how I think it’s true, then it’s true, and nobody can tell me otherwise. That’s the real-life reductio ad absurdum of American individualism. And it would become a credo of Fantasyland.

Franklin’s only awakening during the Great Awakening was to the profits available by pandering to American religionists. Over the next three years, he published an evangelical book almost monthly. With Whitefield himself, Franklin wrote, he formed “no religious Connection.” Franklin and his fellow Founders’ conceptions of God tended toward the vague and impersonal, a Creator who created and then got out of the way. The “enthusiasts” of the era—channelers of the Holy Spirit, elaborate decoders of the divine plan, proselytizers—were not their people. John Adams fretted in a letter to Jefferson that his son John Quincy might “retire…to study prophecies to the end of his life.” Adams wrote to a Dutch friend that the Bible consists of “millions of fables, tales, legends,” and that Christianity had “prostituted” all the arts “to the sordid and detestable purposes of superstition and fraud.” George Washington “is an unbeliever,” Jefferson once reckoned, and only “has divines constantly about him because he thinks it right to keep up appearances.” Jefferson himself kept up appearances by attending church but instructed his seventeen-year-old nephew to “question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.” He considered religions “all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies,” including “our particular superstition,” Christianity. One winter in the White House, President Jefferson p...

When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn’t mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: “We forgot.”

One of the best-known facts about his war service, the time he knelt in prayer at Valley Forge, was almost certainly untrue. A bestselling work of fiction in the 1800s, The Legends of the American Revolution, 1776, included a story called “The Fourth of July, 1776.” A quasi-angel—“a tall slender man…dressed in a dark robe”—mysteriously appears among the Founders in Philadelphia and delivers a five-minute speech (“God has given America to be free!”) that makes them finally stop arguing and sign the Declaration. Then he mysteriously disappears. Americans from across the religious spectrum chose to regard that fantasy as historical fact, and they still do today.*1

Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America,

There is no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America….

Reverend Darby, the end-time evangelist and rapture inventor, considered the telegraph a “harbinger of Armageddon.”

Just four years after gold was discovered, total output peaked and mining was industrialized, requiring capital, deeds, bosses, entrepreneurs.

“I know of no country where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men,” Tocqueville observed. “Love of money is either the chief or secondary motive in everything Americans do.”

the Panic of 1893. That financial panic, which triggered a huge economic depression, was caused in part by the unsustainable overbuilding of the western railroads and the popping of that railroad bubble. Which had been inflated by the western real estate bubble.

Acknowledging actual, specific conspiracies makes sense. But reflexive conspiracism can become a bad habit and a misguided way of making sense of current events.

transplanted Southern Cavaliers set about re-creating feudal Olde England in the New World, with black slaves instead of white serfs.

Consider the selling of the president 1840. William Henry Harrison was the first fully merchandised candidate. He had grown up rich and was the nominee of the elites’ Whig Party. But his spin doctors sold him to voters as the opposite—a common man, a rough regular guy, with on-message campaign songs and chants, one about his “homespun coat” and “no ruffled shirt.” They branded him with life-size and miniature log cabins, and they gave out whiskey in bottles shaped like log cabins and shaving soap called Log-Cabin Emollient. Harrison had fought Indians in the West forty years earlier, so his handlers had the candidate perform Indian war cries at campaign events. His opponent’s upbringing really had been humble, but he was the incumbent president and thus could be framed as an elitist. Harrison won by a landslide.

The New York Sun was the great pioneer penny paper, and in 1835 it published an extraordinary six-part, sixteen-thousand-word series. Every day for a week, a battalion of newsboys—also an invention of the two-year-old Sun—

Phineas Barnum, known as P.T., who by his early twenties was earning a living in Connecticut selling lottery tickets. Coming of age during this period of avid belief in the unbelievable, Barnum had had his career-making, world-changing epiphany: he realized “the perfect good-nature with which the American public submits to a clever humbug.”

fundamental Fantasyland mindset: If some imaginary proposition is exciting, and nobody can prove it’s untrue, then it’s my right as an American to believe it’s true. Barnum’s response to his naturalist was a perfect perversion of Enlightenment empiricism and logic: Disbelieving in mermaids isn’t proof that this creature isn’t a mermaid.

Frederick Jackson Turner delivered an hour-long talk a week after the Fourth of July called “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” During the “four centuries from the discovery,” he said, Americans had invented and reinvented themselves on successive frontiers, in proximity to wild nature. “A steady movement away from the influence of Europe” had defined our new national character “on American lines,” making of us

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1905 that states and towns could legally require citizens to be vaccinated against smallpox and other infectious diseases—that Americans’ constitutional right to believe and promote whatever they wished did not give “an absolute right in each person to be, in all times and in all circumstances, wholly free from restraint.”

As a million and a half black people migrated from South to North during the 1910s and ’20s, four of the five states with the largest Klan memberships were Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. At

The Mind of the South. It began as an essay for H. L. Mencken’s magazine, where Cash wrote that the South’s salient characteristic is a magnificent incapacity for the real, a Brobdingnagian talent for the fantastic. The very legend of the Old South, for example, is warp and woof of the Southern mind…. Unpleasant realities were singularly rare, and those which existed, as, for example, slavery, lent themselves to pleasant glorification. Thus fact gave way to amiable fiction…. Everywhere [the Southerner] turns away from reality to a gaudy world of his own making.

Slavery’s spread was stopped, but not the nationwide spread of certain unfortunate Southern habits of mind, along with increasingly berserk versions of Christianity.

