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12: High
Weirdness in the American Hinterlands
By the early
twenty-first century, it had become clear that there were,
broadly speaking, two Americas. One was the inheritor of what we
may term Enlightenment rationalism and liberalism in the older
sense, carrying the connotations of liberality and the kind of
generosity
of spirit -- and skepticism of religious zealotry -- that characterized
Thomas Jefferson especially but that was found liberally among
the Founding Fathers more generally. This America was inclined toward
pluralism, toward a secular state, and toward the long tradition
of America as refuge from religious persecution elsewhere in the
world. But for the second, newer America, this foundational American
tradition was anathema-for the second America is marked by a
literalist, fundamentalist doctrinalism, by a virulent hatred of
"liberalism,"
and, most important for our purposes, by a persistent strain
of what one must term a dispersed inquisitionalism.
Naturally, what I am sketching here is a broad but nonetheless
widely recognized distinction, codified in the misleading
characterization
of the United States as composed of "red" and "blue" statescolors
from the convenient designations of broadcast television networks
for those states that apparently voted Democratic (blue) or Republican
(red) in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. The
blue states (notably New England, the Upper Midwest, and California)
of course included a significant population that corresponded to
what I term the "second America," and by the same token, the red
states included their own lesser proportion of those who still corre112
THE NEW INQUISITIONS
sponded to what I term the "first America," so the distinction between
"red"
and "blue" is actually somewhat misleading because it ignores the more
important
division between those Americans who are indebted more to the pluralist,
Enlightenment vision of Jefferson, and those more inclined to espouse
a literalist Christian fundamentalism.
Now, some may think that this distinction I am making here is perhaps
overbroad, and no doubt it is, albeit less so than the division between
"red"
and "blue" states. Undoubtedly, there is a broad swath of the American
population
that belongs neither to "red" nor to "blue," and that is not
particularly
aligned with either the pluralist "first America" or with the
fundamentalist
"second America." It is too easy to overstate such divisions within the
population
as a whole. Still, I am willing to wager that much and perhaps all of
what follows will come as a bit of a shock to many readers, especially
those
that belong to the "first America" of Jeffersonian rationalism, for what
I am
terming the "second America" has a deeply paranoiac strain of
inquisitionalism
that runs through it, of which many Americans remained entirely unaware.
Although we cannot examine every instance of it, in surveying this
unique
strain of new American dispersed inquisitionalism we certainly can
establish
clearly its existence and nature.
The Satanic Panic of Late-Twentieth-Century America
We earlier noted the Satanic panic of the 1980s in America, to which
Carl
Raschke contributed a lurid tome and various pronouncements on talk
shows
of the time such as Geraldo. But it is time now to go more deeply into
the
history of the Satanic panic in America, and to follow a particularly
interesting
current within it-a current we may term "Illuminatiphobia." One is
tempted
to use the term "lineage" to describe this particular phenomenon,
because it
can be traced to specific interconnected individuals and works. The
Satanic
panic came to a head during the 1980s, but it had its beginnings in the
1970s,
and in particular with a lurid best-selling book by Mike Warnke entitled
The
Satan Seller (1973).
Aptly named, The Satan Seller became a national best-selling Christian
title
from Logos International in 1973, at that point in American history when
the
hippie movement was fading away but also was feeding into Christianity
through the "Jesus movement," as well as more broadly through ordinary
social
osmosis. As Jon Trott and Mike Hertenstein put it in their riveting
expose of
Mike Warnke in 1992 entitled "Selling Satan: The Tragic History of Mike
Warnke,"
HIGH WEIRDNESS IN THE AMERICAN HINTERLANDS II3
A generation of Christians learned its basic concepts of Satanism
and the occult from Mike Warnke's testimony in The Satan Seller.
Based on his alleged satanic experiences, Warnke came to be recognized
as a prominent authority on the occult, even advising law enforcement
officers investigating occult crime. We believe The Satan
Seller has been responsible, more than any other single volume in
the Christian market, for promoting the current nationwide "Satanism
scare."1
But when The Satan Sellers was published in 1973, and for a long time
thereafter, Warnke's wild tales of his youthful involvement with a
"Satanic
brotherhood"-elaborated in his books and in his public talks, as well as
in
his appearances on various television shows-went unchallenged. Warnke
claims that The Satan Seller sold three million copies; he claims to
have been
on the television shows The 700 Club, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Larry King
Live,
Focus on the Family, and 20/20; and he continued as a nationally known
Christian
author, preacher, and public speaker into the twenty-first century, long
after investigative reporting had revealed his tales of youthful
"Satanism" to
bear little or no relationship to the truth.
