Book abstract:

When people talk about the chaotic, increasingly precarious political landscape in the United States, they often point to polarization and the culture wars as the cause. The Shadow Gospel tells a very different story. Foregrounding 80 years of densely wraparound religious and secular media preaching the dangers of liberalism (the gospel of the shadow gospel) and the versions of Christianity, conservatism, and liberalism that result (the shadows it casts), the book argues that the fracture and chaos in US politics isn’t the result of a clean split between left and right. Instead, it’s a split between the shadow gospel’s quasi-religious anti-liberal demonology–the vague sense that an evil leftist force is threatening to destroy American society–and the people accused of being the liberal devil. This is no simple demonization. Untethered from ideology and theology, anti-liberal demonology invents the liberal devil in order to fight it. A shadow gospel framework helps contextualize the violence of January 6th, the fervor of Satanic conspiracy theorizing, and the crusade against “wokeness” and LGBTQ existence. But it also helps explain the most vexing elements of our politics: that the most potent source of religious messaging and influence in the US is secular, that the most ruthless destroyers of Republicans are other Republicans, and that anti-liberal fear and loathing spans the political spectrum. 

By offering new ways of thinking about religious influence, the left/right dichotomy, and the appeal of Donald Trump, The Shadow Gospel reveals the true roadblocks to pluralistic democracy and emphasizes what people across the religious and political spectrum stand to lose if we don’t exorcise our anti-liberal demons. There are no easy solutions to our vast and complicated political problems. But those solutions will remain elusive if how we frame our problems is part of the problem. It is long past time to drag the shadow gospel out into the light.

Open access pre-proof introduction, “Introducing the Shadow Gospel,” posted July 2024.

Full manuscript forthcoming with The MIT Press in Spring 2025.

———————————————————————————————————————————

Introducing the Shadow Gospel

The War on Christmas is a War on You

Fox News host John Gibson may have written the book The War on Christmas, but as far as he’s concerned, credit for popularizing the war belongs to his former colleague Bill O’Reilly. “It wasn’t really me,” Gibson explained in a 2016 interview. “When Bill made it an issue, it went mega.”1

Gibson, who mentions several times in his book that he is not a devout Christian, is both correct and not quite right. The War on Christmas, which is said to reflect liberals’ efforts to remove all vestiges of Christmas from public life and replace them with the rhetorical equivalent of a bowl of cold oatmeal, is now synonymous with Fox News. And Bill O’Reilly did indeed popularize the phrase with a now-infamous 2004 Fox News segment lamenting the various Christmastime traditions–like being greeted with “Merry Christmas!” at a grocery store–that the liberals and their foot soldiers in the ACLU were allegedly whittling away.2 They did it because they could, O’Reilly said; and because they were too weak to accomplish any of the other sweeping cultural changes they were gunning for. Christmas, though, Christmas was a place for them to start–and who knows what they would go after next.

With each passing year, the War on Christmas grew increasingly coordinated. At least, so said O’Reilly and the other prime-time hosts at Fox News, providing as much comedic fuel for The Daily Show as it did reactionary fuel for The Rush Limbaugh Show.3 So, when the Christmas tree outside Fox News’ headquarters was set on fire by an unhoused man struggling with addiction on December 8, 2021, the network had nearly twenty years of branding to leverage.4 The fire was evidence of a War on Christmas Trees, which pointed to the broader War on Christmas, which pointed to an even broader War on Christians, which ultimately was a war on you, the Fox News viewer. Fox News contributor Reverend Jacques DeGraff likened the fire to the attack on Pearl Harbor, adding that “these colors don’t run,” referencing the post-September 11 rallying cry of American hawkishness.5

Whatever John Gibson, Bill O’Reilly, or any other Fox News personality might think, however, the network can’t take credit for inventing the notion of a War on Christmas. In 1959, the conspiratorial John Birch Society published a pamphlet titled “There Goes Christmas?!” which blamed the United Nations and Communists for the holiday’s de-Christing, an argument that echoed virulent anti-Semite Henry Ford in his 1921 pamphlet “The International Jew.”6 References to a War on Christmas were also present in the work of National Review writers Peter Brimelow and John O’Sullivan in the 1990s, which Brimelow officially codified into a litany in 20007; this rhetoric was right at home within the incendiary rhetoric of Evangelical radio networks at the time8 and the “huge movement” of Christian grievance it stoked.9 This is not to say that all Evangelicals were concerned about the alleged War on Christmas. For many Christians, a pervasive worry was that there wasn’t enough Christ in Christmas,10 and that materialism and commercialization had obscured the true “reason for the season.”11

The War on Christmas, however, was a good wedge issue. It was also a good ratings grab, which is how the war went mainstream. Before Fox News stormed the battlefield, the people airing concerns about attacks against Christmas–seen as a proxy for Christians generally–were those steeped in conservative media, church, and legal networks. What Fox News and Bill O’Reilly did was to bring the war to everyone else. The result is that, since 2004, the War on Christmas has become a holiday tradition.

Parental Warning: Explicit Congressional Testimony

In 1984, a small group of wives of prominent US politicians and business figures found themselves deeply disturbed. Their children were being exposed to sexually explicit song lyrics performed by the likes of Prince and Madonna, and they were worried about the effect these lyrics might have on their families and society as a whole.12 Four of these wives, most prominently Tipper Gore, whose husband was Democratic senator Al Gore, and Susan Baker, whose husband was Republican US Treasury secretary James Baker, formed the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC). The goal of the PMRC was to lobby the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to include a warning label on explicit records; and the goal of doing that was to protect children and families from the corrosive influence of rock music on kids’ value systems. It wasn’t just the glamorization of drug use, sex, and rebelliousness that concerned the PMRC, captured in the PMRC’s “Filthy Fifteen” litany of worst offenders. It was the alleged link between rock music and suicide. Somebody needed to think of the children.

