6 The New York Review
calling out moral hypocrisy, or wring-
ing our hands over cynicism, or even
from the power of numbers. Democ-
racy has to be sustained by the same
will to power that can destroy it. Q
Caroline Fraser
This election is a referendum on exis-
tential issues, among them racial jus-
tice, climate change, voting rights, and
health care during a global pandemic.
But it is also, in ways easily overlooked
during successive crises, about religion:
whether to empower for four more
years, at the highest levels of govern-
ment, a zealotry so extreme that it has
become a death cult.
Around the country, white evangeli-
cal Christians are killing each other, as
well as perfect strangers, glorifying the
inevitable and deadly result of refusing
to wear masks and observe protective
measures. On August 7, 2020, a Maine
wedding became a super- spreader
event when sixty- two guests, most not
wearing masks or practicing social
distancing, in defiance of state regula-
tions, gathered indoors at the Tri- Town
Baptist Church in East Millinocket and
later supped and danced at a reception,
also indoors, at the Big Moose Inn. Of-
ficiating was Todd Bell of Calvary Bap-
tist Church, located in another Maine
town, two hundred miles south. At
subsequent indoor church services he
expressed no remorse, remaining op-
posed to the “socialistic platform” rep-
resented by masks and distancing. His
parishioners are now testing positive.
He said he hoped that another recent
visit he made, to Oxford, Maine, which
has a casino, had infected gamblers
there. “Be a good place to spread it,”
he told the congregation.
According to the Maine CDC, the
wedding plague has triggered outbreaks
at a county jail, a nursing home, and a
school, causing more than 270 cases
of Covid- 19 and killing eight. None of
the victims—most at a nursing home a
hundred miles from Millinocket—had
attended the wedding.
In June, a member of the First As-
sembly of God in Fort Myers, Flor-
ida, allowed her teenage daughter,
Carsyn Leigh Davis, to go to a church-
sponsored party held in a gym and
attended by a hundred kids, offering
“games, awesome giveaways, free food,
a DJ,” and, apparently, coronavirus.
Carsyn, who had survived cancer and
other serious conditions, contracted it.
Her mother had promoted a website
called “DON’T MASK OUR KIDS” and
refused to allow her to be intubated,
having her treated with hydroxychlo-
roquine instead. The girl died two days
after her seventeenth birthday. The
church denied responsibility, and sup-
porters posted messages on Facebook
attributing criticism by “media and
elites” to “Satan.”
In July, The New York Times found
more than 650 cases linked to religious
facilities. In Oregon, 356 cases are be-
lieved to have been connected to a Pen-
tecostal church wedding; at a Calvary
Chapel in Texas, fifty people caught
coronavirus after hugging in church;
eighty- two tested positive at a Christian
youth camp in Missouri. Given their
views on abortion—and their adoration
of Trump and the judges he installs to
stop it—evangelicals have expressed a
jarring indifference to life. The Oregon
pastor said, without regard to those the
faithful might infect, “If God wants me
to get Covid, I’ll get Covid.”
According to a Pew study, Americans
overwhelmingly believe that churches
should observe health regulations, and
the majority have. Christian scofflaws
are scarcely alone: Orthodox Jewish
communities have contributed to the
spread, alongside businesses from bars
and meatpacking plants to prisons and
colleges. But white evangelicals, unlike
other groups, wield unique power in
the White House, promoting a “mus-
cular Christianity,” one that despises
“pansies,” the “women and effeminate
men” who wear masks. Many believe
the coronavirus is a hoax and, accord-
ing to Jared Yates Sexton, a political
analyst who has written on Trump
messianism, they “are not afraid of
mass death.” Eighty percent voted for
Trump in 2016. Without them, he can-
not win in 2020.
Trump has surrounded himself with
“court evangelicals,” including Paula
White, the White House aide and Flor-
ida televangelist who once offered suc-
cor to Michael Jackson and has hauled
in millions preaching her prosperity
gospel. He has wooed QAnon, the
radical outgrowth of those who saw
his election as divine intervention and
whose “Deep State” is rife with de-
mons. These Revelation- steeped souls
have cast Trump as leader of a spiri-
tual war against “invaders” (migrant
caravans), “Jezebels” (pro- choice sup-
porters), and cannibalistic pedophiles
(Democrats). In March he called for
a return to churches by Easter, deem-
ing them essential services; in June he
fondled a Bible outside St. John’s Epis-
copal Church after a five- minute stroll
that the faithful hailed as a “Jericho
Walk.” The relish with which he licks
fundamentalist boots is something he
has otherwise accorded only to Putin,
Kim Jong Un, and white supremacists,
whose ideology, according to one study,
has come to “dominate not just South-
ern culture, but White Christianity.”
He is their creature.
Joined by conservative Catholics and
anti- vaxxers from all walks of unrea-
son, white evangelicals oppose poten-
tial vaccines, which may contain, as Bell
warned in his sermon, “aborted baby
tissue” (i.e., tissue developed from fetal
cell lines, used in other medical and
pharmaceutical research). Alternately,
vaccines could well prove to be “the
mark of the beast,” smuggled in by Bill
Gates or Anthony Fauci. Extremists
have long been flogging similar fears
about Social Security cards and birth
certificates, but now the delusions are
mainstream, exalted by the president’s
most demented followers. They want
apocalypse now. At the polls, Amer-
icans will decide whether to give it to
them. QVivian Gornick
The morning after Donald Trump’s
election, everyone who had not voted
for him probably woke up thinking,
“How did we get here?” Nearly four
years later, even when we ask it rhetor-
ically, we are still marveling over the
question, for which no satisfying answer
has ever been found. How indeed did
we get here? Everyone—economists,
sociologists, political scientists—has a
theory: Vietnam, rapacious capitalism,the digital revolution. And while I am
usually the last person in the room to
resort to theory, I nonetheless have one,
too, which I’ll now throw in the ring.
