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AI in the City of God is a gift of unsurpassing power for those who would illuminate the world with the Spirit of Man and the good works of Make/Protect/Teach.
AI in the City of Man is a tool of unsurpassing power for those who would snuff out the small-l liberal virtues and small-c conservative virtues alike in their unceasing struggle to achieve power for power’s sake.
Who wins?
Oh, the City of Man always wins here in the world-as-it-is.
The Visigoths always sack Rome. The Vandals always sack Augustine’s city of Hippo. Augustine always dies in the siege. Bad things always happen to good people … at scale.
Augustine’s question … my question … the ONLY question … is how we keep the faith through the darkness. How do we maintain a community of the faithful, whether that’s a faith in the God of Abraham or the Spirit of Man, even as the barbarians sack our cities and burn our books?
An AI in the City of God, Epsilon Theory (4.11.2023)
There were a dozen or so, I think. Give or take.
They started their work around the same time, at the turn of the 21st century, a handful of similar independent laboratories across the United States engaged in dangerous and highly specialized research. These were not secret operations by any means. Neither were they especially well known. They were small, unaffiliated and largely unregulated.
Most of the laboratories had some connection with one or two of the others. They shared notes. Executives for one might sit on another’s board or advise them on various matters, sometimes important, sometimes trivial. But there was no hierarchy, no ordered structure by which one directed the other or held the others accountable. So similar was their work and so shared their vision, however, that an outsider would never believe it to be decentralized. So effective was the work product that an outsider would never believe it came from these labs on the fringe, thinly resourced and barely acknowledged, even when their work was carried on by their massive peer institutions.
That work? The purposeful design and modification of viruses. Gain-of-function research.
This work may sound evil on the surface, and yes, their work resulted in many evils in the end. But in the beginning, I think, these mad scientists paved their research paths with good intentions.
Since they were decentralized, it is not possible to perfectly summarize those intentions. But at a very high level, we can say that they sought to use segments of RNA from the most ancient, virulent and contagious viruses encountered by humanity and to attach them to instructions designed to bring about beneficial rather than adverse changes in infected humans. In other words, they sought to produce exceptionally contagious viruses of good.
And it worked. Boy, did it work. The contagious part, anyway. The good part, not so much.
Since using a modified virus to spread positive effects is an old sci-fi trope by now, was the failure the result of plain scientific hubris? A bit of the old Dr. Ian Malcolm didn’t-stop-to-think-if-they-should? Was it just bad luck? Was it the result of the interference of others?
Hard to say. It’s not an exact science.
I mean, virus research is, or at least it ought to be. But this isn’t a story about actual virologists, literal viruses or the circumstances of their potential escape from bioweapons laboratories conveniently located near exotic animal wet markets.
It is a story about memes.
It is a story about words. It is a story about how an unaffiliated, decentralized, superficially uninfluential group of people in the business of telling old stories inserted some of the most ancient, virulent and contagious memes encountered by humanity into narrative viruses that over a period of two decades mutated into forms that would produce symptoms and infect hosts that even the virologists who designed them could never have anticipated.
The virologists in our story are Christian ministers you probably have never heard of. The old stories are Christian stories and American stories, built from the stuff of memes, metaphors and imagery that permeate all human cultures. The carriers are politicians, public figures and people you probably know.
But perhaps most instructively, this is a story about the first, largest and most successful astroturfing – that is, fake grassroots – campaign of the 21st century, conducted with shared strategic vision but practically no direct coordination, relying purely on the power of meme, human susceptibility and the power of the internet and social media to accelerate the promulgation of ideas through overlapping networks. Whatever its purposed original aims, the chief symptom of the most recent mutation of the virus was to form an inexhaustible well-spring of support for an all-out assault on a fundamental, indispensable American institution:
The common knowledge of the validity of American elections.
There are other symptoms of this narrative virus, to be sure. But none of them is nearly so interesting. Certainly not to us, anyway.
In An AI in the City of God, we published two examples of the kind of astroturfing efforts of massive social significance for which large language models (LLM) could conceivably act as accelerators: an attempt to astroturf the destruction of faith in the US dollar, and an attempt to astroturf the destruction of faith in US elections. Needless to say, understanding how human hands (mostly by accident, no less) achieved a big part of one of the most concerning sinister use cases of generative AI is worthy of attention. But there’s another, even more interesting observation to make about how this virus came to produce this symptom in so many of its hosts, something that should affect our thinking on all uses of AI in the City of Man:
Nothing in the original design of the narrative virus has anything whatsoever to do with elections, electoral fraud or electoral integrity.
While the narrative viruses in this case were crafted and disseminated by decentralized, uncoordinated but strategically aligned human intelligences (with the aid of the occasional social media algorithm), this remains important to anyone giving thought to how generative AI could be used at scale to manipulate public common knowledge, including what we all accept as historical fact. That is, we must understand that the vector for that manipulation will not always be a common knowledge carpet bombing campaign, flooding social media and news-adjacent networks with truthy linguistic formulations designed to change what everyone thinks everyone else thinks in a direct, linear way. Nor will it necessarily take the form of the manipulation of common knowledge that takes place today through major media outlets’ embrace of fiat news – the presentation of opinion as fact.
Like the Widening Gyre, the most effective vectors for effective astroturfing campaigns may focus not so much on changing common knowledge but on changing What We Need to Be True.
What We Need to Be True means the status quo on which institutions and individuals are dependent. It means the political, cultural and social issues on which we have staked our ego and identity. It means the basis on which we have painstakingly structured how we make money or the way that others define our success. For obvious reasons, changing What We Need to Be True is hard. And yet, that is precisely what happened in this case: the memetic RNA of these narratives didn’t target the common knowledge of any host population about elections. It changed what a large host population needed to be true about elections.
Was that population largely conservative? Republican? Obviously. Was it, as many have written, disproportionately tilted toward evangelical Christians? Duh. But the story is a lot more complicated than that.
Alas, it is a story that cannot be told in full here.
Which is a shame.
After all, the conceit upon which we have framed our relationship with generative AI (and with one another in an generative AI-affected world) comes from Augustine’s City of God, the ur-text when it comes to considering the intersection of the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of men. I suppose that the real ur-text would be the New Testament, but if the last decade has taught us anything, it is that “My Kingdom is not of this world” is apparently too nuanced and inscrutable a statement for any of us to take at face value. So I guess we’ll give it to the man from Hippo. Unfortunately, the evolution of this idea from Augustine to Luther to Calvin to Kuyper has plenty of ink to its name already. So, too, does the unbroken chain of various strains of Christian nationalism in the United States, both malignant and benign, over the past 400 years.
Some of that ink is interesting but not always useful, at least for what we want to discuss. David French, for example, whom I admire and often agree with, was among the first to correctly call out the role of “white evangelicals” in the January 6th capitol riot, but is focused on the rise of Trumpism more broadly. The same could be said for Kristin Du Mez, whose earnestness and efforts I also admire, even if I find myself disagreeing with her conclusions more often than not. Outside of these better-than-average examples, much of modern writing about Christian nationalism is focused on either ludicrous bogeymen (e.g. These evil people engage politically based on opinions they derive in part from their faith! Shame!) or strains of Christian nationalism that have existed for decades, without much effort to explain why they suddenly became attached to Stop the Steal, COVID trutherism and Q-adjacent conspiracy nuttery.
There is one scholar whose work on the topic I think is vastly underfollowed – that of Dr. Matthew Taylor, from the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies (ICJS). If you want to understand the nuts and bolts of the broader story, its players and its chronology, invest a week of your commuting podcast time in his five-part Charismatic Revival Fury podcast. If you want research and hard data with a bit less story-telling around them, I also recommend the work of Paul Djupe, the Head of the Data for Political Research program at Denison University. If you want well-sourced, scholarly data on quotes, timing and other specifics from involved players and are willing to tolerate some excessively sympathetic context at times, the work of Jim Beverley is similarly useful.
But this essay series won’t be about “Christian nationalism”, mostly because, as I said, it has attracted enough ink. Also, in part, because I think it’s mostly a dumb thing to write about. What the New York Times means by the term could not be more different from what Stephen Wolfe means by the term, which could not be more different from what Sean Feucht means by it, which could not be more different from what Patrick Deneen means by it, which could not be more different from the opinions of tens of millions of ordinary Americans, who think a nation is a thing, have some preferences (like literally everyone else) about its dominant cultural values and who are kind of wondering why everyone is screaming at them. Writing earnestly about Christian nationalism in 2023 is little more than an invitation for people to put words in your mouth or accuse you of putting words in theirs. So, no, this is not a story about Christian nationalism. But this is also not a story about elections, election fraud claims, churches, ministers or politicians, either. This is not a story about a series of events.
