The Demon in America's Sacred Narrative
America is a religion consumed by the eternally recurring apocalypse, and war is its cleansing ritual.
America is a Religion. On July 4, 1776, the United States was baptized with these words: “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor”. By this oath, a nation was born and launched on its mythic passage of becoming. The Founders—our “creators”—had imagined more than a nation, however. They had also drafted the story arc of a divinely heroic journey, centering the United States as the culmination (to be) of History.
This is America’s sacred narrative. Since its founding, the United States has pursued, with burning religious fervor, a higher calling to redeem humanity, punish the wicked, and christen a golden millennium on earth. While France, Britain, Germany, and Russia stalked the world in search of new colonies and conquests, America has steadfastly hewed to its unique vision of divine mission as “God’s New Israel”. Whereas the mythical narratives of other great powers were cruelly self-centered, American scripture was—and remains today—“To Serve Man”.
Thus, among all the revolutions unleashed by Modernity, the United States declares itself—in its own scripture—to be the trailblazer and pathfinder of humanity. America is the exceptional nation—the singular, the pure-of-heart, the baptizer, and redeemer of all peoples despised and downtrodden: The “last, best hope of earth”.
This is the catechism of the American Civil Religion. In the world’s eyes, all this may seem like a ritual of self-serving vanity, yet the Civil Religion is the national article of faith for Americans. It is Holy Writ, which takes rhetorical form through what Americans take to be History. Yet this vision of history is better understood as a body of sacred literature, in many ways comparable to Islam.
In place of the Qur’an, America has its Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Instead of the Sira (السيرة النبوية), Hadith (حديث), and Tafsir (تفسير), America has the Federalist Papers, presidential homilies beginning with Washington’s Farewell Address, and traditions, stories, and sayings of the Founders—all the way to modern-day interpretations offered by successor “great Americans”. Instead of Fiqh (فقه) and its Madhhab (مذهب) system, America has its own schools of jurisprudence to interpret and translate—in a sort of Ijtihad (اجتهاد)—its scripture into the proper “way to act” (cf. Madhhab).
We can only truly apprehend American thought and action today through the lens of religion. Indeed, America is a religion as uncompromising as Islam. For instance, one may assume that Americans lack Shahada (ٱلشَّهَادَةُ), or “the testimony” to the faith—but it was not so long ago that students in all American public schools would recite The Pledge of Allegiance (“the oath”) daily. Not only is America’s national anthem a pure hymn, but its sacred words—Freedom and Democracy—are also chanted ritually by its people just asʾIn shāʾ Allāh is by Muslims.
American Civil Religion is in many ways comparable to Islam. Just as Dar-al-Islam relentlessly pushed for a global community “by fire and sword”, the United States has sought a no less relentless universalism.
Our sacred literature defines who we are, where we come from, and where we are going—and as they do for the Islamic Ummah (أُمّة), they form the riverbed of our national self. Moreover, like Islam, America’s mission is also “rightly” guided, to be fulfilled only when all humanity is gathered in its “democratic” embrace. Just as Dar-al-Islam, in its heyday, relentlessly pushed for a global community “by fire and sword”, the United States has sought a no less relentless universalism in its apogee century.
Our sacred literature defines American identity as a grand narrative arc endowed by God—to be realized through a recurring series of ever-ascending epiphanic stories: a historical cycle of ecstatic struggles shaping America’s mythic passage of becoming and culminating in an apocalypse—“revelation” or “unveiling” (Ancient Greek apokálupsis). Within these apocalyptic cycles, the hidden meaning of the American sacred story arc is revealed only through the realization of universal democracy. As with Islam, the American religion too culminates in an apocalypse.
As such, the American story arc can only be fulfilled through battle. Every “peak life” moment in the American sacred narrative has been realized through mutual sacrifice and the transcendental power of victory in battle. From its founding moment to today, war has been the anvil of America, and blood its divine annealing.
Not only is each major American war regarded as a benchmark of progress toward a millenarian Grail, but each American generation has been encouraged to move the yardstick forward. While not every struggle succeeded, each drive built a launchpad for the next big push. So all-consuming, so all-powerful is the American sacred narrative that, in over 250 years, there has been no significant historical break in the unyielding American drive for Jihad.
Sacred narrative rules Americans: it rules what they think, say, and do. The question is, who controls this sacred narrative? Of course, the American Gospel is the creation of the American people. However much we believe—if often figuratively—in its divine inspiration, America’s “good news” is of our own making. And just as with the Constitution itself, we theoretically have the power to amend it. Yet, given that the imperative for exegesis is carved into the Ur-tablets of American Civil Religion, sectarianism becomes inevitable.
American Civil Religion is inextricably linked with the Reformation, Calvinist Christianity, and the bloody history of Protestantism, with America’s sacred narrative shaped and christened through the country’s first and second Great Awakenings. Although its scriptural reading became secular in the Progressive era, the American religion still remained tethered to its formative roots. Indeed, even our contemporary “Church of Woke” cannot escape its original Calvinist Christian tubers.
