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

by Kurt Andersen

Before the Internet, crackpots were mostly isolated and surely had a harder time remaining convinced of their alternate realities. Now their devoutly believed opinions are all over the airwaves and the Web, just like actual news. Now all the fantasies look real.

In other words: 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, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.

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.

When John Wesley was five, his church boarding school in London caught fire. Getting plucked from the blaze became for him miraculous proof that God had special plans for him. He began praying constantly. He started a club of ultra-Christians at Oxford, got ordained, and arrived in the new colony of Georgia to serve as priest for its first town, Savannah. “My chief motive” in coming, he wrote, was “to learn the true sense of the Gospel of Christ by preaching it to the heathen.”

“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. At the end of the 1700s, with the Enlightenment triumphant, science ascendant, and tolerance required, craziness was newly free to show itself. “Alchemy, astrology…occult Freemasonry, magnetic healing, prophetic visions, the conjuring of spirits, usually thought sidelined by natural scientists a hundred years earlier,” all revived, the Oxford historian Keith Thomas explains, their promoters and followers “implicitly following Kant’s injunction to think for themselves. It was only in an atmosphere of enlightened tolerance that such unorthodox cults could have been openly practiced.”

In one of his last sermons, not long after he announced his candidacy for U.S. president, Smith bragged to his people that he’d kept them more loyal than Jesus had his disciples. “I glory in persecution,” he told them. Shortly thereafter, still in his thirties, he was indicted, arrested, and then killed while in custody—like Jesus Christ.

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.

Methodism’s cofounder Wesley published a bestselling self-help compendium of remedies, subtitled An Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases—onions and honey cure baldness, apples prevent insanity. A Presbyterian minister named Sylvester Graham (of the eponymous cracker) led a movement based on his conviction that meat and spices were unhealthy and, maybe worse, sexual stimulants. The cofounder of the new Seventh-day Adventist denomination, who’d had visions of the end of the world, also had a vision of a hospital devoted to water cures and hired an Adventist physician named Dr. John Kellogg (of the eponymous corn flakes) to run it.*

Inventing a religion, as Mary Baker Eddy did, was one way to scale. Manufacturing and selling miraculous products was another, as American wheeler-dealers figured out in the 1830s and ’40s, when branded miracle cures became an industry.

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.

Jedediah Morse’s son, a New York City painting professor and tinkerer, developed a sideline as a hysterical anti-Catholic crusader just as he was about to invent his telegraph. Samuel F. B. Morse’s 1835 book, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, was an exposé of “the cloven foot of this subtle foreign heresy…the existence of a foreign conspiracy against the liberties of the country.”

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.”

As a million and a half black people migrated from South to North during the 1910s and ’20s, four of the five states with the largest Klan memberships were Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. At its peak in the early 1920s, probably 5 percent of white American men were in the KKK.

As a military and legal fact, the Confederacy lost the Civil War, and the United States remained united and joined the rest of the developed world in ending slavery. But in other ways, the question of which side won is more ambiguous. Slavery’s spread was stopped, but not the nationwide spread of certain unfortunate Southern habits of mind, along with increasingly berserk versions of Christianity.

Whenever the drug wore off, I always knew the supernatural episodes had been hallucinations, but the hundred flittering illusions and intuitions of the acid trips did change me, softened my brittle adolescent certainties, twigged me to the precariousness of perception and the accessibility of the mystical.

One of the WWF’s lawyers who lobbied in the 1980s to get pro wrestling deregulated—to persuade the government it wasn’t a real sport, even though for a century it had pretended otherwise—was elected to the Senate in the 1990s and has run for president twice. Rick Santorum disingenuously defends pro wrestling as a genre of “morality plays” that are “a non-elite artifact of our culture that has survived by trying to keep up with the envelope-pushers in Hollywood and New York.” The last time Santorum sought the Republican nomination, in 2016, he lost to a much bigger figure in the wrestling world. Before entering politics, the current president of the United States had sponsored WWE events at one of his casinos, then became a WWE character pretending to slap and body-slam McMahon on stage, and finally got inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.

