I obviously do not believe Biblical prophecies have a divine source in any sense. At the same time, I am fascinated by the power coherent images and attitudes have to influence people’s perceptions and experiences, especially when shared by many people. The easiest example of the latter is the energy at a major sports or music event. It can be palpable, and then dissipate when the crowed disperses and ceases giving the event their energy and attention. Understanding this phenomenon sheds a fascinating light on Donald Trump’s popularity, especially with Evangelicals.
This insight about the subtle power of focused imagery and emotion was important for many Renaissance Neo-Platonists, Tibetan Buddhists, and many other non-Western spiritual practices. They recognized the importance of disciplined attention not in words, but in images charged by focused emotion. The 13th Dalai Lama explained this point: ““The power of producing magic formations, tulkus, or less lasting and materialized tulpas, does not, however, belong exclusively to such mystic exalted beings. Any human, divine, or demoniac being may be possessed of it. The only difference comes from the degree of power, and this depends on the strength of the concentration and the quality of the mind itself.”
The generic Western occult term for this kind of phenomena is “thought forms.” In many ways thought forms are like Richard Dawkins’ original concept of a meme, except they exist in mental space that is not contained simply within the bodies of those with minds. For Dawkins memes powerfully influence our minds, and in his terms, can even be “parasites” benefiting at their host’s expense. They are human creations, usually unintentional, and are not human controlled. They also have some independence and can attract people independently from those who initially created them. A form with a certain emotional energy shaping it will be attracted to sources of similar energy.
I am NOT saying the entire psychic world is of this nature. In my experience it obviously is not. But insofar as we add depth and energy to them, these thought form/memes are a significant part of the psychic dimension as it connects with us in a more material dimension.
Using this perspective, I want to take a deeper look on the metaphysical dimension of Trump and the American right wing, especially its evangelical component.
A certain kind of Christian has focused on the image of an anti-Christ for some 2000 years. Those people, at least those today, are possessed with a deep hatred for those of us different from themselves, believing we are servants of Satan. According to the Bible real Christians will be raptured up and away before the Antichrist takes power. Sadly, this did not happen in 2016. According to the same scripture. There is supposed to be a great increase in wars and suffering. While we have seen an uptick in wars due to Ukraine and Gaza, these are small potatoes compared to WWII. COVID is a plague, but one that pales in comparison with those of the past, including during Biblical times. On balance, peace in Western Europe is more firmly established than it ever has been throughout history. Christians are supposed to be persecuted everywhere the Beast rules, but we have seen a renewed strength in the United State of the very kinds of Christianity whose members are concerned with the prophecies in Revelations. It is they who do the persecuting.
There are an extraordinary number of ways in which Donald Trump resembles Biblical descriptions of the Antichrist. This identification has much going for it because Trump’s character is the most devoid of saving graces of any human beings I have ever encountered. If evil exists in human form, he qualifies as evil. So, even if you take Biblical prophecies seriously, as I do not, Trump is not the Antichrist.
And yet if we take the analysis I started this piece with, there are grounds for finding an interesting connection between Trump and the Biblical image of the Antichrist, even though it has zero connection to divine plans of any sort.
Consider what I regard as the most important spiritual insight Jesus ever made, appearing in Matthew 25:35-40:
35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
In my view, whether said by Jesus or someone writing in his name, this is the most spiritually profound piece in the entire Bible, as well as the most consistently ignored theologically. For here Jesus says he (God) is in everybody. There is no original sin and no demand for beliefs of some sort to enter heaven- only for actions everyone is capable of. The specifics of belief are decidedly secondary to actions.
And it is here the Trump-as-Antichrist crowd gets very weird in the most literal sense. What have been Trump’s actions? They are the opposite of what Jesus recommended.
Thom Hartman lists the following (which could be expanded farther) https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/is-trump-the-antichrist :
· More than twenty women have accused him of rape and sexual assault.
· Hundreds of contractors, customers and employees have accused him of stealing from them or refusing to pay them (or both), as have members of his own family
· Throughout his presidency, he lied over 30,000 times and continues to lie daily
· He pits Americans against each other by race, religion, and region in an effort to tear our country apart and thus weaken opposition to his authoritarian rule
· He openly encouraged violence against unarmed people at multiple rallies and encouraged state violence at a speech to chiefs of police; most recently he encouraged an assault on members of the press
· He tried to overthrow and end our democracy
· He embraced depraved, ungodly murderers, kleptocrats, and “strongman” rulers while ridiculing western democracies and their elected leaders
· He tried to damage or dismantle political and military systems designed to keep peace in the world, including the UN, NATO, and the Iran JCPOA
· He reaches out to Jesus’s followers and then directs them toward bigotry, violence, and hatred
· As an object of admiration and a role model, he’s replaced Jesus in many white evangelical congregations
· He delighted in tearing children from their parents and putting them in cages
· He tried to end Americans’ access to lifesaving medical care by killing Obamacare and privatizing Medicare
· He watched on TV, like a delighted child, as his followers killed three police officers, sent 140 others to the hospital, and tried to murder the Vice President and Speaker of the House
· He lied about Covid (after disclosing the truth to Bob Woodward), causing more disease and deaths in America than any other nation in the world except Peru
There is a genuine puzzle here. The people most vocally concerned about the Antichrist in prophecy are also among Trump’s most devoted followers, and yet Trump acts in perfect harmony with the Antichrist’s values as Biblically described, and in perfect rejection of those Jesus explicitly taught.