Time and again in American history, autochthonous native sects have tried to “revise” the sacred narrative, perhaps even transfiguring it. What is more—given the Jihadi messianism that frames America’s national scripture—this revisionist path must pass through the valley of kin bloodletting and civil war.
The apocalypse that brings the promised Millennium to Mankind must necessarily reflect the apocalyptic yearning in the American Gospel itself: if fallen into corruption, we must be purified and made worthy again to act as the World Redeemer. For its sins, a corrupted sacred narrative cannot find expiation. Rather, a New Testament that is stainless must replace a corroded Old Testament. Rebirth thus requires passage through the cleansing fires of war. Indeed, obsession with the purifying, consecrating potential of the trials—and terrors—inherent in war is the demon that lurks hidden in the warren of our sacred literature.
This demonic possession with war has been hard-wired into America’s very birth as a nation. The American Revolution compelled the new nation to cast out its own brothers and cast off its ancient kinship with Britain. The very source code of America’s sacred narrative—the Declaration—was predicated on the transfiguration of our (former) kin into (henceforth) alien outsiders—if not enemies. Independence required metamorphosis. The passage to “revelation” lay through the fire of existential, internecine war.
In American Gospel, rebirth requires passage through the cleansing fires of war. Obsession with the purifying, consecrating potential of the trials—and terrors—inherent in war is the demon that lurks hidden in America’s sacred narrative.
The Declaration also foreshadowed America’s second demonic possession. The American Civil War evolved from a pronounced sectarian split that raced increasingly out of control after 1815. Two wildly different, and yet eerily similar evangelizing, neo-Christian sects drove a schism in the Civil Religion that took on the passionate intensity of Europe’s religious wars (1545-1648).
America’s third possession with holy war swelled into nothing less than a global apocalypse. Here the United States had to confront not rival sects within the American Civil Religion, but rather the (gnostic) Demiurge itself in a series of dark manifestations—Fascism, Nazism, Communism—which could only be defeated by the Light.
Since 1945, the United States has often conflated the neo-sectarian battles it has faced at home with its universal jihad to uplift and redeem humanity abroad. The core of America’s sacred narrative—its self-understanding as divinely-ordained, universalist, and apocalyptic—is, in its intense religiosity, troubling. That Americans are wholly oblivious to such religious zeal is disturbing. Nevertheless, this sacred narrative has driven Americans in every generation, urging them to recreate and relive their original story arc—an eternal recurrence that now has global ramifications.
This brings us to our current predicament. Since 2014, a rapidly-growing new sect—“The Church of Woke”—has sought to transform and fully possess the American civil religion, to reign as the successor faith. Ironically, the fervor of its evangelism channels the post-millennialism of the First Great Awakening, whose messianism was codified in Novus Ordo Seclorum (New Order of the Ages).
How did the American civil religion take shape? What is the lineage of the critical moment in which we find ourselves today?
The Four Pillars of American Righteousness
American Civil Religion is driven by four underlying beliefs and attitudes: 1) missionarianism, 2) messianism, 3) Manichaeism, and 4) millenarianism. First, it is believed that the United States is on a mission from God, as Elwood Blues reminds us. America is charged by God (or Providence) and thus carries with it His authority, the American people serving as divine agents. With America’s founding, this divine voice—above and outside, yet rising also within—becomes immanent in America’s Founders and its “elect”.
The second driver of American theology is its messianic idealism, which is rooted in an eschatological view of existence. America, it is believed, has been chosen—as the “exceptional nation”—to raise up the downtrodden and succor the oppressed. America is the Redeemer Nation par excellence. The world’s “salvation” rests on America, and the nation must take it upon itself to overthrow and punish the wicked, to seek out and cast down Evil itself. This surety in their anointed role in a “last judgment” makes Americans especially prone to adopting a black-or-white mentality. America represents the Light, fighting against the eternal “Dark Side”—this is the third pillar and the foundation of America’s Manichaeism.
Finally, as the shining city on a hill, America represents God’s chosen nation—its people having the holy charge of delivering on the postmillennial promise of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. America will thus shepherd Humanity through a mythic passage to the blessed “broad, sunlit uplands”. These four mental frames are inextricable from our very being as Americans and form the crux of our worldview even today.
Before examining these pillars of American Civil Religion in more detail, a word of caution. All nations have foundational myths and—whether heavily or more lightly—they are all ruled by them. America is not unique among nations. Yet its sacred narrative is truly distinct, and a powerful force in its national psyche. This sacred narrative cannot fully capture the richness and diversity of an original ethos once rooted in ancient traditions. American culture remains a loam of intertwining folkways and worldviews that still recalls its historical antecedents. Some have called these “Albion’s Seed”.
Yet time and again, overzealous elites, driven by extreme and utopian agendas, have successfully appropriated the Civil Religion and bent it to their faith and universalist worldview, however at odds with contrasting normative traditions in the American way of life.
