Looking at 2024 US presidential election results in two places where I have deep personal lived experience, Chicago and Union County, PA, I am struck again by the role of culture. In Chicago, the few but increased neighborhood precincts where Republicans took the majority included the fringes of the Northwest and Southwest Sides, the old Reagan Democrat lands of the police and firefighter clans (historically Irish Catholic), such as the now-red-again 41st Ward on the Northwest Side, and Mount Greenwood on the Southwest Side. There were also red precincts in areas with a significant Chinese-American, Mexican-American, and Orthodox Jewish presence–the latter in my old neighborhood of West Ridge (50th Ward), which on the west end has become more of a Chabad neighborhood in recent years. Funnily enough, the precinct in which the Cook County Jail predominates also broke for Trump and the Republicans, perhaps in the grand old tradition of Chicago’s last Republican Mayor Big Bill Thompson and his alleged connections with Al Capone, but also possibly reflecting cultural resentment against a criminal justice system that often predominantly in Chicago involves African-American males.
This map and the places behind it suggest cultural reasons why some micro-areas in Chicago went Republican in 2024. Nationally it is hard to figure deep philosophical differences in our two political parties. They often seem a little more like the Blue and the Green factions in Byzantine Constantinople of yore, or almost like sports team allegiances like the Cubs versus the White Sox, or brand allegiances like Ford vs. Chevy or Mac vs. PC. Breaking Republican at the micro-level of Chicago neighborhoods seems to me from this map more related to cultural preferences on issues such as clannishness related to borders, perceptions of household-family economics, resistance to the bureaucratic culture of the secular “scientific” state, and adherence to traditional human anthropology of sex– than acceptance of ideas of related Anglo and Russian conservatism from an Edmund Burke or Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Patterns of support seem to follow the cultural. The racist and anti-LGBTQ labels hurled by the Left as explanations for the 2024 vote end up as reductively Eurocentric and systemically secular as any anti-government libertarian analysis centered on free markets from that faction of the establishment Right.
But it’s been nearly 25 years since I considered Chicago home, and a bit longer since I was a newspaperman there on the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times, including a stint as urban affairs writer. Although I have known and loved Chicago well, my more recent station has been in rural northern Appalachia, in central Pennsylvania. Here in Union County, contrary to Chicago’s great Democratic sea, only 29% are registered Democrats, with 53% Republicans. In last week’s election, former President Trump won Union County with 61 percent of the vote to Vice President Harris’ 38 percent (with 95 percent of the vote counted). Yet on the university campus where I work in the county, student journalists found that nearly 92% of identifiable faculty on the county voter rolls are registered Democrats, undoubtedly voting for Harris based on visible campus political culture, while just 6 percent are registered Republicans. That, too, says something about culture and politics in a county typified by deeply rooted small towns and Amish and Mennonite communities, in which the contrast between campus and rural life could be tracked in good part by church-going trends and faith beliefs. Moving beneath culture lies religious sensibility, whether overtly so or apparently anti-religious as on my campus, from which politics comes downstream. On the post-Christian Left such as campus faculty culture, support for Trump is not so much a political sin as a kind of religious apostasy, supposedly deserving an incredible intensity of emotional reaciton and ostracism, but minus Christian charity.
Meanwhile, at the top level of national cuture morphing into the “global West,” beyond the vagaries of actual neighborhood voting, American political culture’s civic religion continues to follow its trend into ever-more extreme forms of the Monophysitism characterizing Protestant culture across generations, with roots too in medieval Scholastic Catholicism. Monophysitism is a heresy muddling the human and divine natures of Christ, by emphasizing the latter only, and tending toward Unitarianism. It ultimately strengthens self-assertion. This tendency in Anglo-American civilization traces all the way back to the addition in the West of the filioque to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed by the end of the first millennium, as a symptom of the tendency in the rationalistic Latin West to over-homogenize the mystery of the Holy Trinity, to meld the Divine Persons of Father and the Son in heterodoxical subordination to them of the Holy Spirit. The result was an instrumentalist cosmology and anthropology of created grace, and an individualism that paradoxically lent itself toward a technological worldview. This shaped the tendency toward Unitarianism and Deism in Western theology, culminating religiously in American culture at large with its heavy doses of New Thought and New Age-iness, in both conservative and liberal aspects of the Protestant Enlightenment that have lingered long in America. (This also helps explain why Puritanism in New England historically turned into Unitarianism and New Thought.)