This is a story about language.
This is a story about how the right words in the right environment can change everything.
However, if we would understand how the right words can change everything, there will be few more interesting case studies than the narrative virus that culminated in attacks on the integrity of American elections. To understand that, we must understand the memes underlying its construction, many of which are shared with a particular strain of Christian nationalism. We must understand the people responsible for its design, many of whom are associated with a particular strain of Christian nationalism. And we must understand the mechanisms by which it was transmitted, many of which are deeply integrated into a particular strain of Christian nationalism.
But before we explore the construction of the virus, its designers and its transmission, I think it is far more instructive to look first at its chief carriers. Is there a trait they all share, not some bias from the general population, but something peculiar or idiosyncratic?
Look, yes, nearly all of the people and institutions leading the public promotion of the idea of a stolen election in 2020 are conservative. Nearly all of them are Republicans. Most are Trump fans, or at the very least think he was the best of a bunch of bad options. They skew heavily evangelical. And yes, a lot of them are white. Hooray, I’ve just described 40-something percent of the country. Unless you just want to score tribal points more than you want to understand how this happened, that’s not interesting. That’s not useful.
What IS interesting, what IS useful is that nearly every one of the ring-leaders, the lawsuit filers, the rally coordinators and elected officials involved in the electoral fraud campaign has been integrated – willingly or grudgingly – into the language and practices of a quirky frontier of each of those categories:
American-style, spirit-filled charismatic Christianity.
Human discomfort can be graded on a continuous scale, I think.
If watching a bad American Idol audition is a 1 and a sex scene kicking off while you watch a movie with your parents is a 7, to an old school southern Baptist, being forced to raise your hands and have hands laid on you to receive an “anointing” from apostles and prophets would top out the scale. The man in the middle there is long-time Prestonwood Baptist member Ken Paxton, Attorney-General of the State of Texas. As you may recall, he was the primary author of the short-lived lawsuit which sought to prevent the certification of electors from four states in December 2020. As you almost certainly recall, he is now the subject of impeachment proceedings for allegations of bribery, dereliction of duty and obstruction of justice.
Yanking on poor Ken’s right hand is Dr. Richard Bartlett, who was briefly in the news as the doctor who claimed inhaled budesonide was the silver bullet for COVID-19. Paxton’s left hand is being held aloft by the organizer of the Reawaken America conference series, a former wedding DJ turned “the COVID vax is creating a new species of human from luciferase, the Mark of the Beast and Epstein’s DNA” podcaster by the name of Clay Clark. Oh sure, things have changed in the Baptist church in the last 25 years. You’ll see clapping and hands in the air, at least at some. You’ll hear electric guitars and drums, too. But if you really know old-school southern Baptists, the heart and soul of what media would call “white Evangelicals”, you can feel Paxton’s pain simply by looking at the photo.
For the rest of you, I feel like some explanation is warranted.
When people use the phrase “evangelical” in reference to Christianity, they can mean a lot of different things. To many in Europe, the word is functionally interchangeable with “Protestant.” Here in the states, if a media outlet writes it, the phrase means “terrible white people who can be safely blamed for everything bad that happens in the world.” If it’s anyone else, the term generally refers to churches that are doctrinally (if not necessarily politically) conservative, which means they tend toward beliefs like Biblical inerrancy and literalism…but, um, not always. It usually doesn’t mean Protestant churches that are in mainline denominations, that is, except for lots of Baptists and some Methodists. And, I mean, even some Episcopalians if you’re in the right state. Uh, and a lot of Presbyterians, too. Also, depending on who you’re asking, the charismatics and Pentecostals may or may not be included as a subset or be shunted off into their own figurative and sometimes literal tent. And there’s an experiential component to distinguishing evangelicalism, in the “relationship with Jesus” vs. “religion” sense, but maybe not as much experientialism as in Pentecostal churches.
OK, I feel like I’m doing a crap job explaining this, so forget everything I just said and use this rule of thumb: if an American Christian willingly says “Yes, absolutely!” to the question “Are you a born-again Christian?” then they’re evangelical. If they cringe and grudgingly say, “Yeah, I mean, I guess so, but can you clarify what you mean?” they’re probably a non-evangelical, mainline Protestant. If they say, “OK, what are you selling?” they’re Catholic.
So what’s a charismatic? Well, it’s not a moniker based on charm. It is simply an extension of the Greek word charism, or gift. The term is a reference to the emphasis that churches of this tradition place on the “gifts of the spirit”, described most fully in 1 Corinthians 12 and, to a lesser extent, Romans 12. Healing, prophecy, words of knowledge, speaking in tongues, interpretation of tongues, yes, but in some contexts also less sexy things like exhortation, service, teaching and mercy. A bunch of churches and denominations take a hard line view based on the very next chapter in 1 Corinthians that the conditions for the cessation of certain of those gifts were met, and that they have ceased. These are accordingly often called cessationist views. Many others believe they have continued, and are accordingly called continuationists. Thirty years ago, we’d have called the former “evangelicals” and the latter “charismatics,” but the lines are a bit blurrier these days, for reasons that will sort of turn out to be the whole point of this essay.
For the time being, let’s accept that charismatic churches in the United States are, therefore, generally continuationist churches within the evangelical tradition. Now, this may have you thinking of Pentecostals and, as my partner from Alabama remarked to me, snake handlers, Big Tent Revivals, faith healers and the like. You’re not entirely wrong. But because you didn’t sign up for a Survey of World Religions class, I’m just going to shortcut the accurate explanation and summarize it like this: 21st century charismatics are a lot like Pentecostals, but generally place less emphasis on the specific gift of speaking in tongues, are less doctrinally uniform and have more ambiguous polity (church-speak for how churches submit to being governed). Your mileage with any single church or minister may vary. Uh, wildly.
For much of the early 20th century, surprisingly, the charismatic movement largely inhabited the mainline denominations, and mostly focused on belief in miracles of healing. That is, it wasn’t so much what we now call evangelicals, but rather episcopals and even Catholics who traveled to Azusa Street, a multi-year revival that spawned most modern forms of Pentecostalism in America. Many of those local priests, bishops and ministers took back to local churches and parishes a belief that supernatural healings were taking place, that the charisms of the New Testament were alive and well.
Where it grew in what we might today call the evangelical church, it was either in the post-Azusa Street Pentecostal denominations like the Assemblies of God, or else in the famous tradition of faith healers and revivals of the 30s, 40s and 50s. Oral Roberts, William Branham, Jack Coe and Paul Cain held huge events around the US and the world that began to overlap with the evangelical church. Certainly there are threads, some bright and clear and some tangled, that would lead you from any of these events to what I refer to as “American-style, spirit-filled charismatic Christianity.”
Likewise, you could also find all sorts of seeds and shoots of charismatic practice in the history of frontier revivalism and early Pentecostalism. The entire history of Methodism, for example, is a history of revival and movements that have varied between keeping the door to Pentecostalism barely cracked open, and rushing headlong through that very same door! But in character, doctrine, organization and temperament, the core of the American charismatic church as we recognize it today really emerged with the Jesus People movement, in 1968 in Costa Mesa, California. At the very least, that was when the growth of the movement truly accelerated.
If you saw the recent film Jesus Revolution, you get the gist.
In mid-1968, after an appetizer of doctrinal disagreement and a heavy helping of unproductive church politics, a former Foursquare (Pentecostal) pastor named Chuck Smith found himself at the helm of a tiny non-denominational assembly they would call Calvary Chapel. Smith and his family also found themselves in the middle of something far more surprising: one of the largest concentrations of hippies south of Haight Street. It was a source of endless fascination for them, so much so that Kay, his wife, once exclaimed while driving past a lumbering horde of these creatures on Main Street in Huntington Beach, “We have to meet a hippie!”
Their opportunity would come soon enough.
The Smiths’ daughter Janette was preparing for a date with a young man named John. It being the 1960s, young John was undergoing questioning from Chuck and Kay before the date could / would commence. Yes, he had experimented with marijuana before. Yes, he was a believer now. Yes, if the situation arose, he could introduce them to a hippie. The usual questions.
And so Chuck Smith was introduced to a young man named Lonnie Frisbee.
Lonnie was only recently back in Orange County after spending months in various communes in San Francisco, where he had been studying as an art student during the famed Summer of Love. He was handsome, long-haired and endlessly charismatic, described in nearly every piece and memoir as looking very much like he walked directly out of the stories of Christ and his dusty-footed disciples.
It was in that sort of bohemian splendor that Frisbee and his then-wife Connie gave their testimony to the could-not-be-more-different members of the Costa Mesta Calvary Chapel. It was in the wake of that testimony that the people of Calvary Chapel felt uniquely called to minister to this community.