Nevertheless, every American generation from the founding forward has been ruled by an embracing civil religion. If America's sacred narrative has been viewed and interpreted through the prism of a dominant strain of thought—owing more to Thomas Jefferson than to George Washington—it nonetheless has captured the American identity, body and soul. How did a menagerie of colonial folkways, habits, and heritage homogenize into the uncompromising and absolutist American Civil Religion we know today?
A minority of zealots, driven by extreme and utopian agendas, have successfully appropriated the American Civil Religion and bent it to their faith and universalist worldview. They are the masked coachmen of revolution.
The passion of America’s birth—the Revolutionary upheaval felt by every citizen—offered a fanatical minority the perfect setting for capturing the American imagination with the promise of a “project” everlasting, a perfect cauldron for effecting a national metamorphosis.
Then, out of the chaotic possibility of this milieu, a new religion and its sacred narrative were able to crystallize, while also creating the conditions for proselytizing a more passive and politically-agnostic colonial society. A minority of zealots—cherished in generations to come, like “The Sons of Liberty”—became the masked coachmen of the Revolution.
From late-colonial America to our time, true believers have “driven” every American apocalyptic story arc. As with most revolutions in history, the firebrand few are the evangelists shaping the mayhem of change, injecting their righteousness into the spiritual arteries of the many.
I. Missionary America
The American Mission flows from a divine spring. Over time, the Puritan community’s original covenant with God was transformed into America’s prime directive. America thus became “a city upon a hill, where the eyes of all people”—not only in America but around the world—gaze in wonder upon it. The resulting Missionary state has only one inner yearning: to bathe all peoples in the baptismal water of democracy, freedom, and equality.
This American Mission has been awakened and rechristened four times. The so-called First and Second “Great Awakenings” were dramatic national events galvanized by the spiritual fires of Christian revivalism. Preceding the American Revolution, the First Great Awakening electrified the cry of “Liberty” with an evangelical edge, which echoed the ringing prophecy of Jonathan Edwards.
The Second Great Awakening birthed new American sects—like Christian Science, the Shakers, and the Church of Latter-day Saints—and led both pro- and anti-slavery movements toward sectarian evangelism, with the full expectation of an apocalyptic struggle ahead. The period of Reconstruction that followed was aimed at fulfilling a salvational narrative that would not simply redeem the enslaved, but also wash away the sins of America itself—a second national baptism.
Christian national epiphanies were then succeeded by a different kind of third great awakening, although it was never formally called that. Yet out of the corruption of the Gilded Age and the purgatory of industrial life, a movement called the Social Gospel rose up to help Americans discover a new promise of salvation in this life. This movement in turn animated an emerging Progressive cause: to be as midwives, so that old Christianity might give birth to a new, secular vision that would still remain true to its former self. Wholly-secular Progressives gladly accepted Christian blessings on an enterprise that had no interest in old Christian roots.
Despite ostensibly rejecting all Christian ancestry, however, the ritual and doctrine of this new incarnation of Civil Religion would still hew to the original, sacred Calvinist form. Only, all future American apocalypses could henceforth command and entrance us with a secular voice.
American Mission thus mixes redemption with conversion. Protestations about making the world “safe”—as claimed by Woodrow Wilson in his Declaration of War speech, or Samatha Power’s Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in our time—are misleading. In fact, the rhetorical invocation of a “safe and secure world” represents a divine American dispensation for its true goal: converting all nations and peoples to the American Religion.
This story arc began with the Second Great Awakening when Christian missionaries “proceeded out of the United States to the four corners of the earth”. By the 1890s, when the nation-state was flung onto the world, the state had unfurled new mission banners and catechisms in a secular voice, such as: “conversion through instruction”, “education in democracy”, and “American Civilization”.
In fact, the Taft Commission, setting the cultural compass of American rule over the Philippines, made education in democracy and American Civilization the nation-building project of the day. Hundreds of American teachers (the “Thomasites”) were shipped in, and the US Army built thousands of schools. Thus, school-building became the heroic trope of democracy-building, an official “word made flesh” to inspire later “nation-building" missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hence, the neon call of the American Mission evolved from self-redemption to world redemption. Initially driven by Christian revivalism, America’s missionary zeal soon pivoted to accommodate a secular, yet still-sacred covenant (Wilson’s 14 Points made explicit use of this word) with the world as such. The authority of this implicit covenant is still in full force today. No other world religion has proselytized its doctrines more aggressively.
II. Messianic America
American Messianism channels the power of theological legacies steeped in Calvin’s vision of predestination. It reflects a collective embrace of predestination, enfolding both nation and citizen. In 1765, John Adams declared that the American People were guided by “benign providence”, and that their Mission had messianic dimensions:
I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.