Many people already were. The Parent Teacher Association had been trying to make headway with the RIAA on precisely this issue, to no avail.13 The PMRC, in contrast, was much harder to ignore, particularly after the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee–which included four senators whose wives were PMRC members–announced that they would hold a public hearing on the need for a parental advisory label on records. On the day of the hearing, senators on both sides of the aisle decried the “outrageous filth”14 and “danger to society”15 the music industry was producing. A parade of expert witnesses bolstered the senators’ concerns by emphasizing how music negatively affects behavior, with one musicologist focusing on the dangers of subliminal messaging. The correlation between rock music and teenage suicide was a recurring worry. But there were dissenters. Musicians Dee Snyder of Twisted Sister, John Denver, and Frank Zappa were called to testify on behalf of the music industry, resulting in a number of sensationalist, overtly comical moments involving the recitation of naughty words into the congressional record. The circus-like atmosphere of the testimony, not to mention all the gratuitous F-bombs, ensured that the hearings would be, as Tipper Gore mused in her 1987 book, “the hottest ticket in town all year.”16

The PMRC was a secular organization–in name, anyway. In practice, the PMRC and its mission had strong ties to the Christian Right, particularly James Dobson’s organization Focus on the Family. PMRC’s first meeting had been held in a church and featured youth minister Jeff Ling, who ultimately testified at the 1985 Senate hearing.17 Its public service video “Rising to the Challenge” was produced by media company Teen Vision, then headed by Bob DeMoss, who was later hired as Focus on the Family’s “youth culture expert.”18 Susan Baker, one of the founding members of PMRC, sat on Focus on the Family’s board of directors.19 Further, much of the “evidence” cited in the 1985 Senate hearings, including the dubious link between teen suicide and rock music, was taken from Evangelical sources.20 The hearings also drew from equally dubious claims about “backmasking,” which Evangelical preachers and other media figures claimed contained satanic messages. Some of these Evangelicals insisted that listening to rock music was literally demonic.21 Others, like the St. Paul, Minnesota ministry duo the Peters Brothers, were more measured in their arguments, particularly when they appeared on cable television.22 According to the Peters Brothers, rock music and its backmasked messages lead teens astray from good morals–and towards more figurative demons like premarital sex and drug use. They were cited in the 1985 PMRC hearings.23 Post-hearing the PMRC continued secularizing Evangelical messages, including in the “Satanism Research Packets” they mailed to concerned parents.24

The PMRC did not, however, advertise their ties to Evangelicalism and groups like Focus on the Family.25 And when the mainstream media, particularly cable news, covered the 1985 hearings, controversy over “backmasking” and general fears about the dangerous influence of rock music further obscured the Evangelical origins of the panic. This was about our children and families; this was about porn rock and suicide. How could you not support the former and how could you not want to do something about the latter? By the time the Explicit Lyrics sticker finally made its debut in 1990, it had already become part of the pop-cultural backdrop. Of course we needed to think about the children.

Covid Freedom Fighting

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic Donald Trump seemed prepared, even eager, to take credit for the development of a Covid vaccine and hawk it as Trump-branded merchandise.26 Once the vaccine was available, however, vaccinations were roped into the same Fox News orbit discourse as masks, social distancing, and lockdowns. Even the Trump-allied Republican leaders who weakly affirmed the value of vaccines reinforced the consensus Party message: “but you shouldn’t be forced to take it.” Republican governors Ron DeSantis of Florida, Kristi Noem of South Dakota, and Greg Abbott of Texas were on the frontlines of the antivax fight, outright banning vaccine requirements for businesses and vaccine mandates for state employees.27 As with so many other Covid issues, religious freedom became a rallying cry. Republican representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina encapsulated the Covid freedoms slushpile when he railed against the Biden administration’s plan for door-to-door vaccine outreach. “Think about what those mechanisms could be used for. They could then go door-to-door to take your guns. They could go door-to-door to take your Bibles.”28

Conservative media took this stance even further, entertaining all kinds of conspiracy theories about the vaccine.29 Fox News was relentless in its “just asking questions” vaccine coverage, as hosts and guests regularly challenged the safety of the Covid vaccine, pushed disproven Covid treatments–including an ineffective malaria drug and horse dewormer whose primary effect on humans was to tear up one’s stomach lining–and railed against the fascism of vaccine mandates.30 (This, of course, despite the fact that Fox News maintained a strict vaccine requirement for employees, including prime-time talent.31) Between late June and early August of 2021, conservative media watchdog group Media Matters for America found that 63 percent of all Fox News segments about the vaccine included false and misleading information.32 Fox’s Covid coverage correlated to vaccine rates among Fox News viewers during that same timeframe that were much lower than the national average.33 Fox News wasn’t the only antivax game in town; rightwing networks like Newsmax and One America News, which many Trump supporters turned to when they felt Fox News wasn’t pro-Trump enough, also pushed antivax messages, so much so that their audiences were twice as likely as Fox News audiences to resist vaccination.34

Just as it was for pro-Trump political leaders, concern over religious freedom remained a common theme of conservative anti-vaccine media.35 People should be able to make healthcare choices in accordance with their religious faith, the argument went, and the threat to the tenet “my body my choice” was further proof of creeping leftist authoritarianism (never mind that many of the people shouting that slogan were also anti-abortion).36 Fox News host Tucker Carlson underscored the leftist threat when he argued that Christianity was being phased out in favor of the “cult of Coronavirus,” evidenced, in part, by the “vaxed” vaccination status necklace worn by New York State Governor Kathy Hochul (an “unelected governor of a dying state with bad weather,” Carlson sneered).37 By this same logic, Carlson argued in another segment that vaccine mandates in the military were an effort to purge “sincere Christians.”38

The “sincere Christians” leading the National Association of Evangelicals who supported the vaccine weren’t making similar arguments.39 In fact, reflecting the position of religious leaders around the globe, Christian leaders, including Pope Francis, resoundingly encouraged Covid vaccinations.40 And yet there were plenty of Evangelicals, including some pastors, who decried vaccine mandates and also claimed that Christians were being purged from public life because of them.41 Some used social media to offer “religious exemption” letters to help sidestep workplace vaccine requirements. “We’re not anti-vaxxers,” one Oklahoma pastor and Republican U.S. Senate candidate explained. “We’re just pro-freedom.”42

If Not Christianity, Then What?

Each of these three cases, like all the cases we’ll be exploring in this book, promote the interests of conservative–and implicitly white–Christians in the United States. At the same time, there’s something disorienting about the Christianity on display.

