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

by Kurt Andersen

The disagreements dividing Protestants from Catholics were about the internal consistency of the magical rules within their common fantasy scheme.

out of the new Protestant religion, a new proto-American attitude emerged during the 1500s. Millions of ordinary people decided that they, each of them, had the right to decide what was true or untrue, regardless of what fancy experts said. And furthermore, they believed, passionate fantastical belief was the key to everything.

By the 1620s in the Old World, literal belief in biblical end-time prophecies was fading, along with other medieval artifacts.

Today most of us think of witches as a kind of independent magical species—a folk superstition, not part of the Christian scheme. And for the thousand years or so that Catholics ran Christianity, the church agreed: witchcraft officially didn’t exist during the Middle Ages. But as soon as Protestantism emerged, so did alleged witches and witch hunts.

THE BIG PIECE of secular conventional wisdom about Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God’s glory, success looks like a sign of His grace. But it seems clear to me 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.

Like science, Protestantism was powered by skepticism of the established religious paradigms, which were to be revised or rejected—but unlike science, the old paradigms were to be replaced by new fixed truths. The scientific method is unceasingly skeptical, each truth understood as a partial, provisional best-we-can-do-for-the-moment understanding of reality. In their travesty of science, Protestant true believers scrutinized the natural world to deduce the underlying godly or satanic causes of every strange effect, from comets to hurricanes to Indian attacks to unusual illnesses and deaths. For believers in the new American religion, the truth was out there: everything happened for a purpose, and the purpose wasn’t so hard to suss out.

In On the Jews and Their Lies, Martin Luther wrote of “the unbearable, devilish burden of the Jews….Wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils.” In order “to save our souls from the Jews, that is, from the devil,” he recommended burning all synagogues and destroying Jews’ houses, and that even “safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jew.”

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.

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.

For Christians in Europe, one’s official religious choice was essentially binary—subscribe to a state-sanctioned church, Protestant or Catholic, or to no organized religion at all.

The religious divergence of Europe and America became more pronounced, as Europeans swung toward the calm and reasonable, Americans toward the excited and fantastical.

America was created by people resistant to reality checks and convinced they had special access to the truth, a place founded to enact grand fantasies. No Joseph Smiths emerged elsewhere in the modern world. And if they had, where else would so many responsible people instantly abandon their previous beliefs and lives and risk everything on the say-so of such a man making such claims?

Arthur C. Clarke’s famous third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

One of the patients at Kellogg’s Seventh-day Adventist sanitarium was C. W. Post, who got the idea there for Grape Nuts, which made him rich. Among Grape Nuts’ advertised health benefits was curing appendicitis. As it happened, Post later had an apparent appendicitis attack, and when surgery didn’t end his distress, he shot and killed himself.

“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.”

Christian religiosity itself, in particular our pseudo-hyperrational kind, amounts to belief in the grandest and greatest conspiracy of all: God the mastermind plotting and executing His all-encompassing scheme, assisted by a team of co-conspirators, the angels and prophets. Like religious explanations, conspiratorial explanations of the world tend to connect all sorts of dots, real and imaginary, drawing lines to impute intention and design and purpose everywhere, ignoring the generally greater power of randomness and happenstance.

Another result of America’s Enlightenment roots is that thick strain of skepticism. That reflex, to disbelieve official explanations, seems antithetical to religious belief and faith in hidden purposes and plans. Skepticism, after all, is an antonym for credulity. But when both are robust and overheated, they can fuse into conspiracy-mindedness. Take nothing on faith—except that the truth is deliberately hidden and can be discovered and precisely diagrammed.

