Guest: Whitney Phillips, Co-Author of »The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-Liberal Demonology Possessed US Religion, Media, and Politics«
Mentioned book: Adrian Daub »Cancel Culture Transfer« (German) / »The Cancel Culture Panic« (English)
Other references:
- Breitband episode about evangelical influence on social media (German)
- Kompressor about OnlyFans’ influence on pop culture (German)
- Hays Code
- A a set of industry guidelines for the self-censorship of content that was applied to most motion pictures released by major studios in the United States from 1934 to 1968.
- Megachurches
- Prefrontal cortex development
Transcript
(The transcript has been generated using the Whisper Large v3 Turbo model in Macwhisper and might contain errors.)
Hagen
Hello and welcome to a very rare occasion, a new episode of this podcast. And it's only the second episode and I'm already trying something new because the conversation you're going to hear wasn't actually meant to be released when we recorded it. because it was actually meant for the show Breitband, where I usually work at. So I'm talking to Whitney Phillips, who's a professor of information politics and ethics at the School of Journalism and Communication from the University of Oregon and author or co-author of books like This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, where she looks at 4chan and online trolling or the reason for our current talk the shadow gospel where she looks at the influence that evangelicals have on us media and have had for decades. The reason I wanted to talk about evangelicals which might sound like a weird topic for the things I usually cover, which is internet culture, internet politics, and of course from a German angle a lot of the time.
But the reason I wanted to talk about evangelicals go back to a different thing I did for the show Compressor, where I talked about OnlyFans and how OnlyFans became a part of modern pop culture. And when I reported on that, I, of course, looked at the discourse surrounding OnlyFans. And there's, of course, a lot of backlash because it's pornography. And there's always a lot of backlash around pornography. But what I found interesting is... that I found many left-wing feminist influencers who talked about the actual problems that pornography has. There's taking advantage of women, of less privileged people, how slimy the porn industry can be. But these same influencers or activists said things that were against porn, but... followed different ways of arguing. There were a lot of puritanical arguments there, like, it's just not a good thing to do because you don't do it, which isn't the same as talking about the patriarchy, about misogyny online. And I thought, these sound weirdly religious to me. And that led me to the thing I did for Breitband, where I looked at how evangelicals get their talking points into discussions like this. And Whitney is one of the experts I talk to.
And because it wasn't meant to be released as a whole interview, I need to give you some context about it. because some terms won't be thoroughly explained because the way it works is that I take small snippets and quotes and play them inside the show. So I didn't need to define things I already knew about At another point, I'm mentioning Adrian Daub, who is a professor for comparative linguistics at the University of Stanford. And we're talking about his book, Cancel Culture Transfer, which is the German name, or Cancel Culture Panic, which is the name for the English translation. So that is the context there. I will, of course, try to link as many things as I can in the podcast description. But I don't want to bother you any longer with the introduction. So let's talk with the actual conversation where I asked Whitney Phillips how the evangelicals got started in being interested in media and why they tried to shape it and influence it in the ways they did. Yeah.
Whitney
It wasn't just that they wanted to save their own souls, convert souls. They wanted to convert society. And so there was this recognition that the way that you do that is to harness the media. At that time in the United States, the biggest, the burgeoning media apparatus was radio. For reasons that are kind of complicated and get into the weeds, they were essentially in this war for radio supremacy in the US, and ultimately they won. Evangelicals were able to kind of position evangelicalism as the American Christianity. So, not one of many Christianities, because there are lots of Christianities in the United States. But they were able to situate themselves as the Christianity because they won that media fight.
In every iteration of media, including the advent of cable television, all of the stuff that happened subsequent to that. In the US, evangelicals have always been the best at harnessing that. And they've been really good at harnessing, even VHS tapes. We think of that now as being an antiquated technology. But when it first emerged, that was cutting edge. And evangelicals used that to promote and spread these very hellfire, satanic, panicky kinds of direct-to-consumer videos that really help to prop up dispensationalism, this apocalyptic approach to the world. And they were the best at it.
They were always the best at it because, in their minds, they had to be because they didn't see a place for themselves within mainstream media. Seeing that evangelical churches, just christian churches generally, have been very good at positioning themselves on social media, that's actually more of a continuation of a long-standing trend. The question is just: Would non-christian people have encountered it before? And I think that's really the shift. That if you were an evangelical person or christian person, you would have been well aware of the media landscape that was your denomination of your faith. People outside of that had no idea that any of this stuff was happening. And so, in the United States, evangelicalism was able to amass a great deal of sort of visibility, or at least a great deal of, they were able to promote their messages with great intensity outside of the awareness of the mainstream. So, it's really more about who's paying attention to what the evangelicals are doing rather than suddenly evangelicals have become really good at harnessing media. They're so skilled at it and just have been for decades and decades.
I think the interesting thing might be really because we come in contact with them even before we get into porn, like even with traditional movies, it's like now there's a whole discourse about Do we need nudity at all? Even kissing, are sex scenes necessary and not because of some feminist way, the way that the relationship is portrayed or that that is problematic. But Is this a necessary part of storytelling at all? And that feels so puritanical, religious. very contrary to the way things had developed before, where it seemed to be more and more progressive and more and more things were allowed and more taboos were broken or left behind.
