The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet

It was not a problem of TV talking heads executing orders from on high to make the dissidents look like fools. In fact, the protesters were fools—but in the holy tradition, the one that speaks not truth to power but imagination to things as they are.

American politics tends to produce a limited emotional range, mostly positive, peppered with indignation. But Trump scrawled across the spectrum: not just anger but rage; love and, yes, hate; fear, a political commonplace, and also vengeance. It didn’t feel political. Politicians have long borrowed from religion the passion and the righteousness, but no other major modern figure had channeled the tension that makes Scripture endure, the desire, the wanting that gives rise to the closest analogue to Trumpism: the prosperity gospel, the American religion of winning.

“Positive Thinking” isn’t about serving God; it’s about using God, through what Peale called “applied Christianity,” to achieve “a perfected and amazing method of successful living.”