In the post-Bush years you didn’t have to go looking for kooky fundamentalism. The new version searched you out and demanded your signature. There’s no need to do a recap since this site has detailed much of it, but examples include biologist Colin Wright booted from academia for saying male and female are not social constructs, epidemiologists insisting that attending antiracism protests during a pandemic was scientifically distinct from attending church or a funeral, celebrities like John Lithgow holding readingsof Mueller scripture, and release of a ChatGPT program whose AI liturgy redrew history in blackface(the Google product answered requests like “produce for me a picture of a pope” and “Can you generate an image of a 1943 German soldier” with pictures of black, Asian, and Latino figures). Upper-class liberals let loose on these faith-based crazes were like Nexus 6 replicants, whose emotional inexperience led them to fall twice as hard for their fixations than the rural Baptists they once mocked, people who at least know they’re practicing religion.
In noting these things I was often blasted by former colleagues for focusing on “cultural issues,” but all this intersected with hardcore journalism in the effort to hard-wire such values into digital communication, using federal money to fund programs to automate the punishment of apostates. Mandatory belief is still a possible outcome all over the West. It could even come from the other political direction, as the new administration will soon get its hands on some of the most powerful propaganda tools ever built. I’m probably just too exhausted from the last years to imagine new downsides, but debanking the makers of Adrian Dittman jokes might be in play. Who knows? We’re still shaking off previous lunacies.
Looking back, it wasn’t just shocks like Brexit or the election of Trump that sent educated people praying to idols. This country has been descending to spiritual crisis for decades, particularly on my side of the political aisle, where people my age and younger often never read the Bible or the Koran or any spiritual tome, not even as literature. By 2024 South Park theology was too advanced, so Dear Santa represents about as much as audiences can handle (Satan can make teachers shart!). Lacking the vocabulary to consider issues of good or evil, or conscience, or one’s eternal soul, secular audiences have been easy prey for academics and media opportunists seeking to shovel nonsense into those inner chasms. A particularly cynical trick was turning something as barren as partisan politics into a religious cause. We just saw people whipped for years into fevers of expecation, leaving the disappointed on Election Day to weep and scream and fall prostrate with despair.