And they did.
The first Calvary Chapel became many. A few years later, through a Calvary Chapel church plant in West LA, another movement called the Vineyard emerged. Incidentally, the Vineyard is the church that I grew up in. Over the next 50 years, the non-denominational charismatic revolution took place.
So why does this matter to a story about the damage being done to common knowledge about the validity of American democracy?
You’re about to hear about people prophesying, and about people who believe those prophets heard from God. You’ll hear about people who speak in tongues, and others who believe they can translate it. You’ll see ministers anointing politicians’ and officials’ heads with oil. You’ll read the language of spiritual warfare and intercession in the world of angels and demons, of the issuing of decrees and commands to those spirits. You’ll hear about people who had explicit visions from God of rallies that would shape and change the outcome of world events. You’ll read about people blowing shofars and marching around buildings like Joshua. You’ll hear about worship being led which fully integrates these concepts, and high production value television programs which present them on a recurring basis in between news reports and panel segments with self-named modern-day prophets and apostles.
If you are atheist or agnostic or profess to another faith, all of this probably seems deeply weird to you. But the whole reason I am going through the trouble of explaining this is that it is important to understand that much of it seems even weirder to most evangelical and mainline Protestant Christians. I don’t mean that at all pejoratively. Call a charismatic or Pentecostal weird and they’ll smile. Then they’ll quote 2 Samuel 6:22 (“And I will be even more undignified than this!“) and 1 Corinthians 1:27 (“But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise”), then ask if they can pray for you so that you might also become weird.
Despite this, there is a prevailing narrative, almost a tacit assumption at this point, that the subsumption of faith into Trumpism – especially as part of stolen election claims – was some sort of pre-meditated, centralized initiative of a cabal of crusty old white racists from the white evangelical church. A natural by-product of evangelicals getting their tendrils into the GOP over the course of the 80s and 90s, if you will. It wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong. It’s absolutely (and very obviously) true that in the end the MAGA ranks were chock full of evangelicals who’d more likely cast a bronze bust of Barack Obama than cast out a demon. But it is critical to understand that both the creators and ultimately the carriers of this narrative virus as it reached the electoral fraud zenith spoke a language that was entirely charismatic-Pentecostal in nature, utterly foreign to most conservative evangelicals in the late 1990s and early 2000s, to say nothing of their mainline Protestant brethren.
To wit, to be a part of the true “election integrity” astroturf movement, Ken Paxton, architect of the last gasp lawsuit against the certification of electors, wasn’t called and physically forced on-stage to pay obeisance to Donald Trump or to some cabal of ultra-conservative John MacArthur clones, but to a stage full of MLM pushers turned election grifters who at some point adopted the patois of charismatic spiritual warriors.
But Ken Paxton was far from the only leader of the initiatives who embraced, willingly or otherwise, this fringe charismatic vernacular.
As we meet these people, I think it’s important to be clear: I have less than zero animus toward charismatic Christians or their beliefs. These are my people, my friends, my family. They’re who I grew up with. I LOVE these weirdos, even if the opportunity as an adult to consider my own beliefs has made all of this seem almost as weird to me as it will seem to you. Don’t read this as the old guilt-by-association game. I am not trying to convince you that those beliefs or language make any of these people guilty, bad, stupid, malicious or anything else (although some of these folks end up checking all four of those boxes for other reasons entirely).
I’m simply trying to convince you that the carriers ARE adhering to specific charismatic norms, so that we can then start answering how on earth an edge-of-the-mainstream cultural sub-group ended up in a perfectly overlapping circle with all of the conspiracy theory symptoms of a particular widespread narrative virus.
Where do we begin this nine-part journey?
Join us on Monday, July 3rd for Part 2, where we will explore the carriers of this narrative virus.
Nine parts. I can only imagine how many hours of discussion went into this. Looking forward to all of it.
@rguinn I was wondering: did you use the narrative machine retrospectively, whether wholly or in part, to identify the sources here?
As someone raised Catholic and currently attending an evangelical Baptist church I audibly guffawed at this paragraph. Absolute perfection.
As a socially liberal and fiscally conservative Presbyterian who is probably more agnostic now and (yes a run-on sentence) am fully ingrained with the fact that our country’s laws are based on Presbyterian polity, I too laughed out loud at this statement.
Levity, a good carrier for important considerations.
Rusty,
Curious to see what attention, if any, the doctrine of biblical innerancy will get in this series.
As a teenager, I was baptized in and eventually pastored at a wonderful Foursquare church in Oregon. Additionally, for several years during that time, I lived with 4 Calivinist buddies of mine.
During my years-long exposure to both charismatic Pentecostalism and Calvinism, I found over and over again how fundamentally problematic the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and literalism is for all churches, regardless of whether it’s the reformed Eric Metaxas/Wayne Grudem/John Piper type or the charismatic Pentecostal Benny Hinn type.
In my experience, the “charismatic norms” (like prophesy), can be a really beautiful thing. But it’s when the charismatic norms (like prophesy) are connected to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy/literalism that things can go super sideways and do anything but “edify”. As I see it, inerrancy is the core virus that has been wreaking havoc in the churches (you name the tradition) and the world for centuries.
Anyway, really looking forward to reading these notes.
Three of the mentioned fellows will make at least a cameo appearance, but it isn’t necessarily a focus of the series. I agree that it would also be fascinating to see how that narrative - the soul of American evangelicalism, really - emerged and became common knowledge, but that would be a different series.
In part, although as I think you’ll discover as we go along, our aim was to be thorough enough not to have to be stingy in our source selection.
Man, fascinating stuff. Can’t wait to read the rest.
I was raised mainline Protestant in NY in the 80s. Never even heard of Charismatics until I moved to TX as an adult.
I think I understand why it is the fastest-growing branch of Christianity. Vs the stuff I was raised with, my first impression as an outsider is the level of passion and… hmm… immediacy.
I’m assuming that this is the basic story we’re discussing, I had not heard it yet. It explains what some prophets need(ed?) to be true and why.
This was a great and insightful read, @rguinn.
“Like the Widening Gyre, the most effective vectors for effective astroturfing campaigns may focus not so much on changing common knowledge but on changing What We Need to Be True.”
Inoculation against direct responsibilities is one of the fundamental traits of human beings’ proto-centralized religions. In a context of apparent lack of control, agency was projected outward.
Witchcraft was the reason for pain without feeling guilty and gods’ (God) wrath for pain when feeling guilty in ancient cultures.
In this context of apparent lack of control (post 2008), changing what we need to be true is an escape from direct responsibilities when focusing on the excuses that explain the individual or collective failure as an out-of-control external factor (spiritual: evil-witchcraft- the devil or kind of real threats: immigrants - woke - deep state), that apparently has agency and goes directly against you as a cosmic good vs. evil fight. So, it’s the perfect context for this phenomenon to emerge in the American-style, spirit-filled charismatic Christianity.
Low locus of control (direct control over outcomes) + belief in miracles (indirect control over outcomes) + best in class already system of memes (Christianity).
You’ve got it nailed. Only I think that we will discover that there are many more areas of our society and culture which exhibit very similar traits in very different wrappers.
Really interesting start…as someone who has walked among the movements you reference, I’m looking forward to your reflections and observations.
I’ll just observe here that the role of discernment has always been the weak link when it comes to Pentacostal/Charismatic movements.
I think increasing pursuit of experiential faith - whether that faith is in something religious or secular - is an endemic feature of the long now. So yes, I think this is right. I also think it’s a broader thing happening rather than anything idiosyncratic to this movement.
100%
From John Gray:
“ More than the faux-Marxian musings of postmodern thinkers, it is the singular American faith in national redemption that drives the woke insurgency. The self-imposed inquisitorial regime in universities and newspapers — where editors and journalists, professors and students are encouraged to sniff out and report heresy so it can be exposed and exorcised — smacks of Salem more than Leningrad. Saturated with Christian theology, Locke’s Enlightenment liberalism is reverting to a more primordial version of the founding faith. America is changing, radically and irreversibly, but it is also staying the same.”
I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.
-Thomas Jefferson
I can’t think of any other group that can take on politics, economic and now religion like the ‘cast of characters’ at Epsilon Theory. Know that this note, IMO, is about the “widespread narrative virus” we have discussed over the last four years regarding politics and economics. I am comfortable adding religion to swim in these narrative waters.
After reading Rusty’s note many times, here’s what stood out the most to me:
“As we meet these people, I think it’s important to be clear: I have less than zero animus (hostility*) toward charismatic Christians or their beliefs. These are my people, my friends, my family. They’re who I grew up with. I LOVE these weirdos, even if the opportunity as an adult to consider my own beliefs has made all of this seem almost as weird to me as it will seem to you. Don’t read this as the old guilt-by-association game. I am not trying to convince you that those beliefs or language make any of these people guilty, bad, stupid, malicious or anything else (although some of these folks end up checking all four of those boxes for other reasons entirely).