Far from a badge of authentic Christian experience (however authentic any personal experiences in it may have been), this cultural atmosphere relates to what the Evangelist John writes of in Revelation as the “synagogue of Satan” in his message to the Church at Philadelphia, in an amorphous Unitarian-Masonic-style sense of divinity, drifting into self-assertive neopaganism, in the spirit of Anti-Christ denying the Incarnation and setting up a culture of technocratic and anti-Christian global management. The trend increasingly cuts itself off from the legacy of Israel as understood in the continuities of Orthodox Christian tradition — the realization of Old Testament Israel in the Orthodox Church of the Apostolic succession from Pentecost, fully Trinitarian in relationality, and as such embracing all peoples within their varied cultural traditions. The emerging civic religion instead involves a neocolonial sense of the particular sensibility of Western individualism as universal, and of beings as ideas in a virtual reality subject to technocracy. Individualism becomes the atomization against which Hannah Arendt warned as a paradoxical symptom of a developing totalitarian-included culture. That is the non-partisan and accelerating marker of American life at a meta-level.
Indeed, American civic religion today, while often wrongly seen as the most overtly religious culture among major world powers, increasingly has become the most aggressively globalistic and worldly in the neopagan inclinations of a technocratic “Deep State” (“Burning Man” meets Jeffrey Epstein) that oddly embraces both neoliberalism and neoconservatism. This affects the top level of politics in what some call the U.S. “uniparty,” in sync with a developing global mindset in which traditional Christians may detect a whiff of what the Evangelist John also called in one of his Epistles indeed called “the spirit of Antichrist,” the denial in the midst of post-Christian “Christendom” that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. This follows the prophetic foreshadowing of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. The new globalistic civil religion is in influence more cultural at a stratospheric level than political, interwoven with religious sensibilities.
One specific example with which I had personal experience through my family’s history was the influential cult Christian Science, which Georgetown historian Caroll Quigley (President Bill Clinton’s reputed mentor on the history of modern trans-Atlantic international relations) called the religion of the so-called “Milner Group” in his book The Anglo-American Establishment. In the 1920s into the 1940s the Milner Group (an outgrowth of Cecil Rhodes’ earlier network) exerted a cultural influence at the top of Anglo-American relations, helping to form the Commonwealth of Nations while envisioning a technocratic American succession to the British Empire. The Milner Group involved the influence of the “Christian Science Church,” a liberal conservative religious cult, with which I had family experience. It was a mix of postive thinking and Puritanism, drawing on a purported new vision of spirituality, while enhancing ultimately a strong sense of self-will, in a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) milieu. Its adherents also dabbled with the idea that the British Empire marked the modern rebirth of the biblical “lost tribes” of Israel. It declined along with the shadow of the British Empire, while leaving remarkable traces of its past presence and influence. When President-elect Donald Trump announced his new White House chief of staff appointment, Susie Wiles, for example, he did so at Mar-a-Lago, which was built for a Christian Scientist social influencer originally, Marjorie Meriwether Post. Wiles herself was formed politically by Jack Kemp, who was raised a Christian Scientist and continued to be influenced by its ideas, articulated by the writer Warren Brooks in his book The Economy of Mind. And the very position of White House Chief of Staff had been fashioned in its modern form by the Christian Scientist H.R. Haldeman, one of many members of the sect present in the Nixon administration.
But my second and more current personal connection to cultural religious influence reflecting this trend toward a global civic religion unfolds in this pre-election piece I wrote for The Federalist. The killing of a cousin in the Jonestown massacre in 1978 highlighted a particular example of today’s evolving top-level, paradoxically globalistically-minded but individualistic spirituality. This non-partisan Deep State culture hovers invisibly because it lacks the local specificity of the cultures of neighborhoods in Chicago mentioned earlier, or in my Appalachian region. The vote in the 2024 presidential election interestingly may reflect at the neighborhood level resistance to the development of a globalistic neopagan religious sensibility. But the actual mechanics of any such neighborhood resistance are as likely as not themselves to be immersed (and co-opted) in this higher-level cultural trend. The latter, in its beyond-neighborhood dimension, moves into ever-more amorphous New Age notions. Dangerously identifying deity with individual will, it sets the stage for techno-totalitarianism. Below is the text of my Federalist piece, a snapshot of a particular aspect of this cultural-religious trend.
