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

by Kurt Andersen

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.

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. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible.

As particular fantasies get traction and become contagious, other fantasists are encouraged by a cascade of out-of-control tolerance. It’s a kind of twisted Golden Rule unconsciously followed: If those people believe that, then certainly we can believe this.

Each of the small fantasies and simulations we insert into our lives is harmless enough, replacing a small piece of the authentic but mundane here, another over there. The world looks a little more like a movie set and seems a little more exciting and glamorous, like Hitchcock’s definition of drama—life with the dull bits cut out. Each of us can feel like a sexier hero in a cooler story, younger than we actually are if we’re old or older if we’re young. Over time the patches of unreality take up more and more space in our lives. Eventually the whole lawn becomes AstroTurf. We stop registering the differences between simulated and authentic, real and unreal.

our drift toward credulity, doing our own thing, and having an altogether uncertain grip on reality has overwhelmed our other exceptional national traits and turned us into a less-developed country as well.

It also established a theme we’ll encounter again and again: around some plausible bit of reality, Americans leap to concoct wishful (or terrified) fictions they ardently believe to be true.

Hakluyt’s breathless chronicle of America had been commissioned by the thirty-year-old aristocrat, poet, rake, adventurer, zealous Protestant, and gold-mad New World enthusiast Walter Raleigh. He was a charming, larger-than-life up-and-comer—a stereotypical go-go American before English America even existed.

Raleigh helped invent the kind of elaborate pseudoempiricism that in the centuries to come would become a permanent feature of Fantasyland testimonials—about religion, about quack science, about conspiracy, about whatever was being urgently sold.

Down in Virginia, meanwhile, more than six thousand people had emigrated to Jamestown by 1620, the equivalent of a midsize English city at the time. At least three-quarters had died but not the abiding dream. People kept coming and believing, hopefulness becoming delusion. It was a gold rush with no gold.

The historian Daniel Boorstin went even further, suggesting that “American civilization [has] been shaped by the fact that there was a kind of natural selection here of those people who were willing to believe in advertising.” Western civilization’s first great advertising campaign was created in order to inspire enough dreamers and suckers to create America.

The Protestants’ founding commitment to fierce, decentralized, do-it-yourself truth-finding and spiritual purity naturally led to the continuous generation of self-righteous sectarian spin-offs.

Ferociously believing every miracle and myth in an ancient text wasn’t enough. They were no longer just a group of rash, disapproving English rustics living in a European city. They were a tribe wandering for years in exile, just like in Exodus, determined to find a promised land, as prophesied in the Book of Revelation. Because, really, once you are free—no, obliged—to figure out the fantastical truth on your own, and then create your own new religious species around that truth (Protestantism), and then a new subspecies (Puritanism), and then a sub-subspecies (Separating Puritanism), what’s stopping you from realizing the ultimate dream of conjuring your own utopian nation dedicated to your perfect new religion?

The myth we’ve constructed says that the first nonnative new Americans who mattered were the idealists, the hyperreligious people seeking freedom to believe and act out their passionate, elaborate, all-consuming fantasies.

But what made the Puritans so American, as they self-consciously invented America, wasn’t just the Protestant zealotry. Rather, it was the paradoxical combination of their beliefs and temperament. They were over-the-top magical thinkers but also prolific readers and writers. They were excruciatingly rational fantasists who regarded theology as an elaborate scientific endeavor. They were whacked-out visionaries but also ambitious bourgeois doers, accomplished managers and owners and makers. They were theologically medieval—but traveling three thousand miles to create a utopia led by university-educated gentlemen was a radically modern endeavor.

No, Hutchinson is so American because she was so confident in herself, in her intuitions and idiosyncratic, subjective understanding of reality. She’s so American because, unlike the worried, pointy-headed people around her, she didn’t recognize ambiguity or admit to self-doubt. Her perceptions and beliefs were true because they were hers and because she felt them so thoroughly to be true. They weren’t mere theories and opinions delivered by her Oxford- and Cambridge-educated antagonists. Hutchinson didn’t have to study any book but the Bible to arrive at the truth. Because she felt it. She knew it. The great historian of Puritanism Perry Miller refers to her “fanatical anti-intellectualism”—in other words, a prototypical Fantasyland American.