I’m simply trying to convince you that the carriers ARE adhering to specific charismatic norms, so that we can then start answering how on earth an edge-of-the-mainstream cultural sub-group ended up in a perfectly overlapping circle with all of the conspiracy theory symptoms of a particular widespread narrative virus.”
(*edited by me: bold print and definition of animus)
Jim
That makes one of us, Jim!
But I am grateful for the vote of confidence!
Why do i get the feeling that Kirk just ordered Sulu to hit Warp Speed and it’s gonna kick in on Monday?
I’m not comfortable - there should be something here to ensure discomfort for just about everyone - but focused and challenged to stretch my thinking.
Looking forward to the chapter(s) with Francis Schaefer and Jerry Falwell.
Thanks Rusty.
“ there should be something here to ensure discomfort for just about everyone - but focused and challenged to stretch my thinking.”
Yes. Thank you Ed.
Jim
Parts 3 and 5, respectively.
I don’t know the shape of the next eight parts, but is there a tie-in to the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ people in there or are they too far out of the umbrella of what you’re covering? Since I know admittedly very little about the Charismatics I find myself very interested to see where this all goes.
The “prosperity gospel” preachers are a subset of a movement that claims much greater authority to decree various outcomes (i.e. more than just personal wealth) in the material world, so in a way, yes. You’ll also find (in Part 2) some discussion of how the prosperity gospel preachers in particular appealed to DJT as what he called “a good racket” in a way that gave other charismatic ministers and personalities both access and credibility that they had lacked before. But not a great deal on that topic specifically. Interesting as it is, it remains somewhat out-of-scope.
Thanks for this article; it reminded me of this one. Tremendous writing which I think is worthy of sharing on Epsilon. I live in Oberlin OH and would note that the zeal of the students (and the enabling administration) on the Oberlin campus seems to have abated a bit after their endowment fund took that large hit over the bakery fiasco. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/woke-america-russian-novel
Having completed Part 2, I hope you will consider a print version of the complete series, including the references.
A word of appreciation before I read Part 2. Thank you, Rusty, for doing the hard work and creating a series of much interest in my household.
It has been a beautiful reminder to me that I know so little about so much of interest out there!
Absolutely.
From the perspective of a Phoenix native living in semi-rural Arizona I can tell you that there is nothing about this that is inaccurate, in my direct experience. Having sat in Tommy Barnett’s church on a couple of occasions, broken bread with Oath-Keeper-adjacent neighbors, and attended local government meetings protested by Proud Boys I can attest to the veracity of this battle in the narrative and culture wars.
As I remarked earlier there will probably be much in this series that will make readers uncomfortable, particularly so for the agnostic or atheist. I believe this series, this exploration, is a rare gift.
It honestly makes me deeply sad that some may come away thinking that it’s just more evidence that the whole cloth of Christianity is trash. I get that it’s possible - even logical - to believe that.
Augustine was a pivotal writer and thinker about a narrative and movement that both preceded and vastly exceeds him. It’s not for nothing that at the heart of narrative are words, and that “In the beginning was the Word…”
Thanks again Rusty. Looking forward to the discussion!
Thanks Rusty for all the research and thoughtful insights into these political/religious grifters. I recognize many of the names just from skimming the headlines, but don’t know the details about the tours and TV shows. You haven’t mentioned it yet, but I’m willing to bet there is significant money being taken from the cult followers pockets at these events. At least Mike Lindell is upfront about the tour being a promotion event for his pillow business.
I’m originally from the Midwest and many of my relatives are decent people, but have fallen into the Q narrative trap because they’re hearing it at church. My relatives being “good Christians” believe if they hear it from a man of the cloth then it must be true.
I recall visiting a Pentecostal church in 1992 and being handed a voting guide with the “recommended” candidates highlighted. Needless to say Bill Clinton was not the preferred POTUS candidate. I’m not sure if the word “dominion” came up in the sermon that day, but it was certainly strongly implied that evangelical Christians had the duty to be the army of God fighting the evil non-believers.
Quick heads up that we’re condensing the comment section for the series to a single thread that will show up at the bottom of each note, mostly because that seems like the way people seemed to want to interact. If there is a single topic or idea that you wanted to pull out of the main thread, however, please feel free to start a new topic directly on the forum.
We’ll try to mark in the thread where each new note was published to help keep people’s comments a bit clearer.
Forgive me but the article you referenced was a terrible read. The term “woke” is used liberally (excuse the pun), but no key member of this movement is ever identified other than examples of relics from the past. The “woke” that this person is talking about is a cartoon in this case, an other being that doesn’t wholly exist in reality.
@rguinn This seems like it’s going to be an incredible piece of work and I appreciate you sharing it with the world. I don’t think there is many people who are able to tread these waters while being able to bridge the gap but based on your previous work I think you are probably one of them. Having no first hand insight into the minds of the people and religion you are exploring, it’s already been an enlightening read.
I think there are cartoonish features in the John Gray piece, and I think you’re right to observe that the author makes a lot of claims without providing many specific examples.
But without meaning to speak for Marcos, I think there is a narrow point being made by Gray that there are inquisitorial qualities to the handling of off-narrative views that look very much like religious norms-enforcement even outside of explicitly religious settings. If we can look past Gray’s generalizing of the triumph of intersectionalism in the academy and other cultural institutions with blanket “wokeism” language, I think that’s an entirely fair assertion. It is certainly one we intend to explore, anyway!
What part discusses the woke leftists who do not acknowledge facts but pervert the facts to meet their narrative? For example, read what Gorsuch wrote in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis pg 19 second paragraph after “V” “When the dissent finally gets around to that question— more than halfway into its opinion—it reimagines the facts of this case from top to bottom. The dissent claims that Colorado wishes to regulate Ms. Smith’s “conduct,” not her speech.”
Brian, I feel like Part 1 and the forum discussion thus far both seem to express pretty clearly that this is being presented as a case study that has larger implications in mind, including some of what appears to be on yours. One of the things I value most about this community is that I know I can trust it to hear a story without needing to be constantly reminded that there are analogous stories and events not being mentioned explicitly that also warrant our attention, or which exhibit very similar tendencies.
Rusty, are we entering into Soul! wars? A battle for the Soul! of a country, the Soul! of an institution, the Soul! of a community?
What do I need to be true? That Trust is not lost, for when Trust is lost, the search for Soul begins.
Context is important (June 2020 piece)
This is the main point:
“Salem more than Leningrad”.
This is the consequence:
“America is changing, radically and irreversibly, but it is also staying the same.”
Same (Jungian) archetypes, different memes?
Maybe even the same memes in different environments and context.
Great journey @rguinn with Part 2.
What about S. Bannon? Maybe he doesn’t fit into this story, but it definitely has an obscure spiritual background and a ‘cosmic battle’ mindset, don’t you think?
No doubt about it. If the focus were Jan 6 more specifically, I think that he would have been indispensable. Even on this topic he could have been mentioned (and was in early drafts), but the number of other threads you have to cover to adequately explain Bannon’s influence and role always felt very distracting on any re-read I did.
I enter this series as a very confused reader. I have little experiential knowledge of religion. Zen koans and meditation in nature do not count.
I grabbed the reference to the Asuza Street Revival and looked it up on Wikipedia. I am reminded of the intense revivals that went on every weekend at lake Merritt in Oakland around the same time in the early 1900s. Both of my paternal grandparents attended Berkeley U. in the latter 19teens and were quite familiar with those revivals, but as astonished onlookers.
My grandparents were on the side of science and engineering. They were liberals, possibly with a capital L. I only know that they inoculated their children, and by extension succeeding generations, against religious beliefs. They sent my dad to every church in town to attend for months until he could explain what the people believed. At age 11, when he came home and used the n-word, the next Sunday found him enrolled in a nearby Black church’s bible class. Of course, the mostly elderly congregation treated him kindly, but all he came to understand was that they believed Jesus would heal their aching hearts. Or something.
We were supposed to learn what other people believed and think for ourselves. We were sent to church to join the choirs and learn to sing. Man, was that fun!
So I find all this mystifying even though I have experience with the emotions of cults and can relate from that angle. I know I will take useful knowledge from the series, but will have to look up a LOT of these references. Gonna be a heavy slog, and I’m learning as much from the comments as from the notes. Thanks to all.
This post within the thread marks when in the discussion Part 3 was published.
I’m sorry you feel that way, Peter! I’m still grateful that you took the time to read it. If you’d like to talk more about anything, please feel free to send me a DM on the forum.