In the US, a lot of the driver of the code, so we had what was known as the Hays Code that Restricted, you know, could a married couple even be shown in the same bed? In the United States, the answer was no, because that was like, that was not acceptable. And it was Catholic groups were a big part of this as well. But religious groups were, at that period of time, they were really pushing to get sex out of Hollywood. And so. It's interesting that there would be a returning back to that. But there's definitely for it. But yeah, you would think that's something that's relegated to the past. And certainly the young people wouldn't be on board with that. But when you look kind of broadly at where The religious rite has been. We're kind of just going full circle to where they started. But it just is interesting that that historical arc doesn't seem like where we should have ended up, but here we are.
A few moments ago, you said you were curious about how it is outside of the US. And while, of course, we have evangelicals over here, they don't have nearly the influence. Like we don't have this whole T V preacher thing. And because of the way it's financed and structured over here, we don't have these people buying private jets with church money and we don't have mega churches. It that's just not a thing. Like here mainly the Protestant and Catholic church are present. And There are smaller offshoots, and yeah, there are some radicals there, but it's not that mainstream. But the interesting thing is it was always that US media, of course, was very successful, so it influenced us as well with movies, with T V shows. But I think it's becoming more apparent as well because the platforms we communicate on haven't been US based before. Like we owned the broadcasters. Sure, we showed US movies, but we also showed French movies, we showed German movies. And Now everything is funneled through the US mainly, which also means through their moderation standards toward their acceptability of nudity or or whatever is. And that feels like the designs of the platforms are influenced by the U. S. religious perception or standards to some way.
That's well, that's interesting. So Facebook and Twitter, the sort of big two to and Instagram, of course, to come out of the US. It was definitely when they were developed, they definitely were pulling from ideology, ideology really fundamental to a U. S. context. And around speech, what that meant was a kind of Information wants to be free. You don't want to restrict speech in any kind of way. Sort of the First Amendment, not on steroids, because the First Amendment is already kind of on steroids in the United States compared to other sort of speech contexts around the world. But that there really was this feeling that you are doing a disservice to the network if you don't Make information as frictionless as possible.
And that runs parallel to then, it's not just that information wants to be free, you want to be able to monetize people's information. So it should be free and it should get you money. And that is, I would say, within the context of Silicon Valley and that ethos, the sort of libertarian kind of ethos that doesn't really have grounding in religious tradition in the U. S. And what has happened, especially since Trump won. That all of the moderation that had been happening sort of haphazardly on those platforms, that's been pulled away. So speeches. There weren't really reliable guardrails beforehand, but now there really aren't reliable guardrails. So that is not exactly sort of challenging what you were saying, but I don't, the religious stuff comes after. Like, the religious stuff is not really baked into the cake.
I think that what has happened is that. The pervasive ideology around speech and around sort of freedom in the United States, that's what baked the cake. It's just that the people This is such a weird metaphor. The people who live on top of the cake have become religified through other kinds of influences that are very often disconnected from churches in any meaningful way. And so you've got this. It's not a religious basis, but it starts things start to look religious in many pockets online because this kind of quasi-religiosity has been sprinkled on top of it. So it's actually really, really weird. That it's an after effect, it's not a cause. That's how I would characterize it. It's just kind of knowing the kind of background of where some of these platforms are coming from, how they're based in. The sort of guiding ideologies of the United States in the last couple of decades.
But I think it's also interesting to think what makes them so successful because what you just said, like they are often even removed from the churches themselves, like how it happens. And that's also something I noticed while I got here, was like this thing on OnlyFans I did and the purity culture thing. And I think that's very interesting because if you're on TikTok or on other social media, you see many people arguing for it who definitely don't have a religious connection. And there are many parts to criticize about pornography, and there's a discussion to be had about power, about exploitation. But much of this discourse, even from these activists, sounds very like purity culture and not because of actual problems, but more about ethics and personal morals. what makes them s so efficient at communicating that they even can infiltrate other cultures, other spaces that are removed from religion itself?
When you are disconnected from actual religious theology, from specific religious tenets, and from the sort of pesky task of having to read the Bible, It makes the religion or the religious ideas more mobilizable because you get kind of stuck if you are committed to a particular religious tradition. There's only so many things you can say, there's only so many things you can do. You are confined by. The strictures of the religious practice and tradition. So you can't do as much with it if that's what you're doing. It's a lot easier to utilize religion towards, especially cultural ends. If you don't have those strictures, if you're not connected to churches, one thing that really characterizes evangelicalism in the United States when it was establishing itself. Was that it was primarily pushed forward by what are known as parachurch organizations.
So they're not really connected to the church exactly. They talk a lot about Jesus, but it's not really theological. It's more about the packaging, it's more about kind of bringing people into the fold, but it's not really grounded on anything. And that means it can be harnessed towards. Lots of things. And so when I hear about purity culture, you even see some of that discourse in the fact that a lot of people, like Maha, a lot of people who are in the kind of wellness space. The discourse is also around purity, or purity of food, purity of farming. You have all these people who otherwise would be kind of Republicans or conservatives adopting the language of basically like left-wing hippies, with a very particular exception, which is that they hate left-wing hippies. They hate the left, and what they're actually advocating for is a purity from what are seen as liberal impurities.
And in the US, liberal is a very complicated word that, you know, it has a long history. And we try to unpack those histories in my latest book. But it's just this idea that the left, sort of broadly conceived, connected to liberals, broadly conceived, connected to the Democratic Party, broadly conceived. That there's some impurity that they bring into culture, that they bring into agribusiness, that they bring into science and all these other sorts of institutions. And so, purity culture in this really broad sense is about pushing out those elements. And so, when you think about the accusation that Hollywood is this liberal bastion. Part of, I mean, I would need to do interviews and would need to do sort of more direct kind of research.
