I was writing this post before learning of the shooting in Nashville. I don’t want to add any additional strife to an already unsettling story. I hope this longer post can be a starting place to how we discuss and process such tragic events that inspire the urge to put the blame onto one person or cabal or ideology.
If we put the blame of such a dreadful act wholly on gun lobbyists or transgender individuals, we are perpetuating the likelihood of the next mass murder. We need to protect each other, understand our history, and explore our deep imagination, in order to find where such an impulse might come from. Practice compassion. May the souls of those lost rest in peace.
An apocalypse was scheduled for 1844. William Miller calculated Christ’s return to a couple of dates that year, but the day that came to be known as the Great Disappointment landed on October 22.
Many lost faith, but several persevered. Several months after the fatefully unfated day, 17 year-old Ellen Harmon (soon to be Ellen White), who had been so moved by Miller’s preaching began to have visions of her own. Their imagery harked to the mythic psychedelia of Daniel and Revelation, showing swaths of God’s people falling off the straight and narrow path climbing to the heavens while only an elect few persevered to the New Jerusalem.
While Christ did not appear to descend to earth, something else did, some Lovecraftian spores that blossomed in thoughts and dreams and writings around the world. In addition to Adventism and Mormonism (only 14 years its senior), the Spiritualist movement blossomed in the same countrysides as these new American religions following the Fox Sisters’ spirit rappings in 1848. While Ellen White, among many others, fiercely opposed the Spiritualist movement, claiming it was nothing more than a diabolical deception, both her and the Fox Sisters embodied a similar spiritual zeitgeist: the spiritual realm could be accessed by anyone, including young, uneducated women.
In Europe, Karl Marx met Friedrich Engels not two months before the Great Disappointment. The 1840s marked the early periods of both Marx and Charles Darwin’s bibliographies, godless grimoires to be denounced by the evolving churches and their work ethics. In the years since these movements were unleashed on the world, American Protestantism has defined itself in opposition to these epistemologies: the paranormal spiritualists and their participatory seances, class struggle and radical critiques of capital, and a biology that places humanity in a larger timeline than the Bible seemed to account for.
We have not yet coherently harmonized these epistemologies. We are still trying to yell these songs over each other, the cacophony of which expressed itself on January 6th, 2021, another improperly prophesied day of atonement. Such an event reminds us that conspiracy theories and apocalypses are not a threat to American democracy, but are encoded into American Protestantism as American Protestantism is encoded into American politics. This is not something to eradicate or purge, but to sit with. In the words of Bayo Akomolafe, “The times are urgent-- we must slow down.” Liberal Christians who write out against conspiracy theories can only go so far before they are forced to admit or ignore the fact that the Christianity they are defending is itself an imperialist conspiracy theory.
When I say “conspiracy theory” I am borrowing Joe Forrest’s definition— “a well-organized effort initiated by an elite group of powerful men and women secretly working toward a singular goal or vision that often involves collaboration between government agencies and the media.”
The weakness of this definition is its strength: its diverse applicability. Does the war profiteering and sown Islamophobia from the Bush administration and neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan mean they were responsible for 9/11? No. But it does lead us to the question: what is the difference between a corporately funded political campaign and a conspiracy theory? What about Coca-Cola sponsored nutritional science? Raytheon board member Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defense? CIA-facilitated drugdealing? Church-facilitated drugdealing? Systematic rape by Hollywood elites? Systematic rape by politicians and political donors? A drugdealing CIA collaborating with churches facilitating systematic pedophilic rape?
By this open-ended definition, the Bible is a conspiracy theory, curated and edited by elite groups of church politicians in a very prolific era of texts. But that doesn’t mean it is inherently “dangerous” or “false” and that we must do away with it in order to find some truer Truth. It is a tension to sit with rather than to argue, invalidate, or correct. As Charles Eisenstein writes in his essay The Conspiracy Myth, “my purpose is neither to advocate nor to debunk the conspiracy narrative, but rather to look at what it illuminates. It is, after all, neither provable nor falsifiable.”
For example, we can observe Jesus’ literal existence, which is what most protestantisms depend their spiritual authority upon, as a conspiracy theory. Whole literatures exist analyzing the gospels as mystery traditions, popular spiritualist literature, and even deliberate Roman propaganda.
You do not need to subscribe to these arguments in order to see that the religious consensus within which we find ourselves has been sociopolitically determined. The New Testament was curated and edited by elite groups of theologians and scribes, excluding lost libraries of Christian literature. Read a gnostic gospel to feel that foreign yet familiar sense of mythic grandeur that was excluded from the canon but can still be felt in the official gospels. We need to become literate in the difference between mystery literature and literal history, finding the value and limitations of each.
Imperial influence isn’t exclusive to the New Testament. The Old Testament is rife with political agendas conflicting against and inspiring each other. The genocidally monotheistic Deuteronomist writers demonized Yahweh’s consort, Asherah, literally making her into the demon Ashtoreth and demolishing her holy sites and priests, priestesses, and “male prostitutes” as declared in 2 Kings 23. Of course, if we’re casting doubt into the historicity of texts as recent as the gospels, then we must also hold space for the possibility that this theocratic genocide may not have literally happened. If it did, then the monotheism that gave us our Christianity is established upon a ruthless genocide as opposed to the polite reason and open dialogue contemporary Christians so fondly revere. If this did not literally occur and these accounts exist as scriptural propaganda, then the writers of our scriptures simply wanted to commit genocide. Are our scriptures written by genociders or dreamers of genocide? There’s no saying how far these attempts at erasure go. Could the Deuteronomist writers have wholly expunged the divine feminine from the Bible? Is their ruthlessly monotheistic torch worth keeping lit?
Protestantism, as a conceptual framework to relate to the Bible, developed in the zeitgeist of the Enlightenment, aligning itself with other contemporary values such as Reason and Natural Science, and ultimately flourishing due to the technological innovation of the printing press. The mystical Logos become rational Logic.
From a believer’s perspective, the success of Protestantism is the movement of the Spirit. From a media technology perspective, the success of Protestantism is the success of a kind of machine-thinking. The medium is the message, media theorist Marshall McCluhan writes, “This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology”. The magic art of literacy became a mechanistic skill, not wyrd words to be annunciated, but information to be processed.
This Enlightenment machine-thinking invaded the sciences as well as the humanities. We can see the influence of machine-thinking in Christianity as Protestantism evolved into an abstracted, intellectual decoding project, apocalypses to be calculated, savages to be converted and civilized and taught how (or, if they were particularly savage and ungodly, forced) to work productively. The institutions of the church, whose moral authority was no longer Tradition but Production, served a function similar to that of the professional managerial class, described by John and Barbara Ehrenreich as “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.” As one empire relayed the baton to the next, Christianity maintained its function of creating a spiritual justification for a material imperialism. As Philip K. Dick put it, The Empire never ended.
When liberal Christians argue against conspiracy theories with rationale and facts, we hide our faces from a dreadful realization. The crux of our Christianity relies, not on the transformative power of a Palestinian exorcist who was ostensibly executed by the state, but on Protestant exceptionalism as demonstrated by its successful imperialism and hegemony. Our Christianity is founded on millennia of corpses. Corpses that are still being discovered on the grounds of church-operated boarding schools. Our American churches stand on stolen lands. The Empire has taken our faith as its trappings and we have taken the Empire’s trappings for our faith.
Conspiracy theories are not a disease but an imaginal immune response to a malign environment, symptoms of a declining empire. Conspiracy means breathing with. Behind masks, inhaling burning forests, let us not waste our breath or inspiration on arguments, but imagine a better world with others. Where is your breath best enjoyed? Who do you share your living breath with?