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Monday Read: A Native of Conklin, NY Discusses QAnon
22 Plays3 years ago
Why is QAnon significant, and why has the conspiracy theory taken root in certain evangelical circles?
In today's episode of Interactions, we hear from Sarah Louise MacMillen of Duquesne University, who investigates these questions in her Canopy Forum article “A Native of Conklin, NY Discusses QAnon.”
Drawing on the work of Jacques Ellul and Theodor Adorno, Macmillen puts forward that one reason QAnon so strongly took hold in the evangelical sphere has to do with the evangelical emphasis on the free rational choice of the individual.
“When the search for knowledge and authority is left to the individual (and their mobile phone search) there is no gatekeeper for theological knowledge," writes Macmillen, "and it is more difficult to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate interpretations of scripture. This lack of gatekeepers, combined with a perceived grievance about secularization and diversity, creates a 'perfect' storm for the anti-intellectual forces of QAnon.”
Read the original article on Canopy Forum.
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Transcript
Introduction to Law and Religion
00:00:05
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Interactions, a podcast about law and religion and how we interact in the world around us.
QAnon in Evangelical Circles
00:00:16
Speaker
In today's episode, we hear from Sarah Louise McMillan of Duquesne University and her Canopy Forum article, A Native of Conklin, New York, discusses QAnon.
00:00:29
Speaker
In her article, Macmillan investigates why the conspiracy theory known as QAnon has taken root in certain evangelical circles. QAnon, Macmillan shows, operates not only within media spaces and political culture, but also within the theological domain.
00:00:51
Speaker
Its ideology is derived from what Macmillan describes as powerful forms of pseudo-biblical imagery. This has served to make the conspiracy theory especially palatable to some conservative Christians.
QAnon's Ideological Appeal
00:01:07
Speaker
Drawing on the work of Jacques Ilul and Theodore Adorno,
00:01:11
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Macmillan puts forward that another reason QAnon so strongly took hold in the evangelical sphere has to do with the evangelical emphasis on the free rational choice of the individual.
00:01:25
Speaker
Though the abuses of power by many religious authorities is clear today, there are benefits in some cases to granting authority to educated clergy or theologians, Macmillan writes. When the search for knowledge and authority is left to the individual and their mobile phone search,
00:01:46
Speaker
There is no gatekeeper for theological knowledge, and it is more difficult to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate interpretations of Scripture. This lack of gatekeepers, combined with the perceived grievance about secularization and diversity, creates a perfect storm for the anti-intellectual forces of QAnon. All this and more on today's episode of Interactions.
Conspiracy Theories and Media Culture
00:02:15
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I'm Janet Metzger.
00:02:25
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In a series of recent articles in the journal Critical Sociology, my colleagues and I explored the hazards of conspiracy theories within contemporary media spaces and political culture.
00:02:40
Speaker
While conspiracy theories aren't new to politics or religion, the fascistic presence emerging within American political culture and civil society is characterized by certain conspiratorial modes of expression.
00:02:56
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These should not be ignored. This essay seeks to discuss this phenomenon through the work of the sociologist and theologian Jacques Ellul's mid-20th century exploration of the roots of fascism.
00:03:11
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The pro-Trump QAnon movement is, as the New York Times defined it in September of 2021, a big tent conspiracy theory arising from an internet base that projects a number of political scenarios.
Political Culture and Pseudo-Biblical Roots
00:03:27
Speaker
The main scenario is that the presidential election of 2020 was manipulated by an elite cabal of liberal pedophiles whom Donald Trump is righteously battling.
00:03:41
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Why is QAnon significant? Why do some not see it as lies and nonsense? It is based on untruths, yes, and for that fact alone, QAnon jeopardizes American political culture.
00:03:57
Speaker
But it is also derived from powerful forms of pseudo-biblical imagery and other dynamics within American political and religious cultures. This is what makes it so potent and persuasive.
Ellul's Analysis of Law and Politics
00:04:13
Speaker
The work of mid-20th century French thinker Jacques Ellul resonates with American politics today. Ellul was able to see the unique nexus between law, politics, and religion, wherein certain forms of fascism coalesce without the usual checks and balances that liberalism provides.