But what I suspect is that the thing that is regarded as impure. is the vestiges of liberalism and the idea of this, you know, all things go, like liberals/slash the left, slash the Democrats. Have this reputation as being permissive about certainly gender representation and sort of sexual mores, and that shows up in all kinds of ways in trans conversations, right? And So they're regarded as being, and this is, it's not necessarily referring to any specific group of people, but like the idea of a liberal. Is that you can change your pronouns, you can do this or that, like there's no rules. And so that's regarded as being an impurity or like some kind of deviance or something, a deviance from. Traditional America, real America.
That's also why you see people like the trad wives phenomenon, where you've got these liberalizing influences, they're indoctrinating kids, they're indoctrinating women. Cast off their traditional biological roles. And so, Tradwife is about rejecting the impurity of liberalism and returning to a purity of an imagined conservatism. So That's my suspicion is that a lot of discourses around purity are about identifying those cultural elements said to be causing the impurity and then saying we're rejecting that and we're going back. We want to go back to the 1950s. You know, before the libs took hold, or whatever. Like, how does that line up with what you were seeing or what you have encountered?
I think it's pretty much that, and I think it's also Yes, look at the world right now. I mean, my job is to I get paid and I have the time as part of my job to read the news, to think about the news. And even I'm like now with the Iran thing happening, that's horrible. That one I can't deal with. I I'm done. My plate is full. I have to compartmentalize. And that one I can't touch. And if that even happens to me who's like has the space and the time. There's so much happening. And I feel like it's also a return to easy answers that's happening.
Yeah, well, right. I mean, and the idea, and this is hardly a new concept, that modernity has brought all kinds of social problems and we have to go back to a simpler time. People have always said that, right? I mean, not realizing that every simpler time was so much more complicated than gets represented. But so, yeah, I think. I think that there can be a deeply held conviction that like libs are responsible for cultural rot. That has been an ongoing and kind of growing Perspective among many people who aren't even necessarily conservative or Republican, but just it's become this position that a lot of people end up Taking. So I think that that's a powerful influence.
But then, yeah, you want to go back to a time that was simpler. You know, you want to go back to a time when Your behavior was more prescribed, that you knew what men versus women were supposed to be doing, where it wasn't so confusing. I mean, it could. Just be a backlash to how stressed out and overwhelmed people are. And then, without kind of having that understanding of history, that You know, things in the 1950s wasn't halcyon. It wasn't easy. Maybe some people's lives were a little easier, but by and large, that was not a great time.
To be a woman, to be a person of color, to be most people, you know, plus the fact that it just becomes then a trend online, people are really influenced by trends. So if the trend is to kind of move in this more Purity culture direction, it kind of has a recipe. There are a lot of things that would bring a lot of people to that. And how can you tell just by observing who's Committed in an ideological way to pushing out liberal influence. How many people just kind of like the aesthetic of the meme? And how many people are just overwhelmed and want some kind of answer that feels easy and graspable? That if we just. Get rid of porn, or we just get rid of sex, then maybe I will feel less anxious. So it's probably all of those things combined, and you can't really tease out which is which. But it speaks to the very weird moment that all of us find ourselves in.
I just had a thought, like it really just occurred to me, so I haven't thought it out, but I'm interested in your opinion on it because what I just thought of was also people want to go back to a clear good and evil and away from the gray area. It is political, it's a tough topic, but if you look at everything in the discourse about Israel, where it's like both sides are the other ones are evil. And like, that doesn't mean that yours is Also, right. Two sides can be wrong. Two sides can do bad things. And everybody is so like, no, I have to be on the right side. And like. It isn't always that easy. And I feel like this is also a thing that falls into this whole easy answer thing. There needs to be a good person, there needs to be a bad person. And people are way more complicated than that.
Then the world is more complicated than that, and history is more complicated than that. Politics is more, everything is more complicated than that. One thing I would say I mean, I focus on politics in my class, I focus on media, but in order to focus on those two things, especially in a U. S. context in the last couple of years. I also focus on the impact of overwhelm and stress on communication and on cognition. And one of the things that is really well established. In research, not just related to how people behave online, but what our brains do when we get stressed out. That essentially, so if you think of your brain, the frontal part of your brain, this is the prefrontal cortex, I'm pointing to my forehead. That's where all of our high-level decision-making takes place. That's where we're able to attune to other people's feelings and experiences. That's where we take perspective. That's where we weigh real threats against imagined threats. That's where we're able to self-soothe all of the things. That we would want people to be able to do, to interact with each other in society. That happens up here.
It's the most recently evolved part of our brain. It's a very sophisticated apparatus. You compare that with the, and I'm pointing to my brainstem on the back of my head, that's where your limbic system is. That's basically the lizard brain that is responsible for fight, flee, freeze. And what happens when We get overwhelmed because we're actually under physical threat or because we're inundated with information, because we're confused, because we're scared. Essentially, all of our processing moves from our prefrontal cortex down to our limbic brain. That now suddenly we're operating from this other part of our evolutionary kind of existence. And so it means that a lot of the sort of careful Reflection that we would normally be able to do, we don't have access to in the same kind of way.