What is it about Warnke's stories of Satanism that continued to make him
an attractive figure on the Christian evangelical circuits long after
those stories
had been thoroughly discredited-by Christian evangelical investigative
reporters,
no less? The answer, I think, is that Warnke's yarns disguised as memoir
drew on archetypes that people wanted (indeed, still want) to believe.
Especially in the wake of the hippie movement and the most extreme
excesses of the period, like the murders committed by the Manson Family,
the
late-twentieth-century evangelical movement in America emerges in part
as a
kind of reactionary social countermovement, one premised on the supposed
widespread decadence of American society that evangelicals were to
reject and
redeem. What more aptly symbolizes that decadence than Warnke's tale of
himself as a kind of youthful salesman of Satanism who "ascended in the
satanic ranks to the position of high priest, with fifteen hundred
followers in
three cities. [In addition to beautiful women consorts] he had unlimited
wealth
and power at his disposal, provided by members of Satan ism's highest
echelon,
the Illuminati."2 The breathless rhetoric actually reveals this
"Satanism" to bear
a striking similarity to an American direct-marketing pyramidal
corporate
structure, with young Mike as an up-and-coming corporate salesman,
albeit
one who claims to have participated in ritual rape and murder, and to
have
met Charles Manson himself. What a redemption story to sell!
Because, of course, that is the real narrative of The Satan Seller: it
sells a
II4 THE NEW INQUISITIONS
tale of a man's descent into depravity and of his subsequent redemption.
The
deeper the depravity, the more impressive is the redemption. Thus, it is
perhaps
not surprising that according to the investigative reporters Jon Trott
and
Mike Hertenstein, throughout his life, Warnke would not only fabricate
stories
but also then elaborate on them so as to make the bad worse. In a
typical
instance from early in his career, Karen Siegel recalls: "Mike liked to
introduce
me as a former hippie or drug addict-which I'd been, but I wasn't proud
of.
Then he started introducing me as a former prostitute, which I'd never
been.
I had to ask him to stop.'" In any case, Warnke's "Satanism" redemption
story
was a tale that sold, and sold well.
One might think that once Warnke realized that his concocted story of
"Satanism" was beginning to claim real victims via a public hysteria, he
would
have backpedaled, but such a narrative wouldn't be taking into account
the
money and fame that the "Satanic panic" brought him. By the mid-1980s,
Warnke had appeared on the ABC network television show 20/20, in a
segment
called "The Devil Worshippers," and he had developed a public persona as
a
consultant to police departments on "occult crime," as well as a
"center" for
refugees from an imagined international network of Satanists. The
"center"
reportedly consisted in a brick building, a director, and someone to
answer the
telephone. Warnke claimed fifty thousand calls a month, but the center's
former
director said it was more like 120. What the "Center" and the publicity
did accomplish: bring in over $2 million a year to Warnke's non-profit
organizations
by 1988-1990. He and his wife of the time purchased various
condominiums,
horses, a former plantation estate that they termed a "parsonage,"
and so forth. Warnke was riding high, his profits buoyed whenever he
told the
story of "Jeffy" a boy whom "Satanic ritual abuse" had reduced to a
"vegetable."
His "center" would care for "Jeffy" if only Warnke's audience would
cough up
another "love offering.'"
I have two friends who were professional counselors during the 1980s
Satanic panic, one in the South, and one in the Upper Midwest. Both
report
that clients began showing up with fears that their children were
getting involved
in "the occult" or worse, in some organized Satanic group, and
occasionally
clients would come in with vague suspicions that they, too, had been
victims of Satanic ritual abuse during childhood. Such notions had been
spread
widely, not only through sensationalistic, unsubstantiated books that
appeared
in the wake of Warnke's success with The Satan Seller-books such as
Michelle
Smith and Lawrence Pazder's Michelle Remembers (1980), or Lauren
Statton's
Satan's Underground (1988)-but also, they report, by way of Southern
Baptist
church networks and other evangelical church organizations. S
It took more than a decade for the Satanism scare to spread widely
across
HIGH WEIRDNESS IN THE AMERICAN HINTERLANDS Il5
America and to begin to generate actual arrests and trials, which went
on even
as books highly critical of the phenomenon appeared. Wild claims were
routinely
made: thus, one book, The Edge of Evil (1989), asserted on good hearsay
that forty to sixty thousand people were ritually murdered in the United
States
alone each yead6 Naturally, because such numbers are so insanely high
compared
to official numbers concerning people missing or murdered, there must
be a national conspiracy to keep the real numbers hidden-or so the
thinking
went. Among the best books chronicling how and why this bizarre new
inquisitional
period emerged in the United States and England is Jeffrey Victor's
Satanic Panic (1993). Victor shows how the rumor-panics-which popped up
in communities across America during this period, mostly driven by wild
evangelical
claims dispersed through local church networks-reflected the age-old
rhetoric of secret "Satanic" cults that practiced (what else?)