00:04:36
Speaker
In an edited volume on Ellul's thought, scholar Jacob Rolison summarizes that for Ellul, fascism emerges when law is no longer at the heart of society. What is then left to connect the personal to the collective? Technique, the obsession with efficiency and technology as a means to salvation, and propaganda then become the very means of government.
00:05:05
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However, even more significantly, Elul anticipated how Western liberalism actually creates an opportunity for fascism to thrive symbiotically as a reaction to the tenets of liberalism.
Fascism, Solidarity, and Modern Society
00:05:22
Speaker
Though he was inspired by Marxist perspectives on mass movements, Ellul was sensitive to the ways the masses could be manipulated by propaganda. Further, Rolison explores how, in his essay, Fascism, Son of Liberalism, 1937, Ellul describes fascism as a feigned reaction against this world.
00:05:46
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Ellul notes that the strong emotional seductiveness of fascism is both a product of A, liberalism, and B, sociologist Emile Durkheim's sense of modern forms of solidarity, even as it presents itself as a rejection of that very solidarity.
00:06:06
Speaker
The ultimate draw of fascism is its revisionist, nostalgic form of what Durkheim attributed to primitive religious cultures, also known as mechanical solidarity. Mechanical solidarity is derived from the sharing of values, norms, and beliefs, similarities in identities, and is usually based in religious or magical values of ritual, symbol, and tradition.
00:06:35
Speaker
In contrast, modern society is based on our sense of interdependence within working and social, usually urbanized, life. Fascism then requires a magician rather than a politician. It is animated by spectacle and carnival. It is an energy that can charismatically draw out the support of the alienated masses.
00:07:03
Speaker
Today, in the mid-stage between liberalism and fascism, the collective political will remains the creator of law based upon the legacy of laws, and all the old liberal theories can reappear in a kind of carapace.
Populism and Purity in Politics
00:07:21
Speaker
A little notes that the judicial transformation of fascism may make mass special laws against Jews and others, claiming that it is based on morality peculiar to its people. Ultimately, fascist laws change nothing.
00:07:39
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in Fascism, Son of Liberalism. Elul stresses that the important dynamic of fascism is in its social forms and challenge to the political establishment. For QAnon, this challenge takes the form of a discourse where civil society and populist politicians on the far right use imagery and figurative expressions found on political signage and bumper stickers
00:08:08
Speaker
like drain the swamp, no more bullshit, and even liberalism is the new fascism, to contrast with the rhetoric of the so-called political elites. Also, one must note the most recent dog whistling politics moments from Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and others during the Katanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearings.
00:08:33
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Here, the coded message was a subtle or not-so-subtle nod to QAnot assumptions about the perverse tendencies of the liberal elite. Many of the inquiries and questions directed at Judge Brown Jackson focused on the liberal nominees' judgments on cases related to sex offenders and child pornography.
00:08:56
Speaker
One dimension of building fascist energy is an obsession with the battle of purity versus perversion. There is a link here between liberalism and perversion that recalls the embrace of traditional values in fascist Germany as a reaction to a libertine Weimar in troubling ways. We'll be right back after the break.
00:09:24
Speaker
High Interactions Listeners, this is Justin Lateral at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion.
Promotion and Anti-Intellectualism
00:09:30
Speaker
If you liked this episode and want to learn more about the interactions of law and religion around the world,
00:09:36
Speaker
Check out the link to our book brochure in the podcast description. There you'll find over 40 new titles like God and the Illegal Alien by Robert Heimburger and Michael Perry's new book on human rights, democracy, and constitutionalism. Each title includes a short description and a link to buy the book online. Thanks for listening to interactions.
00:10:14
Speaker
There are other troubling aspects of QAnon that build from these self-perceived traditionalist values. QAnon's voice erupts from within an aggrieved pocket of civil society and is a symptom of what Richard Hofstadter noted generations ago in anti-intellectualism in American life.