Hence, America is not only “messianic” in character—as in, “possessed by passion and zeal”—but manifests an implicitly biblical vision proclaiming its faith in the predestined nature of its passage. A “chosen nation” divinely elected to act in the name of Providence as the world’s Redeemer, the grand arc of the American sacred narrative marches on forever forward—with America as the arm of God—toward the “blessed” millennium. Reveling in the rapture of this messianic zeitgeist, Walt Whitman could thus exclaim in 1860:
I am the chanter — I chant aloud over the pageant; …
I chant the new empire, grander than any before — As in a vision it comes to me;
I chant America, the Mistress — I chant a greater supremacy; …
And you, Libertad of the world!
Or as Herman Melville sang in 1850:
We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours. In our youth is our strength…our deep voice is heard afar. Long enough have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us.
By the mid-19th century, America’s ether of Mission was fully infused with “Young Libertad” messianism, in a dimorphic smelting of Testaments Old and New. Indeed Edwards’ legacy managed to create an authentic American-Christian voice however removed this may seem from the realities of mid-19th-century American political life.
III. Manichaen America
The idea of an eternal struggle of good against evil goes back to ancient Persia and the gnostic, dualistic religion of the prophet Mani (آیینِ مانی). This is an enduring theme whose deep current flows into Christianity and its many heresies (i.e., Albigensians, Bogomils, and Paulicians). American Manichaeism assumes a Demiurge—and having conjured him proclaims him as its own. Once America claims the entire power of the Good and makes it wholly inherent in its Self-conception, the Alien, the Stranger, and the denominated Other can then all at once—through the performance of national liturgy—be transubstantiated into pure Evil.
In this reflexive act, othering thus precedes ultimate, official vilification. Religious faith creates a dispensation whereby the Other can be transformed into world-corrupting evil. It is with this sacred injunction that America’s gatekeepers of public opinion regularly accuse and ostracize dissenting American voices.
The original icon of American evil emerged with the American Revolution with which it remains forever synced. During this primal American Apocalypse, the Revolutionaries cast out former brothers as the alleged agents of the primeval tyrant, George III. The hot Freudian allure of turning Brother into Other reached its peak in America’s Second Apocalypse. During the Civil War, “Brother against Brother” became the war’s everyday motto. Compared to the Revolutionary War, American apostasy had matured. In the Civil War, expiation and atonement—rejoining the body of the (American) Church—became the Union’s most urgent task.
Moving into the 20th century, a working reconciliation was needed through which the former enemy might find atonement and be welcomed—on bended knee—into the true faith guaranteed by American prophecy. This is wholly in keeping with America’s original formula for dealing with the prototypical Other, whereby the Tory—unforgiven perpetrators of (our) original sin—were cast out and exiled from the City on a Hill for eternity: banished to the wintry fastness beyond America’s firmament, known today as Canada. Thus, the first two apocalypses of America set up a dualistic pathology in the American sacred narrative: ostracism or redemption.
America’s novel 20th-century solution was to transform the enemy by distilling all evil and sin onto a “satanic” individual to be the new personification of evil. Hence, America’s primordial enemy was not Germans, but Hitler; not Soviets, but Stalin; not Russians, but Putin. Evil personified as Antichrist—has been the holy-of-holies in America’s redemption formula for close to a century.
IV. Millenarian America
Although this is not the common sense of the word today, “apocalypse”, as discussed earlier, means revelation—lifting the veil on God’s Word and His Plan. “Apocalypse”, then, does not signify the end of the world but rather its culmination: “All history is finally apocalyptic”.
A particular apocalyptic outcome—postmillennialism—is embedded in the American sacred narrative. It can be traced, again, to Jonathan Edwards. Historians have accused Edwards of “catalyzing this unique strain of eschatology”, thereby steering America in the direction of “manifest destiny”.
The sudden fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in a false dawn. America’s ruling class was simply not prepared for such a serendipitous apocalypse.
Today, no “rightly guided” American may consider, let alone accept, a lesser eschaton. For example, given the dogmas of the American Civil Religion, a “realism” that dares to question the divine power of democracy, instantly becomes anathema. A vision of the “national interest” that is unmoored from our sacred plan amounts to apostasy. Let us consult our American scriptures. First, Revelation 14:19:
And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the wrath of God.
Compare it to this verse from the liturgy of the Civil War—The Battle Hymn of the Republic:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.
Thus, in the wake of its second apocalyptic war, in 1865, with the polity purified and evil cast down, a new America could be born.
Each one of America’s national crises, Americans believed, could imminently usher in a millennial age—a “Novus Ordo Seclorum”, as prefigured and prophesied in Washington’s words. The apocalypse and its revelatory power thus always point to the predestined end of our story arc—a heavenly mimesis in which the divine world is reflected on earth.
Hence, in 1945, some eighty years after the Civil War, the third American apocalypse was regarded as yet another providential opportunity to fulfill America’s ordained prophecy. Even as the promise of a final judgment was left frozen by the Cold War and deferred for posterity to claim, the U.S. establishment began to flog a Millennium-in-Waiting: that there was still an impending “Free World” to be realized someday in a holy liberal international order.