First, the War on Christmas case points to two Christianities. Calls to put Christ back in Christmas emerge from biblical teachings and focus on individual Christians’ relationships with God. In contrast, the War on Christmas is broadcast through secular channels and focuses on the perceived threat that Christians in the United States are no longer free to be Christian in public, and by extension, are no longer free to be Christian anywhere. The PMRC case illustrates how influential Christian messages can become once they shed any direct connections to the church and emerge, seemingly secularized, from the mouths of those who have significant public platforms but not necessarily meaningful connections to Christianity–and who just might be Democrats. The Covid vaccine case further underscores the disconnect between beliefs informed by the Bible and beliefs informed by rightwing media. It also shows how the invocation of Christianity by such media–however biblically untethered it might be–serves rhetorically as shield and sword.

In these cases, the religion on display isn’t exactly religious. As claims about threats to Christians, Christmas, or children are filtered through cable television and other mass media, they might lose some of their religious content; they might not mention God at all, and focus instead on freedoms allegedly under attack. And yet for those who believe them, the messages carry all the weight and moral authority of a sermon from the pulpit or passage from the Bible.

So what exactly is happening? In this book we call the not-quite-religion on display the shadow gospel. The gospel part of the shadow gospel refers to eighty years of densely-overlapping messages about a historically ungrounded, hyperbolized liberal devil said to be hellbent on censoring conservative voices, eroding traditional values, undermining religion, and destroying “real” America. Three frames shape the gospel’s messages. The first is outright conspiracism, which posits cadres of scheming liberals in the government or within institutions such as journalism, with granular detail given to the alleged plots and ringleaders themselves. Outright conspiratorial messages are most likely to be designated as “extreme” and tend to be most salient within far-right networks, though they also filter into mainstream conservative spaces. The second is the anti- frame, which forwards staunch if abstract opposition to all things liberal, whether those things are described as such by self-identifying liberals or are coded as liberal by conservatives. Anti- messages are predicated on grievance, feed into narratives about beleaguered conservatives, and are a recurring focus of rightwing media. The third is the pro- frame, which is expressed as positive support for ideals such as the family, freedom, and America. These messages are least obviously partisan and most likely to spread beyond rightwing circles.

The shadow part of the shadow gospel refers to the versions of conservatism and Christianity that have been conjured through anti-liberal messages. Just as a shadow is tethered to but cannot be equated with the solid object casting it, the shadow gospel is tethered to but cannot be equated with conservative ideology or Christian theology. What emerged in the mid-century media environment and expanded over the decades is a shadow realm of false histories and half-truths that uses the language of faith and family–and caricatures of what a “liberal” is–to exalt the category of “real” Americans, to hell with everyone else.

This analysis begins with mid-Century Evangelical and rightwing activist—and later, institutional Republican—networks because that is where shadow gospel messages first emerged and thrived. Although the messages were swiftly adopted towards partisan political ends (namely, to help elect more Republicans), they were not the product of partisan politics. Their origins were, instead, strikingly nonpartisan. It is therefore unsurprising that, in the end, the messages that eventually were politicized did not stay confined to the political right; and neither did their implications. As later chapters will show, shadow gospel messages have also circulated widely within the political left—at least, what gets called “the left.” More on that caveat soon.

The relationship between left and right is central to the story we’re telling. That said, this is not a book about polarization. In fact, our underlying argument is that the polarization frame misses something important when it attributes the chaos of the U.S. political landscape to intensifying clashes between leftwing liberals and rightwing conservatives. People are obviously clashing, and intensely. Our claim is that the left/right polarization framework does not fully explain why. The framework we present instead is one of possession by the shadow gospel, which transcends conventional partisan categories. The result is that we are not merely asking readers to consider how the shadow gospel has taken hold of the MAGA (Make America Great Again), Trumpist, Evangelical them. We are also asking readers to consider how the shadow gospel has become an animating spirit in the United States more broadly. To modify the old saying, the devil you know is much easier to exorcise than the devil you don’t.

The Shadow Gospel, Not the Church Gospel

As hinted above, our argument about the shadow gospel challenges how politics in the United States has for decades been understood: through the prism of left and right. Central to the polarization narrative is the conventional account of how Christian conservatism, particularly Evangelicalism, came to dominate the rightwing, and by extension, the U.S. political landscape. We will be telling a different story entirely about religious influence in the U.S., with major implications for the basic coherence of notions of “left” and “right.”

However, the conventional account of Evangelical influence remains a significant part of our study. That account goes like this. In the 1970s, very conservative Republican and Evangelical leaders came together to push the Republican Party platform towards more conservative policy positions on issues like abortion and same sex marriage.43 This was an advantageous arrangement for both groups; Republicans benefitted because Evangelicals were an untapped but increasingly powerful voting block that would give the Party an electoral advantage,44 and Evangelicals benefited because it put them and their interpretation of biblical teachings in the driver’s seat of policy-making.45 The synergy between Evangelicals and Republicans is what allowed Evangelicalism’s “Three Bs” of belonging, belief, and behavior46 to remake U.S. politics.

Appropriately, our shadow gospel book project started with a discussion of Evangelical influence. It took the form of a January 6th, 2021 email exchange between Brockway, a religion and politics scholar whose work focuses on secularism, Evangelical activism, and Evangelical party influence, and Phillips, a media studies scholar whose early work on internet trolling evolved into a political communication and journalism focus, with much energy devoted to rightwing conspiracy theories. Like many people in the United States and around the world, we were both trying to make sense of the violence and chaos at the U.S. Capitol as it unfolded. Brockway, at the time Phillips’s colleague at Syracuse University, messaged to ask whether the trolls Phillips had studied on 4chan were Evangelical, since the visual rhetoric of the Capitol rioters included a heady mix of trolling memes, Christian symbolism, and antagonistic Trump support.47 Phillips was surprised by this question. Trolls in the early days of 4chan had delighted in mocking and harassing Christians; they definitely weren’t Evangelical.48 But the more we talked about the role of religion, or at least the role of Christian symbology, within rightwing political networks, the more we realized that there was something strange about the relationship between religious and secular media, and something even stranger about the relationship between religious and secular belief.

