In my last post—a short introduction to this series of blogs I’m calling Bad Theology—I asked why evangelical Christians seemed so susceptible to the blandishments of Donald Trump and his allies. Why in the face of his numerous lies, his business and personal failures, his many violations of basic Christian ethics, and his lack of any apparent allegiance to Jesus as Lord would four out of five evangelicals support him election after election? In Tim Alberta’s bestselling The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (HarperCollins 2023), he cites an idolatrous love for America. While that may be true, there is, I think, a deeper reason why evangelicalism is so vulnerable to hucksters and charlatans: bad theology, theology that has lost the thread of what the Christian faith is about. In these posts I will explore some theological missteps that are intrinsic to American popular theology, beginning with a two-part post on way the evangelical church has nurtured an apocalyptic habit of mind.

THE PARANOID STYLE OF AMERICAN POLITICS

Just over 60 years ago the historian Richard Hofstadter published in Harpers Magazine his now famous article on “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (Harpers, November, 1964; the essay was adapted from the Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford University in November 1963). In the piece, Hofstadter makes the point that conspiratorial thinking has long characterized American politics.

As Hofstadter notes at the beginning of the essay, “paranoid” might not have been the best choice of words. He does not have in mind anything necessarily psychologically aberrant—“paranoia” in the clinical sense—but rather a “style of mind,” a way of thinking.

Better, I think, to call it “apocalyptic,” an apocalyptic habit of mind. “Apocalyptic” comes from the Greek through the Bible. “Apocalypse” is the name for the last book of the New Testament, the book we know in English as Revelation. But the word is used more often in the Bible. It refers to an “unveiling,” an “uncovering,” a “disclosure.” The notion is that in the event of the apocalypse what has been hidden will at last be disclosed.

In contemporary English, the word has taken on the color of the book of Revelation: blood and war and judgment, dragons and other fantastic beasts, the city of Babylon and the city of God, and more. Carnage. Apocalyptic seems the mood of many movies these days, especially those aimed at young men. These movies are all about adrenaline, as the hero goes from one battle to the next, always escaping the present danger only to run into another danger, emerging at the end with the earth ruined but he (and usually her) miraculously alive and ready to build a new earth where the old one once stood. 

That picture of apocalypse remains important, but it’s not where the apocalyptic frame of mind begins. For that, we should return to the article from 60 years ago by Richard Hofstadter. 

In the article Hofstadter lays out three characteristics of what he calls “the paranoid style” and what I am calling “an apocalyptic habit of mind.” The first of these is what he calls “the now familiar sustaining conspiracy.” He has in mind the notion, current in the 1960s and still somewhat current today, that social progressivism—Roosevelt’s New Deal, for example—is or was intended to pave the way for communism. Nothing like wetting the appetites of the masses for communism like giving them Social Security, so goes this argument. But the particularities of the conspiracy don’t matter here; what matters is the notion that there exists under the surface of everything that happens a vast and nefarious conspiracy to take over the world.

The second characteristic of this way of thinking is the notion that the government has been infiltrated at all levels by people who are actively part of this conspiracy, people who have sold out to evil. And the third is that this conspiracy is aided and abetted by current cultural trends, “the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media. . ..” 

You will recognize immediately that these three elements of conspiratorial thinking from the 1960s and before have taken on new names but still exist pretty much unchanged today. The vast conspiracy has morphed from communism—although that is still mentioned—to the likes of Pizzagate and QAnon, which claim among other things  that leading Democrats are sex-traffickers who drink the blood of infants. The government infiltrators are now not embedded communists but  “the deep state.” And the compromised “mainstream media” have become “fake news.” But it’s the same stuff, recycled and amplified and speeded up in a way that in pre-internet times it could not have been.

None of this is surprising. This way of thinking has staying power. It’s present wherever people fear that they are losing out to someone or something else. It’s present not just in America but everywhere. People are always looking for someone to blame. Looking for “them,” whoever “them” are. 

HOW THINGS DON’T HAPPEN

The antidote to conspiratorial thinking is education. Keep in mind that going to school and education are not the same thing. You can go to school without learning much of anything. And you can learn what needs to be learned in life without going to school. I have mentioned before in this regard the example of my own father. His schooling stopped at 8^th grade; his learning did not. 