In fact, his cabin, which his friends helped him build, was barely a half-hour walk from the prosperous old town where his mom and dad and a couple of thousand other people lived, and only a seventeen-mile trip on the new railroad from the third-largest city in America. John Muir, the nature-worshipping American who actually walked the walk a generation later, mocked Thoreau as a poseur pretending to “see forests in orchards and patches of huckleberry brush” a “mere saunter” from Concord. Indeed, when Thoreau left Walden Pond to spend a couple of weeks in the true wilderness of northern Maine, he was horrified—“grim and wild,” “vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature.” After eight hundred days living deep and sucking out all the marrow of existence, he returned to town, helping run his father’s pencil-making business, living for the rest of his life at his parents’ big house on Main Street. 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. In addition, Thoreau believed in fairies and astrology and thought the full moon enabled him to have out-of-body experiences.

thirty-two-year-old Herman Melville wrote a letter to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne about this wave of romantic giddiness. Melville appreciated the delicious, seductive power of their peers’ transcendental ecstasies, but he also understood them to be on a slippery slope toward a very American solipsism. “ ‘Live in the all,’ ” Melville wrote to Hawthorne. What nonsense!… This “all” feeling…there is some truth in. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion. That is, it only becomes problematic when people refuse to let blissful epiphanies remain mostly obscure and evanescent.

a 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.

Until the twentieth century, nostalgia still had a specific quasi-medical meaning—extreme personal homesickness, the melancholy of soldiers and exiles missing their towns and countries and old friends. But during the nineteenth century, a new form of nostalgia emerged as an important tic in Americans’ psychology, an imaginary homesickness for places and times the nostalgists had never experienced and that had in some cases never existed.

Science had proved that humans descended from animals—which is tough to reconcile with a literal reading of Genesis, in which God forms man from the dust of the ground by breathing into his nostrils the breath of life. In the half-century since Darwin’s The Descent of Man, intellectually supple Christians around the world—the “modernists”—had reconciled Scripture with scientific evidence: the astronomers, geologists, paleontologists, and biologists were simply discovering the operational details of God’s miraculous creation. Even orthodox theologians were showing flexibility. “ ‘Evolution,’ ” an essayist wrote in The Fundamentals, was “but a new name for ‘creation,’ ” and thus “the Bible and science are…in harmony.” So God in his amazing way created man, but not in a single day, and not by blowing on a dirt statue.

Going to the movies wasn’t like reading a novel at home, privately imagining a fictional world, but more like going to church—quietly gathering for an hour or two in a special hall every week with a crowd of neighbors to experience a magical, dreamlike virtual reality simultaneously.

For a century, Americans had a wide-ranging, well-established vocabulary for this, talking about suckers falling for hogwash. After the 1920s, however, we invented fewer and fewer such disparagements. Soon words like balderdash, humbug, and bunkum were shoved to the back of the language attic and semiretired or eliminated, along with hooey, claptrap, and malarkey. We also did a strange thing to a certain set of older words. For as long as they’d been English, incredible, unbelievable, unreal, fabulous, and fantastic were either derogatory or neutrally descriptive, different ways of calling claims unlikely, imaginary, or untrue. But then they were all redefined to be terms of supreme praise, synonyms for wonderful, glorious, outstanding, superb.

Coca-Cola, until recently a patent medicine for headaches and impotence, had been rebranded around looser dreams of refreshment and fun, so in the 1930s its downtown L.A. bottling plant was refashioned to look like an enormous cruise ship, with portholes and a catwalk.

Miami Beach was created by a developer who dredged up sand from the ocean and imported thousands of tons of soil.

By the end of the decade, the average American spent a third of his or her waking hours watching TV. Nowhere and never had more people spent more time consuming fictions and advertising, and never in such a continuous quasi-hypnotic state.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty became a box office hit in 1947 by satirizing an American freak who fictionalized himself as a dashing hero, living in his own private dreamworld. Yet the new normal—driving in and out of suburban pastoral fantasies, immersing in endless new televised fantasies—was turning all Americans into Walter Mittys without them realizing it.

A farmer named Walter Knott had started growing a freakishly large new berry, which he named the boysenberry and sold at his farmstand—and then built attractions to get more money out of the fruit buyers: a nineteenth-century hotel hauled in from Arizona, a fake ghost town and saloon, a reproduction Old West theater.

