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May 9 - June 5, 2022
You may find me too judgmental about matters of deep personal conviction. As I pass by fish in barrels, I will often shoot them.
being American means we can believe any damn thing we want, that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned.
Major cable channels air documentaries treating mermaids, monsters, ghosts, and angels as real.
Bill Gates’s foundation has funded an institute devoted to creationist pseudoscience.
nowhere else in the rich world are such beliefs central to the self-identities of so many people. We are Fantasyland’s global crucible and epicenter.
mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today,
Every believer, Protestants said, was now a priest.
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.
The disagreements dividing Protestants from Catholics were about the internal consistency of the magical rules within their common fantasy scheme.
Western civilization’s first great advertising campaign was created in order to inspire enough dreamers and suckers to create America.
rationalists and cynics—that is, most modern scholars—are
In other words, America was founded by a nutty religious cult.
We also prefer to talk about Pilgrims rather than Puritans, because the former has none of the negative connotations that stuck permanently to the latter.
Theocracy had just entered the English language—and to the Puritans, it was a good concept.
He explained that the Antichrist’s big move had not already occurred, as Protestant conventional wisdom had it, taking over the Vatican.
The famous bit of his sermon, “We are as a city upon a hill,” has endured because that as makes it a simile, endlessly adaptable as a happy, self-flattering metaphor for 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.
So the seeds of America in New England were a peculiar hybrid generated from the cusp of the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment,
Alone among the Puritans, Anne Hutchinson is the one with whom American sensibilities today can connect, because America is now a nation where every individual is gloriously free to construct any version of reality he or she devoutly believes to be true.
Individual freedom of thought in early America was specifically about the freedom to believe whatever supernaturalism you wished.
The year of pitiless killing from the summer of 1675 through the summer of 1676 was among the most concentrated bloodbaths in American history.
In Europe, the learned had entered The Age of Reason. In the New World, however, unreason had made a ferocious comeback.
the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty.
The Great Awakening got started as America’s first youthquake.
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.
When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn’t mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: “We forgot.”
“The Enlightenment was as much about rejecting the claims of reason and of rational choice as it was about upholding them.”
It was only in an atmosphere of enlightened tolerance that such unorthodox cults could have been openly practiced.”
Here in improvisation nation, the individual liberty empowered by the Enlightenment led to a certain fanaticism when it came to finding God.
But it turned out that a lot of Americans, being Americans, still wanted a promise of the adventure tale to end all adventure tales.
But the big, long-lasting impact was the mainstreaming of the belief among modern American Christians that they might personally experience the final fantasy—the end of days, the return of Jesus, Satan vanquished.
“What is most interesting about Joseph Smith,” Bushman writes in a sentence of breathtaking understatement, “is that people believed him.”
In 1848 the Homeopathic Medical College was founded in Philadelphia, eventually becoming the Drexel University College of Medicine.
Phrenologists were the American mental health professionals for most of the nineteenth century,
the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided the plaintiff had no recourse: sorry, sucker, in this free market, buyer and seller beware. Telling less than the whole truth—hustling—had received a blanket indemnity.
The Puritans, oppressed by conniving elites, developed a self-identity focused on victimhood that sent them into American self-exile.
Christian religiosity itself, in particular our pseudo-hyperrational kind, amounts to belief in the grandest and greatest conspiracy of all:
Twain was a hyperbolist, for sure, but his conclusion still bears repeating: a particular set of historical fictions and fantasies led to secession and Civil War.
Thoreau epitomized this particular have-your-cake-and-eat-it American fantasy, a life in harmony with nature as long as it’s not too uncomfortable or inconvenient.
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.”
There were riots, a lynching, and between 1910 and 1920, the miraculous disappearance of almost a million German-born Americans from the census rolls.
Fear of Jewish influence had its American moment as soon as the Jewish population hit 2 percent—about the same threshold at which American anti-Catholic hysteria kicked in a century earlier.
In fact, white Southerners had fought the war to defend their right as Americans to believe anything they wanted to believe, even an unsustainable fantasy, even if it meant treating a class of humanity as nonhuman.
After the World War, 90 percent of movies were American movies.
Before movies and radio, most Americans had surely never heard the voice of more than a single major celebrity in their lifetimes.
suburbs could also satisfy white people’s nostalgia for a time when they lived almost exclusively among other white (and Christian, preferably Protestant) people.
what other place on Earth has been more congenial to believers and promoters of mad dreams and schemes of so many kinds? California is America squared.
He was the Steve Jobs of his era, a visionary impresario taking pieces created by others and integrating them to make a shiny new branded invention greater than the sum of its constituent parts.
Like mesmerism and homeopathy in the nineteenth century, orgone therapy was an import from German Europe.
The synthetic amphetamine Benzedrine was available over the counter in the United States until 1959,
