When failed Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore was confronted with allegations of sexual misconduct with minors, he took to Twitter to respond. In a four part tweet, which did not include an actual denial, Mr. Moore invoked both a conspiracy by the ”Obama-Clinton Machine,” and a spiritual battle, with the ”forces of evil waging all-out war,” to the degree that ”our nation is at a crossroads — both spiritually and politically.”
In the wall-to-wall news coverage that followed, few seemed to find it remarkable that a major-party candidate for the United States Senate was offering this literally, extraordinary claim — that he is caught up in an epic, supernatural battle, rather than a mundane argument about the facts of his case. And the horse race polling, at least initially, showed the disturbing allegations running neck-and-neck with Moore’s personal, apocalyptic, conspiracy fantasy. How did we get here?
In “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History” (Random House, $30), Kurt Andersen claims that our course to post-factual America was set by the Pilgrims, making it appropriate that we honor them at Thanksgiving with both a harvest feast and fraught political conversations with our extended families. The Pilgrims’ quest for religious freedom is a core part of our foundational myth, and in the textbook version of American history, this reformation ideal allowed Americans to pursue empirical evidence and rational enlightenment values, a la the Founding Fathers. In fact, it also allowed Americans to pursue just about anything, and that’s exactly what they did.
In the first half of “Fantasyland,” Mr. Andersen gives a whirlwind tour through 400 years of American history, deftly pointing out the many times Americans have veered off the enlightenment path and opted for instinct, novelty, emotion, and personal epiphanies. While he explores several threads in the history of American credulity, including pseudo-science, conspiracy theories, and the soft-focus, reality-blurring of the infotainment industry, his central and most convincing thesis involves America’s unique religious history.
Beginning with the Great Awakening’s emphasis on a personal experience of the divine, a faith in ecstatic visions brought us not only new Protestant denominations like Methodists and Pentecostals, but what Mr. Andersen dubs the ”Christianity fan-fiction” of the Book of Mormon, along with Christian Science, Seventh-Day Adventists, Shakers and various strains of spiritualism. On the strength of personal visions, Americans welcomed faith-healing, claims of extra-planetary origins, end-time prophecies and modern miracles into popular American spirituality and culture. And, if some of these innovations didn’t sit well with polite society in 19th century America, there was always plenty of room to move off and form a new community until the dust settled. Young America was a perfect incubator for religious invention and innovation — for Fantasyland.
Mr. Andersen’s witty and irreverent analysis of American pop culture, with it’s open dismissal of any supernatural claims, may risk alienating all but an atheist choir, but any traditionalists who stick around for the second half of the book will enjoy the thorough take-down of 60’s culture. As academia joined with the hippies to declare truth to be a social construct, and altered states of consciousness a source of wisdom, America’s intellectual elite paved the way for a new round of pseudo-science, alternative medicine, paranormal belief, and explicitly relative New Age philosophies. Rather than seeing the upheaval of the 60’s as a radical rejection of American principles, “Fantasyland” will convince you that it was more of a radical fulfillment — the Pilgrim’s vision of religious freedom, the ”priesthood of all believers,” come to fruition.
And if the hippies are descended from the Pilgrims, they are also the immediate forefathers of our current cast of characters: Roy Moore with his supernatural excuses, Bill Maher’s anti-science vaccine denials, Alex Jones’ free-style ”truther” rants, Oprah’s New Age proselytizing, Wayne LaPierre’s dystopian visions, Dr. Oz’s magic beans, and a president who believes in all of them.
Last year, many Americans woke up to our alarming, post-truth culture, with it’s alternative facts, echo chambers and conspiracy theories. Finding common ground for our political conversation seems both urgent and unlikely: though “Fantasyland,” provides an entertaining and insightful diagnosis, it does not offer a solution. But, by chronicling the splintered history of our American dreams and visions, it makes a convincing case that our current impasse is not unique. We have been here before. We may have been here all along. Here in Fantasyland, what you make of that idea is, of course, entirely up to you.
Ruth Quint is a writer living in the North Hills.
First Published: December 17, 2017, 12:54 p.m.
