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

by Kurt Andersen

We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any nation, practically a synonym for developed country. But at the same time, 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.

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.

George Washington “is an unbeliever,” Jefferson once reckoned, and only “has divines constantly about him because he thinks it right to keep up appearances.” Jefferson himself kept up appearances by attending church but instructed his seventeen-year-old nephew to “question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.” He considered religions “all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies,” including “our particular superstition,” Christianity.

“As to Jesus of Nazareth,” Franklin wrote just before he died, “I have…some doubts as to his Divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon…and I think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.” When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn’t mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: “We forgot.”

So much about the founding of the church seems so comic, even at the most fine-grained level. When Smith asked a disciple to serve as church historian, for instance, the man said he’d do it only if God asked him. So Joseph repeated the order, this time using more God-like language: “Behold it is expedient in me that my servant John should write and keep a regular history.”

Dr. Thomas’ Electric Oil contained alcohol, opium, and cocaine, although it probably did not, as claimed, cure “deafness in 2 days.”)

George Washington and dozens of signers of both the Declaration and the Constitution had been Masons. “Their Grand Secret,” the young Freemason Ben Franklin said, “is that they have no secret at all.”

After secession happened and fighting broke out, conspiracy theories multiplied, most of them crazily implausible, like the one in an 1863 exposé called Interior Causes of the War: The Nation Demonized and Its President a Spirit-Rapper. The author, a “resident of Ohio,” said it was no coincidence that abolitionism and the craze for communicating with the dead had taken off simultaneously during the late 1840s and 1850s. The spirits, dead people, “have a magnetism peculiar to themselves, fired with vengeance [and] hatred.” In other words, ghosts and their living American interlocutors—the spiritualists—were scheming to destroy the nation. “For a number of years before the war, the spiritualists were promised, by spirits, a president of their own faith.” Lincoln “sprang mysteriously from the prairies,” “selected by spirits for the very work—the equalization of white men and negroes—which he is now endeavoring to perform.” “These spirits…are now in control” of the Union. By means of “a secret hole in the White House, a rapping table,” “Mr. Lincoln, and at least a portion of his cabinet…are now holding spiritual circles in the executive mansion, and consulting spirits in regard to the prospects and conduct of the war.” The spirits had essentially hypnotized Lincoln and the Union leaders into thinking they’d win the Civil War in order to send America “down the broad road to ruin.”

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.”

That young man was Phineas Barnum, known as P.T., who by his early twenties was earning a living in Connecticut selling lottery tickets. Coming of age during this period of avid belief in the unbelievable, Barnum had had his career-making, world-changing epiphany: he realized “the perfect good-nature with which the American public submits to a clever humbug.”

It endured in new forms in the new century, with Daddy’s and Granddaddy’s Civil War a noble and glorious Lost Cause that tragically failed to preserve their antebellum golden age. Slavery qua slavery? No, no, no, the war hadn’t really been about that; slavery was a detail. 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.

On the very first day of the twentieth century, this twenty-seven-year-old put his hands on a student, a thirty-year-old woman, and, according to him, “a halo seemed to surround her head and face, and she began speaking in the Chinese language and was unable to speak English for three days.” Although a local Chinese person said that what she spoke wasn’t Chinese at all, the believers believed, and soon more Topekans, including the minister and his clerical peers, were excitedly speaking dozens of different made-up foreign languages.

Even as McCarthy was being purged, Graham explained that Communism was “master-minded by Satan….There is no other explanation for the tremendous gains of Communism…unless they have supernatural power and wisdom and intelligence given to them.” It was just like with Satan’s Native American warriors in the 1600s.

“Today the advent of McCarthyism has thrown real fear into the hearts of some,” a young Washington reporter wrote a few months after McCarthy’s speech in 1950, “fear of what a demagogue can do to America while the press helplessly gives its sometimes unwilling cooperation….But who knows? One greater than McCarthy may come.”

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. In 1962 and 1963 the Supreme Court decided in two cases, with only one dissenter in each instance, that it was unconstitutional for public schools to conduct organized prayer or Bible readings, and in 1968 the court finally ruled—unanimously—that states could not ban the teaching of evolution. Until the 1960s, biblical literalists (like white supremacists) had not been prohibited from imposing their beliefs on everyone around them.

Then in 1967 New Orleans’s wacko district attorney indicted a local businessman for being part of a supposed conspiracy of gay right-wingers to assassinate Kennedy—“a Nazi operation, whose sponsors included some of the oil-rich millionaires in Texas,” with the CIA, FBI, and Bobby Kennedy complicit in the cover-up. After NBC News broadcast an investigation discrediting the theory, the DA said the documentary was a piece of “thought control,” obviously commissioned by NBC’s parent company RCA, “one of the top ten defense contractors” and thus “desperate because we are in the process of uncovering their hoax.” The notion of an immense and monstrous JFK assassination conspiracy became conventional wisdom in America.

Gun nut became a phrase in the 1960s because gun nuts really didn’t exist until then—and they emerged on the far right and left simultaneously.

When Congress was passing gun regulation in 1968, the National Rifle Association’s executive vice-president wrote that “the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”

But violent crime had tripled in a decade, and 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.

