Theocracy Awakening: election reflections from a former christian cultist
it only ends once
“Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason. And that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness”
—President-Elect Donald Trump, in his acceptance speech on November 6th, 2024
I’ve lived in a theocracy before. These days I feel my muscle memory being reactivated.
The world was supposed to end long before I was born. It keeps not ending, my Armageddon delayed, and I wonder if my true fear is not the world’s end, but its refusal to do so. Armageddon would be simple, a hard reset on everything that has been. Persisting requires the unpleasant chore of untangling knots left behind by our forefathers.
Oof. Okay, sorry, I get a little portentous and doomsday-ish sometimes. In my defense, I was raised Jehovah’s Witness.
God’s day of wrath, I was told, would arrive any moment, like a thief in the night. The world would end when everyone least expected, which (I realize in hindsight) rendered the signs of the end paradoxical: if you think the world is going to end, no it isn’t, because it can’t end when you’re expecting it. But you ought to “live in expectation” of it anyhow. “Keep on the watch and prove yourself ready,” even though you’ll still be caught with your pants down either way.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are a patriarchal Christian cult which preaches that Armageddon is good news…if you join God and His chosen people, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was raised singing hymns, prayers set to melody, about the coming glory of a global theocracy. Oh how peaceful it will be, we would say, when all the violent people are murdered by God and His angels.
One of our favorite hymns was entitled, “Loyally Submit to Theocratic Order.”
For us in the group, it was a happy song. We’d sing with big smiles, and then have a barbeque after the Sunday service, play some congregation softball in the park, play some euchre. We had no idea that to most on the outside, “submitting to theocracy” would be viewed as an ominous threat. You say a word enough times, it stops sounding like a real word; just pleasant noise. You don’t hear the discordance between the happy harmony and the violent promise.
That’s because living in a theocracy means living in contradiction. It means loving thy neighbor—and the best way to love thy neighbor is to convert thy neighbor, so they don’t become collateral damage in the coming apocalypse.*
“God does not desire any to be destroyed,” said the Bible. He’s a god of love, silly, He doesn’t want to destroy people…just His enemies. Just the apostates and false religions and gays and transes and blood-transfusion-recipients.
A phrase would be thrown around in the literature produced by my old religion: “wholesome dread.” It had to do with fearing God: a god who is both happy and all-loving and jealous and thin-skinned and violent. Godly fear, I was told, was defined as “an awe and a profound reverence for the Creator and a wholesome dread of displeasing him.”
Perhaps that’s why I started questioning my faith when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. Armageddon was said to be like a thief in the night. Trump was a bull in a china shop. Even atheists thought the world was going to end.
Which meant, perversely, it would not.
It has not.
It will not.
Not everyone who voted for Trump is a Christian Nationalist. But all Christian Nationalists support Donald Trump. They wrote Project 2025, they sit in congress and the senate and on the Supreme Court.
Christian Nationalists believe the United States was founded by God to bring about His kingdom on earth. A theocratic order, to which the heathens must loyally submit. The constitution (which we might quickly note does not mention Christianity or the kingdom or Jesus or the Bible) is a divine document. Originalism, it turns out, was never about finding the “original” meaning of the document the founding fathers had written, in a historical sense. It was about finding the truth, in a spiritual sense, much in the way theologians interpret scripture.
Outside Justice Samuel Alito’s vacation home, a Christian nationalist flag waved proudly after January 6th. After the story broke this past summer, Alito’s wife, Martha Ann Alito, was secretly recorded by a documentary filmmaker, who asked her about the flag debacle:
“I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag, because I have to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month,” said Martha Ann.
Mrs. Alito, apparently, daydreams about the sorts of flags she wants to vindictively fly outside her several homes:
“I made a flag in my head. This is how I satisfy myself. I made a flag. It's white and has yellow and orange flames around it. And in the middle is the word vergogna. Vergogna in Italian means shame—vergogna. V-E-R-G-O-G-N-A. Vergogna. Shame, shame, shame on you."
It was not enough for Mrs. Alito to simply display her Christian virtue, the way queer people display their pride. It had to be vindictive. Retributive. There had to be divine punishment for those who did not have a wholesome dread of displeasing God.
In September of this year, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, a crowd of thousands gathered to hear about their savior, Donald Trump, delivering them from “the forces of darkness.” The AP reported on the spectacle, and quoted preacher Hank Kunneman as saying (well, yelling):
“We break every curse against Donald Trump — we break every satanic incantation against his presidency.”
Combined with a fractured, decentralized charismatic apostolic movement—in which any random TikTokker can form an ersatz church and claim to be receiving direct revelation from God—there has been a rising tide of magical thinking, conspiracism, and delusion.
Trump has won again: over half the country voted for the god of family values and rape; the god of peace and retribution. I do, as it happens, have a dread of displeasing our new god. It’s hard not to be worried about this militarized retribution he keeps talking about. Then again, pissing off dictators is about as wholesome as it gets.
Since Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss this past Tuesday, I’ve been living in a state of wholesome dread.
Wholesome dread describes my current vibe (remember vibes? remember when we had the vibes??) toward reality. I dread the future, but with a knowledge that humans have always found wholesome ways to build each other up and find joy and community in the face of dreadful oppression.