kidnapping and
ritual murder of children, exactly what Christians were accused of by
Romans
in late antiquity.'
It is incredible that only a decade before the end of the twentieth
century,
there was a full-blown "Satanist" witch-hunt generated in the American
evangelical
community. We look back on this period and at the sensational books
and news stories, the "police consultants," the "Satanic ritual abuse"
counselors,
the hysteria that emerged mostly (although by no means exclusively) in
the American Protestant community, but, most of all, at the way the
hysteria
manifested itself in the "secular arm" of the law enforcement system in
England
and in the United States, and we can hardly believe that all of this
happened
in a more or less technologically advanced, "modern" Western society
at the end of the twentieth century!8 Yet a decade later, the panic had
mostly
subsided.
It is true that by the early twenty-first century, one could hardly find
a book
in Christian bookstores that alluded to the Satanic panic of only a
scant decade
earlier. And it is also true that at least some of that absence was a
result of the
efforts of courageous Christian authors such as the investigative
reporters for
Cornerstone Magazine, who cumulatively generated an awareness, at least
among a significant number of evangelicals, that the Satanism scare of
the
1980s and early 1990S was overwrought hysteria. This led to a widespread
evangelical shift: a belief that a much greater danger was to be found
in the
"decadent mainstream culture"-that is, in what many perceived as social
disorder
of more mundane sorts. Thus, as is of course well known, we see the
rise of the "evangelical right" to political power, and an emphasis on a
religious
social agenda during the late twentieth and earlier twenty-first
centuries in the
United States.
n6 THE NEW INQUISITIONS
Illuminatiphobia
But this shift should not be read-as it often is-as tantamount to an
abandonment
or an overcoming of those fears that generated the Satanic panic of
the 1980s and early 1990s. Rather, a too-little-acknowledged refocusing
took
place. At the same time that the "Satanic ritual abuse" hysteria was
subsiding
in the early 1990S, and at just the period when the "religious right"
was turning
its fairly newfound collective attention toward gaining political power,
we see
the fears of the religious right refocusing. The Satanic panic was
really based
more on fears concerning the personal or individual: that is, individual
children
or people were imagined as having been subjected to "Satanic ritual
abuse."
But the new fear, spread most widely by Pat Robertson in his book The
New
World Order (1991), was social and political, or collective rather than
personal.
The new fear was not of "Satanic ritual abuse," but, rather, of a
shadowy secret
order that wanted to control the world, create a single world
government, and
usher in the Antichrist. The new fear was of the "Illuminati."
"Illuminatiphobia" can be traced back to the same period and even some
of the same books and authors that generated the Satanic panic. Mike
Warnke,
in his wild narrative The Satan Seller, claimed that he was admitted to
the secret
inner circle of Satanists-very wealthy and powerful men-and that this
group
was called the "Illuminati." Jon Trott and Mike Hertenstein wrote that,
in 1967,
when living in San Diego, Warnke paid a visit to the pastor of Scott
Memorial
Baptist Church. This pastor was none other than Tim laHaye, who is
mentioned
in the acknowledgments of The Satan Seller, who much later was coauthor
of the Left Behind series of books, and who will shortly playa
significant
role in our narrative. Typically,Warnke claimed that he brought up the
term
"Illuminati," but in fact,
"The conversation really wasn't like he put it in his book," says Dr.
laHaye. "I brought up the term Illuminati first. 1 had been reading
a book on the subject, and 1 tried testing him to see if he really
knew anything about it. He didn't seem to have ever heard the word
before."9
It is fascinating to see that these two themes-Satanic panic and
Illuminatiphobia-
can be traced back to Warnke and laHaye in the California evangelical
scene as early as the 1960s. But the time was not right for
Illuminatiphobia
to flourish: it remained mostly dormant through the 1970S and 1980s,
whereas the Satanic panic waxed.
