In The Midnight Kingdom (2023), Jared Yates Sexton recalls
"tabloids from the grocery store checkout detailing an invisible world where monsters walked among us and a secret machinery whirred just under the surface of the material realm. She [my grandmother] died still believing this conspiracy theory, still desperate to understand why her life had played out as it had. She needed a story to explain it, to make sense of why she had suffered so terribly in the Great Depression, why she had lost friends and family in battles fought in lands she would never see, and why, having won the peace and then war with Satan’s empire, the heavenly kingdom promised to her by preachers and televangelists had failed to materialize."
"It was in 2015 that I first realized this affliction that troubled my family had become a pressing, existential threat." As a journalist at MAGA rallies, he found that people only wanted to talk about "conspiracies and evil plots."
A bit of what's discussed in the book:
History
Christianity began as "a persecuted cult on the fringes of society" that was fascinated by acts of martyrdom. Christianity aspired to "a homogenous society ordered by its own tenets and beliefs," and Christians "portray[ed] themselves as holders of an unconquerable divine truth so potent and so undeniable that even the leaders of the Roman Empire were desperate to snuff it out." It became "the official religion of Rome, and eventually the mythology through which the modern world was formed." That story, he says, "is the story of how systems of domination are constructed, solidified, and weaponized."
A difference between Judaism and Christianity:
"While Jewish thought tended to view Satan as 'a symbol of the tendency to evil within humanity,' the Christians believed they were engaged in an active and dire war against the literal personification of evil. This battle defined Christian mythology and was a worldview based on 'transcendent reality' divorced from empirical evidence and based on 'visions' and faith."
Unfortunately, "the church was still under attack by evil forces as long as there remained a single nonbeliever."
The "Great Chain of Being," was "an ordered hierarchy beginning with God, traveling down," and the feudal system justified itself by that idea, joining kings and churches.
How does one know if one is saved? Whether salvation is under a person's control (as in Lutheranism) or preordained (as in Calvinism), their wealth is considered an indicator of God's favor.
Even when religious arguments gave way to scientific arguments in the Enlightenment: "It was unthinkable to many white Enlightenment figures that people of color should be treated equally, let alone that they should rise up, displace their oppressors, and attempt self-rule."
In colonial America, secret societies of rich white men like the Sons of Liberty "effectively merged their economic concerns with the apocalypticism of scripture, charging that 'monsters in the shape of men' were doing the business of Satan, and that 'touching any paper' with the derided official stamp meant that one would 'receive the mark of the beast' as forewarned in the Book of Revelation."
21st century
Though "Obama was a moderate neoliberal president who idolized Ronald Reagan and touted policies designed by Republicans in coordination with corporations," Republicans portrayed him as the evil socialist of their conspiracy theories. Donald Trump repeatedly went on Fox News "to further the racist conspiracy theory that Obama had not been born in the United States, making him ineligible for the presidency, and claiming that somebody told him that Obama was secretly a Muslim. The national conversation was effectively hijacked," and
"Millions of Americans were shoved into an alternate reality populated by white supremacist paranoid fantasies, leftover demons of the War on Terror, and Christian fears of persecution and apocalypse, set within the frame of the New World Order narrative that diverted blame from neoliberalism to shadowy, evil forces lurking behind every corner. By the spring of 2010, the consequences were already becoming apparent. Nearly a quarter of Republicans believed Obama was the Antichrist and an overwhelming majority were confident he was a secret Muslim socialist with plans to take their guns before handing America over to a one-world government."
Trump "won the vote of roughly 80 percent of all white evangelicals, owing a debt to their sense of cultural and political persecution, not to mention their leaders’ praising Trump as being heaven-sent." Like Obama, Trump upheld neoliberal policies.
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