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A new religious spirit is at work, permeating all sides of American politics.
BY: PAUL SIEWERS
NOVEMBER 01, 2024
As the major presidential candidates proclaim their faith credentials in the final days of the election, it’s noteworthy that Kamala Harris got her big boost into politics from a lover who was a close ally of the cultic mass murderer Jim Jones.
In 1978, Jones led more than 900 followers to their deaths in the jungles of Jonestown, Guyana, by having them drink poisoned juice. It was one of the darkest days of the revolutionary after-life of the 1960s in America.
The sulphurous stench of Jonestown still lingers in American culture. The tragedy was inextricably linked to the trending emergence of a new civil religion replacing “old Christendom.” Charged by hyper-racialist and pan-sexual self-expression, it proved hostile at its core to traditional Christian family life as the foundational basis for the U.S. republic.
The opening ceremony at the Olympics this summer showed how that new civil religion has gone global. Dionysus prancing around a blasphemous LGBTQ parody of the “Last Supper” was very much in the spirit of Jones’ culturally Marxist and nominally Christian new order. That revolution in “normalized” form is now not only livestreamed but mainstreamed. In the United States, it replaces lingering quaint nods to Christianity such as President Eisenhower’s 1950s “In God We Trust” motto on U.S. currency.
Cult Leader Helps San Francisco Democrats
Jones demonically combined a racialist and pan-sexualist political machine with a cult, attracting San Francisco political boss Willie Brown, Harris’ lover and mentor, among other leftist leaders. Jones harvested votes to help their careers and spread their post-1960s ideologies. This new civil religion of power is not so much an atheistic revolutionary ideology as a kind of pagan challenge to what John Adams called the “general principles of Christianity” underlying America.
The goal of destroying the Christian sense of family came from both a Trotskyite sense of The Communist Manifesto and hedonistic consumerism out of Silicon Valley. It exalts personal will while ironically making people more submissive to social control. As if a revolutionary LinkedIn to advance careers, it afflicts all sides of the political spectrum, although the Harris-Walz ticket of “change” is the clearest avatar this election season.
In the 1970s, support from Democrat leaders enabled Jones to operate his abusive cult. Harris’ ex-boyfriend Brown, a former California Assembly speaker and San Francisco mayor, reportedly attended Jones’ Peoples Temple several dozen times and praised Jones liberally. San Francisco Mayor George Moscone appointed Jones chair of the city Housing Authority Commission.
LGBTQ icon Harvey Milk spoke often at Jones’ congregation, saying he found there “a sense of being … I can never leave.” Brown introduced Jones at a testimonial dinner positively as “a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein … Chairman Mao.” Brown’s flippancy about Mao, likely the greatest mass-killing leader of history, was more chilling given Jones’ finale, the greatest cluster of forced civilian deaths of Americans prior to 9/11.
Until then, with Jones as an ally Brown spearheaded legalizing homosexuality in California, building his political clout in what became ground zero of the new American civil religion, now also known as “wokeness.” The new quasi-religious awokening from the start sought to override the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” cited in the Declaration of Independence.
Kamala Tied to Sexual and Other Marxists
Brown disavowed Jones, but only after the tragedy at Jonestown. Harris never disavowed Brown, who reportedly gifted her with a BMW and travel to Europe while they were lovers. They “dated” in 1994-1995, during which he appointed her (a younger deputy state’s attorney) to two commissions, which gave her a statewide profile. He supported her election as San Francisco district attorney.
Her underlying views continue an ultra-racial and hyper-sexual reinterpretation of what it means to be human that bloomed among northern California leftists in Brown’s era, a culture hostile to what Abraham Lincoln called “one nation under God” and to the Declaration’s view that rights come from God in a Christian context. A century before Jonestown, Fyodor Dostoevsky considered demonic influence a factor in such nihilism in his novel Demons.
Indeed, Jones decided early that as a revolutionary it was not profitable for him to continue in the Soviet-allied American Communist Party, then dogged by an anticommunist FBI. So, he decided to infiltrate American Christianity. He became a pastor in the Disciples of Christ, a time-honored Protestant denomination in which he and his congregation remained until their violent end in 1978.