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. American Christianity in the twenty-first century resembles Hutchinson’s version more than it does the official Christianity of her time.

Williams and Hutchinson were thus both key inventors of American individualism. He disagreed with the religious nonsense you spouted, but he would defend to the death your right to spout it; she was the crackpot case study for extreme freedom of thought and speech, insisting she be allowed to believe and tell people she had magical powers. Which Williams was willing to let her do in Providence, where she moved.

Over the next two generations, as the English population quintupled, exceeding the Indians’, the natives naturally grew…restless. As a result, after a half-century the settlers’ long-standing fantasy of a pan-Indian conspiracy became self-fulfillingly real: the natives finally did form a multitribal alliance to fight back. The public case for wiping out the newly militant Indians remained supernatural, however. For Christians who imagined themselves battling satanic beasts, conventional rules of war no longer applied. Yet another Harvard-educated minister, serving as chaplain to one of Massachusetts’s military units, exhorted his soldiers to “kill, burn, sink, destroy all sin and Corruption…which are professed enemies to Christ Jesus, and not to pity or spare any of them.” The year of pitiless killing from the summer of 1675 through the summer of 1676 was among the most concentrated bloodbaths in American history.

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.

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.” Early American Methodists thus put “great stock in dreams, visions, supernatural impressions, miraculous healings, speaking in tongues.” Of course, each preacher and believer of every sect knew that his or her idiosyncratic version of the truth was the truth.

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

“The familiar and often unquestioned claim that the Enlightenment was a movement concerned exclusively with enthralling reason over the passions and all other forms of human feeling or attachment, is…simply false,” writes the UCLA historian Anthony Pagden in The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters. “The Enlightenment was as much about rejecting the claims of reason and of rational choice as it was about upholding them.” The Enlightenment gave license to the freedom of all thought, in and outside religion, the absurd and untrue as well as the sensible and true. Especially in America.

We started to believe attractive falsehoods about our founding. Successful leaders had been glorified always, but America’s mythologizing happened immediately and had a particular sanctimonious flavor.

Every set of beliefs and practices—old or new, more or less reasonable or plainly nuts—was officially equal to every other.

As ever for American true believers, persecution by the benighted was proof of their own righteousness.

As the Vanderbilt historian Paul Conkin and Harold Bloom of Yale have both noted, Cane Ridge was the Woodstock for American Christianity, an anarchic, unprecedented August moment of mass spectacle that crystallized and symbolized a new way of thinking and acting, a permanent new subculture.

More Baptist and Methodist preachers organized more camp meetings all over the country, but especially in the South, and more mobs of people assembled to go over the top and out of their minds. It had gone viral. As a mass-market phenomenon in the 1800s, widespread and frequent, it was unique to America. A new and fully American Christianity had been invented, more fantastic and unsubtle than any other, strictly subjective and individual—as Bloom says, an “experiential faith that called itself Christianity while possessing features very unlike European or earlier American doctrinal formulations.” The new mode quickly spread from the frontier back east to civilization. During the year after Cane Ridge, a third of the students at Yale were converted, born again.

Like his pioneering predecessor Whitefield a century earlier, he understood that in America Christianity should be a kind of show business: “to expect to promote religion without excitements,” Finney wrote, “is…absurd.”

Darby more or less invented the idea of “the rapture,” a moment just before all hell breaks loose when Jesus will arrive incognito and take Christians away to heavenly safety to wait out the earthly horrors. Then He and the lucky saints return to Earth for the happy ending. Third, Darby wasn’t trying to forge a whole new denomination, just offering new features that could be attached to any church’s existing theology.

Americans often resist the idea that educated experts can tell them what is and isn’t true, but from the Puritans on, we’ve also been more than happy for scholarly fellow believers to confirm our beliefs and make them more impressively complicated.

Joseph Smith was a quintessentially American figure. Whether he was a heartfelt believer in his delusions or among the greatest confidence men ever, his extreme audacity—his mind-boggling balls—is the American character ad absurdum. 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.

Homeopathy, its fake medicines prescribed to cure every disease, is a product of magical thinking in the extreme. After it was exported from Germany to America during the so-called Era of Good Feelings, it swept the country and continued booming for the rest of the 1800s.