The puzzle gets deeper. In an act of extraordinary projection, Trump’s evangelical supporters think of themselves as the good Christians persecuted by the larger society. Yet they support a man whose actions are the opposite of what Jesus urged. As Revelations describes, they also wear “the mark of the best” in their foreheads: their MAGA hats. They deny the legitimacy of any views but their own, seeking to set peaceful elections aside when they do not go as they want. They are unusually closed to any honest examination of facts, and when confronted by facts descend almost always into spouting slogans and proven lies. While most are decent people outside the realm of politics, when it comes up they seem to enter a kind of trance, as if possessed.
I contend they are in a trance, the kind of trance we see when a person follows post-hypnotic suggestions but otherwise acts perfectly normally. The kind of trance that resembles Dawkins’ meme-as-parasite. This is the kind of trance that infects cult followers, but in this case without the cult’s ability to completely seal them off from the outside world. Even so, this trance has done a remarkably effective job of sealing their reasons for being Trumpers off from their interactions with the rest of society.
But why would these Christians be vulnerable and others not? The answer is that despite its claims, Biblical monotheism, is not and never has reflected a single ultimate deity, but rather many deities, each rooted in conflicting interpretations of the same supposedly authoritative scriptures. I prove this in my book God is Dead: Long Live the Gods. For some, God is good, loving, forgiving, and for the Orthodox, God is also both transcendental to and immanent within the world. This is a God compatible with Matthew 25:35-40. Such people would be very inhospitable to infection by the Antichrist thought-form.
For others, the Christian God is a very different deity, commanding absolute obedience on pain of eternal punishment. His demands, practically impossible to meet, can only be forgiven if they believe without question that He sacrificed his only begotten son so he would be able to forgive those who disobeyed His commands. This deity continually tests His believers to ascertain the strength of their faith, and if they fail the test, Hell is their fate. , From the standpoint of the first group, such a being is more like a demon than a god. It is also a being whose importance rests entirely on its power to dominate and punish any conceivable opposition.
A great many of them say their God hates gays, liberals, transpeople, or whoever, verifying their own dislike of these people as not fitting their image of what is good. Hating a large group of fellow citizens who are considered to be allies of Satan also encourages them to seek a way to dominate them. They think they are acting in self-defense even though no one is interfering with their own actions. This belief opens themselves to infection by the Antichrist version of thought-forms focused on domination. They can easily enter a state of trance.
Trance
People in a trance do not see and experience the same world as people not in that trance. They do not see Trump as fitting the character of the Antichrist. They do not see the enormous gulf between the actions of the man they support and everything the Jesus they say they have accepted into their lives ever said. They also see a man who promises to dominate those they wish to dominate, but cannot. They get to participate in domination at one remove.
In their fanaticism, they create an emotional field in harmony with that of a two-thousand-year-old thought form. They feed their own emotional energy into this thought form that has in many ways melded with Trump because his own emotional state is so compatible with it. This is the spiritual foundation for why so many evangelical Americans seem blind to facts, unwilling to use reasons to make their point, and committed to seeing honest disagreement as evidence for badness.
This kind of trance is not unique to Americans, or to conservatives. It happens when people are attracted to dominating others whom they fear as evil or implacable enemies due to class, race, nationality, religion, or some similar division. A version of this afflicted the average Nazi in Germany. Another version infected the Communists who overlooked the crimes of their party and its government in the name of a better future. Another infects today’s “Pan-Slaves” who view Russian civilization as needing to be imposed everywhere its power allows. This is the same poisonous cake, but with different icings. And, of course, if two such tranced out groups end up battling one another, as happened between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, the power of domination to shape human action is enhanced.
In Knowing and Being, Michael Polanyi quotes Miklos Gimes, a leading Hungarian Communist during the Hungarian Revolution in 1954, who was later executed by the Russians after they crushed it. Based on his opwn experience in it, Gimes gave the best deszcription of such a trance when viewed from a person who finally woke up, that I have encountered.