The new culture behind radical politics in northern California aligned itself with a worldly view of human beings categorized by skin color (the mystical unity of “voices of color”) and preferred sexual orifices and stimulation. Yet it paradoxically presented identity as fluid, unbound by objective limits, except self-willed racial and sexual identities linked to career success.
Claiming a Pastor 400 Miles Away
Harris both benefits from and participates in this new religious culture of the American-led global West. Her parents are of Irish-Jamaican/African and Indian backgrounds. Although her mother and name come from Indian Hindu tradition, she joined an African-American Baptist congregation in San Francisco growing up and married a Jewish man.
After living in Los Angeles for years, she still identifies her home place of worship far away at Third Baptist, San Francisco. The pastor at Third Baptist, the Rev. Amos Brown (no relation to Willie), controversially blamed America for the 9/11 terrorist attack and supported Rev. Jeremiah Wright as President Obama’s former pastor when Wright was attacked for his comments on “God damn America.”
Despite living so far from Third Baptist, Harris often shouts out praise to Amos Brown, and he was one of her guests at Joe Biden’s inauguration. “He has been on this journey with me every step of the way, from when I first thought about running for public office almost two decades ago,” Harris has said. “And he has been such a voice of leadership, more leadership, and leadership in our nation. And so I want to thank you, Dr. Brown, for all that you are – all that you are.”
Consider, too, Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. He supported placing tampons in boys’ school restrooms to accommodate transgenderism and prioritizing Covid medicine by race. Critics say he let racialist concerns rather than legal principles affect his response to the devastating Minnesota Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots. He assumes the role of “normal” American.
The erosion of the republic’s first principles symbolized by the Harris-Walz ticket doesn’t attempt to erase the Eurocentric Enlightenment, but is its extreme apotheosis. Decoupled from the traditional Christian family, the country stumbles like a sleep-walking giant conflicted by an ethos of self-will, as John Quincy Adams predicted it would.
The Spirits Inside Bolshevik Atheism
The late Dartmouth poet Donald Sheehan said the lesson of the great novels of Dostoevsky — a writer obsessed with nihilism’s advance in the West — was the need for self-emptying in Christ rather than self-assertion. We have the latter today in spades in our new civil religion.
Amid all the self-willed identity power, where is loving our neighbor more than oneself in Christ? In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn summed up three basic principles of Bolshevik atheism that oddly mesh with the self-assertion of today’s globalizing ethos:
1. Survive at any price. The ends justify the means, even the death of others.
2. Only material results matter. Two wrongs can make a right.
3. Adherence to the “permanent lie.” Don’t disturb the virtual reality in which we all supposedly must swim, lest you disturb your career and loved ones.
Scarily, these rules guide today’s civil religion under the banners of social justice and careerism. In them, “love is love” flatlines as self-love, as the revolution has become live-streamed.
Expressing self-will for power means submitting to the new secular high-tech mass as a rite. It is like a parody of Christian sobornost, or mystical unity, outside the Church as the Body of Christ, and in a dark mist like the biblical sorcerer Bar-Jesus, unable to see.
We are left with the body of Dionysus at the Olympic rituals and the long shadow of Jonestown in the background. We learn to love live-streamed kindly “Momala” and allegedly affable Walz, while off-screen Dionysian maenads would, like Jones, tear apart our children in the medical neutering supported by Harris-Walz.
What’s Weird: Paganism or Christianity?
A new religious spirit is at work, permeating all sides of American politics. We increasingly live in a demonized virtual version of God’s Creation, which often we look right through without seeing.
As a boy, I remember watching in our working-class Chicago neighborhood the broadcast reports of the massacre at Jonestown, feeling “something wicked this way comes.” Jones also directed the killing of investigators including my own cousin, Rep. Leo Ryan. Ryan grew up with my father in a West Side Irish-American enclave. The two went on double dates in high school. I have an early home movie of them wrestling on an inner-city lawn, leftover from an earlier American Dream.
Now the new virtual-reality civil religion as system immerses us online as the new normal. It defines the traditional as “weird,” synonymous with creepy. But once “weird” meant having an otherworldly destiny.
Indeed, traditional Christianity and ideas of self-government that emerged from it have always been weird in the older sense. The memory of Jonestown and the recent live-streaming of global Dionysus from Paris by contrast warn of the danger of normalizing the diabolical.
Christians, however, know this live-streamed revolution will not be the last word. Thank God.