00:10:35
Speaker
When anti-intellectualism meets religion, there is a perfect storm of emotivism within the power of transcendent claims. As Michael Lueaux suggests, following historian Mark Knoll, there is no mind or tempered dialogue between faith and reason within many pockets of American evangelicalism today.
00:10:59
Speaker
As Caitlin Beatty of Religion News Service noted early in the emergence of QAnon, evangelicals are particularly vulnerable to QAnon. Perhaps this is due to evangelicals' mode of polity or authority being generally located in the individual believer. It is no mere coincidence that COVID surges and support for QAnon overlapped.
00:11:26
Speaker
During the isolation of quarantine, QAnon was able to take hold as a kind of internet religion. There is an important point here about clerical authority and theological knowledge.
Authority and Misinterpretation in Evangelicalism
00:11:39
Speaker
Though the abuses of power by many religious authorities is clear today, as in the case of the Roman Catholic Church's sex abuse scandals and cover-ups, in some cases there are benefits to granting authority to educated clergy or theologians.
00:11:57
Speaker
When the search for knowledge and authority is left to the individual and their mobile phone search, there is no gatekeeper for theological knowledge, and it is more difficult to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate interpretations of Scripture.
00:12:13
Speaker
This lack of gatekeepers, combined with a perceived grievance about secularization and diversity, creates a perfect storm for the anti-intellectual forces of QAnon. The grievance is further illuminated by Elul and Wilhelm Reich in the context of the events leading up to World War II.
00:12:35
Speaker
Again, as in Weimar, Germany, we see here a rejection of elite liberal and secularized knowledge, also encompassing cultures of diversity, individualism, and tolerance. These are typically the values of what late 19th and early 20th century social thinker Ferdinand Tonis describes in his concept of Gesellschaft.
00:13:01
Speaker
Additionally, Theodore Adorno's description of the American religious imagination's rejection of the intellectual and pharisaical also relates to QAnon's discussion of the sinful troupe or liberal cabal of elites.
Narratives and Mythical Imagination
00:13:18
Speaker
There is a long legacy of anti-Semitism in various forms that lead up to the contemporary category conspiracy theorizing presented by QAnon.
00:13:29
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In response to Adolf Hitler's ascent, Wilhelm Reich accurately noted that the contemptuous label of Jew was applied to anyone who did not fit the Aryan mold. Of course, the labeling of bicoastal, secular, education and media elite is the current confabulation and constellation of Jew identity today.
00:13:54
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As Reich described, the little man who lacks the powers of creativity and the energy to truly self-govern, issues compounded by the force of overwhelming social, political, economic, environmental problems, cedes power to the big man's savior in grandiose populists like Donald Trump.
00:14:16
Speaker
Donald Trump's savior status is built upon the sense that something is deeply wrong with the status quo. As Lorenzo di Tommaso explains, this creates the apocalyptic setting for a collective eschatological salvation that anticipates an earthly utopia as the abode and reward of the saved.
00:14:40
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Ditamasso continues, Messianism is the set of ideas concerning the anticipation for an end-time agent or agents who play a positive, authoritative, and usually redemptive role.
00:14:56
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The ressentiment is fueled by the Great Replacement Theory as a motivator for QAnon followers, as Chicago researcher on terrorism Robert Pape has demonstrated in his analysis of the January 6, 2021, participants.
00:15:13
Speaker
QAnon conspiracies are followed by a population that are fueled by ressentiment, usually the less educated but sometimes financially well-off middle class, as described by my colleagues, Lauren Langman and George Lunsko.
00:15:32
Speaker
Finding a similar connection between QAnon support and recentement, Anthony Domaggio suggests the narrative that Trump voters are on the social margins and experience low income is largely a constructed one.
00:15:48
Speaker
DiMaggio states, the vast majority of trumpeters see the rich as virtuous, as deserving of their wealth, and as having worked harder than the rest of us to obtain their wealth. Trump's support base is very much grounded in the traditional right-wing neoliberal and plutocratic values of the GOP.
