Such is the circuitous route I followed trying to analyse the cultish adulation of Donald Trump, which I find anthropologically more interesting than any of his policies. Some of them I like, others I don’t, but that’s not my subject today.
In any case, a real, especially religious, conservative may like or dislike a politician or, more common, tolerate or despise him. In some cases, the feelings may be stronger, encompassing such extremes as love or hatred.
But under no circumstances can such a man worship a politician, see him – or, for that matter, any political doctrine or method of government – as the cure for all of life’s ills.
That such quasi-religious veneration is widespread across the entire political spectrum of modernity proves yet again that real, especially religious, conservatives have no place in modern politics.
This brings us to Bléneau, a village in my neck of the French woods. Sitting in the middle of it is a medieval church that, like many other French churches, was converted into a Temple of Reason during the Revolution. That saved the building by tempering the destructive zeal of the revolutionaries who strove to erase every vestige of Catholicism.
Many of them weren’t atheists. Like most of their American revolutionary colleagues, they were deists who professed faith in some nebulous clock-winding deity and therefore detested apostolic religions preaching God’s continued interest in His creation.
Hence exhibited on the lovely façade of that Bléneau church is a directive issued by Robespierre: “The French People recognise the existence of the Supreme Being and the Immortality of the Soul.” Lip service thus paid, inchoate modernity could proceed undeterred to worship at the altar of a secular, political religion, following the precedent set by the American Founders and their precursors.
One such precursor was the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop, who in 1630 delivered an oration in which he alluded to Matthew 5: 14 by describing the new community as a “city upon a hill”. The full text of that verse left his audience in no doubt that the nation they had set out to build was ordained by God: “Ye are the light of this world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.”
The Mayflower Puritans believed in God and they also believed in the new nation they were creating. Their descendants conflated the two and eventually produced history’s first political religion that made perfunctory references to God while deifying their country, variously described as a republic, a democracy, a liberal democracy, but always serving as an object of neo-pagan adulation.
That inaugurated a widespread sacralisation of politics now divorced from traditional religious constraints. The development was revolutionary and, like all revolutions, it was claimed finally to have come to grips with the meaning and fundamentals of human life.
Though lacking God, the new cult possessed the outer aspects of a religion: scripture (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Founders’ exegesis thereof), rituals, mythology, commandments, sacraments and symbols.
Moreover, already at that early stage the impression was conveyed, for the time being obliquely, that America’s founding documents were binding not just for the country but also for the unsuspecting outside world. If all those countries didn’t realise what was good for them, it was up to America to teach them – and chastise them if they proved recalcitrant.
(In 1895, for example, HMG had to remind US Secretary of State Richard Olney that the Monroe Doctrine fell far short of being international law.)
In the 1840s the journalist John L. O’Sullivan coined the term ‘manifest destiny’ to describe America’s messianic mission in the world. Said manifest destiny was according to him “divine”: it was incumbent upon America “to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man”.
Never in the history of the world had there existed another nation so bursting with such sanctimonious arrogance. The world had to wait until the twentieth century for America’s antithetical doppelgänger to appear: Soviet Russia on her own messianic crusade.
The differences between the two are obvious enough, but the similarities are just as telling, if less commented upon.
To reinforce the quasi-religious aspects of their political self-worship both countries borrowed their iconography from various creeds, either pagan or faux Christian. In ghoulish mimicry of Christian relics, for example, the ‘uncorrupted’ body of Lenin still lies in its Red Square mausoleum.
Rumours used to be spread that Soviet scientists were working on ways to bring Lenin’s body back to life, and every Soviet city, town or village was adorned with posters screaming “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will always live!”.
Many have commented on the perverse references to religion in Bolshevik iconography, but few have noticed that the same mimicry is just as robust in America.
Hardly any speech by American leaders from the eighteenth century onwards has omitted quasi-religious references to canonised historical figures, whose deeds are routinely described in Biblical terms. “Fellow citizens, the ark of your covenant is the Declaration of Independence,” pronounced John Quincy Adams, and he meant it exactly as it sounded.
Sacral visual imagery also abounds, as do the mock-religious shrines to past leaders. One such, Mount Rushmore with its 60-foot likenesses of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln carved in granite, is an obligatory site for American pilgrimages.
George Washington in particular is worshipped in a religious manner as ‘Great Father of the Country’. The interior of the Capitol dome in Washington displays a fresco entitled The Apotheosis of Washington where the sainted Father is surrounded by Baroque angels and also representations of other Founders in contact with various pagan gods, such as Neptune, Vulcan and Minerva.
In the same vein, the Lincoln Memorial is designed as a Greek temple and is actually identified as such in marble: “In this temple, as in the hearts of the people, for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”
The Jefferson Memorial, not far away, is also a replica of a pagan shrine, with various quasi-religious references inscribed. Cited, for example, is a quotation from Jefferson’s letter to Washington preaching: “God who gave us life gave us liberty…”
To emulate the God of the Scriptures, the American political deity had to claim creative powers. God Mark I may or may not have created the world, but it was definitely up to God Mark II to recreate it. In that sense, America fulfilled the prophesy of one of her spiritual fathers, Thomas Paine.
In his revolutionary gospel Common Sense Paine thundered off his pulpit that, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand…”.
America and Russia signpost the two poles in politics elevated to a cult. It’s easy enough to trace both back to truly religious antecedents, Puritan Protestant in the US, Byzantine caesaropapist in Russia. But in reality such links have long since receded into a distant genetic memory, something of mainly antiquarian or, if you will, anthropological interest.
But the sacralisation of politics has survived this severance of its religious roots, and it’s noticeable throughout what used to be Christendom. The four principal post-Enlightenment political trends, socialism, communism, fascism and liberal democracy, converge in their propensity for making far-reaching eschatological claims – and eliciting similar cultish adulation.
One can’t escape the impression that modernity desperately seeks another conduit into which to channel the inherent human need for worshipping something higher than self. No longer able to worship God, it engages in the ghastly mimicry of worshipping politics.
From there, it’s but a short step to worshipping politicians – cults demand a figurine to sit at the top of the totem pole. At some point, the general political cravings demand a personalised expression – and find it in variously charismatic leaders.
Some of them may be downright evil, such as Lenin, Stalin or Hitler. Others, the Thatchers and Reagans of this world, may be rather virtuous. Others, like Gandhi or Trump, somewhere in between. But all are equally telling illustrations of the same idiosyncratically modern tendency: sacralisation of political power.
It’s only in this context that I can begin to understand the hysterical adulation of Trump evinced by even some people I know to be intelligent and well-informed. They all display symptoms that Gustave Le Bon described in his seminal book on crowd psychology as “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others”.
Arguing with them is as useless as trying to prove to a Muslim that there is a God other than Allah, and Mohammed isn’t his prophet. Cultish idols are there not to be analysed but to be worshipped. One can only hope that there is no apocalypse at the other end.