Guest Post: Can Ancient ‘Heresies’ Really Help Us Understand American Politics?

In a recent episode of the WNYC radio program and podcast On the Media, the American journalist Jeff Sharlet attributed the emergence of Trumpism, QAnon and its attendant conservative, conspiratorial ecosystem of thought to two major religious sources: the first is the Prosperity Gospel, a well-known Evangelical spin on American metaphysics and New Thought in particular, in which prayer in the form positive thought is believed to actively shape the world of the devotee.^[1] The second major source of Trumpist religious thought, according to Sharlet, is Gnosticism, which he describes as a second-century Christian “heresy” with a few major features: a belief in an evil creator god or demiurge, and an emphasis on direct experiential contact–rather than a priestly intermediacy–between the individual and God.

In the segment, which is titled “The Ancient Heresy That Helps Us Understand QAnon,” Sharlet identifies Gnosticism as the real core of Trumpist religious thought and life, a hidden and heretical root from which so much of the challenge facing American civil society today seems to spring.

Sharlet is a canny observer of the American religious landscape, and his estimation of Gnosticism as a “metaphorical frame for Trumpism” presents a compelling connection. We might say that religion, as it has been said about history, does not repeat itself, but often seems to rhyme. The question we might pose to Sharlet and to other observers of American radicalism is the extent to which an understanding of Gnosticism really helps us understand the emergent religious trends and their political consequences in the United States.

Following contemporary scholarship of early Christianity, we can understand Gnosticism as a label for a diverse assortment of ancient Mediterranean and early Christian movements and beliefs. For ancient Gnostics, the belief in an evil (or at least ignorant) creator god led to the conviction of creation as a failure, of an absolutely sinful and fallen world. At the same time, Gnostic religion included the conviction of an unassailable divine core within each human being, through which properly trained individuals could access the uncreated divine truth, a special kind of unworldly insight called gnosis. Through this process of insight, the devotee sees past the sin and delusion of the created world towards an uncreated and timeless divine reality.^[2]

Sharlet identifies Gnosticism as a “heresy,” a label which recent scholarship on the subject has highlighted: Gnosticism is a heresy today because we consider it through the eyes of Orthodoxy. In the narratives of historians like Elaine Pagels, Apostolic Christians “won out” over Gnostic Christians to eventually go on to form what is now the Catholic Church and the basis for modern Christianity. Early Christianity, we now know, was a wildly diverse array of religious movements, with contradictory theologies, sacraments, and with leaders who often openly accused one another of error and delusion. Gnosticism is, in fact, older than Catholicism, and its status as a “heresy” today, from a historical perspective, is a matter of circumstance.

Since the (re)discovery of Gnostic literature in the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945, Gnosticism and ideas called Gnostic have been deeply influential sources of popular culture and religious thought. As a source of contemporary culture, Gnosticism has been cited as the source of everything from popular science fiction to modernist poetry.^[3] Harold Bloom famously connected Gnosticism to American religious culture writ large in his sweeping 1992 work of what he called “religious criticism,” The American Religion: The Emergence of a Post Christian Nation. For Bloom, Gnosticism was a fitting label for American Evangelicalism, Mormonism, New Age, even Billy Graham found himself a target of Bloom’s Gnostic criticism of American religion.

There’s something of a trend, then, among critics of American religion in particular to treat Gnostic religion as a kind of piercing insight into American Christian life. And historically, the comparison is compelling. American Christians have identified simultaneously as “traditionally Christian,” even while they insist on their own individuality, uniqueness, their exceptionalism. But what is it about Gnosticism in particular in which these critics see America so clearly? And are the Trumpists really retweeting an “ancient heresy,” as Sharlet suggests?

American Evangelical Protestantism and its more recent developments, Trumpism and QAnon, arise and persist within a thoroughly familiar Christian cosmology: Trump is an embattled prophet-king who seems to single-handedly hold back a rising tide of sin and delusion for his followers. God is in heaven while evil forces seem to dominate life on Earth. Indeed, the connection to Gnostic thought here is compelling, but a much clearer connection can be found in simply locating Trumpist Evangelicalism where it really sits: within the history of modern Christianity. From Reformation onward (and there are so many compelling pre-Reformation examples), radical Christians have seen institutions, both of state and of church, as the very powers and principalities of which Paul warned them in the Letter to the Ephesians.

Many of the most radical communities which exemplified this Reformation hostility towards institutions fled persecution in Europe to come to the Americas, where figures like William Penn and Thomas Jefferson eventually codified their legal insulation from institutional interference. In doing so, they unwittingly established the permanent friction in American civil society that figures like Jeff Sharlet and Harold Bloom identify as “Gnostic”: an unyielding religious conviction in the divine exception of the individual and the innate corruption of institutions.

Gnostic religious literature is compelling because it presents us with an uncanny image of what Christianity–and by extension, much of American culture today–might have been, the other directions in which it could have gone. Gnostic literature presents us with a tempting, ancient and “heretical” cause for the ails of contemporary American politics and religion. But the sources of Trumpism and QAnon are not to be found in ancient Gnostic literature, compelling as the rhyme might sound. Trumpist Christianity and QAnon arose much closer to home, in the very foundations of American religious and civic life.

^[1] For an overview of the metaphysical and esoteric origins of American Prosperity theology, see John S. Haller Jr.’s The History of New Thought: From Mind Cure to Positive Thinking and the Prosperity Gospel (West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation Press. 2012)

^[2] For two perspectives on ancient Gnosticism in contemporary scholarship see Karen L. King, What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge: Belknap Press: 2005) and. April DeConick, The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today. (New York: Columbia University Press. 2016)

^[3] See Fryderyk Kwiatkowski. “About the Concept of “Gnosticism” in Fiction Studies.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 18.3 (2016), and Peter O’Leary, Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002) for two compelling uses of Gnosticism as a critical category rather than an object of study.