The sudden fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in a false dawn. America’s ruling class was simply not prepared for such a serendipitous apocalypse. They spasmodically declared a “New World Order” and celebrated the “end of history”—as though all mankind would simply bow down to America’s great seal.
Of course, the promised Millennium remains elusive still. But that has not stopped the U.S. foreign policy establishment from attaching existential stakes to every new war it wages, lashing onto them the divinely-sanctioned dreams embedded in America’s mythic quest—always tantalizing—for spiritual fulfillment. Remarkably, the depth and breadth of America’s civil religion rival any world faith—not only in the enormity of its theology, the power of its dogma, and the grip of its sacred literature, but also in its manically beneficent yet still brutal impact on humanity and history.
To better understand the American sacred narrative, it can be helpful to evaluate America’s national story arc as one would do a TV series. As such, the American hit series has already been renewed for a number of seasons—even if ours is a sacred story organized around apocalypses.
As a universalist religion rooted from birth in apocalypse, America’s 250-year lifecycle is wholly captured by its sacred apocalyptic arc, punctuated by three astonishing “revelations”: its birth with the American Revolution, a baptism or purification in the Civil War, and a world redemption during the two World Wars—nearly fulfilled, yet forestalled.
So what might be in store in the new, possibly final, season? Where, in fact, are we heading in this operatic ordeal?
The Fourth American Apocalypse?
Americans still deny that their national ideology amounts to a civil religion. Arguably, Robert Bellah’s big insight on the topic has had standing since 1973, cited intermittently in American mainstream media. Yet such acknowledgment is occluded and rare, and popular awareness is almost non-existent. Americans resolutely stonewall their civil religion for three reasons.
First, the United States was born in the fires of Enlightenment thought, where religion—especially the Roman Church—equaled superstition. Edward Gibbon—whose own epiphany came in the Roman Forum in 1775—pinned Rome’s “Decline and Fall” squarely on the forces of “barbarism and religion”.
Yet the Founders inhabited a milieu shaped by a Protestant zeitgeist, which ruled their lives. If Americans were to be champions of Reason—where “Science is real” and (in almost any dispute) “settled”—that Temple of Reason had to have its roots entangled in Calvinist Predestination. Of course, any “rightly-guided” American knows that his country is synonymous with Progress—America can never be Medieval. Hence, within an attitude entirely lacking in self-awareness, any regnant state religion—with its harsh religious law—would appear backward, primitive, or, as it is often said of Islamic fundamentalism, tantamount to “returning to the 14th century”.
Furthermore, Americans—almost without exception—cannot conceive of religion in the absence of a formal, confessional “Church”. Thus, even at the height of the Cold War, the evils of Communism were not identified as the sins of an alternate church. The Marxist-Leninist canon could not possibly be theology: instead, it had to be “ideology”. After all, how could “godless commies” be religious? Add to this the fact that many on the Americans Left actually sympathized with the “idea” of Socialism and found it appealing for the United States if it was “done right”. In other words, they believed that a healthy dose of American democracy and freedom would surely cleanse Marxism of its ills and distill its otherwise noble ideals. Socialism failed in Russia because it was not anointed by America’s “good news”—an American version would have thrived.
Finally, an American confession of faith—the open enunciation that a national civil religion indeed does exist—would appear to void the Constitution’s establishment clause. However, can the original American civil religion—as conceived by the Founders—credibly be called an established church? They would almost certainly say, No. After all, a civil religion is not a church—at least not in the way the Enlightenment understood religion. In the 18th century, “religion” meant an established state church. Canon law and common law were thus both within the prerogatives of the state, which the Founders understood as Parliament and the King. Owning the Church of England meant that the British state could—and did—tell people how to live and think, as evidenced by the Act of Uniformity, the Test Acts, and the penal laws.
These are some of the reasons that some might resist framing the latest faith movement emerging from today’s Fourth Great Awakening as another familiar, even classic, sectarian challenge to the civil religion. In fact, the “Awokening” is comparable to those aggressively-opposed evangelical sects embodied in the North and the South that thrust America into (internal) combat in the 1850s after the Second Great Awakening. And its provenance can even be traced back directly to the secular-socialist themes of the Progressive Era that were reflected in the Social Gospel.
Yet the growth of this virulent, new American sect goes much further, signaling the emergence of a putative new American church for real. Here, “Church of Woke” refers to a prospective legal edifice, which seeks to fundamentally revise and transform America’s constitutional compact through semi-sacred, state-sponsored doctrines including “Critical Race Theory” (CRT), “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI), “Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance” (ESG).
In the 20th century, state protection and privilege created a political proscenium over a coalition of three separate, secular-spiritual identity groups: Feminists, People of Color, and LGBT. Each of these sects has within them a gaggle of restive factions and denominations. This alliance of sects has merged into an “intersectional” political coalition that could be sustained so long as its shared agenda remains within reach.