This is not to say that Illuminatiphobia didn't exist during this
period-it
HIGH WEIRDNESS IN THE AMERICAN HINTERLANDS "7
did, among members of right-wing fringe groups such as the John Birch
Society,
and among followers of perennial presidential candidate Lyndon La-
Rouche, for instance. But this peculiar phenomenon was far from
mainstream
in the 1970S and 1980s: it mostly circulated in the evangelical
community
through tracts, pamphlets, and, curiously, through the same means that
helped
bring down the Shah of Iran in 1979: the surreptitious circulation of
cassette
tapes, in this case among evangelical church members across the United
States. These cassette tapes consisted in talks by John Todd, a man in
his late
twenties who claimed that he had been raised as a witch, that "witches
were
conspiring to take over the world," and that the "Illuminati" had a
secret plan
to install one of their own as the American president (Jimmy Carter[!))
who
then was sure to declare martial law, outlaw guns, and drive true
Christians
into the hills. 10
Todd's cassette tape and traveling ministry against the "Illuminati,"
chiefly
during 1976-1979, strongly encouraged Christian separatism and
survivalism
in the evangelical community. Todd himself, an enterprising fellow, in
addition
to tapes and a traveling ministry, reportedly sold dehydrated food to
aspiring
survivalists whom he encouraged with tales of the imminent domination of
the world by the Illuminati. His views were strange from the start but
grew
weirder and weirder. Todd claimed that he had been initiated into
something
called the "Grand Druid Council," asserted to be second to the
Rothschild
family in the occult cosa nostra. As Michael Barkun points out in A
Culture of
Conspiracy (2003), the anti-Rothschild rhetoric clearly comes freighted
with a
long history of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. I I Todd claimed to have
seen
secret "Illuminati" documents that ordered the removal of President
Nixon,
the eventual election of President Jimmy Carter (said to be a pawn of
the
Illuminati and perhaps even the Antichrist!) and finally "world
takeover" by
the "Illuminati" in '980.12 By the late '970s, Todd had taken to
claiming that
Ruth Carter Stapleton (President Carter's sister) was nothing less than
the
"most powerful witch in the world," and, further, that many prominent
evangelicalleaders
in fact were in cahoots with the "Illluminati."13
At this point we touch on one of the most bizarre elements of the
Illuminatiphobic
paranoia: its inevitable tendency to accuse other evangelicals of
being pawns of the Illuminati. The expose book The Todd Phenomenon
undoubtedly
would not have been written had Todd stuck to marketing his
Illuminatiphobia.
But, instead, Todd inaugurated what was to become a familiar
pattern in Illuminatiphobic circles: he began denouncing all the major
evangelicalleaders
as pawns of the Illuminati or as outright members. Jerry Falwell,
Bob Jones (founder of Bob Jones University), Billy Graham, Jim Bakker,
the
owners of Christian television-the list goes on and on of those whom
Todd
lI8 THE NEW INQUISITIONS
accused of having taken millions of dollars in money from the
"Illuminati:'
and so forth. One can see why survivalism is an almost inevitable
consequence
of such views: if American society (even evangelical leadership) is the
province
of Lucifer and about to collapse into "revolution" or "Illuminati"
domination,
then it makes a certain weird sense to encourage survivalist enclaves in
the
American hinterlands. But what on earth accounts for the attacks on
fellow
evangelicals as "Illuminati"?