And so when I am brokering difficult conversations in my classroom with students about politics, I want us to understand how our brains work because students need to be able to recognize when they're moving from a prefrontal front brain place to a downstairs brain place. Because once you go into a downstairs brain place, you're basically only capable of thinking in black and white. Survival, not survival, good, evil. That's what we have to keep ourselves safe. If millions and millions of people around the world, for all kinds of reasons, in all kinds of different conversations, if they find themselves in this Different sort of cognitive mode, discourse becomes impossible because that is not where gray area lives. And it doesn't mean that people aren't capable. It doesn't mean that they wouldn't be interested in having those conversations. It means that That skill set is maybe not accessible to us in the way that it would be under different conditions.
So if you think about Crushing anxiety, crushing catastrophe, just nothing but information and scary information from every direction. Why are we surprised? Number one, that conversations online often are not very good. And number two, that a lot of people for a lot of different issues in a lot of different directions. Are in a mode where who's good and who's bad is an easier place to go. When you think about it from that perspective, you can, and I think you should, have some compassion for why. People are often in this binary kind of place. It's because that is where their brains are, and their brains are there because things are so stressful and things are so scary. The reality of most situations is so much more complicated than this person is the devil and this person is 100% good. And so the conditions of our lives, the network conditions of our lives, really prevent us from being in a great place comfortably.
That's also pretty interesting because I had this a couple of times now over the last month or year where conversations that would have ended in a fight online, but I didn't have them online. I had them in a bar talking to the person. And the result was we are still of different opinions and still have different conclusions. But it turned out like how much closer we actually were together, we agreed way more on the problem space. We didn't agree on the solutions and what would be the right way to solve everything. I wouldn't say everything is fixed now, but it was way easier to find points where we could agree with each other.
And part of that is one of the ways that we kind of Self-soothe, or one of the ways that we down-regulate our nervous system is by attuning to another person. So that means that when you're, I mean, it doesn't always Work this way because sometimes people get really reactive around each other. Obviously, that's why violence happens. But if you're in a situation where you're able to actually connect with another person and see them, you know, engage with them. Pay attention to their reactions, expend some curiosity, then what that kind of does is it helps your brain stay in this frontal place.
Which doesn't mean you can't ultimately think that the person is terribly misguided and that you will never agree with them, you may never like them, but there's more opportunity in person. To find a way to kind of keep things a little bit simmered down, and our ability to be in a gray area space and to consider the different. causes and and the the various consequences that might happen. Certain situations are more conducive to that. And the Internet is not conducive to that in any way. You know, so if you have, especially if we're thinking about younger people, this is not just true of younger people, too, of course, but younger people spend an enormous amount of their time online or.
Kind of filtered through a device. They might be interacting in person, but they're also interacting in a sort of device space. And so those are spaces that are just more geared towards keeping your limbic brain activated. So, the conversations we need to be able to have that are hard and require everybody to kind of check their priors and Consider other perspectives and maybe allow for the possibility that you might be wrong, or at least that you might not know everything. That is not what the internet sets us up to be able to do. And our discourse is reflective of that.
What I just thought of was this whole …, because I know the actual number is disputed because of when the study cutoff was and everything. But this whole thing about your prefrontal cortex only being developed in your twenties, late twenties, thirties, whenever. But at the same time, that's actually different from what happened before, where Yes, young people dominated pop culture, but they were always edited through television appearances, whatever. And now we see the unedited thoughts and discussions being dominated by people whose prefrontal cortex isn't developed yet, and now you say now you're saying like that is actually an important part to be making decisions, that that might even be the problem there.
As an instructor, so I started teaching college in 2007. And my experience with college students then in the United States, you know, by and large, They had fun, and that was a carefree time in their lives. And, you know, they would get stressed out about certain things and breakups, and they worried about grades. So, it wasn't that college was this perfect experience. Some students, you know, had other kinds of financial challenges and other challenges. So, it wasn't 100% just Playing all the time. But as time has gone on, and I have continued teaching the same age of student, but the world has changed. The students that I teach now in 2025, and I talk to them about this: the level of stress, the level of anxiety, the level of just worry about the world. Yes, that has to do with the fact that the world is very complicated, but it's also that they never get a break from information. We can talk about the sort of, I don't do developmental psychology, so I'm less kind of.
I'm not really in the position to speak to that as an expert, but as someone who studies communication and who also just by virtue of being in rooms with them. I study undergraduates. I teach them. You know, I have to try to figure out what works for them. What worked for my students in 2007 is not necessarily going to work for them now. They're not necessarily in the same headspace. And so you can see in that kind of longitudinal way how conversation becomes increasingly difficult, and people figuring out where they belong in the world becomes increasingly difficult. Because there's no rest ever. People don't get to rest.
And when you are engaging online, often, especially, so I'm speaking to my college students in a US context. You know, when they're engaging online, they're all often doing it because they're trying to hustle, they're trying to find internships, they're trying to build a brand, they're doing things in this very They're positioning themselves in the marketplace. They're thinking of themselves in that way. There's no kind of consequence-free action. You're always performing. That requires a lot of.
I think pretty important that like these things don't work anymore. I mean, this is going off topic now, but I see the same like when people talk about the discourse around AI in schools and like you would have cheated too if you had in your early twenties, you didn't know the value of learning yourself. trying to explain that to people that their brains also didn't work like they do do now.