For me, it all begins with the liber-
ationist movements of the 1970s and
1980s; that is, the surprise uprising of
blacks, women, and gays in a country
that was still failing to deliver the po-
litical and social equality that had long
been promised and long been denied.
Convinced that the United States was
a mature democracy, we feminists in
particular were certain that the gross
subordination under which American
women lived, now articulated by hun-
dreds of us, would tomorrow be ac-
knowledged by thousands, and the day
after that by millions. How could it be
otherwise? Only people of serious ill
will or intellectual deficiency or down-
right political greed would oppose the
obvious. And after all, how many of
them could there be?
We soon had our answer in the
form of the formidable Phyllis Schla-
fly, the rock-ribbed Republican whose
violent denunciations of the feminist
movement we found both frightening
and incomprehensible. For Schlafly,
feminism was the Antichrist, and she
would rather see America come apart
at the seams than submit to our god-
less demands. She wanted America to
remain—as God would have wanted
it to remain—safe for Mom and apple
pie. She wanted the protective laws that
ensured inequality for women—state
laws that limited the number of hours
a woman could work in a week, for ex-
ample—to stay in place. She wanted
Roe v. Wade overturned. She said there
was no such thing as rape in marriage
and that labor-saving devices such as
indoor clothes dryers had provided all
the improvement in life that a woman
needed.
What was sobering—and what sent
us reeling—was the incredible re-
sponse she received from a few million
women, ordinarily apolitical, who now
seemed to be living in active terror of
social change, the idea of women living
independent of marriage and mother-
hood having sent them over the edge.
What very few on my side of the divide
really understood was how primitive
these issues actually were, and how
far-reaching were both the fear and,
yes, the despair they induced. Pretty
soon many of us began to realize that
the gulf between the women’s move-
ment and Schlafly’s followers not only
wasn’t going to narrow, it was going to
grow steadily wider; and under its di-
viding influence American society (as
all of us had ever known it) might begin
seriously to come apart.
At this point an old-time revivalist
movement began to sweep through the
land, the kind that arises when a soci-
ety is forced, like an individual, to face
its own deepest conflicts retreats into
the mindlessness of unreason. Within
two decades there were evangelicals
everywhere, prayer breakfasts in the
White House, and Americans in un-
heard-of numbers announcing their
belief in angels.
It was as though, having been forced
into a soul-searching it could not sus-
tain, the United States had decided
instead to have a nervous breakdown.
When Thomas Frank wrote What’s the
Matter with Kansas? (2004), his book
about the Midwest turning conserva-
tive, he wondered why hardworking
farmers and blue-collar laborers werevoting against their own interests,
which he took to be economic. But they
were in fact voting for what was now
their own interest. The rallying cries
“abortion!” and “gay marriage!”—
uttered as warnings of threats to life
and limb—said it all. The enormity of
the fear and anxiety that they felt at the
thought of welcoming into the democ-
racy all those not like themselves was
eye-opening.
I’ve never thought of myself as a pa-
triot; still, it wasn’t until September 11
and the subsequent wars that I began
to lose a light-heartedness about being
American that I didn’t know I’d had
until I lost it. Somewhere inside me,
when reading about the human rights
atrocities some other country was
committing, I must always have been
gratified to think that “America would
never do that.” Now, of course, I know
better. Still, it was not until Donald
Trump became president that I could
even imagine American democracy
self- destructing. Now it seems a dis-
tinct possibility. Who knows what sort
of damage done in the future will be
traced back to these years? On that
score, all bets are off.
But on most scores, all bets are off.
I live from day to day, sometimes ani-
mated, sometimes really depressed, but
mainly in a state of open-ended curios-
ity about how much of the damage I am
going to see play itself out. QMichael Gorra
I was out hiking with a college friend,
a tax lawyer who used to be a Repub-
lican, and in between our moments
of fear and loathing we talked of the
things about the present that we sim-
ply found baffling. Look, I said as we
panted up a hillside, we’re both experts
of a kind; people pay us for our opin-
ions and judgment and experience. We
believe in our own expertise, and in
consequence we also trust our counter-
parts, the people who know things we
don’t: the climate scientists and evolu-
tionary biologists, the doctors who tell
us that vaccines are both necessary and
safe, my auto mechanic and plumber.
So I just don’t understand the suspi-
cion of professional judgment that’s so
much a part of Trump’s movement and
of Brexit too.
My friend then wondered about those
who don’t have any such expertise and
know it; those to whom the world of or-
ganized information appears in some
sense illegible. Might that explain the
hostility? A fair point, I thought, and
I can certainly see the votes in ginning
up a suspicion of the educated as such.
But of course it’s more complicated. A
lot of money goes into keeping people
misinformed, from the energy industry
in particular. Yet who profits from the
anti- vax movement, say, and what part
does religion have in it all?
Two books have helped me think
about such questions this summer. One
is Kevin Young’s Bunk (2017), a his-
tory of hoaxes and conspiracy theories
in American life, and especially those
hoaxes that both blur and police the
lines of race. A lot of us enjoy a good
con. We enjoy watching other people
get conned, anyway, and watching the
comeuppance of confession as well.
Conspiracy theories are more compli-
cated, and Young shows that a belief
in them—in secret hands pulling the