As it turns out, such attacks by American evangelicals on American
evangelicals
as "Illuminati" remained a common phenomenon into the early
twenty-first century. Hicks and Lewis, authors of The Todd Phenomenon
(1979),
asserted that "what started out as a mere testimony of God's saving
grace has
grown into a full-blown inquisition."" This new inquisition of
evangelicals by
evangelicals continued, and is quite suited to new media. Just as Todd
used
cassette tapes to great effect in the 1970s, in the 2000S, the
Illuminatiphobes
seized on the Web and adapted Todd's rhetoric. Thus, Web sites such as
cuttingedge.org or thewatcherfiles.com proliferated, proclaiming the
guilt of
every major evangelical leader as occultists or pawns of the
"Illuminati." Those
evangelicals who decry the "Illuminati" and propose a conspiracist,
paranoiac
worldview are bound to be accused of being "Illuminati" themselves. A
simple
Web search will reveal sites claiming, like Todd himself, that
evangelical leader
Pat Robertson is a member of (or a pawn of) the Illuminati. 15
Now this is entertaining not least because Pat Robertson is arguably
more
responsible than anyone else in spreading Illuminatiphobia across the
United
States via his 1991 best-selling book The New World Order. The New World
Order
sold at least half a million copies and not only made a stir, but
arguably contributed
to the defeat of President George H. W. Bush in 1992. In fact, the
book's title came explicitly from the phrase often uttered by Bush Sr.
in
speeches during the latter half of his presidency, and Robertson makes
it quite
clear that he thoroughly disapproves of any Bushian effort toward global
United
Nations initiatives, and, for that matter, of the multinational military
coalition
that Bush Sr. brought together for the First Gulf War.10 Indeed, the
"entire
war:' he thinks, may well have been a "setup," a result of an
international
conspiracy.
Very early in the book, Robertson comes right out and directly writes
that
a "single thread runs from the White House to the State Department to
the
Council on Foreign Relations to the Trilateral Commission to secret
societies
to extreme New Agers. There must be a new world order." To him, it does
not
matter particularly which political party is in power; "some other
power" shapes
United States public policy irrespective of which party is putatively in
charge.
Robertson continues: "Some authors and researches have pointed to the
influHIGH
WEIRDNESS IN THE AMERICAN HINTERLANDS 119
ence of the eighteenth-century elite group, the Illuminati"; others
point to the
"demonic" New Age religion. But in any case, "the events of public
policy" are
"planned"; they spring "from the depth of something that is evil,
neither well
intentioned nor benevolent."17
To his research associates' credit, Robertson's book is documented-it is
not merely a farrago of wild, unsubstantiated assertions. For instance,
he cites
the historian Carroll Quigley's books The Anglo-American Establishment
(1981)
and Tragedy and Hope (1966), which emerge as sources fairly frequently
in
what we may loosely call the "conspiracy community." Quigley was a
historian
at Georgetown University, and is most remembered for discussing in print
the
history of connections between English wealth and aristocracy and an
American
ruling elite dominating the Council on Foreign Relations.18 Quigley was
actually a historian-albeit admittedly one whose major work cited by
Robertson,
Tragedy and Hope, is devoid of footnotes or sources-and the figures and
groups Robertson discusses are also real. The question is what
interpretation
one lays upon those historical subjects.
In The New World Order, the interpretation is consistently conspiracist.
Its
method is to take facts, events, or figures that appear to be unrelated,
and to
weave together out of them an unfailingly sinister picture of secret
powers and
alliances, all out to institute a one-world bureaucratic power that will
in turn
prepare the way for the Antichrist. The Illuminati figure in Robertson's
book
as a convenient reference point, but Robertson is not quite as cavalier
with the
term as many other evangelicals have been. He refers, of course, to Adam
Weishaupt and the founding of the Illuminati lodge on I May 1776, and
discusses
the diffusion of illuminist ideas through France and Germany. Weishaupt
did exist, after all. But not surprisingly, Robertson ignores the
profusion
of other secret or semi-secret societies in Europe during this period-he
ignores
context and parallels-and instead hurries on to claim that Marx and
Engels wrote their Communist Manifesto at the behest of secret societies
whose
origins were "German Illuminism."l9 He then hedges: "The Illuminist
streams
clearly flowed in Marxist Communism in the I840S. Whether there was a
meaningful confluence of these streams in Europe and elsewhere, remains
to
be seen."20 In any case, Robertson concludes, the aims of those who seek
a
new world order are "I) the elimination of private property, 2) the
elimination
of national governments and national sovereignty, 3), the elimination of
traditional
Judeo-Christian theism, and 4) a world government controlled by an
elite made up of those who are considered to be superior, or in the
occultic
sense, 'adepts' or 'illuminated: "21
Later in the book, however, Robertson engages the more usual kinds of
Illuminatiphobic rhetoric. He professes to know with unsubstantiated
certainty
120 THE NEW INQUISITIONS
that "Members of the Illuminati at the highest levels of the order were
atheists
and Satanists." Furthermore, "they made every effort to conceal their
true purposes
by the use of the name of Freemasonry."" Now we're off to the races.