Well, and the other thing too is that my experience as an instructor Students have never been busier. And so you have these tools that allow them to multitask, sometimes in classes. They're going to take it. And that just contributes to or emphasizes the fact that we're talking about bandwidth issues. So anytime. I'm asked to talk about big cultural trends or challenges or weird things that are happening. It's important, I think, to look at the thing itself, the challenge itself. What is it that's actually being discussed? But it's really critical, I think, to also consider this holistic picture: that it isn't just that people are behaving in X, Y, or Z problematic way or strange way.
It's always against the backdrop of what the media environment is like, what the regulatory environment is like, and how we as human beings Interact with all of those things in better ways, sometimes, but often in worse ways. And so then the next question, usually, after considering, so here's this problematic thing, what do we do about it? What we do about it is complicated by the fact that what is contributing is all of it, all of it at once. So you can't take away the mental health conversation in all of this. Any more that you can take away the regulatory framework. How you would deal with a mental health crisis is different than how you would deal with a regulation crisis, especially if you're talking across the globe. So Everything, even talking about our problems, let alone how it is that people engage with those problems, everything is so much bigger and more complicated, I think, than we appreciate. And our brains are a really big part of that conversation that go sort of underappreciated, I think.
Talking about brains is a good hang up to get back to evangelicals, I think. How do they manage to instill things in the minds of people that are exactly The opposite of what they propose to believe in, because let's take my migration. Jesus was clearly for migration if you believe what's in the Bible. He wanted to help the poor, like there was a prostitute with them. He was clearly something that now would be called a liberal in the US, and a very progressive one at that. So how can people read that and don't notice?
Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, in the U. S. , this is pretty well reported that pastors around the country for years now have been dealing with the fact that a lot of their parishioners Will approach them after a sermon and say, like, why are you using these liberal talking points? And he's like, I was talking about Jesus. I was talking, I like, literally quoting from the Bible. I mean, and you saw some of this tension play out in the U. S. a couple of months ago with Doge, you know, going after Lutheran ministries and other. Christian organizations that were doing Jesus stuff in that they were, you know, servicing immigrants and helping people who, you know, who had migrated to this country.
They were totally doing Christian stuff. And yet they get attacked by these other kinds of Christians who say, I mean, even J. D. Vance, who is very publicly Catholic. Basically, saying you're doing Christianity wrong, or you're of the devil, basically. You're doing this liberal stuff, you're leftist, you're Marxist. When in reality, they're doing the stuff of Christianity. So that is a phenomenon that has been happening for quite some time in the United States. And on the surface, it seems really bizarre, because you're like, yeah, didn't you know that Jesus was totally cool with migrants? The way that we talk about it, my co-author and I, is we have this concept called demonologic. we have developed this idea of demonology, of describing the kind of underlying belief system in this Christianity that's not exactly Christian or it's not totally tethered to Christianity. Demonology is pointing vaguely to this sense of leftist or liberal threat. And it's not really referring to anyone in particular. And it's really nebulous and it's constantly shapeshifting. But it's very effective emotionally because you can point to whoever you designate as evil and like situate them in this cosmic drama frame. Emotionally satisfying.
It creates a kind of clarity, even if it is confusing for everybody else. And so, demonology is this guiding framework that drives a lot of behavior that looks Christian, that looks religious. But it's not actually focused on God or Jesus. It's focused on the liberal devil. So that's the framework that we're engaging with. But demonologic are those places where you see MAGA, for example, Making statements that seem really hypocritical, making statements that are really antithetical to what Jesus would say, for example. They proclaim themselves to be Christians. And then they do stuff that's really anti-Christian. And it looks like the words that we have typically to describe it, it's hypocrisy. Or there's it just is incoherent. That's the way that people try to respond. Those words kind of fail, though, to capture what actually is happening in terms of the belief structure that The reason that Lutheran ministries are doing something bad, it's because they can't be Christian because they're doing liberal stuff.
So, what they're attacking in their minds, it's not the Christianity. They're attacking the liberalism. So, you see that in other areas too, where it seems Trump will do something or MAGA will do something that seems really hypocritical. They'll hold one group of people to a different standard. You know, that, for example, MAGA is really protective of free speech. And the reason that Trump is going after Harvard University is because they infringed on the speech of Jewish students or otherwise there's not it conservatives are being censored on campus, and that's why you have to attack Harvard. At the same time, they can take really power, really strong steps against. Students who are supporting Palestine, right? And so they're very comfortable taking speech rights away from people who are using speech that they don't approve of.
They are banning books, which has never been a sign of being on the right side of history.
But well, there's that, but there's also they ban books, and it might look like that goes against free speech, but it does not. Because what they are banning are liberal ideas. And liberal ideas don't count as real American ideas. They're fundamentally problematic. So you can simultaneously ban books. Kick out students for writing pro-Palestine op-eds, you know, fire liberal professors. You can do all of those things and still maintain that you're protecting free speech because the right people's speech is being protected. That is not fully explainable by hypocrisy. That can only be explained by this other mechanism that explains what it is that's actually being targeted. And that's why. A concept like demonologic, I think, is useful when trying to contend with these really weird moments that otherwise are not very easily explained by our existing frameworks.
Yes, I mean, since we last talked, we actually got a new government in Germany, with our new chancellor being part of the Christian Democratic Union. One of the first things that happened is that one of the high ranking government members from that party told the churches to stay out of politics, and they're going against church sanctuary. Which is weird. I I'm not very concise messaging. I I'd call it that.
Yeah, I mean, so in so how strange is that in terms of the historical context in Germany? Like, is that a really out of the blue kind of, or seems like an of the blue sort of thing?
