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

by Kurt Andersen

Had phrenology come to America before Methodism began its fermentation, it would have been persecuted as a heresy and possibly rejected entirely.

Methodism’s cofounder Wesley published a bestselling self-help compendium of remedies, subtitled An Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases—onions and honey cure baldness, apples prevent insanity. A Presbyterian minister named Sylvester Graham (of the eponymous cracker) led a movement based on his conviction that meat and spices were unhealthy and, maybe worse, sexual stimulants. The cofounder of the new Seventh-day Adventist denomination, who’d had visions of the end of the world, also had a vision of a hospital devoted to water cures and hired an Adventist physician named Dr. John Kellogg (of the eponymous corn flakes) to run it.*

The conservative talk-radio host John Ziegler made a similar confession in 2016: “We’ve effectively brainwashed the core of our audience. And now it’s gone too far. Because the gatekeepers have lost all credibility in the minds of consumers, I don’t see how you reverse it.”

“I’m not an atheist,” the great Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson said in 2015, “I’m a scientist. Atheism is the belief that there is no god, and you declare there is no god: ‘Come, my fellow atheists, let us march together and conquer those idiots who think there is a god—all these other tribes. We’re going to prevail.’ I would even say I’m agnostic because I’m a scientist.”