The consequence of such mingling is that an individual who enters the communications system pursuing one interest soon becomes aware of stigmatized material on a broad range of subjects. As a result, 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.

More than a third of U.S. Catholics, including most Hispanic Catholics, are now charismatics.

That expectation of an imminent Second Coming is surely more widespread and respectable today in America than at any time in three hundred years and vastly more than anywhere else outside the Third World.

Today about a tenth of South Koreans are Pentecostals or charismatics, an extraordinarily large fraction in the developed world and in East Asia—but a far distant second to the United States.

Harkin also cosponsored a bill in the 1990s, along with two-thirds of the Senate, now a law, that removed supplements—not just vitamins but herbs and other botanicals, hormones, natural whatever—from regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. The author of the law was Orrin Hatch, the Republican senior senator from Utah; not coincidentally, America’s nutritional supplement industry is concentrated in Utah, where Mormons are also concentrated. When federal deregulation was enacted in the 1990s, Americans were buying $9 billion worth of supplements a year; today they spend around $40 billion.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., the first big New York media company to enter the Christian book market in a big way, in the 1980s, has practically cornered it, selling half the true-believer books in the United States.

creationism is now also taught to many tens of thousands of children in public schools—that is, in publicly funded charter schools. For instance, a company called Responsive Ed is the largest charter-education operator in Texas, with dozens of schools around the state. “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth,” Responsive Ed’s science texts teach. Evolutionary biology, they say, consists of “dogma” and “unproved theory.”

Like the new patent medicine business, the survivalist freeze-dried food sector is a Utah-based Mormon oligopoly—Latter-day Saints have been end-time stockpilers for a century.

You] in what we call the reality-based community…believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We create our own reality.” —KARL ROVE, senior advisor to President George W. Bush (2004)

“You’re saying it’s a falsehood. And they’re giving…our press secretary gave alternative facts.” —KELLYANNE CONWAY, counselor to President Donald Trump (2017)

The GOP is now quite explicitly Christian, the first time the United States has had such a major party. It is the American coalition of white Christians, papering over doctrinal and class differences—and now led, weirdly, by one of the least religious presidents in modern times.

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.

Most Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: let business do whatever it wants, but don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish; and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism.

It’s a political movement whose most widely read and influential texts are fiction. “I grew up reading Ayn Rand,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has said, “and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.” It was those fictions that allowed him and other higher-IQ Americans to see contemporary America as a dystopia in which selfishness is righteous and they are the last heroes.

fact, 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.

Eight of the fifty state constitutions officially prohibit atheists from holding public office; of those, Pennsylvania and Tennessee specifically require officeholders to believe in Heaven and Hell; and in Arkansas, atheists are technically ineligible to have any state job or to testify in court.

According to Bill Maher, “Flu vaccines are bullshit”—in fact, getting vaccinated with a “flu shot is the worst thing you can do….If you have a flu shot for more than five years in a row,” he said on CNN, “there’s ten times the likelihood that you’ll get Alzheimer’s disease.” It wasn’t the vaccine against polio that reduced its U.S. incidence from thirty thousand cases the year before he was born to several dozen when he was in grade school—it was just that better sanitation came along in the late 1950s. “I’m not into Western medicine,” Maher says, and he means it—he denies the very basis of infectious disease medicine: “It’s not the invading germs….It’s not the mosquitoes, it’s the swamp that they are breeding in.”

“In my opinion,” Albert Einstein wrote, “the idea of a personal God is a childlike one…but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist….I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.”

Superrationalists are often prone to arrogance, hubris, a blindered devotion to markets or technology, an abandonment of the wholehearted search for meaning beyond science and economics. Flecks of fantasy are charming condiments in everyday existence. Like so much of life, it’s an instance of the Goldilocks Problem, avoiding the too-cold and the too-hot in favor of the just-right.