Not really. It's actually a very neoliberal financially motivated party. The Chancellor worked at Blackrock before he became Chancellor. So and the party has always been very much conservative. And yeah, they also believe in God, but it was also very much about the financial system, capitalism. And it's not really surprising, but it's like it's still obviously weird. Like you are called the Christian Democratic Union, you can't chastise the church. That that that's not how
That's well, we just live in a world right now where things don't seem to make a lot of sense and our existing frameworks don't fully account for the weirdness. I think that it's a call. To really rethink those frameworks and to figure out how we can better describe the weirdness. It's really hard to figure out what to do about weird stuff. And I'm speaking very broadly here. It's hard to figure out what to do about weird things, especially if we determine that they're harmful things. How do you do something about that if you can't even describe it with language? And that's the problem that, especially in the United States, trying, we think about politics here in terms of right versus left. It's different in other parts of the world, of course. But we have this two-party system. And it has, it cleaves onto the left and the right. And then that allows us to talk about polarization and the culture wars and all of these things that seem to be really stable. Even the designation between religious and secular, the binary seems to be true. But then you actually dive in and you look at it. The binary doesn't make any sense. The binary doesn't line up with what is actually happening. And yet, people often still use those same frameworks to try to talk about what's going on. And it just means that we're talking over, above, under, around the issues rather than contending fully with what is actually so weird in this moment.
I think do you know Adrian Daub? Like he's actually a German professor, but he teaches comparative literature at Stanford and is It's very interesting because, of course, he sees the US discourse, has a very US perspective. But he also writes books and how it is in Germany. And one of his, I think it is his latest book, is like called Cancel Culture Transparent. because this whole culture was cancelled culture discourse and now woke, whatever the newest terms are, it's always at the same. It's like political correctness, it's always at the same. We brought that over to Germany and directly copied it We don't have a two-party system. It's way more splintered. And he wrote about how this doesn't make any sense. How you c it doesn't make sense in the US, and it makes even less sense in Germany, but it doesn't need to.
I mean, that's where a lot of this stuff gets very interesting. I'm fascinated by how some of these discourses and some of these binaries move around the globe. The figure of the liberal devil or the leftist devil, that it has its own, it has origins in the United States for these very particular historical and media-related reasons, and should not end up in other parts of the world. And yet, it has. To my knowledge, there's not been comparative analyses of how it is that we sort of ended up here. But I think that needs to happen to best understand the kinds of dynamics that you're describing in the story and that. You know, just don't they sort of defy easy explanation. I think that explanation is in global comparative analysis of. How religion and politics and polarization have failed us, like the distinctions between religious versus not religious. Left versus right, whatever. Those things have failed us in explaining, and we need a better way of explaining it in our respective countries and then also globally as part of a broader conversation about transglobal communication.
I think a lot of stuff needs to happen because if you look at the election period before the election even happened, like the new Chancellor, he took very much stuff out of the Trump playbook, even though he isn't a Trump. He is like this very like I said, he's from Black Rock. He's like this serious older businessman, elder statesman, like what he portrays himself like, which is very much not like Trump, who's like loud and brash and But at the same time, he did the same thing of no, I'm just gonna say things that are obviously not things I can accomplish. He promised the exact opposite the things of the things he knew he needed to do after the election, and it worked for him. So and Trump did the same. Like he knew he was lying and it works. Now we have that system here, even though he's a very different character, the same methods work
Well, it's helpful, I think, to think about some of these dynamics in terms of Informational Darwinism. That's a framing that I'm using in a chapter I'm working on now, where our information ecosystem sort of selects for the fittest. Information and the fittest rhetorical modes. And people, human beings, were very good at doing things that have proven to be successful. Our networks also incentivize and make it more likely that those are the things that are rewarded. So it's this combination where the network is rewarding certain kinds of actions. Human beings are also choosing certain kinds of actions. And then what you end up with is really similar kinds of people in positions of power because they're able to harness and In some cases, weaponize information in similar ways because that's what works.
I get why evangelicals in principle, like some things I get, like, yeah, you can jet around in a private jet and have a rock concert at your mega church. That's awesome, I get it. Who doesn't want to be celebrated like that? Fine. But what is the goal behind influencing everyday discourse like that? Because It's not like they really care about Christianity or they really care about the messaging. It's about getting the power, but the preachers they already have the power. They are not as far as I can tell, they aren't into politics. They don't go for the Presidency. They don't go for a career in the Republican Party or something like that. What is the plan? Why do what they do?
Yeah, I mean, that's hard. Some people are just cynics, right? Some people have just figured out how do you commoditize, make money off of the information ecosystem. So a certain percentage of Preachers, a certain percentage of MAGA personalities, they don't believe it. They see an opportunity and they're opportunistic and they're smart enough to understand how the network works. In those cases, the motives are going to be much more straightforward. It's money, it's power, it's influence, it's whatever. And that's sort of less interesting to me because that just is people wanting to. Amass things for themselves and to enhance themselves in one way or the other.