The conversations that followed–many more emails, Covid quarantine Zooms, and countless voice memos–uncovered another oddity: the anomalies generated by the conventional account of Evangelical influence. Most conspicuous is the fact that since the early 1980s–the time of Evangelical Christianity’s supposed rise in cultural influence–Evangelicalism has remained stagnant in terms of numbers of believers.49 Measured as a percentage of the population, there are no more Evangelicals today than there were in the 1980s; Evangelicals now, as then, make up about a quarter of the population.50 Evangelicals have not even grown as a percentage of the Republican Party since the Reagan era.51 What has changed is the secular population, which has risen sharply since the 1980s.52 The numbers suggest that the last forty years have been a conversion and outreach failure for Evangelicals, rather than a period of increasing influence and power. Indeed the only significant rise in Evangelical identification during the last four decades came under the Trump presidency, but critically, that was not accompanied by a similar rise in church attendance.53

Further, while activists might have been able to link Republican Party machinery with Evangelical leadership during the 1970s, the full fusing of Republican and Evangelical identity within the churchgoing public didn’t happen until the 1990s.54 This is to say nothing of how improbable the forging of Republicanism with Evangelicalism was in the 1970s; it might seem like a natural fit from our contemporary perspective, but pre-Reagan Republicans and Evangelicals were far from monolithic.55 The idea that a few rightwing activists single-handedly changed the course of U.S. politics in the 1970s is compelling, but is complicated by the fact that these same activists were unable to make overwhelming electoral headway for another twenty years. Social science research conducted by Clyde Wilcox in the 1980s adds to this complication. In his study of the Religious Right, Wilcox identified significant demographic and attitudinal similarities between Christian rightwingers of the 1950s and the Religious Right of 1980s that couldn’t have been engendered by Republican organizing because it predated that organizing by decades.56 Wilcox’s work suggests that the Republican Party inherited a powerful (if ideologically slippery) coalition, but can’t be credited with building it.

What became clear to us was that the existing stories–about Evangelicalism and about rightwing activism–were incomplete. Something besides Evangelical believers, churches, and theological tenets themselves had powered Evangelical influence within the Republican Party and U.S. culture more broadly. The argument we developed over the subsequent two years was that a gospel had fueled the relationship between the religious and the secular; a gospel had fundamentally shaped, and was continuing to shape, the American landscape. But it wasn’t the church gospel.57

Demonology and Disconnection

By arguing that Evangelicalism is not in the driver’s seat of U.S. culture and politics–at least not in the way the conventional account would suggest–we are not swapping out one religious influence for another. Specifically, we are not positing a white Christian nationalist explanation.

Christian nationalism can seem like a close fit, particularly when considering the shadow gospel’s MAGA manifestations. It is certainly the framework with the most cultural traction, largely because so many Christian leaders and groups have taken up the cause of fighting it within their own ranks.

In these contexts, many cite the January 6th, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol as the moment they realized the dangers of such a belief system, particularly given the prevalence of Christian rhetoric used by pro-Trump insurrectionists. Of course, January 6th wasn’t a stand-alone event, and worry over white Christian nationalism isn’t restricted to that one day. As an example, in a Time magazine article focused on the “Christians against Christian Nationalism” movement, discussion of the insurrection pivots to reflections on the 2022 Buffalo massacre, in which a white supremacist opened fire on a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood.58

Like so many of the articles that highlight the dangers of white Christian nationalism, the Time article posits the racist “Great Replacement” theory as the link between white Christianity and nationalism. This theory maintains that non-white non-Christians are trying to take over the country, thereby replacing the “real” Americans. The Buffalo shooter took the Great Replacement narrative to its grotesque extremes. However, rightwing media and Republican politicians have promoted versions of the theory–some watered-down, some full-throated–even if they don’t describe it as “replacement” as such. For instance former House Speaker Newt Gingrich stated on Fox News just a few months prior to the Buffalo shooting that leftists were trying to “drown traditional, classic Americans with as many people as they can who know nothing of American history, nothing of American tradition, nothing of the rule of law.”59 Fox News’ Tucker Carlson–host of the most popular show on cable until he was fired from the network as it navigated a costly 2020 election defamation case–also played a central role in promoting the theory, as he’d all but signed his name to the idea of “replacement.”

The prominence–and danger–of Great Replacement discourses animate a great deal of academic research focused on white Christian nationalism and the threat it poses to democracy.60 Empirical research conducted by sociologists Samuel Perry and Philip Gorski has been especially influential in articulating white Christian nationalist belief. As Perry and Gorski describe it, white Christian nationalism is a reactionary and increasingly anti-democratic fundamentalist worldview that seeks to establish the United States as a Christian nation and ensure that Christians are central to that nation.61 Perry and Gorski emphasize that white Christian nationalism can take secular and semi-secular forms, but ultimately it emerges from all the stuff of Christianity, just warped and directed towards exclusionary ends. Perry and Gorski identify specific indicators of white Christian nationalism, which they measure by asking respondents to assess their agreement with statements such as, “The success of the United States is part of God’s plan” and “the federal government should advocate Christian values.”62 These indicators, like the belief system they index, are grounded in theology. These indicators are also grounded in ideology. They point to something specific, consistent, and ultimately coherent.

In contrast, the case studies we were beginning to explore for this book project–including our three opening cases–were not consistently or coherently grounded in theology or ideology. They were not even grounded in identity, at least not in the cut-and-dried identity categories said to carve up the US electorate. The messages swirling in our ever-expanding pile of cases were not restricted to conservatives or Republicans or Christians. They often targeted conservative Republicans. They also often targeted Christians, including Evangelicals, most frequently those who pushed back against false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from Donald Trump, or who followed basic Covid mitigation protocols–or who merely acknowledged that Covid was real.

The overarching strangeness suffusing these cases has historical precedent. Historian Richard Hofstadter, famous–and for some, infamous–for grounding the “paranoid style” of U.S. politics in a good-versus-evil apocalypticism, identified all kinds of strangeness in the Christianity and, as he described it, “pseudo-conservatism” he was analyzing in the 1960s.63 He argues, presciently, that the anticommunism animating conservatism during the Cold War was influenced by Christian fundamentalism.64 He also argues presciently that the fundamentalism on display was better described as a religious style than a grounded theology, since it wasn’t clear “how many evangelical right-wingers adhere to a literal view of Scripture and other fundamentalist tenets.”65

Pulling from 1960s survey data about the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade analyzed by political scientist Raymond Wolfinger and others66–which decades later was re-examined by Clyde Wilcox–Hofstadter also notes that the “pseudo-conservatism” he and his colleagues were identifying within the Republican Party wasn’t coming from the expected places, like economic concerns. Where Hofstadter ultimately directed his energy was towards the style of this group, with a particular focus on the conspiracism and paranoia that Hofstadter attributed to fringe fundamentalism. What we have come to believe is that Hofstadter was knocking on the door of the shadow gospel. He didn’t walk fully in because he restricted his analysis, first, to conspiracism, and second, to the religious fringes. (In our analysis we will highlight the shadow gospel’s additional anti- and pro- registers as well as the fact that it did not emerge from the fringes of fundamentalism, but rather from emergent Evangelical Christianity, which at the time Hofstadter was writing was actively positioning itself as “classic” American Christianity. This is a critical point of divergence between our study and studies focused on white Christian nationalism, which lament the takeover of Evangelicalism by white Christian nationalist extremism.67 Our argument is that what has gripped many Evangelical churches isn’t outside extremism but rather reflects media and rhetorical dynamics at the core of Evangelicalism’s founding.) Still, Hofstadter deserves credit for recognizing that this indeterminate thing, this in-between thing, was something to measure—and to worry about.