Slowly we had come to believe, at least with the greater, the dominant part of our consciousness, that there are two kinds of truth, that the truth of the Party and the people can be different and can be more important than the objective truth, and that truth and political expediency are in fact identical. . . . [This outlook] penetrated the remotest corners of our thinking, obscured our vision, paralysed our critical faculties and finally rendered many of us incapable of sensing or apprehending truth. That is how it was, it is no use denying it.” (p.29)
But there is another step still further along this road to spiritual and moral nihilism.
Thinking about Power
In his Ritual: Power, Healing and Community, Maildoma Somé writes:
When power comes out of its hiddenness, it shrinks the person who brought it into the open and turns that person into a servant. The only way that overt power can remain visible is by being fed, and he who knows how to make power visible end up trapped into keeping that power visible. . . .
Somé adds “To display power is to become servile to it in a way that is extremely disempowering. This is because the service is fueled by the terror of losing the fantasy of having power.” (p. 59) He is describing Power as a psychic parasite, a parasite fed at the expense of those providing it energy. I think it is the ultimate psychic parasite. Like many biological parasites that affect the mind, it feels good to be parasitized.
To go farther, I want to make a vital distinction about power, which I identify by either capitalizing ‘Power’, or using a lower case ‘power.’ There are two steps in grasping this distinction.
As Starhawk explains in her Truth or Dare, power can be ‘power-with’, ‘power-from-within’, and ‘power-over.’ ‘Power-from-within,’ refers to the ability to walk our talk, to make a difference in how we act rather than passively responding to others’ actions. ‘Power-with’ refers to our ability to influence equals. ‘Power-over,’ refers to power as control or domination. All three exist in complex relationships with one another.
I suspect we are hard-wired to find acquiring power attractive because power overcomes many barriers to satisfying our needs and desires. From a human perspective, power is necessary to survive, potentially in too short a supply, and the power we have can be lost. Therefore we feel good when we acquire it or use it. This is true for all three forms of power Starhawk described.
Power-over something is a necessary element in life. I must have power-over my tools to use them to achieve a goal. I may value tools for other reasons as well, such as their beauty or their connection with valued people in my life, but when I use them as tools it is because they increase my power to make a difference. But whereas a tool is basically an object, a living being is a subject. Power-over a subject is domination. I do not dominate my hammer, but I can dominate my pet or a person.
Sometimes the pleasure we get from exercising power becomes reason enough to exercise it. This can be true for all three forms of power. It is here that power-as-Domination gets out of our control, so that we become its vehicle rather than it being ours. This leads to my crucial distinction. I distinguish power in its necessary form essential for our flourishing with a lower-case ‘p.’ Power as an end in itself, dominating subjects, I distinguish with a capital ‘P.’
The average evangelical Trump supporters reflects the influence of a deity whose major characteristic is Power. They continually emphasize their deity’s omnipotence. The energy that fuels this thought form is the pleasure of domination and this deity’s followers continually fuel it. In George Orwell’s novel 1984, O’Brien told Winston Smith:
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. . . . We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. . . . We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
In Orwell’s 1984, the Party is a secular god that can do no wrong. Weaned from secular garb, the god of Domination is its ‘spiritual’ side. O’Brien added “The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.” From the torturer’s point of view that torture does not give us truth because the tortured will tell whatever the torturer want to hear to make it stop is no argument against it. The experience of pure power over another is the motive, not a search for truth.
At this point I am not referring to the average Trump supporter, but rather to those Republicans who, at one time, denounced Trump for what he is, and are now falling in lock-step with him. We see many people who once harshly criticized Trump, the Mitch McConnells, JD Vances, Lindsey Grahams, Ron DeSantises, and those like them, now becoming his willing subordinates because what they really seek is the power to dominate. Like any other addict parasitized by a substance, they prefer being high in a hierarchy of power to not exercising power at all. A smaller dose is better than no dose at all. Their ideologies, then and now, are simply misleading labels covering up their true motive of seeing to dominate all around them.
This phenomenon explains why, when Russia conquered part of Germany, former Nazis could easily work for them, and when, later, communism fell, former Russian Communists could easily work in the new right-wing Russian state. Ideology was a vector for spreading the parasite and making it seem a normal part of a good life, but the minds infected were infected by Power. McConnell, Vance, Graham, and DeSantis are little different.
The lust to dominate pervades the political right, but we who oppose them are also susceptible. Intellectual arguments like mine will not break its hold for many, because to grasp an intellectual argument a person must step back from the trance, dis-identify with the thought form/meme, and examine it from a distance. It can be done. As with Gimes and the Hungarian Revolution, moral and ethical outrage can break the trance, perhaps because the heart is the deepest level with which we connect to ultimate reality, and so cannot be parasitized. With all their faults, the Cheneys seem to have done this. But doing so takes courage.