Soon we learn that Masonic initiation into the 32nd Degree consists in
requiring
that "the candidate therefore must strike back at [three) assassins
which
are, courtesy of the Illuminati, the government, organized religion, and
private
property."23As if this weren't enough, the ritual is said by Robertson
to be
"based on the cult of Amitabha Buddha [sicl"24 On occasion, reading such
works is mind-bending. In toto, we have learned that "The New Age
religions,
the beliefs of the Illuminati, and illuminated Freemasonry all seem to
move
along parallel tracks with world Communism and world finance. Their
appeals
vary somewhat, but essentially they are all striving for the same
frightening
vision."2S
What does Robertson propose to do, based on his paranoiac view of the
world? Robertson lays out a clear agenda, beginning with the
organization of
the Christian Coalition, which will "build a significant database to use
to communicate
with those people who are regular voters." He predicts that Republicans
will retake the Senate in 1992, and the House in 1996, and insists that
an adequate presidential candidate will have to disavow "the
Rockefellercontrolled
Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission," and will
have to regard the United Nations and globalism with a very suspicious
eye.26
In George W. Bush, of course, Robertson's agenda was largely fulfilled,
and in
fact, the final chapter of The New World Order reads for the most part
like a
broad blueprint for what actually had happened in the United States by
2004,
with near one-party rule by Republicans.
In The New World Order, Robertson signaled the shift from the dispersed
inquisition of the "Satanic panic" to the broader sociopolitical venue
of an "epic
struggle" between "people of faith and people of the humanistic-occultic
sphere. "27He was by no means alone in this shift, of course. Another
important
figure in it was Tim laHaye, whom we first saw in 1967, informing the
young
Mike Warnke about the "Illluminati." laHaye, like Robertson, has been a
leading
figure in the American evangelical world, and instrumental in the fusion
between the Republican Party and Christian evangelical leaders. LaHaye
went
on to write or cowrite numerous books, including of course the
phenomenally
successful Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels that reportedly sold
fifteen
million copies in 2001 alone.28
The "Illuminati" play a more or less tangential role in the Left Behind
series, but they appear explicitly in laHaye's nonfiction book The
Rapture
(2002), where laHaye writes that:
HIGH WEIRDNESS IN THE AMERICAN HINTERLANDS 121
I myself have been a 50-year student of the satanically inspired,
centuries-old conspiracy to use government, education, and media to
destroy every vestige of Christianity within our society and establish
a new world order. Having read at least 50 books on the Illuminati,
I am convinced that it exists and can be blamed for many of man's
inhumane actions against his fellow man during the past 200 years.
Dr. Adam Weishaupt, a professor at Goldestdat University,
launched the Illuminati in Bavaria on May I, 1776. For 30 years my
wife and I have worked tirelessly to halt the effects of this conspiracy
on the church, our government, media, and the public schools;
so obviously I am not hostile to the conspiracy theory. An enormous
amount of evidence proves that the secularization of our once Judeo-
Christian society has not been an accident but is the result of the
devilishly clever scheming carried on by this secret order.29
LaHaye goes on to make the connection, if possible, even more explicit:
In fact, one reason the Illuminati conspirators are running far behind
their schedule to usher in the new world order is that the Religious
Right in the 1980s registered and got out the vote of a record
number of evangelical Christians in the election of Ronald Reagan
as president. His election didn't solve all our national problems; it
wasn't intended to. But it lit the way for other Christians who could
turn the conspirators back another decade.30
Here LaHaye, like Robertson, makes explicit that the ascent to political
power
of the Religious Right is to be seen as a manifestation of a global
sociopolitical
battle with none other than-the dreaded "Illuminati."
Another source for spreading Illuminatiphobia in evangelical circles is
Larry Burkett's novel The Illuminati (1991). The Illuminati was
published by
Thomas Nelson Publishers in Nashville, a leading evangelical press, and
reportedly
sold at least 250,000 copies. Its chapter on the history of the
Illuminati
is quite entertaining, if you like that sort of thing. The novel baldly
asserts that
"the Druids" "changed their name to the Freemasons and adopted many of
the same rituals and religious traditions practiced within the Christian
Churches." "From the Freemasons, a small group of world leaders emerged,
dedicated to the establishment of a worldwide order, known as the
'Illuminati.'