Other scholars focused on the Cold War era have pointed to similar unwieldy dynamics and the difficulties of classification, including historian Joel Kovel, who describes America First anticommunism as a semi-religious, semi-secular “realm of the shadowy bizarre.”68 But work of this ilk tends to point to bizarre political and religious contours rather than fully systematize them, let alone ascribe a stable name to them, and also tends to tether the bizarreness to the Cold War era and anticommunism in particular. What we were seeing over and over, through the decades, confined to rightwing networks and also swirling through the mainstream, was an unwieldy not-quite-this-but-not-quite-that animus that long outlived the 1960s. Our goal was to explain it–and to give it a name.

To do so, we synthesized decades of political science, religious studies, and media history research and analyzed the biographies, communications, speeches, and published works of Evangelical leaders, rightwing media figures, and conservative politicians. The methodological term for this kind of work is conjunctural analysis. What it means is dot-connecting.69 By identifying historical trends within contemporary events, culminating with the Trump Era and all the question marks that loom over the impending 2024 election, the contours of the eighty-year-old thing we were looking at began to emerge. What we were dealing with was the felt sense that the liberal enemy is always at the gates, ready to destroy everything that “real” Americans hold most dear, with “real” referring not just to conservative Christians but to the right kind of conservative Christianity–one that is ultimately disconnected from grounded ideological or theological beliefs. What shadow gospel fear and loathing of liberals is instead is a form of demonology.

Anthropologist Phillip Stephens, Jr. describes demonology as “an elaborate body of belief about an evil force that is inexorably undermining society’s most cherished values and institutions.”70 Demonological thinking is different from the more straightforward dynamic of demonization.71 Demonization is grounded; it points to something that exists in the world and says that it is very bad or even evil.72 In contrast, demonology is aggressively ungrounded; it points to a sense of threat mapped onto a fuzzily defined, shapeshifting enemy. Some of these threats may connect to real things in the world: actual external dangers or perceived dangers that take on an almost supernatural quality of malevolence. Most often, though, the threat results from casting shadows and then setting out to defend oneself against them. For demonological conservatives the liberal devil is synonymous with “the left” and Democrats. But reflecting the ungroundedness of the demonological framework, the liberal devil can be anyone who seems to align with liberalism–or who simply questions the existence of a liberal devil.

Religion and politics scholar Jason Bivins also employs the term “antiliberal” to describe some Christians’ beliefs, specifically their opposition to government authority and policies. For Bivins, however, “liberalism” refers to the foundational ideology of American democracy, with its valuing of individual over collective rights and negative freedoms (freedom from government restriction) over positive freedoms (freedoms for everyone to enjoy equally).73 In the context of the shadow gospel, the concept “anti-liberal” describes something very different. It points to a nebulous, omnipresent threat said to undermine God, America, the family, and traditional (specifically, conservative) values. Further, it equates the pursuit of diversity, equity, and inclusion as a liberal plot. The result is an aggressive minoritarianism—simply defined as minority interests overruling majority interests—and a basic if unspoken white supremacy. Anti-liberal demonology thus doesn’t just oppose liberalism as a vague vessel for evil. It actually undermines the foundational sense of liberalism as a structuring framework for democracy.

Ultimately, the vagueness of anti-liberal demonology is what makes it incompatible with ideology and theology. When ideological conservatives opposes left-wing policies, their dissent is based on arguments over specific courses of action, tenets, or proposals. Maybe the arguments are good, maybe the arguments are bad. In either case, ideological conservatives counter what they believe to be worse ideas with what they believe to be better ideas. And when these conservatives find themselves rolling their eyes at the left-leaning friends, colleagues, or family in their lives, they are likely to point to actual conflicts, behaviors, and irritations. Likewise, even the most fundamentalist Christians are rooted in the specificity of biblical teachings. When they talk about external threat, it’s a response to the encroachment of the secular world into their religious sphere. The more secular someone is, the less likely they will be moved by such an argument. But it is still an argument about something solid.

In contrast, when an anti-liberal demonologist is confronted by a liberal–at least, by someone who has been accused of being one–the conversation does not center on the specifics of a given tax policy or adopting a biblical principle in practice. Details and coherence are secondary concerns, if they matter at all. What matters most is the fight. This is what many accounts of white Christian nationalism miss, or at least, misidentify. Demonology can look like ideology and theology. But unlike the ideological and the theological, the demonological is not built on arguments or facts. There is no rhetorical solid ground.

As a result, having little or nothing to do with the actual stuff of Christianity is no problem whatsoever. The fact that Fox News was not encouraging people to attend church, that advocates of the PRMC scrubbed mentions of anything overtly religious, that the most prominent “preachers” across each of our opening case are secular media figures and politicians who made their arguments without guidance from religious doctrines or principles, that the warrior for Christmas John Gibson emphasizes his distance from the church74 and that the Buffalo shooter warrior for “Christian values” (whose “Christian values” apparently include racist bloodlust) explicitly states that he is not Christian75 all fit comfortably within a demonological paradigm where the primary driver isn’t how much someone loves God but how much they hate the liberal devil.

Anti-liberal animus also helps reconcile the disconnect between clear irreligiosity and use of Christian rhetoric. When you have zero meaningful ties to the Bible but continue to make vague references to Jesus, the devil, or sin to suit your changing needs, there’s nothing you can’t aim a God cannon at. Additionally, sidling up to Christianity allows anti-liberals to enjoy the legitimacy afforded by religious affiliation without any of the theological constraints–which as an added bonus allows them to scream religious discrimination any time they are challenged. Thus when critics point to the strikingly unchristian behavior of people like Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, and Donald Trump–all of whom at least wink at the idea of “Christian values”–in the hopes of breaking the spell of their popularity, they fail to see that not being beholden to religious doctrine is what makes that popularity possible. Freed of those strictures, anti-liberals can say anything, regardless of what they might have said the day before, or the hour before, or the moment before.

