BLIND DEVOTION
The roots of today's right-wing extremism
In recent decades, Americans have become obsessed with Apocalyptic themes. Television programs like Paradise, The Walking Dead, Station Eleven and The Last of Us imagine a bleak future. There are dozens of popular dystopian movies, including the Mad Max, Hunger Games and Matrix franchises. Billionaire Peter Thiel lectures about the Antichrist; evangelical pastors predict the imminent end of the world.
This fixation is similar to the 1830s and 1840s when leaders of new religious movements, including Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, predicted the End Times. They prophesied that earthquakes, floods and warfare would destroy the world. Righteous people would survive and Jesus would return to rule over them.
Today, white Christian nationalists claim that the contamination of the United States by immigrants and non-Christians will bring about an era of violence. They believe an epic conflict will soon restore the white race to power. These views are rooted in what Michael Barkun calls “British-Israelism” that first emerged among 17th century Puritans. The Puritans believed that the British people were descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, God’s chosen people, through whom Biblical prophecies would be fulfilled. They had faith that British imperialism was ordained by God and protected by him.
Christian nationalists see themselves as the chosen people and the Jews as the children of Satan. They see a world controlled by a secret cabal which will be defeated by natural disasters and heroic wars. It is, Barkun writes, “an extended revenge fantasy built on the belief that the ‘Aryan’ inheritance was lost through a combination of God’s punishment for earlier sins and the theft of chosenness by Jews, impostors who now pose as Israelites, depriving the ‘true’ Israelites of their birthright. Like most millenarians, they seem far more interested in describing the evil they oppose than in the salvation they desire.”
White supremacists are inspired by The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel in which white civilians wage a guerrilla war against the American government, media, society and finance, all of which are led by Jews. The book endorses the white replacement theory that Jews are plotting to eliminate white people through assimilation, mass immigration and genocide.
The Turner Diaries helped launch The Order, a terrorist group which murdered three people, including talk radio host Alan Berg, and conducted robberies, counterfeiting operations and other violence to provoke a race war. Timothy McVeigh, executed for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, was found with pages from The Turner Diaries after the attack, which closely resembled the bombing in the novel. In 1998, John William King was convicted of shackling a black man’s legs to his truck in Jasper, Texas and dragging him to death. “We’re going to start The Turner Diaries early,” King said.
In her July 2021 New Yorker article, Zoë Heller writes that, according to some scholars, “levels of religiosity and cultic affiliation tend to rise in proportion to the perceived uncertainty of an environment. The less control we feel we have over our circumstances, the more likely we are to entrust our fates to a higher power.”
In The Delusions of Crowds, William J. Bernstein argues that people often don’t use their intellect to analyze the world but instead “rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions.” Bernstein believes mass hysteria can be driven by a believable story “Humans understand the world through narratives,” Bernstein writes. “However much we flatter ourselves about our individual rationality, a good story, no matter how analytically deficient, lingers in the mind, resonates emotionally, and persuades more than the most dispositive facts or data.”
Donald Trump has predicted the coming of World War III and pledged that he is the “only one” who can reverse America’s rapid plunge into the cosmic abyss, adopting the messianic imagery of Christian nationalists. Weeks before the November 2024 election, Elon Musk wrote on X: “Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!”
Right-wing extremists are convinced that their enemies, including globalists, Jews, the Illuminati and a Satanic cabal of pedophiles, secretly control global finance, governments and the media. They believe, Jenny Van Houdt writes in The Journal of American Culture, that a world-altering event—a cataclysm, a revelation, a revolution—is coming soon. Van Houdt adds:
Apocalyptic narratives function as a mobilizing concept, one that has historically helped end-time believers of the Christian right (among others) to channel uncertainties about the state of the world into a unifying worldview that inspires both confidence and action.
Apocalypses, as world-centric narratives of crisis, have a similar capacity to redirect difficult information and feelings of uncertainty about the current state of the world into a new, unified, and reorienting worldview that empowers a subject to act... Apocalypse functions as a kind of mobilizing concept because it injects into the self -narrative a demand for action in response to an irresistibly urgent event... Such encompassing, ‘myth[ic]’ work is a feature of many other apocalyptic narratives; disparate abnormal weather events caused by climate change—and even the difficulty of comprehending something as immense as ‘climate’—can be understood as a global threat…that better prepares for the revolutionary ‘storm’ that will unseat the deep state.
In American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, Matthew Sutton writes: “Discerning [the signs of apocalypse’s] meaning has given the faithful a powerful sense of urgency, a confidence that they alone understand the world in which they are living, and a hope for a future in which they will reign supreme.”
Source:
Adapted from Blind Devotion: 19th century doomsday cults and today’s right-wing extremists, James R. Ross, 2026 (available on Amazon