Photographs often show Disney with the index and middle finger of his right hand together as though he’s about to give the Cub Scout salute: he chain-smoked (and died of lung cancer), but every time they could, he and his handlers had photographs retouched to eliminate the Lucky Strike.

Kerouac, the king of the Beats, nicely embodied a couple of recurrent themes in this history—mythologizing the good old days, living life as if it were a piece of fiction. “Nostalgia,” the Harvard cultural historian Louis Menand has written of On the Road, was “part of its appeal in 1957. For it is not a book about the nineteen-fifties. It’s a book about the nineteen-forties,” the “dying…world of hoboes and migrant workers and cowboys and crazy joyriders.” What’s more, the novel was not a fictionalization of adventures Kerouac just happened to experience—rather, “the trips in On the Road were made for the purpose of writing On the Road.”

In his first year as president, at age sixty-three, Eisenhower was baptized. He appeared at the first National Prayer Breakfast, an event organized by a fundamentalist group, which became annual. The following year Congress and the president stuck “under God” into the eighty-seven-year-old Pledge of Allegiance, then gave America its first official motto, “In God We Trust,” to be printed on currency.

In fact, what the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same coins minted around 1967. 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. Anything goes meant anything went.

As an alternative to psychiatry’s dominant Freudian mode—talking, recalling events, analysis—he and his wife had developed “Gestalt therapy.” Perls’s approach was to focus entirely on patients’ perceptions, without judging. At Esalen, Perls distilled his approach into four sentences, the famous Gestalt prayer: I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.*2 Fine. Except that in America, which began on a slippery slope of subjectivity, this new creed helped accelerate the giant slalom toward a concoct-your-own-truth culture and society.

His new institute embraced the radical notion that psychosis and other mental illnesses were labels imposed by the straight world on eccentrics and visionaries, that they were primarily tools of coercion and control, not legitimate medical conditions at all. This was the big idea behind Ken Kesey’s bestselling novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, of course.

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert said, in character in 2006, mocking the beliefs-trump-facts impulse of today’s right.

Its premise: as rationalism and secularization inexorably sweep the Western world, the only way for religion to thrive is to continue accommodating reason and intellectual subtlety.

the magisterial “Is God Dead?” article barely registered that rising tide of mysticism and magical thinking. “Is God Dead?” contains exactly one glancing reference: “In search of meaning, some believers have desperately turned to psychiatry, Zen or drugs.”

“At the outset practically all the Jesus People were young acid heads,” Tom Wolfe wrote, “who had sworn off drugs…but still wanted the ecstatic spiritualism….This they found in Fundamentalist evangelical holy-rolling Christianity of a sort that ten years before would have seemed utterly impossible to revive in America.”

When evangelicalism and fundamentalism started blowing up bigger than ever in the 1980s, becoming synonymous with the political and cultural right, nobody remembered that Christianity had been revivified and crazified in the same 1960s that produced Esalen and Woodstock. The ascendant Christians mostly didn’t look or talk very 1960s, but they shared the sense of unbound freedom to abandon reason and believe whatever they wished, some of them more fearful than hopeful, others radiating enchantment more than paranoia, some in the thrall of ecstatic experience and others, extreme doctrine. They amounted to a counterculture that emerged from one roiling postrational American sea.

because Calvary Chapel, a large denomination, was created in America during and after the 1960s, it insists it’s “nondenominational”—like American politicians who began insisting at the same time they’re antigovernment.

Because the Vineyard and Calvary Chapel were both booming, and because neither called itself Pentecostal nor obsessed over tongues, they made it easier for Christians in established churches to adopt charismatic modes. I’m weeping, I’m laughing, I’m falling to my knees or declaiming prophecy or speaking in tongues, my backache went away, the traffic jam suddenly cleared, God and Jesus are doing it all for me—I feel it’s true, so it’s true. American Christianity was incorporating more magical realism and special effects than ever. By the end of the 1970s, even Billy Graham gave his okay to speaking in tongues.