Where it gets really interesting is where people are true believers, where there's a kind of There is a religiosity in the effort to convert society, but it isn't a religion that centers on cultivating love for God and Jesus. That kind of faith takes time, that takes engaging with the scripture, you know, that requires energy and effort. And it's slow and it's not flashy. It's certainly the attention economy doesn't care about that kind of faith. That's boring to the attention economy. Instead, it's a religiosity that is centered on hatred of the liberal devil. And when you look at the emergence, the power of the religious right in the United States. Ultimately, Satan is fast and God is slow. That's the difference. Satan is expedient. So if you're able to designate A certain group of people or behavior or things that are not quote unquote real America as the devil, that is the fastest shorthand to get people mobilized. And if you genuinely believe That liberalism, as this broad, vague concept, poses an existential threat. You want to try to convert. Therefore, you want to be in the comms field. You want to engage in You want to share the message. You want to share your faith. It's just not the kind of faith that people assume it is because it's about fighting the liberal devil, and basically that's it. And so when you think about politics, In that kind of way, you know, a lot of what you see out of MAGA, it isn't really policy that they're advocating for. It's fighting the liberal devil.
the fascist principle of you have to have the Jews, whoever. It it it doesn't matter. Your system works because you're against something. You aren't for anything. You need to be against something to mobilize and concentrate power for yourself.
Yeah, and if you're able to affix some degree of religiosity onto that, all the better, because religion inspires people. In a way that, for example, science does not, right? Like religion touches on people's identity, it goes down to their marrow, it's belief, it's
You don't want your kids to go to hell.
Yeah, well, I mean, and what's interesting is that, so evangelicals, part of what the big shift, one of the things that distinguishes evangelicals from fundamentalists, certainly in the 1950s. Or one of the things that allowed them to veer off and do their own thing. For fundamentalists, hell was a faraway place. Like hell was a place where Satan lived, and you had to keep yourself pure and clean and insulated. You don't, you know, you don't watch movies. You don't go dancing. You don't drink alcohol. You don't do those things. And that way, Satan's minions can't steal you away and bring you to hell, which is a faraway place. It's like a, it's, it's a place, and that's where Satan is. Evangelicals shifted how Satan was understood such that Satan wasn't just free range on earth. Earth was hell. Earth was hell. And the way that you would fight against that is to fight against what were regarded as liberal influences that could not be escaped.
It wasn't enough to just not go dancing or not drink alcohol or not go to the movies. Every single thing in society was already suffused with these liberal influences, which meant the devil was everywhere. Think about how powerful that is. As a motivating factor, like in terms of directional reasoning. And so then people who really have internalized that, there is nothing that is more compelling to act. That is going to compel someone to try to do something about these influences. So, if you can take that need to always be fighting, but then connect it to a powerful religious drive. That is, I mean, that is a profound thing to be able to do. And that was what evangelicals were able to do in the United States.
I instantly had to think of this one clip that went viral, I think, multiple times, of one of these evangelical priests be like I see the devil in your eyes. And he said it with an intensity, like even I was like, What the f I get that he gets people to believe him. Like, I don't think he believes it, but I get how people believe this guy. I also like your term free range for the devil because I had to for the last two minutes, I was like the devil running around like a chicken.
It's well, I, so Billy Graham, he's one of the was one of the most prominent evangelicals in the United States. He was sort of the guy that people would imagine in their heads when they thought about like a Christian in the United States. And when he would go around and he would give these like huge rallies, Trump actually attended several of those when he was a kid. And he would talk about sort of the threat of Satan. He was basically like, Satan is everywhere I go. So even Billy Graham. Emphasize that he was not protected from Satan just being able to like scuttle about and go every place and go into the things that you liked. Including education.
So, like, this also, all of these conversations dovetail into what's happening in the education space in the United States and just the idea of like liberal indoctrination. People may be using that word, that term, liberal indoctrination. They may not be explicitly talking about Satan. They may not think about Satan in that outright way. It's making the same argument, though. And that's where the religious influence gets really interesting and difficult to track. Where people using seemingly secular language to talk about the liberal threat, they're actually tapping into that same feeling of. Cosmic drama as people who are using the term Satan literally and explicitly. But it's the same argument with the same emotional intensity. And for a lot of people, they want to be on the right side of that line.
I think you said a thing that them not thinking of it as Satan, because that reminds me of a clip I saw recently of a TikToker saying That he can spot YouTubers who were raced moment. And then he explained how he does it, which I didn't know because we don't really have moments here. That's not a thing we encounter. And I think it was pretty interesting. to see him explain the patterns that made him recognize it. Which leads me to the question, some of this purity discourse is part of general feminist discourse now, which doesn't follow the same logic based on studies and science. How do I spot the patterns of evangelical thoughts, evangelical doctrine, when there isn't the religious aspect being talked about?
Yeah, it's a really good question. And that's something that we've been working on, my coauthor and I, over the last several months. And we've identified a couple of markers. That we think really characterize this as a rhetoric and as a belief system. And it's important to be able to recognize it. So you sort of know what you're dealing with. One of them is very powerful amalgamation. And so. Let me put it this way: it's a powerful disconnection from specific individuals and specific policies.
So, when you're looking at in the United States discourses around trans stuff, one of the really striking things that you notice is that in fights, in quote-unquote culture war fights around trans issues. People are almost never talking about actual trans people. Instead, they're talking about things like gender ideology or indoctrination in schools or these various things where you're like, who are you talking about? And then, so that's one marker where it's not actually talking about the people it says it's talking about. It's a really strange linguistic thing, but you can be having a discussion about something, and it's not actually about that. They're not talking about that at all. Individual people are harmed by it because they're then not allowed to live their lives in the ways that make sense to them or that they should have a right to do. So people, individual people get hurt, but discursively, nobody is talking about individuals.