One piece of wisdom that educated people learn—people who are educated in the sense I’ve given to it here—is to recognize nonsense when one sees it. I recently looked up Charisma Magazine online for reasons I’ll come to in the next post. The site claims that Charisma Media has 87.4 thousand subscribers and gets 8.8 million views. This compares to 110 thousand subscribers and an online readership of 2.2 million for the much better known Christianity Today. Clearly lots of people are reading Charisma.

One of the banner headlines running in the center of the cluttered Charisma home page was a story from a Katie Souza claiming that she had personally seen werewolves. She tells a story about visiting a house that had all sorts of strange things in the basement. When she fled, she says, “The husband [the homeowner]…chases us up the hill. I looked out and he’s hanging out the window, and he’s already morphing.” Into a werewolf, presumably.

I don’t know much about Katie Souza, but it doesn’t take much in the way of common sense to know that this story is not likely to be true in any serious sense. It appears to be designed to sell books. Souza’s latest book, The Serpent and the Soul (not incidentally, published by Charisma Media) is flagged on the story. One wonders, do people actually believe this sort of nonsense? Or is it all wink, wink.

Not all, I would judge. Near the end of his piece on the paranoid style, Richard Hofstadter writes that “one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen.” History is the art of the probable: given what we know of the world in which we live and what evidence we can find, historians ask: what’s likely to have happened. As Hofstadter has it, in order to do history properly—or just to make sense of the world in which we live—we need a canny sense of “how things do not happen.” But, Hofstadster adds, “It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop.” 

This true not just for Hofstadter’s “paranoid” but for the evangelical church as a whole. For a long time the American evangelical church has been trained to think not in terms of what is likely to have happened or will happen in the future but in terms of what must be the case—“must” in the sense that it is somehow biblically or theologically required. The church has been trained to believe that science broadly speaking is wrong. Science is a conspiracy of the academic community to deny the gospel. Theology demands that humans were created separate from the animals, that they lived briefly in a garden, that they fell, and that this fall resulted in evil as we know it. Conspiratorial thinking is built into the theology itself.

Evangelicalism is a mid-twentieth century recasting of an earlier American fundamentalism. Fundamentalism—the name comes from the early twentieth century pamphlets called “The Fundamentals”—was a steadfast attempt to hold out against modernity, against the modern recasting of social mores and against modern thought. In the 1920s, this opposition to modern thought was captured in the farcical Scopes trial. Today it might be best captured by the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky. 

The Ark Encounter features a full-sized reconstruction of the biblical ark, although, truth be told, the biblical description is pretty sketchy (Genesis 6:14-16). The entire exhibit is designed to prove that it could have happened just that way: all the animals along with Noah and his family ensconced for more than a year in a big barge (see Genesis 7:11 and 8:14). Of course, this makes nonsense of what we know about the development of life on earth, let alone the possibility of including all the “kinds” of animals and birds in a single boat, no matter how large. What’s more, if taken as historical fact, as Marilynne Robinson notes in her recent book on Genesis, reading the flood story as history would make God morally monstrous, having drowned most of the human race, including children, along with the animals. 

There are better and easier explanations for the biblical flood story. It seems to have been borrowed from Babylon, modified to fit a new theological context and a new narrative. Looked at in this light, the story presents, as does the larger narrative, a God who cannot bring himself to do what ancient (and sometimes modern) justice seems to require: end the human race. It engages us in this way in conversation not only with the biblical story but with other stories from other times and places. It tells us not what happened long ago but what remains true: given our human penchant for violence and environmental destruction, it is a wonder that we have survived so far. And it leads us to wonder each time we see a rainbow whether we have tried the patience of God one too many times. It’s a powerful story.

But all of this is lost on the Ark Encounter.  The Ark Encounter—a popular destination for evangelical Christians, I’m told—represents a kind of theological thinking endemic to evangelicalism: not a sober-sided approach to what these stories are about and where they came from and how they can be read but how they can be literally true. It’s as if we took Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” and spent our time trying to reconstruct Prospero’s boat and find the island where Caliban lived, missing the entire point of the play.