Under the new Wokeist religion, the boundaries between the global and the local, the domestic and the foreign wither away, to be replaced by a proselytizing, totalizing, and imperial Americanism.
If their joint agenda were to be constitutionally implemented however, the Church of Woke would be able to transform American life: not only would it establish an apparatus of control over how ordinary citizens think and behave, but it would also ordain a new ruling elite as the new clerics of the Church.
The Church of Woke’s efforts to consecrate the American ruling class—through an anointed corps of true believers—are less about breeding a new aristocracy but rather to preserve elite control over wealth and power in American life. In this respect, the Church does not simply seek to reinterpret (ijtihād) the doctrine, law, and scripture of the original civil religion like other sects in American history. It also represents a pathway for the ruling class to consolidate power and maintain the status quo. “Woke radicalism” is, perhaps, not so radical after all—but its extremism portends sectarian autos-da-fé and existential wars of civil religion like those characterizing late antebellum America.
In another sense, the rising and flexing Church of Woke more formally resembles—in its successful subversion of the state and its ruling elites—insurgent Christianity at the end of the 3rd century CE. What might alarm is that this faith movement has managed to capture the “Commanding Heights” of American Life in a little more than a decade. Yet this too points to a symbiotic relationship between church and state that is as timeless as ever. Just as the early Church captured the Roman aristocracy, so did those noble Romans seize the Church to reclaim their hold on power. The civil religion is as much a venal, as it is a sacred, tool of power.
The Church of Woke has, for the moment, captured the U.S. Federal State and the dominant institutions in American Life. Many historical antecedents of the Woke faith movement today, namely the pre-Civil War evangelical American Calvinist sects such as Slave Power and Abolitionists, also tried to appropriate the foundational American civil religion and transfigure it into an established state church in their image. Neither of these fanatical sects was ultimately successful. Yet in equating its movement theology and dogma to what should be (U.S.) law, Woke doctrine is indeed unleashing an American Sharia and demanding the establishment of a truly new American state religion—as understood by our 18th-century Founders—more forcefully than any other sectarian movement in American history.
In equating its movement theology and dogma to what should be U.S. law, Woke doctrine is indeed unleashing an American Sharia and demanding the establishment of a truly new American state religion.
How is all this relevant to America’s engagement in the world, and more directly, to America’s primacist foreign policy as evidenced by the war in Ukraine? Under the new Wokeist religion, the boundaries between the global and the local, the domestic and the foreign wither away, to be replaced by a proselytizing, totalizing, and imperial Americanism.
As an ersatz of the old American civil religion, the Church of Woke wields universalism with a vengeance, prosecuting its ideology at home and abroad in equal measure. Raising high the banner of Woke globalism, America’s original “good news” is thus seamlessly replaced with a more virtuous successor vision. “Nationalism” and love of country will henceforth be judged as backward and primitive forces. “Populism” and agency of the people, so long celebrated as the soul of the American nation, becomes tantamount to autocracy, a medieval evil to be purged from the United States.
America’s (domestic) “corruption” under such “reactionary” forces becomes linked to the heinous influence of foreign states and maligned international actors, such as Hungary or Russia infecting the American Body. Such Woke hysteria closely resembles the deadly bacillus of Red Scare Communism in the early Cold War, with Russia serving as the “Great Satan” in the liberal American establishment’s global culture wars.
To the evil of a reactionary, barbaric, and Rainbow-phobic Russia—and to the larger looming threat posed to the liberal international order by a global autocratic axis—we must also add the apocalyptic terror the Church of Woke feels about climate change. Climate apocalypse is perhaps the greatest blanket dispensation ever devised by American universalism to justify U.S. global hegemony. In the cause of saving the planet, every American intervention can appear righteous. Notice how Dark-Side-of-the-Force autocrats are also fossil-fuel-using climate polluters, in league with the gas-guzzling killers (i.e., oil companies) in our own midst. In this light, foreign threats appear to only mirror the deeper threat at home.
Ultimately, the strategy of the Church of Woke and its clerical class is to exploit an intersectional crusade against pagan backwardness, evil anti-genderism, and climate apostasy abroad—Russia, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, etc.—to justify a domestic jihad at home. Moreover, as it pushes its brand of Girl Boss Militarism, its parishioner group “tilts more female”. In time, America’s new “Woke Imperium” will forcibly bring all Americans—and the world—into the fold of the new Church, or so the believers hope.
It is this convenient symbiosis or identity between enemies foreign and domestic that is most troubling. In its fundamentally global quest for a fourth apocalypse—wherein converting all humanity means ensuring total American conversion as well—the Church of Woke rejects the old, original American civil religion and its central concern: America. While its U.S.-centeredness reveals a degree of historical continuity, its aspiration to globalize Americanism in order to create a homogeneous world state based on its ideology and universal values betrays and subverts the old civil religion.