@rguinn
On some of these writings/comments, I always feel like the kid in the back of the class who is struggling to grasp the mysteries of addition…so with that, here goes what I have been struggling with here…
I was raised extremely Catholic although lapsed myself when able to express my own views. But that said, aside from some leaps of logic (faith), I usually chalked things up to “do the right thing, and be a good person”. Since then, I usually avoid churches outside of weddings/funerals/etc.
When reading the first 3 parts, without being familiar with the specifics of the individuals or movements, I keep coming back to one thing, and that is - is this sort of belief system this widespread where that number of people are willing to follow these leaps of logic blindly? It is the same thing I have asked myself a lot over the last 7-8yrs, but are all of these various churches really reading from the same “prayer books” being peddled by the individuals discussed here? I struggle to think that many people blindly believe whatever someone tells them…or maybe an “emperor’s new clothes” situation where no one wants to be accused of being a bad Christian so they go along…
Maybe it comes from the fact our family doesn’t actively seek out situations to have these conversations, and at least my poker face is not good enough to withhold the “WTF” face if I were listening to someone explain this. But I seriously struggle to believe there are that many people who truly believe some of this.
Is this my own naivety/isolation or are we only explaining a small fraction of the people who are the loudest protestors around the election situation?
It’s a really good question! I think that there is tremendous evidence that the belief system is widespread. I also don’t think that it’s fair to say that anyone being referred to here is following anything “blindly.” Most of the really passionate participants study, read and think about these things far more than most of us think about things that we feel very strongly about.
Part of what I’m trying to convey through this series is a sense of empathy for just how easy it is to dive into what looks like the deep end to the rest of the world when the stories have both inherent power AND align with things that we need to be true. We are ALL suckers for a good story, and when it’s tailored for us? Ooh boy. So yes, there are a LOT of people who believe all of this. And (we’ll get here, I promise) there are a lot of people who believe other things that can be plotted on a similar scale. There but for the grace of, well…anyway, every once in a while when I start really thinking one of my ideas is special, my wife will send me this meme.
TIL how “good Christians” could vote for TFG…twice! I previously had loosely bought into the Liberal memes that the Christian votes were mostly based on racism due to Trump starting his campaign in 2012 with the Obama “birther meme”, but part 3 leads to a much more insidious rationale than pure racism.
The one thing all the characters introduced in Part 3 have in common seems to be 7-figure incomes. As TV man Don Ohlmeyer said, “The answers to all your questions is money.”
Thanks for the history lesson, got my $20 worth today.
Rusty:
When I approached you at ET Connect with a question about how AI might help in bridging the gap in the reconciling the nature of man as presented by St, Augustine in the cities of Man and God, you answered that you would be addressing that in a new series of notes. But as I read your new notes, I can see that you are going well beyond that. At Connect, there was quite a bit of discussion about defining what’s next for ET, What you are doing in using a case study of how a fundamental change in the religious charter of charismatic Christians (from saving individual souls to dominion control of civic organizations) was a catalyst for destroying institutional confidence in our election process is an eye-opener. Anecdotally, there appears to be a similar attack underway on the institutional credibility of the Supreme Court by other forces to change the narrative on what the court has actually done and will do. We definitely live in a “Fiat” world. But I digress. Thanks for your good work. You did good job in identifying denominational differences. I’m a lifelong Methodist. Your observation regarding our indecision regarding who we are is a pretty astute.
Bravo for taking this on. It is stretching my vocabulary and understanding at the same time. It took me longer than the recommended reading time due to all of the rabbit holes I fell into given my complete lack of awareness of so much of this world. This is like learning a new language that we all need to know to walk among our fellow travelers.
Having read part 3 now, I appreciate how deeply you’ve gone into all of this.
Another random observation from my journey: Pentecostalist/Charismatic organizations measure their success in the capitalistic metric of membership growth, necessarily accompanied by greater income, which is taken to be the measure of God’s blessing.
Sheets’ fistful of dollars aren’t paraded about accidentally, to the faithful they are the tangible proof that God is blessing his ministry.
To the non-faithful they are the proof that his ministry isn’t at all like Jesus’, but the non-faithful aren’t listening so…
I think that you’re right. I think that DEI/ESG, Critical Theories (of various ilks), Climate Science (Both Directions), Anti-Vaxx, Scientism all share some features of our narrative virus. I’d been meaning to talk to @bhunt about it, but I think we may do a special Office Hours segment between Parts 8 and 9 to hear more of the analogs that came to mind for readers. Part 9 is intended to be fully about that. I don’t think I’m spoiling any reveals to say that its conclusion will be that this particular narrative virus is not unique.
Thank you, Barry. Six generations deep of Methodist tradition on my dad’s side helps!
Me, too. I hope the ultimate exchange for the investment of time proves to be worth it. Thanks for your trust!
This is a very good observation.
One of the things I’ve tried to be careful about is talking too much about the money. It is very easy to use as a general purpose cudgel for people whose aim is to say “Look at these charlatans”, and none of that is really the aim of the essay series. At all. The opposite - empathy - would be nearer the mark.
That said, whether it’s reasonable or unreasonable to consider a sharp rise in giving a blessing of the ministry (who am I to say?), I think we can say with some confidence that it affects What We Need to Be True. If we learn that converting our ministry to the issuing of election-related decrees produces five times the annual financial support of a ministry focused on more garden-variety teaching and prayer, it will affect how we much we need what we’re saying in the former to be seen as true. There’ll be a little bit of that discussion in Part 7.
Rusty, this has been a welcomed eye-opener for me, as I was previously familiar with none of the apostles or prophets featured in Note 3. Thank you.
Rusty,
I started off highlighting part 3 and very quickly switched to a paint roller…
“We need more than memetics to explain that – we need epimemetics.”
I understand basic epigenitics and its extension into epigenetics of trauma. It’s a small step to epimemetics.
Six more parts to go. I’m off to Staples to pick up more ink.
Note: I also see this on ‘both sides of the aisle’ politically and 'both sides of main stream media." It is, IMO, very much embedded in language itself. In other words, The Word, TM, is NOT a non fungible token. Words are very fungible at best. They are very useful as a tool of man.
I had a good Christian upbringing, IMO, and evolved into a Unitarian.
Jim
It’s what an increasing number of the faithful are listening to these days that is deeply worrisome.
I’m grateful to Rusty for chronicling these events for posterity.
Only because it represents a great opportunity to present the distinction between two kinda/sorta related concepts, I want to point out that mimetics and memetics are different things! Part 3 was nominally about memetics, although mimesis certainly exerts a certain power over the propagation of many memes and narratives. Mimetics has a home on Epsilon Theory as well, however, and if you’re not read out at this point in our series, it’s never a bad time to re-recommend @Luke_Burgis’s excellent contribution to our pages from late 2021.
Faithful Remnant
100% the same meme. I think (hope?) the other components are less analogous!
This post marks the place in this thread at which Part 4: Epimemetics was published.
Your epimemetic phases rang a bell:
The development of language.
The development of the printing press.
The development of television and radio.
I might also add “the development of periodicals” in the early 18th century.
Here’s an admittedly oversimplified take, but sometimes simplicity is revelatory:
What do all of them have in common?
Revolution. Both politically and intellectually. At least of the three that we have historical records of, though one might argue that myths like the Tower of Babel suggest something similar happened with the initial development of language too.
After the printing press came Luther, and after Luther came a century of religious wars, finally settled in the mid-17th century with what today looks like the nascence of religious freedom and the separation of church and state.
After the periodical came Walpole, then Franklin, and then Burke and Jefferson and Smith but also Robespierre and Napoleon. And through - or despite - the bloody revolutions, a framework for lasting representative government was also developed. Also an understanding of human interaction that we now call economics.
After the radio and film came Lenin, and then Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin, but also Roosevelt and Churchill and Kennedy - and perhaps Reagan as well. Propaganda initially used for totalitarianism that led to cataclysm and genocide but also eventually for victory, stability, commerce, and a half-century of widespread peace.
After social media came Trump, and perhaps Xi as well (in his own sphere), but others will certainly come too. And new ideas as well. History tells us it may not be pleasant, but when we’re all exhausted from fighting each other often something good comes out of it.
F*cking hell, @rguinn. The scholarship and evidentiary work here is off the charts.
Without question, the most fascinating thing for me has been the education I’ve gotten about Christian denominations—and denominations isn’t really the right word; it’s more about the major fault lines in belief.
