Men of God in the City of Man, Part 9: Pathogenesis
January 29, 2024·158 comments·Politics
A powerful religious narrative designed to mobilize believers around elections and Israel's salvation became something else entirely when allegations of clergy sexual abuse surfaced. Instead of accountability, institutional leadership deployed the exact same prophetic framework to reframe accusations as satanic persecution. What unfolded was not a failure of the narrative machinery, but its most complete success.
• The narrative virus has multiple pathogenic mechanisms. Eight essays traced how specific religious memes produced election denial among charismatic Christians. But the same memes also create institutional vulnerabilities. When accusations emerged in October 2023, leadership didn't deny them. They incorporated them into prophecy.
• Narrative can be deployed preemptively. After learning of serious allegations, a church leader was permitted to preach twice before any investigation. Those sermons wove decades of prophetic history into a framework where accusations would appear as demonic attacks on Israel's salvation. The congregation heard not about wrongdoing, but about spiritual warfare.
• The institutional response followed the script perfectly. Nearly every leader associated with the movement defended the accused using the identical language present in those sermons. Satan was attacking. This was persecution of the righteous. The accusers must be motivated by hatred of the mission. The narrative machinery functioned exactly as designed.
• Some people's intellectual immune systems rejected it anyway. Despite deep personal investment in the movement and its core mission, a handful of leaders chose documented facts over protective narrative. They spoke up in rooms full of believers. They joined investigations they had everything to lose from supporting. They said the quiet part out loud: this is institutional capture.
• The question is no longer whether narrative affects us. No one is immune. The real question is whether, when encountering actual people and actual events, we can choose truth over the stories we've told ourselves matter most. This is where the pathogen either spreads or stops.
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Comments
Nine parts. I can only imagine how many hours of discussion went into this. Looking forward to all of it.
@rguinn I was wondering: did you use the narrative machine retrospectively, whether wholly or in part, to identify the sources here?
As someone raised Catholic and currently attending an evangelical Baptist church I audibly guffawed at this paragraph. Absolute perfection.
As a socially liberal and fiscally conservative Presbyterian who is probably more agnostic now and (yes a run-on sentence) am fully ingrained with the fact that our country’s laws are based on Presbyterian polity, I too laughed out loud at this statement.
Levity, a good carrier for important considerations.
Rusty,
Curious to see what attention, if any, the doctrine of biblical innerancy will get in this series.
As a teenager, I was baptized in and eventually pastored at a wonderful Foursquare church in Oregon. Additionally, for several years during that time, I lived with 4 Calivinist buddies of mine.
During my years-long exposure to both charismatic Pentecostalism and Calvinism, I found over and over again how fundamentally problematic the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and literalism is for all churches, regardless of whether it’s the reformed Eric Metaxas/Wayne Grudem/John Piper type or the charismatic Pentecostal Benny Hinn type.
In my experience, the “charismatic norms” (like prophesy), can be a really beautiful thing. But it’s when the charismatic norms (like prophesy) are connected to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy/literalism that things can go super sideways and do anything but “edify”. As I see it, inerrancy is the core virus that has been wreaking havoc in the churches (you name the tradition) and the world for centuries.
Anyway, really looking forward to reading these notes.
Three of the mentioned fellows will make at least a cameo appearance, but it isn’t necessarily a focus of the series. I agree that it would also be fascinating to see how that narrative - the soul of American evangelicalism, really - emerged and became common knowledge, but that would be a different series.
In part, although as I think you’ll discover as we go along, our aim was to be thorough enough not to have to be stingy in our source selection.
Man, fascinating stuff. Can’t wait to read the rest.
I was raised mainline Protestant in NY in the 80s. Never even heard of Charismatics until I moved to TX as an adult.
I think I understand why it is the fastest-growing branch of Christianity. Vs the stuff I was raised with, my first impression as an outsider is the level of passion and… hmm… immediacy.
I’m assuming that this is the basic story we’re discussing, I had not heard it yet. It explains what some prophets need(ed?) to be true and why.
This was a great and insightful read, @rguinn.
“Like the Widening Gyre, the most effective vectors for effective astroturfing campaigns may focus not so much on changing common knowledge but on changing What We Need to Be True.”
Inoculation against direct responsibilities is one of the fundamental traits of human beings’ proto-centralized religions. In a context of apparent lack of control, agency was projected outward.
Witchcraft was the reason for pain without feeling guilty and gods’ (God) wrath for pain when feeling guilty in ancient cultures.
In this context of apparent lack of control (post 2008), changing what we need to be true is an escape from direct responsibilities when focusing on the excuses that explain the individual or collective failure as an out-of-control external factor (spiritual: evil-witchcraft- the devil or kind of real threats: immigrants - woke - deep state), that apparently has agency and goes directly against you as a cosmic good vs. evil fight. So, it’s the perfect context for this phenomenon to emerge in the American-style, spirit-filled charismatic Christianity.
Low locus of control (direct control over outcomes) + belief in miracles (indirect control over outcomes) + best in class already system of memes (Christianity).
You’ve got it nailed. Only I think that we will discover that there are many more areas of our society and culture which exhibit very similar traits in very different wrappers.
Really interesting start…as someone who has walked among the movements you reference, I’m looking forward to your reflections and observations.
I’ll just observe here that the role of discernment has always been the weak link when it comes to Pentacostal/Charismatic movements.
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