The unfolding fourth apocalypse brought on by the “awokening” has always been different from earlier renditions (or seasons) of the American apocalypse in our national series. Apocalypse Deferred (1945-1950)—a sequel to Third Apocalypse—drove the United States into 60 years (1963-2023) of repeated and unrequited battlefield débâcles. Each episode culminated in a sacred war (Vietnam, the Afghan proxy war, Desert Storm, the 20-year Global War on Terrorism, and now the Ukraine proxy war) waged to fulfill the prophecy of a global democratic millennium—and each time the dream has slipped away. In turn, the fourth cycle in our narrative arc has been marked by apocalyptic desperation.
Consequently, American messianism has become a Manichaean caricature of itself, in which American “good news” has been replaced by the ever-present specter of Evil and the threat of force. The holy words, Freedom and Democracy, while still chanted, have become a hollow mantra. The American “gospel” no longer preaches about bringing redemption and expiation: it is now concerned with enforcement and punishment. The volte-face came in an instant, on 9/11 and with Guantanamo. The Third Apocalypse ethos of the Nuremberg trials and their majestic public display of democratic judicial review were discarded for summary justice. Almost overnight, America ditched “international rules” and “civilized norms”—and instead built out an archipelago of torture and arbitrary incarceration, without oversight or appeal.
We no longer seek guidance from a higher, forgiving authority, but from the wrathful Old Testament voice within ourselves. In the Woke iteration of American Manichaeism, Evil takes precedence over Good and is fervently personalized. With Milošević, Ghaddafi, Osama Bin Ladin, Saddam, and now Putin, evil can now be artisanally—if not always ethically—sourced. Hence, fighting evil as the antichrist becomes the pulsing rhetorical trope of this fourth season of America’s sacred narrative. Without irony, the 20th anniversary of America’s invasion of Iraq has, astonishingly, revived its most infamous meme— “The Axis of Evil”—without blush or shame. NATO’s proxy war against Russia now sees it as a moniker of its virtue to embrace the rhetorical mantle of what was so recently adjudged America’s greatest strategic débâcle.
If we, as Americans, are ritually caught up in a grand narrative beyond our capacity to apprehend, let alone control, what awaits us? Can we nudge this final story arc so as to avoid total calamity? Do we have any say or agency in our descending destiny?
Last Judgment(s)?
The United States is ruled by its civil religion, not ideology. Americans are driven by a sacred narrative. Yet the drivers are always a small band of fanatical elites—driving a story that can only be fulfilled in war.
Put differently, America is a hit series with a martial story arc punctuated by flares and fireworks. From launch to perigee to apogee, the “American Story” is now in its fourth season. The first three were lit by the fire of apocalyptic battles. Those ecstatic moments of victory and sacrifice were made sacred, and they are treasured as America’s “peak life”. Yet now, as the story arc descends, we have seemingly entered another great battle. Will this prove a new Revelation —our fourth apocalypse—or become Our Series’ finale?
American Story: The Hit Series [Warning: graphic religious content] has a universal audience, and each season is anchored in an apocalyptic climax. Moreover, every single episode is marked by battle—which always defaults to the standard storyline—as programmed by our divinely-anointed Hollywood Producer. Each “Next Generation” episode has its very own sacred and transcendental, if often destructive, war. Each season’s arc pushes the boundaries of Revelation toward a predestined series finale. The first three seasons were exhilarating, even ecstatic when reaching those sacred, “peak life” heights of victory and sacrifice.
But then, during the fourth season opener, around 1962, the grand story arc declined one or more degrees from its apogee, and by 1968, the descent was clear. True, in one episode—1981-88—retro-rockets decelerated its descent. Yet the downward path resumed. The story arc is not about American wealth or the pursuit of happiness. It concerns Revelation and Predestination and fulfilling America’s Mission. The earlier episodes of the fourth season show how the apocalypse opportunity was abused (Vietnam), aborted (Soviet Fall), betrayed (Iraq), and squandered (Afghanistan).
Yet such lost opportunities pale before the battle now enjoined. What are mere strikes, small wars, counterinsurgencies, and coups d'états in the face of the reality that the United States now aggressively challenges the two largest and most dangerous of great powers, Russia and China? Moreover, from their “Commanding Heights”, America’s rulers have made this an existential confrontation: either Democracy and its “rules-based order” will dominate the world, or the “autocracies” will win. One hears the tocsin of an apocalypse. Is this episode to be the season’s finale, or perhaps, the series finale? Questions abound.
Can Global War Drive America to Civil War?
America is today waging two wars simultaneously, one at home, the other abroad. By connecting the aims of the inner war (converting the nation to the Church of Woke) with the outer war (triumphing in the proxy war on Russia as proof of righteousness), the establishment now depends on victory in a foreign war to strengthen its political leverage to push their domestic agenda and maintain its power. So their thinking goes.