Finally, burning opposition to liberalism is how secular proclamations can take on all the religious weight of a divine decree, the fewer concrete details the better. This is how John Gibson could point to all the Christmas trees the liberals haven’t taken away as proof of their war against Christmas. This is how the Fox and Friends hosts could casually sidestep the Christmas tree arson’s motives (or lack thereof); those didn’t matter. What mattered is that the fire served as yet more “proof” that the leftist horde was coming for you, the Fox News viewer, a point driven home by hosts Brian Kilmeade and Ainsley Earhardt. What the fire revealed, Kilmeade insisted, is that “no city is safe, no person is safe.”76 Earhardt clarified which people KIlmeade meant. “This is personal to you, too, at home now: the Fox Christmas tree vandalized. Arson! And that’s personal to you, it’s personal to us. This is an American icon. This is our Christmas tree.”77 In these and other cases, the lack of specificity–indeed, the outright incoherence of the claims being made–is what makes the devil stronger.

What in the Actual Hell

Up to a point, the imagined liberal devil and its demonological tradition–the feeling, simply put, that (liberal) evil is all around–shares some basic characteristics with the Christian devil.

One point of overlap is that, in the Bible, Satan isn’t a static figure. As religious historian Elaine Pagels explains, Satan evolves as early Christianity evolves and maps onto different kinds of enemies as they emerge, reflected in the demonization of Jews, pagans, and heretics, whose opposition to the early Christians was framed as a form of demon possession.78 The logic was that Satan worked through one’s adversaries. The association of particular groups with Satan thus functioned as “a way of characterizing one’s actual enemies as the embodiment of transcendent forces.”79 This proved to be an additive process of demonization. New enemies appended to the list of cosmic opponents didn’t replace the older enemies. Instead, the evil accumulated.80 In their analysis of Satan’s influence on the Western tradition, historians Michelle D. Brock, Richard Raiswell, and David R. Winter build on this idea, noting that Satan’s constructed nature—the fact that his significance isn’t confined to the Bible but rather functions as a composite of people’s experiences with adversity—ensures that “every reiteration of the devil serves to expand the devil’s perceived field of operation.” It also makes Satan something of a rubbish bin; that which you throw all the bad things inside.

Similarly, who and what counts as the liberal devil—who and what gets thrown into that rubbish bin—evolves as the early conservative movement evolves. Subsequent chapters highlight how historically grounded notions of liberals and liberalism—in the 1930s-1940s context of the New Deal, 1950s-1960s context of Evangelicalism, and 1950s-1960s context of rightwing media—were sucked into a demonological amalgamation that flattened liberalism into a singular concept and designated it as the great destroyer. Brock, Raiswell, and Winter’s frame of reiteration helps explain why it was this word, liberal, and not some other word, that became the go-to label for accumulating evil. “Liberal” is, very simply, the most satanic term in the shadow gospel orbit. It was used in different ways in different contexts by different groups of people over many years. It was able to amass the most demonic reiterations as conservative networks strengthened and expanded.

The contemporary understanding of “liberal” that emerged is not a standalone concept, echoing another of Brock, Raiswell, and Winter’s insights about the Christian devil. As they argue, God and the devil become “mutually authenticating and mutually contingent.” In other words, the existence of one reinforces the existence of the other. Similarly, contemporary liberalism has come to imply opposition to conservativism. Modern self-identifying liberals would be inclined to frame this opposition via negativa; they believe the opposite of what conservatives believe. Modern conservatives—certainly those steeped in demonological thinking—would be inclined to frame liberal opposition as an across-the-board, even spiritual, attack.

That general sense of liberal threat has, over the decades, subsumed a dizzying spectrum of bad others that includes “the left” writ large and Democrats, of course, but also the “wrong” kinds of Republicans and Christians, queer people, K-12 teachers, civil rights activists, government bureaucrats, and literally anyone else said to run afoul of the “traditional American values” exalted by the shadow gospel.

Ronald Reagan personifies the shadow gospel dynamic of harnessing placeholder evil. He does so by creating what political scientist Michael Rogin calls a “disembodied self” that Reagan grafted onto whatever policy or economic aim he decided to champion.81 The subversive–if nebulous–opponents of these aims were used to reinforce the category of the good American in contrast to the monstrous/evil American, both of which were disconnected from major American social and political identities but whose clash was framed by Reagan both apocalyptically and cinematically.82 We will revisit Reagan and the demonological template he perfected in later chapters. What his presidency emphasizes is that demonology aimed at perceived liberal threats is a natural shapeshifter, just like the devil himself.

A second overlap between the Christian and liberal devil is that they both lend cosmic significance to turmoil and strife. Pagels emphasizes how, among early Christians, conflict took on a very specific world-sustaining importance. Opposition wasn’t just opposition. Opposition was a supernatural force,83 with the fate of the world always hanging in balance.84 Being threatened in this very particular kind of way–threatened cosmically–was central to early Christian identity and community formation.85 Satan was so important to the story the gospel writers were telling about Jesus that Pagels flatly states that their writings “would make little sense without Satan.”86

The evil liberal, nebulously conceived, is an equally important figure in the development of modern conservatism and its own set of gospels. Subsequent chapters will show that the threat of an apocalypse wrought by liberals lends enormous weight, meaning, and even excitement to fights over everything from tax policy to LGBTQ rights. More foundational than that, liberal evil is the basis of conservative goodness–facilitating an identity that might seem solid and stable but is built on top of shadows.

However, overlaps between the Christian devil and liberal devil can go only so far. The primary difference between the Satan of the Bible and the Satan of the shadow gospel is that, as the archfiend of shadow Christianity, shadow gospel Satan was conjured through widespread, mutually reinforcing rightwing media specifically so that he could be fought. This devil is, in the end, a mass-mediated target to rail against and rally around.