The differences among Christian true believers in the late 1960s and ’70s mirrored the differences among the new bohemian masses. The charismatics were like the hippies and New Agers, experiencing ecstasy and seeing signs and wonders, demanding cool music and clothes in church. The fundamentalists were like the New Left, insular zealots focused on arguing doctrine, hating the unrighteous, and awaiting the final battle. Charismatics were the Christian equivalent of the millions of circa-1970 hippies who didn’t so much disagree with the radicals’ critiques of the rotten world but were ultimately more interested in peace and love and awesomeness.

Over creationism and other issues, hardline evangelicals began reasserting supremacy in the more conservative evangelical denominations. The most hidebound of the big Lutheran branches, the Missouri Synod, recommitted to the dogma that everything in the Bible is factually true. At its 1965 convention, over the objections of a reasonable president, it declared its “conviction that the events recorded in the book of Jonah did occur,” that Jonah was a “real man” swallowed by a “real whale” until his prayers convinced God to make the whale spit him out. The head of its most prestigious seminary explained that no, the Jonah tale is like a lot of stuff in the Bible—a parable, not a factual account. Both men were purged, and the hard-liners took over.

With conspiracism suddenly on the rise, The Late, Great Planet Earth purported to reveal the details of the evil über-conspiracy—how Satan and the Antichrist and False Prophet and their minions in all their respectable disguises were taking over the world. For instance, those confusing references to “Gog” throughout the Bible? Obviously the Soviet Union. And the “beast coming up out of the sea, having ten horns”? The new European Economic Community! (Even though in 1970 it had only six members.) What’s more, the EEC was created by the Treaty of Rome—and in Revelation, of course, “the great whore” Babylon is Rome! And so on. The Late, Great Planet Earth was the bestselling (so-called) nonfiction book of the entire decade, and it continued selling a million copies a year for the rest of the millennium. Its template was fill-in-the-blanks-flexible enough to incorporate all new satanic agents as they emerged—China! Iran! vaccines! Obama! Pope Francis! ISIS!

The modern homeschooling movement, for instance, got going then in both fundamentalist Christian and Woodstockian iterations. The former sought to reduce children’s exposure to ideas from outside the Bible-based bubbles of family and church. In left-bohemian milieux, parents decided that their children are not in this world to live up to expectations; that they must only and always do their own thing; and that tests and grades would turn them into drones of the corporate state. And in the 1970s the courts and state legislatures started deciding okay, whatever, do your own thing, Christian, hippie, it’s all good, school’s optional.

in the late 1970s hysterics managed to take over the NRA, replacing its motto “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation” with the second half of the Second Amendment—“The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed.” Within a decade, the official Republican position shifted almost 180 degrees to oppose any federal registration of firearms.

I’m pretty certain that the unprecedented surge of UFO reports was not evidence of extraterrestrials’ increasing presence but a symptom of Americans’ credulity and magical thinking suddenly unloosed. We wanted to believe in extraterrestrials, so we did. What makes the UFO mania that started in the 1960s historically significant rather than just amusing, however, was the web of elaborate stories that were now being spun, not just sightings and landings but abductions and government cover-ups and secret alliances with interplanetary beings. Those earnest beliefs planted more seeds for the extravagant American conspiracy thinking that by the turn of the century would be rampant and seriously toxic.

lotteries are gambling’s most fantastical form, with worse odds than any casino game. The lottery business is all about selling ridiculous long shots to magical thinkers. What’s more, government-run lotteries were specifically tweaked to exploit the psychology of fantasy. Scratch-card tickets—Four correct, I almost won!—essentially tricked bettors to keep buying, and computer-generated ticket sales gave the illusion of control over random chance.

once a contraceptive method of unprecedented effectiveness came along—the Pill, available everywhere by 1965—heterosexuality dramatically changed. People were freer to have sex more often and therefore more imaginatively, without the antifantasy buzzkill of possible pregnancy. Reliable contraception also meant they could do it with more people they found fleetingly attractive, and have sex unseriously, the way they might daydream about ravishing a character in a novel or a movie. When sex became far less consequential, it could become less “real” and more like exciting fiction.