00:16:10
Speaker
The recentimal reflects a constructed myth about what is wrong with the status quo. And the deliverer, of course, is the messianic presence of Donald Trump.
00:16:23
Speaker
The power of the conspiracy narratives reinforces the fact that there is a strong influence of the mythical imagination as it looms large in the forms of religion meeting propaganda of today. Where liberal faith proclaims a need for reason, QAnon embraces the irrational mythical mode of political and social expression within civil society
00:16:50
Speaker
in contrast to the value of science and reasonable democratic processes. The iconic image of the caricatured shaman in buffalo skins and headdress is the perfect symbol of the uniquely American animal and the mythical imagination.
00:17:09
Speaker
In a Jungian psychological trope, here is a dynamic anima using Native American imagery to the animus of American liberalism and a sense of fallen reason via white liberal elites from the Ivy League. This character is a fascinating example of the charismatic interruption through the means of a kind of a noble savagery in the QAnon movement.
00:17:35
Speaker
Again, the corrupt, educated, polished, bicoastal elites deserve a rupture. It is also an apocalyptic awakening. One can recall the co-opted and fetishized heroes of native wisdom in the Indians of Old Westerns.
00:17:55
Speaker
Q is known for its coded drops of Scripture. Hosea 4 appears on a billboard in the Bible-built Trump country of central Pennsylvania, a potential QAnon drop.
00:18:08
Speaker
In this Hebrew prophet, there is an outline of the destiny of the children of Israel applied to today. America led to sin and unholy behaviors. Hosea 4, verses 1 and 2 reads, Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Israel. For the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land.
00:18:36
Speaker
By swearing and lying and killing and stealing and committing adultery, they break out and blood toucheth blood.
00:18:46
Speaker
Especially relevant to the QAnon audience, these behaviors are practiced by bicoastal elites who do not heed the law of the Lord, especially in the entertainment, political and intellectual industries, swearing, lying, killing, stealing, adultery. There is also a threat of retributive violence embedded here.
00:19:09
Speaker
In the next verse of the fourth chapter of Hosea comes the prophesied punishment and apocalyptic opening, perhaps reflecting our current discourse about ecological crises. Hosea chapter 4 verse 3 reads,
00:19:26
Speaker
Therefore shall the land mourn, and every one that dwelleth therein shall languish with the beasts of the field and with the fowls of heaven, yea, the fishes of the sea also shall be taken away. Later in Hosea chapter 4 verse 6
00:19:44
Speaker
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge, because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me. Seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.
00:20:01
Speaker
The punishment here, coded in the idea that the people of Israel, the chosen ones, the holy ones, the United States, in all its self-gloried exceptionalism, have forgotten God's law and incurred divine punishment, legitimates the actions of January 6th, destroyed for lack of knowledge, thou hast rejected knowledge, and again, the elites have forgotten the law.
Media, Propaganda, and Law's Decline
00:20:28
Speaker
According to Elul's 1937 essay, within fascism, law is no longer at the heart of society but a mere facade. In the old days, even perhaps extended to a psychological projection and nostalgia-filtered, pre-fallen biblical sense of Israel, law protected and connected the individual to society.
00:20:54
Speaker
Today, social media and toxic media mogul propaganda replace that important glue in civil society. As political sociologist Robert Putnam and others have explored, a decline in community connects to a decline in political culture as well.
00:21:15
Speaker
Civil and political society are diminished in a vacuum of life-sustaining forms of culture, replaced by horizontal, Facebook, Instagram, etc., and vertical, media mogul forms of propaganda. This is what Jacques Ellul so eerily predicted in the mid-20th century.
Conclusion and Credits
00:21:43
Speaker
That was A Native of Conklin, New York, discusses QAnon by Sarah Louise McMillan. You can find the full article by following the link in the episode description. Canopy Forum and the Interactions podcast are distributed by the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University and produced by Anna Knudsen and Ethan Anthony. I am your narrator, Janet Metzger.
00:22:10
Speaker
You can follow Canopy Forum on Twitter or Facebook and the Interactions Podcast on Instagram. Thank you for listening.