A second distinction between these two devils is that, while the emergence of Satan within the early Christian tradition may have been narratively necessary, that necessity had a higher and more glorious purpose: bringing about the Second Coming of Christ. Satan is bad, in other words, but the post-apocalyptic outcome is good: a restored, redeemed world.87 For the Christian faithful, victory over evil is assured. “Those who participate in this cosmic drama,” Pagels writes, “cannot lose.”88 In stark contrast, the shadow Christian tradition is not based on the idea that Christ will return after tribulation. There is no promise of a returned messiah or a cleansed word. There is just Revelation Lite: an always and ongoing Armageddon, nothing but horsemen of the liberal apocalypse.89 Those who participate in this cosmic drama cannot stop fighting. Here, the devil is more important than Jesus, if Jesus is even needed at all.

That’s not to say that there is no Jesus within the shadow Christian framework. In the pages to follow, we chronicle how shadow gospel evangelists, from Evangelical leaders in the 1940s and 1950s to partisans at the vanguard of the 1994 Republican Revolution to pundits at Fox News, promote themselves as the savior of the world they have created for themselves, one that is always teetering at the edge of the end times. A scary prospect, certainly, but as cultural theorist Daniel Wojcik emphasizes, religious apocalypticism is acutely appealing as a form of “dark enchantment.”90 Enchantment as a vernacular religious framework describes how humans create meaning, make sense of things, and enliven their existence in a world seen as drab, mechanistic, and soulless, and which is replete with randomness, adversity, and suffering. “Dark enchantment” is equally enlivening, Wojcik argues, but is derived from the perception of “darker” forces at work in human existence, including demons, evil conspiracies, and various flavors of apocalypticism. As Wojcik explains, it can be exciting to be thrust in the middle of a cosmic end-times drama. One’s life takes on newfound significance. And for those who are certain that they are the chosen ones, cosmic significance contributes to heightened self-esteem in the face of perceived evil.91

The Politics of Resentment

The active and aggressive conjuring of the liberal devil by the shadow gospel marks another point of departure between this project and existing political science scholarship. For decades, researchers have described conservatives as reactionary, a framing that dovetails with characteristics of resentment, grievance, and paranoia. The reactionary definition of conservatism often highlights resistance to pluralistic democracy–equal representation within the body politic of various racial, national, and religious groups of different economic classes–that can dovetail into nationalism.92 Classic texts in this vein include Kathy Cramer’s political analysis of Wisconsin conservatives, which argues that economic and cultural resentment in rural communities has intensified distrust of the state and the “liberal elite” said to be running things, as well as Arlie Russel Hochchild’s sociological study of Louisiana conservatives, which explores these conservatives’ belief that liberal elites have allowed cultural “line cutters” to enjoy unearned and undeserved resources at the conservatives’ expense.93 Jeremy Engels focuses on the violent rhetoric that results from the perceived encroachment of the state (or liberal elites) and argues that it can be understood as defensive: they unfairly took something from us.94

In these and other accounts, scholars almost always highlight gaps between perceptions of encroachment and the reality of encroachment. And yet conservative pushback against economic, social, or political democratization tends to be described in terms of clear ideological battle lines between advancing liberals and the conservatives either forced to retreat or who defiantly endeavor to stand their ground. The presumption that conservatives have been pushed into a defensive stance by a modernizing, liberalizing culture–one that threatens traditional values and generally upsets The Way Things Were–forms the core of the culture wars thesis. Sociologist James Davison Hunter maps this political binary onto a traditional/modern divide within religious traditions. Drawing from reactionary definitions of conservatism, Hunter states that traditionalists favor protecting time-honored, religiously grounded values in the face of shifting religions, politics, and societies.95 The conflict of the culture war arises as traditionalists struggle to preserve things and modernists struggle to change them.

By highlighting the demonological conjuring of “liberal” as a unified, historically stable concept–a process that belies the amalgamated and ultimately placeholder quality of the term–the following chapters challenge such a framing. The culture war, we argue, is actually a culture trap. To claim that progressive liberals are the ones policing the boundaries of culture and pushing against traditionalism is to fail to appreciate the decades of shadow gospel evangelizing that sets up a falsely traditionalist morality and then laments that it has been knocked down by its own invented enemy. Put bluntly: the shadow gospel isn’t reactionary. The shadow gospel is progressive. It establishes who and what the devil is, throws the first punch, then it insists it was acting in self-defense. And it is convincing.

This book argues against another element of the reactionary politics framework: the common assumption that if we could just find a way to shift people’s material conditions, or at least shift their perceptions about their material conditions, they would stop feeling aggrieved and, as a consequence, would stop being reactionary. But what if that’s wrong? What if the driver of grievance isn’t despair over feeling screwed over, but excitement over getting to live in a cosmic drama and perpetually fighting a custom-made devil? What if the challenge isn’t extracting people from pain but extracting them from a shadowy form of comfort derived from a devil they don’t just know but prefer?96

Unmasking Myths

When we speak of the shadowy realm of liberal devils, conservative messiahs, and perennial apocalypse conjured by the shadow gospel, we are not being literal. Our conceptions of shadow Christianity and shadow conservatism are meant to function as mental shortcuts to help conceptualize, even visualize, the totally divergent ethical, epistemological, and ontological paradigm that emerges from eighty years of intensely resonant Evangelical and rightwing media centered on the dangers of an amalgamated placeholder liberalism.

To be clear, shadow gospel evangelists absolutely use the language of the Book of Revelation to describe the American cultural landscape, and they absolutely refer to liberals as devils and demons and incessantly point to their godlessness.97 We are not forcing that framework; it’s there, front and center, and has been through the decades. Our rhetorical purpose in developing the shadow/shadowy realm theme is to make a very slippery thing feel a bit more solid, so that we can discuss its origins and point to its consequences. This is simply not possible to do when one takes for granted, instead, that Christian-sounding language and self-identification points to biblically based, theologically grounded Christianity or that conservative-sounding language and self-identification points to principled, ideologically grounded conservatism. Sometimes, grounded theology and ideology is what is happening. Sometimes it is not; often it is not. The shadow gospel provides a framework for identifying and historicizing when it is not.

Historicization is crucial, as doing so challenges the shadow gospel’s most powerful attribute: its ability to make myth. Here we draw from cultural theorist Roland Barthes’ conception of myth: claims about the world that have specific causes and histories but which become so commonplace through such intense wraparound and repetition (the term “wraparound” in the context of repeated media messages will emerge as a recurring framework throughout the chapters) that they come to feel natural and necessary; something that could not be otherwise.98 As myth, they step out into the sunlight convinced of their own reality. They exist beyond argument. They are simply true.