Afterward, two fantasies became entrenched American idées fixes: conspiracies are the key underlying mechanisms of existence, and unlimited gun ownership is both the irreplaceable symbol and means of preserving one’s liberty.

The Angels weren’t the only American criminals at the time whose lives imitated art: only after a novelist and screenwriter invented a Mafia term in 1969—“the godfather”—did actual mafiosi start calling bosses “godfather” and discussing offers that people couldn’t refuse.

WHEN ALL THE BABY BOOMERS were still children, in the early 1960s, the final legal end of white supremacy came into sight. And as a result, certain white Southerners started displaying Confederate symbols, and Southern states retrofitted state flags to include them.

When he first ran for president, Ronald Reagan popularized the term welfare queen—a powerful caricature, based on a single criminal case, that exaggerated the pervasiveness of welfare fraud and spread the fiction that black people were the main recipients of government benefits.

In the digital age, every tribe and fiefdom and principality and region of Fantasyland—every screwball with a computer and a telecom connection—suddenly had an unprecedented way to instruct and rile up and mobilize believers, and to recruit more.

One thing leads to another. Ways of thinking correlate and cluster. Believing in one type of fantasy tends to lead to believing in others. The major general who commanded the army’s paranormal R&D unit starting in the late 1970s—personally attempting to levitate, to dematerialize, to pass through walls, and to mentally disperse clouds—later became a 9/11 truther who’s certain that hijacked planes didn’t bring down the towers or hit the Pentagon.

Those Yale researchers also found that believers in fate, religious and otherwise, include a large subset of “highly paranoid people” who “obsess over other people’s hidden motives.”

Like Christians certain both that evolution is a phony theory and that God created people a few thousand years ago, conspiracists are simultaneously credulous (about impossible plots) and incredulous (about the confusing, dull gray truth). Conspiracists often deride arguments against their theories as disinformation cooked up by the conspirators—the way some Christians consider evolutionary explanations to be the work of the devil.

Once people decide a particular theory is true, they’re apt to be open to another and another and another. In their 2013 paper on conspiracy believers, a team of German social psychologists summarized the research. “In fact,” they found, this tendency even extends to beliefs in mutually contradictory conspiracy theories, and to beliefs in fully fictitious conspiracy theories. Thus, those who believe that Princess Diana faked her own death are also more likely to believe that she was murdered; those who believe…that John F. Kennedy fell victim to an organized conspiracy…are more likely to believe that there was a conspiracy behind the success of the Red Bull energy drink—a conspiracy theory that was purposely developed for a social psychology study.

Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the 1980s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, it hadn’t seemed like a serious problem in America.

Compared to a decade ago, it’s true, almost twice as many Americans say they don’t believe in God. But consider the actual numbers: the total of agnostics and atheists has gone from extremely tiny (4 percent in 2007) to very tiny (7 percent in 2014). Those are percentages one otherwise finds in less-developed countries. If that is evidence for U.S. secularization, we are now just about as secular as, oh, Turkey.

Sure, we’re multicultural. However, those of us who identify with a specific religious tradition but don’t worship Jesus—American Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and others combined—make up less than 6 percent of the population.

Pat Robertson, now eighty-seven, remains the most prominent blame-the-victims horror-storyteller.*6 In 2015 God made stock prices drop 3 percent because the government funded Planned Parenthood, the way he sent Hurricane Katrina as punishment for laws permitting abortion, sent tornadoes to the Midwest in 2012 because He wasn’t hearing enough prayer, and killed a hundred thousand Haitians with an earthquake in 2010 because of their ancestors’ “pact with the devil.” September 11 was God’s punishment of the United States for feminism, homosexuality, free speech, and paganism—ironic, given that the Muslim fantasists who hijacked the planes on 9/11 would’ve agreed totally.

However, “once you know that, in fact, this probably is demonic activity,” you proceed with the deliverance mission—“Pray in Jesus’s name because the demons hate it….If they do their part, demons will leave quietly and quickly in ten minutes, and that is how most deliverances that we do actually happen.” If the de-demonization isn’t quite so easy, there’s a Troubleshooting section. The problem may be that your demon-possessed friends are hearing a satanic voice in their heads saying, “ ‘This is a hoax, this is ridiculous, this stuff isn’t even real.’ ” According to Luhrmann, her Vineyarders in Chicago and Palo Alto “would find themselves kind of going into restaurants and smelling for the demons and then having to pray to expel them.” These, remember, are moderate, mainstream charismatics.

Spiritual warfare can also take place on extremely strategic levels—Wagner, for instance, focuses on the entire nation of Japan. Satan personally enlisted Emperor Akihito on behalf of “the powers of darkness,” Wagner explained on NPR’s Fresh Air—“the sun goddess visits him in person and has sexual intercourse with the emperor….I don’t know how that works between a spirit and a human, but I know that’s the case.”

To be clear, she’s talking mainly not about spiritual contentment but things, objects, lovers, cash. “The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts….It is not your job to work out ‘how’ the money will come to you. It is your job to ask….Leave the details to the Universe on how it will bring it about.” She warns that rationalism can neutralize the magic—in fact, awareness of the real world beyond one’s individual orbit can be problematic. “When I discovered The Secret, I made a decision that I would not watch the news or read newspapers anymore, because it did not make me feel good.”