It's just like broadly. You don't want boys playing girls' sports, right? But it isn't really localized, it's not talking about a specific thing. So that's one marker where you've got this. Disconnection from specificity. The other marker is it's this lumping together of a whole host of traits. So when people talk about liberals or even, let's stay on the trans issue. The trans issue is actually touching up against a million different other sorts of liberal things, not only attitudes towards gender. You know, but it also in the US, it rolls into discourses around critical race theory or it maps onto other kinds of things that are regarded as being liberal. And so there's a part of speech. In English, it's Schenectady. I have no idea what that equivalent would be in German, but it basically is: it's a part standing in for the whole. So if someone were to refer to a car as wheels, It's that, or you refer to a crown and you're actually talking about the monarchy. So it's using a specific thing to describe the totality of the thing.
Trans people are just a symbol for all that's wrong with
Yes, you mentioned one trans thing and you basically light up the entire framework of everything that has ever been described as liberal. So now suddenly the enemy is like the biggest enemy you could imagine when you actually were supposedly talking about one kind of thing. So that Schenectady, again, I don't know what that translation would be, but. It's doing this weird thing where one or one annoying leftist on Twitter represents every leftist that ever existed, right? So it's that. It's like the individual thing or a specific thing becomes everything. So that's one of the markers, or the second marker. The third marker is what I described around demonologic, where there's different standards. Given to liberals that are given to other groups of people. So if a liberal does it, it's inherently bad. And if the same exact thing is done by a quote unquote real American, then it's fine. So, Trump can commit all the crimes that he wants.
And like everybody shrugs, it's okay. But you do you have a liberal, someone designated as a liberal, do the same thing, and blamo, you know, that's like the biggest scandal that ever existed. So It's all those three things. They typically operate together, but those are the markers for us that allows us to differentiate. Well, what makes demonology different than Just not liking someone or thinking someone is terrible. There's some very weird logical things that you can look for once you know you're dealing with that. Then you can kind of say, oh God, I'm kind of dealing with religion right now. It's like religion, not in a traditional way, and it's not about God, and it's not about Jesus, and it's not about the Bible. But it's about the devil. And once you understand that you're dealing with some kind of religious experience, it just might even be easier to manage your expectations. You are never going to argue someone out of their religious belief. And so that is not where, that's not where you put your energy. Like, where else do you put your energy? So, figuring out what the, you know, what the rhetorical markers were was, again, something we worked really hard on. But in all of these cases, those are the things that you see.
One line that goes right through every single aspect, even the trans issue, is a misogyny, because They never talk about trans men. Never. They it's always it's just trans women who are a problem. And with porn, it's like women deciding to do something, having power over their own sexuality. And it's always women. And I get that misogyny has always or for a long time been part of culture. It's woven into every aspect, and not just that's one and we also do others, but no, threat wise, everything is focused on women.
Yeah, it's interesting. And in this book that we're, the follow-up book that we're working on, we're really focusing on demonological masculinity as being a big driver of this. And it gets Tethered to also trolling rhetoric. So basically, the way that you prove that you're a man is that you fight the libs constantly. But what that does, in a sort of ironic way, is it makes Demonological masculinity really fundamentally dependent on liberals. Like, you can't exist as a man if there isn't a liberal, and that ends up.
That's why they're so mad about Bluesky. All their talking points are based on owning the lips, and now the lips aren't there, and that's that's bad.
Right. I mean, so identity is predicated on enemies, the particular kind of enemy, and without that enemy, you don't really exist. And so, what that does, the kind of masculinist displays that you see, it would be easy to Call it toxic masculinity, but I think that the problem and the interesting conversation is not around the ways that it's toxic, it's around the ways that it's not grounded in masculinity. That it's grounded in something else. It's grounded in fighting liberals, and that's all. And so the discussion of, well, this is so, this is all just sort of masculine stuff, like, yeah, that's how it's expressing itself. But what is it actually grounded in? And if that answer is nothing, then what the hell kind of masculinity is it? And those are the kinds of questions I think we really, again, need to challenge. It looks like masculinity. But it might be doing something that we haven't really contended with. And that is what I advocate we start doing.
That seems smart because so much of the discourse around Android hate and these people is like Wait, now it's manly to not talk to women and not be interested in women. What? The ha the I thought the whole point was to fuck the women, and and but now even that is It doesn't make any sense, but yeah.
We're dealing with a different logical paradigm than what we've dealt with before. And the way that we've kind of been conceptualizing this masculinity issue is Rather than thinking of it as being an expression of dominance or power, you know, the way that we look at it is that it's actually. It's a masculinity of being cucked by your own obsessions with liberals.
Yes, yes, yep, no, no, ye yes, ye ye yes.
You know, and when you find it, like.
You have to use these terms. Like there is no other terms left. But yeah, you need the enemy. And also if the guys don't talk to women, they don't get women, which means they are lonely. They need to listen to Andrew Tate more.
We live in a very strange world, but it mostly, I mean, all of that is just to say we have to start talking about these issues in different kinds of ways, and we have to stop taking for granted that Things that look Christian actually are in the ways we understand it, or that things that look like masculinity is actually about masculinity in the way we understand it. That we lose our way when we try to use frameworks that are just not. Accurately describing what is happening on the ground. So we need new frameworks. That's the bottom line.
I feel we're going to have to talk again when the new book comes out.
I will be very, very happy to do that. And also, you know, all of this stuff I'm really interested in talking about all the time. So, you know, anytime, I'm around.