"31 The group, which "flourished from just after the time of Christ,"
was
composed of political, religious, economic, academic, and military
leaders, and
had a hand in the founding of the United States.32
122 THE NEW INQUISITIONS
Burkett continues with this hallucinatory history lesson: "Now, nearly
two
hundred and fifty years after America had become a nation, the Society
[the
Illuminati] was stronger than ever, and its original purpose was
becoming a
reality: a one-world economic system, controlled and directed by this
shadowy
group of the most influential men (and now women) in the world."33Lenin,
Hitler, and Mao had been members hand-picked to unify the world, but had
failed, so a new "Leader" was no doubt on the way, Burkett wrote,
perhaps via
the sinister, Illuminati-controlled Council on Foreign Relations in the
United
States.34I mention Burkett's novel here because it underscores what we
see in
the works of Robertson and laHaye as well as in the works ofTexe Marrs
(who
claims to have sold two million books)-indeed, the script is almost
identical.35
There is an imaginary sinister sociopolitical power called the
"Illuminati," they
have immense power via organizations such as the Trilateral Commission
and
the Council on Foreign Relations, and only the American evangelical
right can
stop them.
The Christian Illuminati
What I find particularly fascinating is that laHaye and other
evangelicals
went on to cofound a shadowy semisecret advisory group of their own: the
Council for National Policy. Here is how one investigative reporter
described
this group:
An elite group with only a few hundred members, the CNP meets
three times a year, usually at posh hotels or resorts, going to
extraordinary
lengths to keep its agenda and membership secret. According
to members willing to speak about it, however, the council unites
rightwing
billionaires with scores of conservative Christian activists and
politicians, and these encounters have spawned countless campaigns
and organizations. Its ranks have included prominent politicians
such as Ed Meese and John Ashcroft, and among its members
can be found an editor of the conservative National Review, leading
televangelists such as Pat Robertson and Falwell, representatives of
the Heritage Foundation and other key think tanks, and activists
including
Grover Norquist and Oliver North.
Supported by moneybags such as Texas oilman Nelson Bunker
Hunt, Amway founder Richard DeVos and beer magnate Joseph
Coors, some in the group helped fund Oliver North's secret campaign
to aid the Nicaraguan contra rebels during the 1980s and fiHIGH
WEIRDNESS IN THE AMERICAN HINTERLANDS 123
nanced the right-wing jihad against President Clinton in the 1990s.
(The impeachment effort was reportedly conceived at a June 1997
meeting of the CNP in Montreal.) In addition, the group has funded
an army of Christian organizers. Falwell says that in the past two
decades,
he has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for his ventures,
including Liberty University, through the CNP. "My guess is that
literally
billions of dollars have been utilized through the Council for
National Policy that would not otherwise have been available," he
says. Bush attended a CNP meeting at the start of his presidential
campaign in 1999 to seek support, and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld took part in the group's gathering [in] April [2003] in
Washington, D.C.'6
In other words, what LaHaye and other leading evangelicals did was to
create
the mirror image of what they most feared-they created a Christian
Illuminati.
The imaginary Illuminati are held to control vast wealth; the Christian
Illuminati in fact have access to vast wealth through very real
billionaires. The
imaginary Illuminati are said to have enormous political power; the
Christian
Illuminati actually possess great political power. The imaginary
Illuminati are
said to see themselves as the "elect," or the "illuminated"; the
Christian Illuminati
see themselves as God's "anointed" and as "born again"-yes, illuminated.
The imaginary Illuminati are said to be secretive and shadowy as they
determined much of the course of United States policy behind the scenes;
the
Christian Illuminati are in fact secretive and shadowy as they
determined much
of the course of United States policy behind the scenes. The imaginary
Illuminati
are said to have the power to vet all the candidates for President; the
Christian Illuminati actually do have the power to vet presidential
candidates,
as we see in the case of George W. Bush. Administration officials,
Republican
legislators, evangelical leaders-all converged in the secretive "Council
for National
Policy," its very name the mirror image of the Illuminatiphobe's hated
"Council on Foreign Relations." Odd, no?