White Southern religious culture became kind of a rump Confederacy. Believers doubled down on the supernatural, looking toward a miraculous do-over, an ultimate victory on Judgment Day and in the hereafter. Instead of squarely facing the uncomfortable facts—slavery was wrong, secession a calamitous mistake—they shifted into excuse-and-deny mode. For a great many white Southerners, defeat made them not contrite and peaceable (like, say, Germans and Japanese after World War II) but permanently pissed off. Which in turn led them to embrace a Christianity almost as medieval as the Puritans’.

Dwight Moody, a shoe salesman turned celebrity preacher, had opened his influential Moody Bible Institute, a college and correspondence school, as well as a publishing house. He insisted that every sentence in the Bible was literally true, no more metaphorical than the Sears, Roebuck catalog, and he helped revive a scriptural fetishism in American Christianity. To make even the most poetic parts like Revelation understandable, he popularized Reverend Darby’s end-time schedule—along with his rapture add-on, the apocalypse escape route to a supernatural VIP waiting room. Moody called this new improved theology the “old-time gospel.” The final masterstroke was making his institute and theology nondenominational: as long as you were evangelical and opposed to open-mindedness, you were welcome. Which

Brooklyn-based editor of the Northern Baptists’ weekly newspaper, working off the title of the recent paperbacks, gave the movement of alarmed Christian superfantasists a name: Fundamentalism is a protest against that rationalistic interpretation of Christianity which seeks to discredit supernaturalism. This rationalism…scorns the miracles of the Old Testament, sets aside the virgin birth of our Lord as a thing unbelievable, laughs at the credulity of those who accept many of the New Testament miracles…and sweeps away the promises of his second coming as an idle dream….In robbing Christianity of its supernatural content,

Christianity is rooted and grounded in supernaturalism, and when robbed of supernaturalism it ceases to be a religion and becomes an exalted system of ethics.

Billy Sunday. He called the Protestant upper crust a “pack of pretentious, pliable, mental perverts…dedicated to the destruction of religion and one and all are liars.” The righteous, regular American people by the million loved him.

Tennessee enacted the strictest of several (Southern) laws that criminalized science’s bastard theories, making it “unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities…and all other public schools of the State…to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animal.”

In 1920, just before the Constitution was amended to give women the vote, all but one of the seven states without any female suffrage were in the South, and most of the states that had been Confederate refused to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment until the 1960s or later.

Until the 1920s, providers of entertainment and information almost never gave their products away. Even cheap newspapers cost a few cents. So when the magical new medium of radio came along, because there was no way to charge listeners, its founding American impresarios required some time to figure out a business model. The wheel they reinvented was the medicine show: they could broadcast a mixture of entertaining fiction (Amos ’n’ Andy, Mystery House, Let’s Pretend) and occasional information (news) and give it all away, because their actual business would be—d’oh!—charging companies to broadcast mixtures of information and entertaining fiction in the form of advertisements.

prototypical built-from-scratch American suburb appeared—Riverside, Illinois, designed and created by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Their model was explicitly nostalgic, “the more agreeable rural characteristics of a New England Village.” Before long, as the Columbia University historian Kenneth Jackson writes in Crabgrass Frontier, “detached housing had clearly emerged as the suburban style,” and “the ideal house” in America “came to be viewed as resting in the middle of a manicured lawn or picturesque garden”—as if in a pastoral landscape from a previous American century. Suburbia, apparently a conflation of the terms suburb and utopia, became a word.

the Flatiron, the Woolworth, Chrysler, and Empire State buildings, plus Rockefeller Center—became fully Oz-like. But of course, at the end of the story Dorothy leaves the magical city and returns to her true American home, the humble farm on the Great Plains.*1

suburbs could also satisfy white people’s nostalgia for a time when they lived almost exclusively among other white (and Christian, preferably Protestant) people.

The idea that finally eclipsed all competing ideas was a notion of individualism that was as old as America itself, liberty and the pursuit of happiness unbound: Believe the dream, mistrust authority, do your own thing, find your own truth. In America from the late 1960s on, equality came to mean not just that the law should treat everyone identically but that your beliefs about anything are equally as true as anyone else’s. As the principle of absolute tolerance became axiomatic in our culture and internalized as part of our psychology—What I believe is true because I want and feel it to be true—individualism turned into rampant solipsism.

Madness and Civilization, echoing the new skepticism of the concept of mental illness, and by the 1970s he argued that rationality itself is a coercive “regime of truth,” oppression by other means. Foucault’s suspicion of reason became deeply and widely embedded in American academia.

For Lindsey and American evangelicals generally, the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was unmistakable evidence of the fulfillment of prophecies. Before the final events can play out, the Jews had to return to Israel. They had! And in 1967, with end-time fever beginning to rise in America, Israelis defeated the invading Arab armies and retook Jerusalem—“And they shall fall by the edge of the sword,” it says in Luke 21:24, “and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles.” In the 1960s and ’70s, with the Middle East beginning to teeter on the edge of real-life Armageddon, this particular fantasy had a massive revival and eruption.

“The Vietnam war,” Reich wrote in The Greening of America, “represents a form of madness in which logic is carried to fantastic extremes.” He had a point. In addition to the fact that moral calculus isn’t reducible to actual calculus, the empiricism these best and brightest practiced was often faulty and fake. Enemy body counts are one very limited metric in war, seductive because they’re simply quantifiable, and in this case grossly exaggerated as well.