Tentative thesis (drawing on Hauerwas, Stringfellow, evangelical history and various left shitposters):
a) American Protestant revivalism is initially a rich, diverse, and bizarre phenomenon with many diametrically opposed variations (particularly around abolition) https://twitter.com/QanonAnonymous/status/1299731517392826368

b) American fundamentalism — distinguishable from revivalism generally by a literalist view of scripture—is however molded by committed racists. The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. If you read the Bible lovelessly and literally, you can find pretexts for slavery.

So while 19th cent evangelicalism is often p cool— abolitionists and early feminists whose egalitarianism has a religious, and in my view actually divine, intensity (despite everything they got wrong)—

Early American fundamentalism is, like, Charles Hodge, a proponent of slavery (they had it in Bible times!), or, later, Machen, a classic American libertarian in that the “freedom” he wants is the freedom of a plantation owner’s sons from the gov’t.

(That is the only definition of freedom that could make libertarians’ actual commitments make any sense whatsoever.)

In the 20th century, this version of fundamentalism first re-brands itself as evangelicalism via the 1942 formation of the National Association of Evangelicals—K Kobes Du Mez’s book put me on to this—and then basically takes over.

It takes over because it uses mass media really well, and because it accommodates American nationalism, as the liberal and mainline churches have already done; but *unlike* them, it doesn’t accommodate itself so completely to the Am mainstream as to disappear into it.

If you’re a fundamentalist Baptist in 1965, you can support Our Boys in Nam and you can salute the flag and you can say our fabulous (largely stolen) wealth is “God’s blessing” but you’re also opposed to enough things that it still feels worthwhile maintaining group identity.

Whereas if you’re a mainliner, you’re p well identified with the prosperous center—against the left, against workers, but for amelioration and “sensible” protest. Why go to church over that? It’s just Life Magazine.

So by the 80s “evangelicalism” is being taken over by a fusion of Southern evangelicalism and fundamentalism specifically. Lots of evangelicals can’t find themselves in this description! It’s a big tent! But a lot can, I think.

Looking back, this is definitely the Christianity I was initiated into as a child in the 80s.

They really did tell us that God magically made a soldier’s busted radio work in Vietnam, that America was specially blessed but in danger of losing it due to gay acceptance, that Jesus would rapture us before climate change got too bad. They really said that shit.

They also really did pass the hat for my father when he was out of work. The pastor of that church (who I couldn’t STAND) gave a homeless guy his car once. Even a v subverted church still has buried potential.

Then 9/11 came and broke everybody’s brains.

After decades of saying, falsely, “we’re under attack,“ of projecting ourselves into the bk of Revelation and thinking “we are surrounded by our future persecutors” rather than finding & standing for those who actually were persecuted (poors, blacks, queers, Jews, Sandinistas...)

... with 9/11, we finally had something to feel attacked about!

And so this obscenely rich and powerful empire becomes the thing we have to protect at all costs, the suffering servant at the center of our worship.

This isn’t all evangelicals. It’s just enough of them for the demographic to go Trump in 2016 and for every evangelical congregation to have a Qanon problem now.

What is Qanon? It’s what happens when you take the America-worshipping wing of this modern fusion of evangelicalism and fundamentalism and take Christ out of it completely.

The intellectual and emotional habits are the same—lots of obsessive reading of the same few texts over and over; a conspiratorial style of reading (the truth hidden in symbols); going way out on an interpretive limb and fighting for that limb like God Himself put you on it;

a confusion of America and Jesus; a feeling of pervasive moral decay; an obsession with lurid stories of tarnished innocence (evangelicals have been bandying fake numbers abt sex trafficking for decades and many were suckered by the satanic child abuse panic in the 80s)*

*ofc I suffer from Epstein-brain and think both of these things exist to some degree

When those are your constitutive practices, and you kind of lose track of Christ completely, what’s left is Qanon. It’s all the things that felt fun abt Christianity, but you don’t have to worry abt that weird Jewish fellow and his difficult ethic (cuck shit!!!)

Where was Christ as all this happened? He was with the poorest and most vulnerable, first of all; he was also active on every side of this culture war. America-ridden fundies nevertheless introduced me to this religion. They didn’t do so without him being present in some way

This is why I don’t always fuck with some versions of left Christianity—I don’t think God ever ceases to love sinners, or ever loves us less, and I don’t think Jesus abandons us.

But Qanon has all the same things that were emotionally satisfying about American nationalist fundagelicalism plus you don’t even have to worry abt Jesus! No wonder it’s spreading like wildfire, via electronic media.

The Chapo guys like to say that American Protestantism is its own new religion. I disagree, bc see two tweets ago. But I see what they mean. And Qanon is the next evolution of that thing.