Like so much pseudoscience, mesmerism was faulty science fiction, a fantasy inspired by a misunderstood bit of reality—scientists had recently demonstrated that muscles are indeed activated by electrical signals. A similar sci-fi leap produced phrenology, which madly extrapolated from the actual fact that the mind is all in the brain and the brain, in the words of its founder, “an aggregate of mental organs with specific functions.”

There’s only “belief in pain.” “We say man suffers from the effects of cold, heat, fatigue. This is human belief, not the truth of being, for matter cannot suffer,” and “what is termed disease does not exist.” And not just pain, not just illness, but dying and matter itself—none of it is real. What’s more, “evil is an illusion, and it has no real basis. Evil is a false belief” that “has no reality.” Over the next few years, she married for a third time and retook her maiden name, becoming Mary Baker Eddy, and founded the Church of Christ, Scientist. Her followers, forming more than a thousand Christian Science churches in America within thirty years, were called not believers but scientists.

“Persecution only serves to propagate new theories, whether of philosophy or religion,” he wrote. “Indeed, some of the popular follies of the times are indebted only to the real or alleged persecutions they have suffered…even for their present existence.”

The Saturday morning in 1815 that news of peace reached New Orleans, a guy who heard it early made a deal to buy fifty tons of tobacco from a man who didn’t yet know the blockade was ending. The seller, feeling cheated afterward, sued the buyer, but in one of its most important early opinions, 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. In commerce as in the rest of life, when it came to truth and falsehood, America was a free-fire zone.

the Gold Rush also triggered a shift in the psychology of Americans at large. Gold in California resurrected the distinctly un-Puritan ambition of the first Virginia settlers—the individual and piratical freedom to grab for instant wealth, with little or no adult supervision.

THE JOB CATEGORY of entrepreneur, not-necessarily-rich men with access to capital who enlisted other men to create a business out of nothing, came into being at the same time as America, itself a business conjured out of nothing. The organizers of the Virginia Companies, which funded the first colonies in the 1600s, were early entrepreneurs. But when the word entered English in the 1800s, entrepreneur was a synonym for showman or impresario, a creator and promoter of spectacles. Right around the time Tocqueville arrived and the Gold Rush happened, its meaning expanded to encompass people starting every sort of business.

You know the story of the ant and the grasshopper? The ant is disciplined, the grasshopper parties as if the good times will last forever—but then winter descends; the ant was correct. Americans were always energetic grasshoppers as well as energetic ants, a sui generis crossbreed, which is why we have been so successful as a nation. Our moxie always came in the two basic types. We possessed the unexciting virtues embodied by the Puritans and their secular descendants like Ben Franklin: steady hard work, frugality, sobriety, and common sense. And then there’s our wilder, faster, and looser side, that packet of attributes that also makes us American: impatient, overexcited gamblers with a weakness for stories too good to be true. Ant mode consistently tempered grasshopper mode.

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 the past, for aeons, as Leo Marx writes in The Machine in the Garden, dreams of withdrawing “from the great world [to] begin a new life in a fresh, green landscape” had been a genre of pure fantasy, “a poetic theme, not to be confused with the way poets did in fact live.” But in America by the late 1700s, “the dream of a retreat to an oasis of harmony and joy was removed from its traditional literary context….The effect of the American environment…was to break down commonsense distinctions between art and life.” In this infinite new place, land of the literal, you could live this fantasy.

But forests and mountains and vast grassy vistas were now a key piece of the national story—“a cultural and moral resource and a basis for national self-esteem,” as Roderick Frazier Nash writes in Wilderness and the American Mind. Americans living in towns and cities, in order to feel truly, virtuously American, needed nearby reminders of wild nature, needed to pretend they were pioneers living at the edge of the untamed.

Henry David Thoreau invented a certain kind of entitled, upper-middle-class extended adolescence.

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.

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.

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.

Entrepreneurialism had become the default American mode. What succeeded in business succeeded in religion and vice versa, charismatic visionaries persuading people to believe golden dreams. Medicine shows were revivalist camp meetings selling a different form of instant salvation. Both were conducted by itinerant showmen appealing to Americans’ hunger for magic and drama. In fact, when the Hamlin’s Wizard Oil medicine show arrived in a new town, it always offered donations to local churches.

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.

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.”

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.