As a Jewish kid from Philadelphia, my understanding of Christian beliefs is limited, understandably. Initially, you were all just “goyim”, a term which belies my Ashkenazic roots (my maternal grandparents were immigrants in the 1930s). That understanding became slightly more nuanced in my 20s, when I felt confident the Christian world could be neatly categorized into three groups (and I hope anyone reading this does not take offense):
I had assumed in the US that Quiet Protestants were the largest group, which seems in retrospect to have been lazy thinking on my part, driven perhaps solely by me extrapolating from my own personal circumstances and the lack of “loud Protestants” in my social circle. And I had thought all Loud Protestants were of the Copeland/Falwell variety since, if I was watching TV on a Sunday morning in the early days of cable, I had to flip through their programs until I found WRESTLING.
So your exposition of the differences between the evangelical and the charismatic groups, as tortured as you thought it was, was massively enlightening. This, combined with Part 4, explains why, in my ignorant eyes, the Loud Protestants seemed to become so ubiquitous. They actually were fairly widespread already, but the vectors of charismatic music and social media democratization and delivery created a massive narrative convergence, at least in terms of political expression.
I am struck though by how mainstream the doctrinal prison seems to have become. Maybe I am still underestimating the size of the charismatic/evangelical political footprint. Or, just as likely, it is the dominance of Fiat news outlets and spokespeople that is defining the world in this Long Now way. The rhetoric is white-hot though. I am glad I live overseas. It insulates me in many ways.
One more thing… I saw @handshaw brought this up and I will confess that I, too, was conflating the terms mimesis and memesis, which (as it did for Rusty) led me specifically to thinking about how @Luke_Burgis speaks of “thin” and “thick” desires. In one of his Substack notes, Luke writes:
I am trying to reconcile these concepts with the ET ideas of “what everybody knows that everybody knows” (WEKTEK) and “what we need to be true” (WWNTBT). For example, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the top 100 songs are an example of WEKTEK, which seems like a thin sort of mimesis in Luke B terms. But there is clearly something “thick” about the base of religious sentiment, which I think in ET terms definitely falls under WWNTBT. I don’t know that I have anything more insightful to say about that, just that it is something that I’m ruminating on now.
Thanks for this extraordinary piece of work.
Quite to the contrary, you’ve given me about three or four things to think about, new ways of phrasing things and brilliant ideas already. I’m really grateful for your contribution to this conversation, JD, and for the admittedly serious investment of time you trusted me with in reading.
I guess I hadn’t been thinking of it in those terms, but yes, I think that you’re right. It is a thought that gives one both pause and hope, which is the best kind, I think!
Point of order, if you will.
Pause for a moment.
While as an aging boomer, I am very comfortable swimming within the gaps of epsilon theory, I would not have been as a youngster.
My journey down this rabbit hole was kick-started by an article in Psychology Today discussing Roman Catholic priest John S Dunne’s book “The Way of All the Earth.”
I read his book in the ’70s, reread in 2018, and reviewed it again this week. Dunne talks about passing over (in Epsilon Theory talk) into the waters of uncertainty and returning to one’s faith stronger.
We’re halfway through Rusty’s notes.
I remain very comfortable being here. I’d be the first to let Rusty know if it fits into my serendipity synchronicity coming-of-age journey. I’m sure we all will.
Thank you,
Jim
Oh, and by the way.
These notes, IMO, apply to every large action role playing use of the tool of language by tool maker man.
Jim
OK, I just finished Part 4 and am sweating only partly because of reading while on the stairstepper.
Beth Moore’s savage beatdown by Johnny Enlow and others for her willingness to disagree with Trumpism (King Cyrus, Broken vessel meme) seems to have a strong Machiavellian component to it.
By that I mean ANY argument necessary to “win” by Enlow was willingly employed - in fact, he very likely believes God influenced his response (yeah, that’s my judgement, deal with it). Where do rational people of conscience within these evangelical communities find refuge?
Where might this end when arguments cease to be adequately effective weapons? One could turn to non-verbal weapons and, since anybody can believe they are hearing orders directly from God, convince themselves that murder is acceptable and part of God’s will.
Where this goes next is increasingly frightening as the groundwork for creating an argument in favor of agreement for using weapons of mass destruction is closer. Don’t think it can’t happen here - maybe it’s even more likely to happen here.
My HOPE is that leaders within these communities take the time to read and digest Rusty’s body of work, allow themselves to become genuinely introspective and think “whoa, what have we done and where is this going?”
The fanatics (sorry, not coming up with a gentler term) are motivated and they won’t stop until their choices have been taken away, or remuneration for effort has diminished significantly. Another HOPE is that good people following a fanatic come to recognize that evolutionary drift and decide to exit that particular flock.
As much as we can hope, I think the idea that leaders will walk away from the brink is highly unlikely. I also think that is hoping for things to happen is also abandoning our own agency.
Mostly agree, but Rusty’s writing could have impact if members bring it to leaders’ attention.
Thing is - positive events need to happen within the evangelical community which I am not even remotely a part of. That agency must come from within and not from us unwashed heathens
I’m reminded of @bhunt ’s response the other day, when someone suggested that we essentially needed to enlighten people… “if we could only open their eyes,” the person said. He observed that people are essentially sovereign beings capable of independent thought and that, to think we could just teach them how to think right, is absurd and patronizing.
You’re obviously entitled to your own view. However, and I think this metaphor is appropriate given the series, my view (born of my own experience) is that the road to Damascus is one one walks alone.
This post marks the place in this thread at which Part 5: Epidemic was published.
It must, and to varying degrees, it is. AND I think it is helpful to think about this as more a case study of something that social networks and the mass weaponization of meme made possible. While you may be right in this specific case, I also think we have to think more broadly about how we address this new world of ours.
The case of Albert Gore, et al, v. Katherine Harris, et al , case number 2000-2808 in Leon County, Florida (the hanging chad case) is mentioned in Part 3.
I watched nearly the entire trial live. Basically IMO, Gore’s team, led by the one-and-only David Boies, argued that the election board should hand recount the undervotes in 3 Florida counties (blue ones), and the Bush team, led by Philip Beck, said a hand recount should include all Florida counties and both undervotes and overvotes. Judge Sauls found for the defendants (Bush team), the case went to the SCOTUS, who upheld Judge Sauls, and the rest is history, depending on whether one is red or blue. If for no other reason, it is worth watching, if you can find it, the parts of the trial conducted by Philip Beck. I seem to recall his asking ~~’ so you want to count a dimple (undervote) for Gore, but not a ballot that has ‘Bush’ punched out and also written in (overvote)?’ But I can’t seem to find that question in the transcripts.
And so now we have the ‘Republicans stole the 2000 election’ as its own meme, if I am using the term correctly. Here is case where the Democrats are crying (meming) election fraud, and I think they’re not charismatics. Perhaps you could eventually do a similar analysis?
Honestly, I’m not particularly interested in doing a similar analysis of that period. Not because it didn’t happen as you say, and not because there is zero memetic power present, but because what interested me in putting together the series wasn’t really election fraud or the reasons that people have claimed it historically.
More specifically, I observe that cries of “election fraud” in close elections are common in every democracy at every period in history. What makes 2020 fascinating as a case study is that the claims in this case were very specific, very falsifiable, very falsified, and still managed to produce a persistent, unwavering base of support. So persistent and unwavering that I think you could argue that DJT’s current public persona and 2024 campaign are functionally designed around this support and the 2020 claims attached to it. The narratives that created that kind of unwavering support are far more interesting to me than the actual claims or the election itself.
If you wanted to find analogs pointing squarely in the other political direction - and it seems like a lot of folks do
- I’d look more in the direction of unwavering, unquestioning support for Trust the Science™ narratives in the face of a replication crisis, p-hacking epidemic and outright politicization of the scientific journal complex. A few others, too.
No doubt. This would be a huge project and I wish I had time to work on it on my own. Despite my bluster about certain topics, the replication crisis and related structural issues are major reasons why I am no longer a professional scientist.
I was infected with the Charismatic Revival Fury living metaverse virus early and often throughout childhood. Mostly the ‘dime store charismatic’ strain, quoting Mathew Taylor with helpful phrasing there. Early days well before the epimemetic drift and dominion theology. Often thought I might end up in ministry. Instead I went and got a physics PhD…and got infected with the Trust the Science virus for my trouble!
I figure a lot of people have had parallel experiences. It sometimes seems it creates a little widening gyre inside of yourself, warring metaverse infections battling for supremacy over my own beliefs and opinions.
Quick recommendation of the pod by Mathew Taylor that Rusty linked to in part 1. Search Charismatic Revival Fury. There are a lot of audio clips presented of Jericho marches, rallies, Jan 6th, etc that I found to be very helpful. Esp if you are like me and had some personal experience with this world the audio brings back memories that really crystallized the context.
Been trying to work on longer comments since part 1, but I keep failing. Thanks for the series Rusty it’s been on my mind a lot since you started, ever a hallmark of the ET classics.