There is a sort of innocence about much of this. Perhaps not for the creators of the Ark Encounter, who have monetized evangelical credulity, but for those who go visit. But what happens when this bent of mind—this notion that the Bible tells us things about the history of the world that science and history have gotten wrong—turns apocalyptic? What happens when it turns from trying to reconstruct a lost history to trying to predict the future? And what if those attempts to predict the future claim to be biblical but are in fact political and partisan? What if the Bible comes to be read in a way that portrays the current debate between political parties as a struggle between good and evil, angels and demons? When does this evangelical habit of mind become dangerous?

FORMING AN APOCALYPTIC HABIT OF MIND

Those of us who are old (and perhaps some younger people) remember prophecy seminars coming to town. An itinerant preacher, sponsored by some local church or a group of local Christians, would take over a school auditorium for an evening or, sometimes, even for a week to teach about what was coming just over the temporal horizon. The preacher, trusty King James Bible in hand (Scofield Bible preferred), would present his reading of biblical prophecy, linking these prophecies to contemporary events and extrapolating from them a scenario for the near future.  A print version of this sort of biblical interpretation, Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth (Zondervan) became a bestselling sensation in 1970. 

These preachers and writers like Hal Lindsey present a world populated by nefarious plotters and naive Christians, by powerful demons and even more powerful angels, by vast conspiracies and last-minute divine interventions. The fevered dreams of the apostles of this sort of Christian eschatology emerged in the 1980s with Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness and in the 1990s with Tim LaHaye’s and Jerry B. Jenkins’s Left Behind series. 

These elaborate prophetic schemes were often triumphs of human ingenuity. Taking a text from, say, Daniel, and combing it with texts from Ezekiel and Revelation, the preacher carefully builds a case for his (almost always him, not her) vision of the future. Richard Hofstadter cites the “pedantry” of the “paranoid style.” He says, “One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows.” He adds, “The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.” 

Indeed. The eschatological prophecies purveyed by the likes of Hal Lindsey purport to be biblical, a careful reading of the text. Those who follow them develop a habit of reading the Bible as if it’s a supernatural code. But even for those who were not then or now students of prophecy in this way, these readings of the biblical text spill over into how they approach both Bible and contemporary culture. They believe that hidden away in Revelation and other prophetic texts are secrets that once revealed would expose the machinations of the devil. They have learned to read and think conspiratorially. The evangelical church has formed an apocalyptic habit of mind.

TAKING CONSPIRACY TO THE NEXT LEVEL

But if we are to tell the whole story, there’s one more step. The older generation of prophecy scholars—those itinerant preachers of the past who conducted prophecy seminars full of charts and diagrams—taught the church an apocalyptic habit of mind. Surely, they suggested, there are things going on not reported in the mainstream media, demonic things, that we need to be aware of. But they were, at least partially, disciplined by the text. They were trying to be biblical, regardless of how far they stretched their interpretations. 

But what if the text no longer mattered? What if discernment of the conspiracy depended not on the Bible but on the preacher’s own gut feelings? In that case, the apocalyptic habit of mind we have been described would be loosed from its moorings in the Bible and perhaps Christian faith itself and become something quite different. A different religion, perhaps. And this is what seems to have happened in a large and influential part of the evangelical church.

But that will have to wait. This post has gotten quite long enough. For that part of the story, I will turn in my next post to Matthew D. Taylor. 

While in San Diego last month at the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature—two large academic societies—I wandered into a session titled “Evangelicalism and Political Violence.” There were papers on the firebrand Charlie Kirk, the Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson, and penal substitutionary atonement (on this last, see a later post), but the paper that most caught my attention was by Matthew D. Taylor: “From the 10/40 Window to January 6th: How Evangelical Violence Shaped the Capitol Riot.” Taylor had a story to tell.

The story is spelled out in much more detail in Taylor’s book, The Violent Take It by Force (Broadleaf Books, 2024). It’s an introduction to a world, loosely evangelical, that picks up the conspiratorial apocalyptic frame of mind and takes it in new directions, a world and a way of thinking that aligns closely with Donald Trump and Trump’s own predilections. Call it “Christian chaos.” It’s in that marriage of evangelicalism and Trumpism that the apocalyptic habit of mind takes on an explicitly antidemocratic color. In doing so, it dips in its own peculiar way into Reformed theology and Abraham Kuyper. That’s story I will tell in the next post.

Until then,

Clay