The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet

“Pause it for a minute,” Belafonte says. He’s not a believer, never was. For him it’s political. He can’t forgive the church the slave catechism taught by traders of flesh: “Your redemption lies in heaven at the right hand of God,” he recites, his voice filled with contempt. “Never rise up against your oppressor. Don’t rebel.” But that was just the surface. Beneath it, or maybe within it, were other meanings. “Bible readings, telling stories, passing information. You planned all the escapes in church. You sang your songs in code. Slave codes.” Then as now, he says. Every spiritual he sang on TV or in a concert hall was a message about this world, not the next.

In Belafonte’s speech that day, recorded by network news, you can hear him fighting to hold on to the vision. “In the hope,” he says, “that the White world, in its bestiality and its decay, in its inability to understand the meaning of the Black movement, in its inability to understand the compassion that Black people are bringing to them, that the White man will be able to come to his senses. Because we find it increasingly hard to deal with his intellect, to deal with him in the sociological sense, but perhaps, after this, we might be able to appeal to his soul. Because that’s all that’s left.”

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.”

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.

As documented in historian James Q. Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model, Hitler looked to American westward expansion, the way, as he said with admiration, that the U.S. “gunned down the millions of redskins,” as inspiration for his eastern ambitions.

the possibility that we do, after all, have some say over the patterns we choose to perceive.