@rguinn :
Hi Rusty,
I have two observations from installment #5.
Observation 1: The 120 day rolling density/Seven Mountains chart
I have a quibble with the trendline that you dropped on this chart. Admittedly I am eyeballing, but there’s no way that what we are observing there is a steady, linear trend over the entirety of this dataset. I see what is at least three and maybe as much as five epochs in this data. My date stamps might be a bit off as the x-axis labels aren’t easy to match against the data series. They are:
1. Beginning through mid 2014: Here we are witnessing language that has some sort of seasonality, but is mean reverting. It may not be seasonal: it might be some sort of unusual or one-time event, though could be epiphenomenal as well.
2. Mid 2014-Mid 2016: Seems seasonal or epiphenomenal language again, but there is a step change to a higher level. And there is clearly something very unusual that happened through Q2/Q3 2015. This prophecy from Johnny Enlow seems instructive. At any rate, it’s something big.
3 (maybe 4 as well?): Mid 2016-End of 2018– I assume that, with Cyrus in the White House, the Elijah List folks are feeling emboldened and we see seemingly limitless growth, and yet it crashes back down around Q2 2018. This is at a higher level that epoch #2 though - there has been another step change. But then there is a steady state until the end of 2019. Not sure whether this is one epoch or two. Could even be three?
4 (or maybe 5?): End 2019-Present: Cyrus is impeached for the first time end of 2019, and here we see a proper and apparently steady linear trend for the first time in this data set. I assume your measure of density measures not just overall usage, but actually the consistency of usage as well. Thus, if we are seeing real linear trend or massive growth, it is not just because one or two people are prophesying using a lot of the seven mountain words, but ALL the prophets are doing so? It would be consistent with the decentralized nature of this group.
Observation 2: Where this is all going
I’ve continued to reflect on the intersection between ET terms (WEKTEK and WWNTBT) and @Luke_Burgis terms (thin vs thick desires). At some point in your series, I assume we will be crossing the proverbial chasm (with apologies to Geoffrey Moore) where people of seemingly sound mind start to believe in something that is entirely falsifiable and falsified.
One of the things I know for a fact and have been able to illustrate with data (at the time, I led a small social media company that investigated it in detail in the French elections in 2017 - summary is here - final report is here - media coverage of our study is here), is that the widening gyre results in the balkanization of media outlets (edit: actually, I shouldn’t describe this in causal terms - it is concomitant and correlated, though i am not sure which came first, or whether it even matters). This is obvious to us now, but in 2017 it was revolutionary in French politics and frankly probably was for US politics as well. The separation goes way beyond the mainstream right vs left traditional media outlets (like Fox vs MSNBC) and touches everything… from proper citizen journalism to batshit crazy conspiracy theorists. So we know there is little to no overlap in terms of people seeing alternative views of their universe. They end up in their own echo chambers hearing the constant beat of the drum.
It is in this context that we can understand these narratives for their emotional manipulation: for what we need to be true. This is easily not just to infer, but to see in the data. Without wanting to go completely Durkheimian, it seems to me that people who are susceptible to these narratives are those who feel alienated, or who believe that there is a break down in the social contract. It is my belief that these narratives provide individuals with a sense of greater personal efficacy as well, especially when they are widely held. There is comfort in numbers. There is consistency in imagery and metaphor and narrative structure. And people literally sit and marinate in it both because it gets them highly exercised and because of the dopamine drip.
As this is true, it should also explain why people then hold onto patently false beliefs. They are either (a) not receiving alternative signals, (b) being inoculated against alternative signals by being told that they are being lied to (conspiracies are ALWAYS narratively unfalsifiable), or (c) the underlying conditions (anomie, feelings of inefficacy/powerlessness, fraying of the social fabric) have not gone away. They remain mired in a mindset that is still fertile to bullshit. And let’s face it, shit is great fertilizer: once you’ve planted in it, other weird stuff grows there as well…
What really, really bothers me are the implications. I agree with you and @bhunt : there is no way out except by rebuilding from the bottom up. And actually it’s more complicated than that. The only way that you rebuild from the bottom up is by establishing trust, which is awfully hard to do in a digital/knock-the-chip-off-your-own-shoulder world. I see nobody in power acting in ways that fosters understanding or compromise now, which isn’t surprising either because there is a max pain prisoner’s dilemma waiting for them. What that means for us in the short to medium term is high levels of reflexive antagonism and pain. That sucks.
No quibble at all, really! Please don’t read any presumption of linearity over the full scale of time here on my part. My goal was much more simplistic: to show people who aren’t used to reading charts “it’s a lot higher now.” For what it’s worth, I think the seasonality of prophetic output is heavily influenced over some periods by this emerging desire to be saying the same things. An episodic nature, as you point out correctly, I think, is exactly how a lot of this works. If this were intended to be a more quantitative argument, this is a case where I think we would identity “hot spots” of linguistic echoing inductively rather than positing from what we know was going on in the world, but we may end up with similar “periods” that you did by doing so. Not sure.
Yes, indeed. Part 8 on Monday.
I try to deal with this question for a great deal of Part 8. Still, I wonder the extent to which it’s not so much an or of the things you mention, but rather a more simplistic, even rational comparison of irrational impulses. That is, does belonging value exceed the cost of cognitive dissonance of whatever alternative signals are being received (net of any inoculation effects of conspiracy communities), and can the group create in-group common knowledge structures which make this equilibrial or at least medium-term stable with enough mutual effort?
Not a rhetorical question. I am struggling with this.
I think this might be amongst the things that has always been true in at-scale human societies. The epimemetics (ahh my autocorrect has learned the word, so now it’s real!) is what has changed…we can now see via our connectedness that our belonging value required dissonance. Each of the epimemetic phases are step changes in our connectedness and each revealed a level of dissonance that had previously been the water we swim. The epimemetic shifts foment instability and change because these realizations are very difficult to assimilate both societally and individually.
This post marks the place in this thread at which Part 6: Pandemic was published.
I was on vacation so I’m way behind in my reading, but @rguinn “bruh” as my kids say… Very well written summary in Parts 1 & 2. These worlds are actually very hard to describe and not come off as judgy or partisan. I think you did a great job, and you made this PCA Presbyterian realize a lot about his own non-denominational Pentecostal upbringing. We didn’t go to church a lot after about age 10-12 but apparently I got a whole lot of charismatic upbringing as a kid having to watch TBN/Daystar. You absolutely NAILED it when you said the part about how evangelicals “would rather die” then raise hands. That’s the way it feels when I go to any church now including my home church. It’s always been such a cringey feeling for me as a Presbyterian. That and altar calls. I’ve been caught up in it during the praise and worship sometimes, but man it takes a whole lot of Spirit to raise these hands.
The takeover of the evangelical church by charismatics and Pentecostals is complete I think. The pendulum is swinging so far that when I visit Catholic or Orthodox churches for weddings/funerals etc I think I might actually fit in better there!!! Sorry mom!
The only thing you’re really missing in your background research material is the media venue of Youtube. That’s been my poor mom’s current choice for radicalization content. That, and I was really, really, surprised you hadn’t written anything about Rabbi Jonathan Cahn.
edit Lastly, what AI did you use for the awesome graphics?
^^^ I am very much appreciating this sense of humility in the series @rguinn. If we swapped out the variables and the stakes, we’d see it in a different light. The challenge is to see the light with these variables and stakes. Brilliant.
It’s difficult to express how deeply I appreciate all your effort here, Rusty.
I’m a “trust science” guy, and so a “trust the science” foe, because science so often proves “the science” to be incorrect, sometimes massively so. Eugenics had a great narrative.
I’m the same way about faith. We’re supposed to “test every spirit” because we know we can be 100% correct one moment and worse than wrong the next. A daily examination of conscience is a discipline simply ignored in too many churches.
McLuhan predicted electronic media would cause us to become more self-defined by emotions than thought, that we would increasingly rationalize instead of reason, and thus we were entering an era in which cannibalism and kumbaya could be alternately practiced without cognitive dissonance…the Global Village is a place where superstition and magical thinking rules.
Is there a better description of social media?
These chapters on how some specific ideas have become entrenched helps explain why people are loathe to believe other than what made them feel good about themselves, even when (maybe especially when) what made a person feel good about themself is shown to be demonstrably false.
The importance of your series goes beyond its specifics.
Wanted to call out the specific line I was thinking of when I heart-reacted this. Lotsa parallel thoughts crashing through my head but this needs to stand alone for a bit.
Solid observation @cplourde.
@rguinn I’m saving any commentary for after the final part is published, but I had to let you know this series is so compelling, and remarkable. I’m learning so much. Thank you!!
Rusty, can you think of a reason why Timoteo Band would leave this bit in their 2020 video, seeing as how it’s both very specific and apparently so far also very wrong?
