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May 9 - June 5, 2022
“Karl Marx dismissed God as a hoax,” McCarthy explained in a speech. “Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.”
FOR INCITING BELIEF in history’s greatest conspiracy, it didn’t hurt that two-thirds of Americans were Protestants, a large and pious fraction of whom subscribed to a stark prophetic version of history and the future—divine virtue fighting it out with satanic evil.
Peale’s approach was perfect for its American moment: breezy self-help motivational cheerleading mixed with supernatural encouragement,
Everyone serious believed that crude, vestigial, old-time religion was about to fizzle out at last in America.
All the ideas we call countercultural barged onto the cultural main stage in the 1960s and ’70s, it’s true, but what we don’t really register is that so did extreme Christianity, full-blown conspiracism, libertarianism, unembarrassed greed, and more.
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.
beyond the familiar signifiers of youthful rebellion (long hair, sex, drugs, music, protests), the truly shocking change on campuses was the rise of antirationalism, a return of the sacred—“mysticism and magic,” the occult, séances, cults around the Book of Revelation.
once granted complete freedom of thought, Jefferson and company assumed, most people would follow the paths of reason. Wasn’t it pretty to think so.
THE STRAIGHT WORLD’S discombobulated OMG reactions back then are understandable given how quickly everything had changed.
after World War II, the academic Establishment also developed second thoughts about reason.
In 1961 the French philosopher Michel Foucault published Madness and Civilization, echoing the new skepticism of the concept of mental illness,
Tart got tenure at UC Davis and proceeded to devote his entire academic career to proving that attempts at objectivity are a sham and that magic is real.
postmodern intellectuals—postpositivists, poststructuralists, social constructivists, postempiricists, epistemic relativists, cognitive relativists, descriptive relativists—turned out to be useful idiots for the American right.
Since the turn of the century, American fundamentalists had reveled in their sense of persecution by an infidel elite, but in the 1960s the atheist tyranny became official.
The nondenominational Protestant rebranding of Pentecostalism as “charismatic Christianity” took off.
The fundamentalists were like the New Left, insular zealots focused on arguing doctrine, hating the unrighteous, and awaiting the final battle.
By the end of the 1960s, most U.S. Protestants were evangelicals.
the Mormons had a great 1960s and ’70s, with U.S. membership almost tripling.
It’s like relativist professors enabling science-denying Christians, and how the antipsychiatry craze in the 1960s appealed simultaneously to left-wingers and right-wingers (as well as to Scientologists).
The first Renaissance fair—that is, faire—took place in 1963 in Los Angeles,
The lottery business is all about selling ridiculous long shots to magical thinkers.
Anti-Establishment relativism had erupted on the left, but it gave license to everyone—in particular, to the far right and in the Christian fever swamps.
America didn’t seem as weird and crazy as it had around 1970. But that’s because we had stopped noticing the weirdness and craziness. We had defined every sort of deviancy down.
In the old days, wrestling always officially insisted it was real. Finally it could stop pretending, because “real” and “fake” were relative, because nobody really cared anymore.
This blending of entertainment fictions and real life was also a central feature of one of pop culture’s only wholly new genres since the 1960s—rap and hip-hop.
the great majority of consoles and cartridges and disks were bought by people who didn’t have to ask their parents for money—the average player was in his thirties.
plenty of Americans mythologized the 1940s and ’50s and early ’60s as their own late lamented antebellum era.
while Reagan had sensibly tacked back toward reality, his true believers on the right maintained total belief in the voodoo.
Over the next year or two, the masses learned of the World Wide Web. The exponential rise of Fantasyland and all its dominions now had its perfect infrastructure.
In every pocket there is now a library, a phonograph, a radio, a movie theater, and a television, as well as a post office, a printing press, a telegraph, a still and video camera, a recording studio, a navigation system, and a radio and TV station.
those who come across one form of stigmatized knowledge will learn of others, in connections that imply that stigmatized knowledge is a unified domain, an alternative worldview, rather than a collection of unrelated ideas.
religious belief leads people to think that almost nothing happens accidentally or randomly:
the single strongest driver of conspiracy belief to be belief in end-time prophecies.
“A fundamentalist,” the religious historian George Marsden famously said, “is an evangelical who is angry about something.”
Indeed, in many ways evangelicals have been Mormonized during the last half-century without realizing it.
only one or two in ten Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists, and charismatics graduated college, versus six in ten Jews.
Charismatics are the madcap descendants of Anne Hutchinson, and their remaining Christian opponents are like latter-day Puritans.
Other developed countries have ascendant political movements driven by fantastical belief in conspiracies and a wish to go back in time, but we have given ours the national government to run.
The American ecumenical mantra used to be We all worship the same God. In Fantasyland, it’s essentially None of us are sticklers for reason.
More than any other single American by far, outside conventional religion and politics, Oprah Winfrey is responsible for giving a national platform and credibility to magical thinking, New Age and otherwise.
Thanks to the coenabling usual suspects—academia, media, government, and business—we are living in two worlds at once, an amazing scientific present and a revived prescientific past, where robotic surgery and 3-D-printed bionic ears coexist with spurious folk remedies.
Homeschools are part of the new infrastructure for enabling alternate realities.
the Christian homeschooling movement consists of a million DIY mini-madrassas.
Holders of any belief about anything, especially and incontrovertibly if those beliefs are ascribed to faith, are now expected to be immune from challenge.
Instead of uncovering, for instance, the widespread sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests, a story that wouldn’t break until the 2000s, in the 1980s and ’90s we focused instead on a terrifying but imaginary crime spree by demonic anti-Christians.
When the American Psychological Association surveyed its members, 93 percent said they believed the people claiming satanic ritual abuse were telling the truth.
Fantastic beliefs that were beyond the pale twenty years ago are now mainstream.
People on the left are by no means all scrupulously reasonable—many give themselves over to the dubious and untrue. But the politics of Fantasyland are highly asymmetrical.
Buchanan, running against a Bush in an effort to run against a Clinton, was a smarter, more sincere and ideologically coherent Trump twenty years ahead of his time.
the Constitution’s key clause—“no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust”—is kind of a theoretical freedom.