When The New Yorker’s science reporter Michael Specter told Oz he knew of no evidence that Reiki works, the doctor agreed—“if you are talking purely about data.”

Among his hundreds of academic papers are two from 2014 and 2015, both entitled “God, Synchronicity, and Postmaterialist Psychology.” In them he describes eleven coincidences that he found so “increasingly improbable,” he figured God must have been signaling him, and then fifteen instances during one two-week period when he happened to encounter the words giraffes and Paris. To Schwartz, this showed that “ ‘spirits’ (e.g., the souls of people who have ‘died’)…collaborate with the Divine…for the purpose of orchestrating complex, creative, and personally meaningful synchronicities.”

In the chapter about religion, Jefferson reminded his readers that some of colonial America’s official, government-sanctioned churches had persecuted and even executed heretics. Therefore, he declared, the new government must neither ban nor embrace any particular religion. Let people believe whatever they want, because “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

The belief that childhood vaccines cause autism was a fantasy that directly produced disease and death among people who happened to be in the proximity of unvaccinated and infected children (see Chapter 41). As disbelief in science grows, our whole society may become less prosperous and more vulnerable. As religious belief drives government to make legal contraception and abortions more difficult to get, the rest of us will have our pockets picked in all kinds of ways for years to come.

That so many of our neighbors are saying so many loony things now is doing us real injury. More and more in lots of ways, Fantasyland has started to pick our pockets and break our legs.

A couple of years later some Denver Post reporters established that the vast majority of missing children were actually runaways or involved in parental custody disputes, and that the standard statistics were indeed exaggerated by orders of magnitude. They won a Pulitzer Prize. And indeed, a decade later the FBI estimated that the number of true kidnapping victims was no more than three hundred a year, most of whom were not murdered. The standard high-end figure of fifty thousand a year had been invented by Adam Walsh’s father, who later admitted it was just his “guesstimate.” The missing-children panic crested, but the myth became a permanent basis for a new American mode of anxious, frightened, overprotective parenting.

So hypnosis is not a reliable tool for getting people to remember events they’ve forgotten. But the underlying idea—that we all have repressed memories that when retrieved can explain ourselves to ourselves—hardened into popular certainty despite fierce scientific consensus that it isn’t true.

Ulric Neisser is one of the founders of cognitive psychology. “False memories and confabulations are not rare at all,” he said in the 1990s, as those fictional memories were being solicited wholesale. “They are still more likely to occur…where memories can be shaped and reshaped to meet the strong interpersonal demands of a therapy session. And once a memory has been thus reconfigured, it is very, very hard to change.” The neurobiologist James McGaugh, another pioneer in the field, has in his half-century of research seen not “a single instance in which a memory was completely repressed and popped up again. There’s absolutely no proof that it can happen. Zero. None. Niente. Nada. All my research says that strong emotional experiences leave emotionally strong memories. Being sexually molested would certainly qualify.”

IN 1984, NOT long before he appeared on the cover of Time and ran for president, Pat Robertson published a book called Answers to 200 of Life’s Most Probing Questions. Several of the questions were about Satan and his fallen angels currently posing as humans. “It is possible,” Robertson wrote, “that a demon prince is in charge of New York, Detroit, St. Louis, or any other city.”

When many of Michelle Pazder’s supposed memories were specifically debunked, a reporter asked her husband if in his view the factual truth was irrelevant. “Yes, that’s right,” Dr. Pazder agreed. “It is a real experience. If you talk to Michelle today, she will say, ‘That’s what I remember.’ We still leave the question open. For her it was very real.” Other people “are all eager to prove or disprove what happened, but in the end it doesn’t matter.” True, false, whatever—it felt real.

As a “high priestess” in the cult, she thought she recalled, she had “tortured, raped, murdered, and cannibalized 2,000 children a year while her husband was at work.”

Psychologists more strongly committed to data and science formed their own national organization—but the main group, the APA, is five times as large. One of its presidents has complained that the pro-rigor faction has a “fervor about science [that] borders on the irrational.”

The recent episode, however, didn’t temper American Christians’ Satan-mania—and some, as in New England several hundred years ago, insist that the recent hysteria was Satan’s doing, that he supernaturally deluded accusers and authorities into punishing those unfortunately innocent people.

Thus neatly absolving them of any responsibility for their own actions.

Right and left agreed, too, that AIDS was a genocidal plot: a year after Behold a Pale Horse asserted that the virus had been invented and spread by “the ruling elite” to kill “the black, Hispanic, and homosexual populations,” Spike Lee said he was convinced that, yes indeed, “AIDS is a government-engineered disease.”

“One of the impressive things about paranoid literature,” Hofstadter observed in the 1960s in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, “is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows”—McCarthy’s ninety-six-page pamphlet had 313 footnote references, and the John Birch Society founder’s attack on President Eisenhower had a hundred pages of notes. With the Web, this concern for pseudofactuality could be more elaborately expressed than ever.