Technically, would have been quite easy to splice right after “Trump to become a trumpet”.
Maybe to keep some street cred for not overediting and not being too specific?
I am amused by the juxtaposition of this with RFK Jr’s opinion of Gates, as well as others.
Hah! Good question! Harder bit to splice, I think, and I think it’s “vague” enough that it falls into the non-falsifiable camp and risks very little. But that’s just my opinion.
Tanya, I’m just so grateful that you’re taking the time to read it. I recognize that it’s such an immense investment of time. More than anything else I hope that it proves a worthwhile investment.
I agree with your response Rusty, BUT, this “specific case” of Pentecostal Charismatic Evangelicals might well be the fulcrum and catalyst upon which huge events occur. It should not be even remotely minimized, as it appears that the future of our country is dependent upon the mindset of the Charismatic Evangelical community whose numbers are way bigger than I ever imagined.
What that community needs to be true seems to put the value of Prophesy!TM way higher than either Science or Science!TM, where originators of Prophesy! can come from most any source which possesses an imagination, strong EQ, social skills, and other needs.
We need more Beth Moores. Desperately.
Credit to you for doing this amazing piece of work
Amen, amen and amen. 100%.
@jddphd, This list resonated with me so much (and elicited a bit of a giggle). I’m theoretically in the Quiet Protestants group (though I was raised mostly secular), but I know exactly what you mean by Loud Protestants!
Well, I didn’t see that plot twist at the end of part 8 coming! Looking forward to seeing everyone in OH on Friday to discuss.
Continue to be amazed by the staggering level of research and scholarship you have put into this series.
One small question about the description of ReAwaken America and the Charismatic-QAnon zoonosis. You said that it was “assumed that [Trump’s} reinstallation would take place through the military.”
Unlike any other prominent politician Trump had openly attacked the military for their dismal performance and portrayed top military leadership as a major component of the “deep state” of Beltway insiders actively working to thwart the will of the American people. Attacks on the “deep state” were a major part of his 2020 campaign (even though Trump had done next to nothing to reign them in while in office).
Unlike almost all of the other Prophecies you’ve described, the military uprising predictions involved a much more cataclysmic event that had to take place within a matter of weeks and contradicted what Trump and his core supporters had believed about the “deep state.” True believers in electoral fraud theories might have ways to rationalize why investigations didn’t confirm their theories (e.g courts and the deep state conspired to suppress evidence/rig cases). But how could the followers of these prophets rationalize the complete failure of the military uprising prediction?
FYI: Beth Moore
@802rob :
We need more Beth Moore’s Desperately
@rguinn to @802rob :
Amen, amen and amen. 100%.
Very good observation and question, Hubert. I don’t have a perfect answer for you…yet.
I can respond anecdotally, but I think some of this still has to play out in the next 18-24 months. The responses I’ve seen thus far typically take one of a few forms, all of which will be familiar to the conspiracy narrative virus:
Trump’s “humility” led him to reject taking advantage of something that could be so harmful to the country he loves;
More evil and darkness needed to be revealed before the transition could take place; or
Perhaps the “military takeover” was simply symbolic for patriotic Americans returning to the polls in 2024 to right what courts, investigators and the Deep State blocked in 2020.
Most importantly, however, when it comes to the prophetic, we have to look back to the idea of “prophesy in part,” and the belief that all of this is conditional. When a prophecy fails, there is a tendency within this community to say that it is because all of the churches affected by the “woke mind virus” didn’t pray and support it enough. I’m as irritated by performative wokeism as anyone else of a conservative persuasion, to be clear, but “blaming it on the people who said the prophets were nuts” is a tale as old as time, and as applicable to the analogs I think we’ll find as this specific example.
I had a dream of you pounding furiously on a keyboard, occasionally muttering quietly whilst a full glass of wine sits untouched and collecting small amounts of settling dust.
Yes, our patience shall eventually be rewarded, hallelujah!
Trivial point of geographic order: much like the trip to Lucas Oil Stadium in Indy, our soggy football would also have to travel upstream on the Mississippi to reach St. Louis. The Ohio joins the Mighty downstream, at the almost biblical Cairo.
And as the football prepares to exit our domestic waterways, it would pass the most Catholic, least evangelical, and most delightfully and originally sinful city of all in our republic: New Orleans. A city where said pigskin would feel just as at home as it would in the Nittany Lion-infested Alleghenies.
This comment in no way demeans the prodigious effort. Rusty needs to make Pentacostal/evangelical baseball cards for all of these characters! It is akin to learning the capabilities of the starting lineup of your kid’s All-Star baseball team. Every name in the story is a blank slate from my starting point.
No doubt! I think your author got tired of creating alternate scenarios, and just really wanted to get in that jab at Goodell.
If not more!
As always, you know it’s a good idea when the Simpsons already did it!
Holy “why am I seeing this now”, Batman! I’m stunned that just as this series is being released, all of a sudden there is an explosion in the press of probes related to the 2020 election. You can’t make this stuff up!
Rusty, you said “And we need to talk about them. All of them.”
I thought you telegraphed this ending pretty well so I know I’m not alone of people who’ve been thinking about how this story about stories frame maps to other systems. The danger we find ourselves in is another ET standby…once you first recognize the water you begin to see it everywhere. Your case study feels like it has elucidated the water of the living metaverse maybe a little too well.
As I sit annoyed at work today I am mapping this to the language and narrative creation relied on by management executives. Summed up by an email from a week ago which notified that it is time again for our annual employee engagement survey. This online survey will be used by the management team, whom me and colleagues have almost never spoken with, to measure how things are going. The company isn’t that big.
Oof, mea culpa. This kind of thing is enough to make your blood boil even without having to see the carefully crafted language a mile away.
Just finished Part 8. Great stuff. What’s the AI you use for the artwork? Bc it’s awesome.
What’s the antidote to heal those infected by the virus? Bc they’re still getting “prophetic words” about a nebulous “shaking” that’s always just over the horizon.
Midjourney. Here’s the prompt I used for Part 3: /imagine donald trump with a crown and royal regalia, standing on a parapet, people bowing, christian imagery, american patriotic imagery, style of medieval illuminated text, glowing words, words jumping out of pages, watercolor, j.m.w. turner, --ar 4:3
All of the others were different descriptors, but all ended with watercolor, j.m.w. turner
Re: artwork; no narrative movement would be complete without a defining art, and in the recommended Matthew Taylor podcast I found mention of James Nesbit - source of some of the some of the memetic illustrations that carpet bombed my inbox back in the day.
I honestly can’t get past the categorization of prophet/apostle-as-raccoon. Personal problem, I suppose: millstones for the lot of them.
I just don’t see any evidence in the New Testament of writers - Paul, Peter, Luke - advocating any political solution to the very real (and ultimately fatal) persecution directed at them. James comes closest in chapter 5; a passage that could apply across history.
Gumby an interesting call on Friday.
Yep. And to be fair, not that you’ve suggested otherwise, this is to be expected. In modern terms we would have characterized these as a disenfranchised minority oppressed by a powerful and authoritarian state. It is difficult to imagine that seizing political power not only to escape persecution but to achieve any other social or cultural ends would have been a primary strategy here. A hope, perhaps.
Set aside for a moment those who advocate theonomic/ecclesiocratic government for reasons of political preference rather than belief in a scriptural mandate. Those who DO arrive at a theological mandate invariably, at least in my reading, require the Greek ethnē in the Great Commission to do a lot of work. That is, they may make many arguments, but all of these that I’ve seen ultimately hinge on the argument that “make disciples of all nations” is explicitly a call to perform discipleship at the level of the national entity, necessarily requiring the discipleship of its government. It’s…a stretchy stretch, even for a group that’s often comfy with some eisegetical preference-imposition. Ethnē is translated a half dozen different ways - gentile, nation, tribe, herd, pagans - and of all the words translated to nation (esp. laos and phylē), its meaning is least like “the government of a people.” Even if it weren’t, in context it’s a pretty wild stretch.
I informally think of these as “ends-based” views. The discipling of the nation at the government level is an end in itself, not simply a means.
For the few arguments I’ve read that aren’t as dependent on this interpretation of “discipling nations,” they tend to be more utilitarian arguments about how maintaining a Christian government with Christian laws will produce a more sustainable Christian culture and lead to more Christians. I informally think of these as “means-based” views, by which I mean that they still see the individual as the exclusive target of discipleship; they just think that capturing government and other “spheres” or “mountains” will be an effective means to achieve a scriptural end. This is more political theory than theology, so absence of scripture as you and I have pointed out doesn’t really answer its contentions.
This being an argument for saving the world from the top-down, however, you can probably guess where we come out on this one, too.