The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet

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.

The Christian Right that has so long dominated the political theology of the United States emphasizes a heavenly reward for righteousness in faith and behavior; the prosperity gospel is about what Peale might call “amazing results” you can measure and count. The old political theology was about the salvation to come; the Trump religion was about deliverance, here and now.

Trump once flirted with and fed morsels to evangelicalism’s spiritual warriors and the rabbit-holers of Q. That was when they were distinct constituencies. But they had been merging, the theology of Q possessing evangelicalism, the organization of the Christian Right incarnating Q’s digital power. Together they became a base; and Trump’s identity. He was no longer a con artist. Now he was his own mark, like an email scammer who clicks on his own malware. He was not selling a dream, he was dreaming it. The difference between him and his believers was that he had the power to make the dream real, for them, for him, for us. To summon into being the “American carnage” he nightmared at his inauguration, the cities he said were desolate set ablaze, the killers in the street recast as heroes, with paramilitary backup, fear a daily given, the plague risen up from legend to fill the land with ghosts. This was his dream. We were all nightmaring it together.

They wanted to believe in what historian Anthea Butler, author of White Evangelical Racism, describes as an implicit “promise of Whiteness” offered to people of color willing to collaborate with White supremacy. This bait-and-switch—the promise of Whiteness is by definition unfulfillable—may be the next American contribution to fascism.

It’s satisfying when an expert flattens a false claim. That’s how so many of us believe we’ll resist the undertow of civil war, fact-checking our way back to solid ground. But much like the cross for Pastor Dave, such corrections miss the point. You can’t fact-check a myth.

If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” such cognitive dissonance is the awful genius of our ecstatically disinformed age.

The fetus and the gun. Small marvel nobody’s yet put them together on a flag.