Yet, the United States has never before tried to escalate a global clash when consumed by an existential struggle within. On the contrary, during the American Civil War, Washington acted with extreme caution, even as Britain and France engaged in a proxy war against it.
Western audiences preen and squeal in delight over amazing Ukrainian triumphs of the Will, while narcissistically taking full credit for their victories, as if they were their own.
The duality of inner and outer war creates a mutually-destructive dynamic. If it prevails in Ukraine, so this logic goes, then the Woke Imperium will also be victorious at home. However, a negative dynamic could also occur. Defeat in the Ukraine war would mean political failure at home. Hence, NATO must win, and Ukraine cannot be allowed to lose.
If losing is unthinkable, in the face of defeat NATO has but one option: to escalate. Yet escalation, for a nation divided, also entails turning the dial on domestic conflict.
Can a Vicarious Apocalypse Lead To Real Armageddon?
There is a yet-unconfessed suspension of disbelief in America’s fourth apocalypse.
For over a year, NATO has made war on Russia, cheered on this war, and demanded Russia’s fall. Indeed, many in the war party go further than to exclaim, “For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power”, and cry out for the Russian Federation’s humiliation and even destruction. Yet at the same time, and often in the same breath, the war party insists that the West is not at war with Russia since there are no U.S. or NATO forces deployed in Ukraine: rather, we are only supplying arms to Kiyv. Many still strenuously deny that this is even a proxy war.
At the same time, however, the true boosters and tub-thumpers of the Ukraine war have loudly proclaimed it to be a bargain. Russia is to be brought down without a single NATO casualty. We drain our evil foe with the blood of willing Ukrainians. A deal! A steal! Moreover, thousands of Americans have bravely enlisted—as purely vicarious participants—to fight alongside Ukraine in the trenches of social media. These heroes of the 195th Keyboard Brigade—North Atlantic Fellas Organization (NAFO — check out their merchandise too!)—do daily battle against the American 5th Column of Putin Stooges and Russia Lovers.
All the while, Western audiences preen and squeal in delight over amazing Ukrainian triumphs of the Will, while narcissistically taking full credit for their victories, as if they were their own. If this indeed is the fourth American apocalypse, then it is truly a remarkable achievement. This is our expiation for all the head-pounding frustration and endless and for-naught blood sacrifice in those failed dirty war episodes we watched earlier in Season Four (“Apocalypse Deferred”). After the terrors of Tet, Khe Sahn, Desert One, Contras, Mogadishu, and Fallujah, the series now offers a bloodless epiphany. Hence, our hoped-for season finale is simply awe-inspiring: not a drop of GI blood is spilled!
The United States can now fight its “greatest geopolitical foe”—but no Americans will die—only willing, sacrificial Ukrainians. Meanwhile, the great American virtual audience, insatiably snared in CGI games and addicted to “hot takes” on social media, bathes in the glory of imminent victory: cheering on every Ukrainian propaganda video, and every depiction of Ukrainians in a Fellowship of the Ring fighting Russian Mordor-Orc darkness.
As the winds of war began shifting toward the end of 2022, NATO’s early, “easy war” strategic options to amp up aid—powerful weapons, Allied command and control, NATO C4ISR, top-shelf training—led Kyiv to rather magical mystery “wins” in autumn of 2022. Yet, by spring 2023, the weapons’ cupboards have turned bare, and the Ukrainian army is bleeding out as the real Ukrainian hoplites are being shredded in a bloodletting exercise that recalls the tragic trenches of the First World War’s battle of Verdun. Escalation options have narrowed.
Ahead, there are only more neon redlines for NATO recklessly to cross—even if they risk another World War. This is the downside of fighting a war on media adrenaline, defined by the infinite ecstasy of “vicarity”. Yet this is no video game. When one is killed in real life there is no automatic respawning.
Series Finale: Impact Crater?
At the end of Season 3 (1961), the United States stood astride the world like a Colossus. “Ike” Eisenhower, General of the Armies of our third American Apocalypse, presided over a “Free World” imperium—over all that mattered.
Yet when he passed from the scene, his more youthful successors embarked on a series of corrosive, endless wars. Throwing off all ancient precepts against military intervention and foreign entanglements from their antecedents, the new men departed from hallowed American tradition. After decades of this, instead of palace courtiers playing at counterinsurgency—ignoring the communities whose sons were dying in their game—the wars of Season 4’s final episodes are now crafted by an executive branch that believes it is given a carte blanche so long as it be parsimonious with the lives of its volunteer force.
The United States began and completed its fateful passage as the embodiment of (divine) Orders: from a “New Order for the Ages” to the “United Nations” to a “New World Order”, and finally to a liberal “Rules-based Order”. But these so-called Orders are a simulacrum for the demon that hides deep within the American sacred narrative and within us all: a fixation with the cleansing fires of war that has driven us to overreach and on the brink of downfall.
Ours indeed is a remarkable metamorphosis: from once-exceptional American “good news”—Humanity’s redemption!—to the Unveiling of global tyranny.