Not really. Recall the transformation that took place in Christianity:
initially,
Christians were subjected to brutal Roman persecution; yet later,
institutional
Roman Christianity subjected "heretics" to brutal persecution and
death. It is perhaps not so surprising that American evangelical
Christianityhaving
ginned up enough fear over an imaginary Illuminati as a paranoiac
explanation for massive social changes in the United States and the
worldwould
itself go on to create just such a group in reality. The psychological
dynamics are clear and fairly well established. Jeffrey Victor, author
of Satanic
Panic, puts it this way:
124 THE NEW INQUISITIONS
In conditions of shared social stress with complex, unclear, and
ambiguous
causes, people need a quick, easy explanation for their
plight. The easiest solution is to blame scapegoats. In Western
societies,
the scapegoating process has traditionally been guided by the
blueprint provided in a demonology, which attributes the causes of
evil to a small, conspiratorial group seeking to undermine the moral
order of society.... In the past, the demonology has been used in
different times and places to scapegoat such groups as heretics,
Jews, witches, Catholics, and Freemasons.37
Victor concludes: "The long history of accusations against heretics,
Jews,
and witches tells us nothing about heretics, Jews, and witches. However,
it tells
us a lot about the mind-set of the claims-makers."38 Exactly. Is it,
then, really so
surprising that the culmination of Illuminatiphobia is the creation of
what
amounts to a Christian Illuminati?
Neither the Satanic panic nor Illuminatiphobia have vanished from the
American hinterlands, of course, as a brief search on the internet
readily reveals.
The Illuminati, it is said, secretly control the weather-better to blame
the Illuminati than one's lawnmower's and automobile's emissions, after
all,
for global warming. The Illuminati are behind those sinister
environmentalists,
just as they are behind any efforts at international cooperation, and
the
Illuminati already have taken over all the main evangelical leaders,
including
Pat Robertson and Tim laHaye, who are themselves occultists, for lo!
look at
the occult symbols on some of their book covers.39 Here the conspiracy
theories
reveal again their recursive loop, as the "conspiracy" is widened to
claim as
"operatives" even the evangelical leaders who "expose" it.
Such is the rhetoric one finds on fringe Web sites generated from the
American hinterlands: once a true believer has embarked on the course of
paranoiac thinking, evidently he or she can never be suspicious enough.
Indeed,
one of the growing conspiracy theories is that the Illuminati is a name
for-I am not kidding here-shapeshifting reptilians from the "fourth
dimension"
who take the form of world leaders like Bill Clinton or George Bush, who
plot against humanity itself, and who don't shrink from sexual abuse of
children!
The Christian link? The shape shifting reptilians are "verified" by
Genesis,
for after all, it was a serpent that tempted Adam and Eve.'° Can a
reptilian
witch-hunt be far away? As Kurt Vonnegut might write: and so it goes.41
Yetanother book that crops up frequently in such circles is the The
Gnostic
Empire Strikes Back by Peter Jones. In it, the author jumbles together
"militant
feminism," "Eastern religions," "homosexual rights," "nature worship,"
"political
correctness," "New Age Gnosticism," and "mysticism" so as to stir up
HIGH WEIRDNESS IN THE AMERICAN HINTERLANDS 125
anxiety among fellow American evangelicals. Jones claims that a "pagan
'Gnostic'
empire, personified by [Roman emperor) Julian [the Apostate] and so
roundly defeated by the early church many centuries back, is now openly
and
brazenly striking back."42 Hence, he recommends "Using, Not Blunting the
Sword of the Lord" because virtually the whole of American society is
become
infested with "diabolical" influences."
Clearly, the American appetite for paranoiac conspiracism is rather
large.
Indeed, Illuminatiphobia already existed in late-eighteenth- and
earlynineteenth-
century America, after the distribution of John Robison's Proofs of
a Conspiracy (1798)-a book still cited by nearly all the
Illuminatiphobes (including
Pat Robertson). What I have called the "second America"-literalist,
often paranoid, and prone to witch-hunts-has a long history of
credulousness,
of which the Satanic panic, Illuminatiphobia, and reptiliphobia for that
matter
are only relatively recent instances. All of this belongs to what the
historian
Richard Hofstadter labeled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," a
fashion
that seems to retain its coterie of gullible aficionados in every era."
But
these subterranean currents in American society almost always remain on
the
fringes of society, and I retain faith that what I earlier called the
"first America"
of Jeffersonian pluralism and common sense will continue to prevail.
But our investigation is not quite finished-it has another chapter. For
laHaye's Council for National Policy anointed candidate George W. Bush
in
1999, and as it turned out, his administration went on to effectively
bring
together many of the themes in this book.45
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