In future posts, I’ll give some thoughts (less pretentiously? Maybe?) about cults and how they work. I’ll talk about Christian nationalism, conspiratorial thinking, and how authoritarian groups use language to create reality frameworks. Today, as the Democratic party and anti-Trump voters everywhere are deconstructing the totemic failure of this election, I’ll just state the simple fact that in order to vote for the “they’re eating the dogs” guy who was on Epstein’s plane and was found liable for sexual assault by a jury, a lot folks had to be either…
Insulated from reality
Unaware of reality, or…
In an alternate reality
I believe many, if not most of the working class voters who cast their ballot for Trump are somewhere in those first two categories—already the airwaves are full of interviews with Latino voters saying they’re certain Trump will not deport their families, and women who believe Trump will not take away their abortion rights. Hell, I know atheists who voted for Trump.
But the Mike Johnsons, Steven Millers, JD Vances, and Alitos of the world are firm adherents to an alternate reality. As are millions of Christian Nationalists around the country, and around the world.
Steven Hasan and other experts in cults and authoritarian cults of personality agree that Donald Trump fits the “cult leader” bill. And cults provide what I’m going to call a reality framework: A self-reinforcing totalist worldview in which anything and everything can be justified or ignored.
Ask a Trump voter what they think of his comments about immigrants being “vermin” who “poison the blood of our country.”
Some voters will simply agree with the statement. But many others will not. They will tell you…
He didn’t say that
If he did say that, you’re taking it out of context
If you didn’t take it out of context, you’re misunderstanding what he meant
Okay, that IS what he meant, but it’s not that bad
Okay, it IS that bad, but the other side is just as bad/worse
This reasoning belies not a desire to grapple with truth, but a desire to maintain a belief in The Ultimate Truth: Trump good, Anti-Trumpers bad.
To the fully brainwormified MAGA member, there is no Trump statement, policy, or action so ridiculous that it cannot be dismissed with excuses or shifting goal posts. And this is because Trump’s most ardent supporters have accepted a mental framework of reality where the conclusion is always: Trump good, Anti-Trumpers bad.
Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, claim to have “the truth.” That’s how we referred to our religion amongst ourselves, as shorthand. When I was a JW in good standing, I was “in the truth.” Our goal in knocking on your door on a Saturday morning and ruining your breakfast was to bring you “into the truth.”
Now that I have left, I have been excommunicated and shunned. I am, as my parents say, “out of the truth.”
It’s odd phrasing. People don’t talk like this, generally. I believe evolution is true, but I do not believe I “have the truth” by accepting the consensus of scientists. In fact, evolution plays basically no role in my day to day life, and I don’t think much about it.
The Truth is much more about having “correct beliefs about things.” It is about being in or out of the best way of life, a way of life chosen by God himself.
The Truth, then, is not some single piece of religious doctrine. As a matter of fact, the doctrines can be messily swapped out at any time without fracturing the structure. Witness leadership changes the doctrine frequently—sometimes to a doctrine that contradicts what was taught as “pure truth” minutes earlier. For a hundred years, Witnesses in the west taught that growing a beard was Scripturally unacceptable. A few months ago, the leadership changed that: now growing a beard is Scripturally acceptable. What was once a sign of sinful indignity (having a beard on your face, if ya want) is now proudly sported by the leadership who used to condemn beards in the first place.
There was not a mass exodus of Jehovah’s Witnesses when The Beard Thing happened. Very few members, relative to the 8.5 million JWs worldwide, stepped back and thought, “hey wait a minute, the men in charge are clearly making things up as they go along.” No. JW Men were just happy to have a new “right” arbitrarily granted to them. How loving, they thought, that God is now allowing them to grow a beard.
This is what happens when someone accepts an alternative framework for reality: one now accepts alternative facts, because fact-facts probably come from DEI Marxist “experts” in woke universities, and what the hell do they know? The group must always be right, the leader must always be right, and that means everything the leader says or does can be justified, even celebrated.
All of which is to say, I picked an odd time to stop believing in Armageddon. I picked an inconvenient time to reject magical thinking, and a demoralizing time to embrace secular humanism and Democracy. (The biggest difference between Jehovah’s Witnesses and other evangelical american sects: Witnesses don’t vote)
When half the country (more?) has a different framework for reality, what do the rest of us do? How can the complexity of life’s myriad truths compete with a simplistic doctrine which presents the truth?
Well. I don’t know, to be honest. But I’d like to blog about it and stuff, and maybe we can figure it out together. I used to be an indoctrinated member of a doomsday cult. It took a great deal of cracks in the armor for the whole thing to finally shatter—indoctrination is nothing if not a defense mechanism against critical thinking.
Defenses can be broken. Minds can be changed. It just happens to be very difficult.
If you think cults are bad and critical thinking is good, I hope you’ll join me in *gestures broadly* whatever this is. The appeal of a Christian cult is prophecy: long ago, God already promised how, why, and that the world would end. Don’t worry about the details. As long as you’re on the ark when the rain starts to fall, you’ll be safe.
For the rest of us, the future is uncertain. This can be terrifying and liberating in equal measure. When I was a Jehovah’s Witness, I had been given a roadmap, a lens through which I could understand and contextualize every world event. No matter how bad things got (or how good things appeared to get) God already had the ending planned out.
But there is no pre-planned ending to whatever comes next. The future is unwritten, and as it turns out, it’s pretty easy to “predict” that very large empires will eventually implode, which is why every generation of mankind since the writing of Revelation has been certain the book really applies to them.
It never does, or maybe it always does. But it’s never the end. As my favorite fake god once said, “it only ends once. Everything that happens before then is just progress.” And as my second-favorite fake god said, “nothing ever ends.”
THE END
*I started writing this before last night’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart where made a joke about Jehovah’s Witnesses, but, yeah. As a guy who knocked on doors for nearly 30 years, I could have told my local Democratic Party that door-knocking is great for in-group morale, not so great for converting the out-group. In Democrats’ defense, Kamala Harris had a more appealing message.