To give a contemporary example, ask anyone who is certain that Christmas is under siege by liberals where they got the idea and they will likely cock their head quizzically. Particularly for those raised on a lifelong diet of demonological media, the evidence is everywhere and has always been everywhere, so much so that the question itself would be jarring. For believers, the existence of a Christmas-assaulting left is perfectly natural and perfectly necessary, yet another example of what we have to deal with because of them.

The War on Christmas points to another, much more powerful myth that we have already begun to unpack: a historically and linguistically stable left and right, with the left mapping onto liberals and the right mapping onto conservatives. The political parties are subject to the same directional split; Democrats go left and Republicans go right. From a contemporary American vantage point, liberal and conservative, left and right, Democrat and Republican, is simply how the political landscape is divided, and liberal versus conservative, left versus right, Democrats versus Republicans is simply how electoral politics are fought. This division between left and right is the ultimate example of something that feels like it could not be otherwise. How else would we describe it?

However, as historians Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis argue, the categories of “left” and “right” are much less coherent than our politics would suggest. “Our two political teams have coalesced around the concept of left and right,” Lewis and Lewis concede, “but the concepts themselves are fictions.”99 Our account of the emergence of the shadow gospel doubles as an account of the emergence of the myth of left and right—one that hinges on a demonological conjuring of liberal threat equated with leftism and the Democratic Party. We are not saying that any of these things are figments of imagination. Millions of people use the word “liberal” to self-identify and to associate themselves with political positions they feel good about (and also to disassociate themselves from conservatives). Economic leftism is real and so is the activist left. The Democratic Party is the (sometimes uneasy) home of people who describe themselves as liberal and leftist. What we are saying, echoing Lewis and Lewis, is that our stories about “left” and “right” need rewriting.

This poses some complications in how to describe things. The left/right dichotomy is the structuring political framework in the United States. It is very difficult to think outside of such an all-encompassing frame. That, however, is precisely our goal; to challenge the assumption that left and right are, like God and Satan, mutually authenticating and mutually contingent. As a result, we use “liberal” and “left” under a blanket disclaimer (and very often, scare quotes). And although we have chosen to employ the term “rightwing” to describe what ultimately is a self-contained media and information ecosystem, “right” does not take for granted an equal and opposite “left.” In the chapters that follow, what “right” points to is itself.

Resisting the left/right framing is the first step in pushing back against the culture wars thesis, one set against the backdrop of the politics of resentment. The overarching claim in culture wars resentment narratives is that conservatives feel bad because of what liberals have done to them. Our counterpoint is that it’s a particular kind of grievance when you are thrashing against a devil that you invented, and which you also enjoy fighting. Of course, people in this mode can simultaneously be struggling financially or socially or both. But whether spoken by a liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, attributing the cause of that struggle to the liberal devil is a demonological move, and needs to be interrogated as such.

The culture wars thesis needs pushback for another reason. When forwarded by demonologists, arguments about encroaching liberals ultimately reflect an aggressive push for the “right to enjoy”100 life without ever having to worry about other people’s needs, concerns, or experiences. The assertions that we get to abide by any standards we want, we get to be as exclusionary as we want, and we get to be as cruel as we want are then transformed by demonologists into a reactionary, defensive, and even pitiable stance. Our goal in calling attention to this and other shadow gospel myths–and just as important, in identifying the network processes by which these myths are created and sustained–is to resist false histories about who gets to be comfortable by default, about who represents “real” America, and about who is the savior and who is the devil.

Chapter Overview

Exclusionary beliefs are not specific to the shadow gospel. They are as much woven into the national American fabric as are efforts to create a more pluralistic, more diverse, and more just union, and are reflected in a true embarrassment of historical examples, from the Puritans’ paranoid, violent, “wellspring of diabolism” aimed at indigenous people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries101 to the Ku Klux Klan’s nineteenth century weaponization of Protestantism to stoke conspiratorial racist and xenophobic fears102 to the fervor–one that Anthea Butler describes as outright religious103–surrounding lynching culture and the Lost Cause narrative embraced by many whites in the post-Civil War U.S. South.

We begin our analysis in the 1940s because this was when the invented liberal devil began to take shape through the emergent gospel of rightwing and Evangelical media. Fundamentally linked to these media, the shadow gospel–the messages themselves and the shadow worlds they created–would evolve through the decades, reflecting changes in media policy, network resources, and conservative audience expectations. “The Realm of the Shadowy Bizarre” (chapter 1) sets the stage for this story with a focus on Cold War anticommunism and its consequences. It highlights the pervasiveness of Christian language and symbology in religious and ostensibly secular anticommunist networks, including within the FBI. It also establishes where, how, and why self-described “100 percent Americans” lobbed demonological attacks against allegedly un-American subversives, forming a shadowy crater into which evil enemies could be accrued.

“Branding Satan” (chapter 2) examines how New Evangelicalism in the 1950s and 1960s and its loosely linked network of parachurch organizations contributed to the shape and scope of the shadow devil by pushing messages about a fundamentally evil liberalism said to be infiltrating education, politics, and pop culture. It also examines how New Evangelicals like Billy Graham reframed Mainline Protestantism as extreme, even outright demonic, in order to claim the throne of mainstream Christianity for themselves. (We use the term “Mainline” to refer to the pluralistic group of Protestant denominations mostly associated with the Federal, later National, Council of Churches. The term “Mainline” emerged in the context of the fundamentalist/modernist divide and would also come to distinguish Mainline from Evangelical Christians like Graham, histories we will revisit in subsequent chapters). This rhetorical move, in which the New Evangelicals defined what was evil in order to position themselves as America’s savior, was foundational to the development of shadow Christianity and shadow conservatism, summed up in the apocalyptic credo, liberals are evil and we are here to save you.

Focusing on rightwing media activists of the 1950s and 1960s, including those within the self-described respectable right and those relegated to the “lunatic fringe,” “Make Me a Shadow Myth” (chapter 3) foregrounds the shadow gospel’s network dynamics. Through intense media wraparound, decontextualization, and opacity, with a powerful amalgamation of pandemonic rhetoric across secular and Evangelical networks, falsely traditional claims about America, conservatism, and Christianity were entrenched as natural and necessary. Claims of liberal bias in media and education, dovetailing with claims of conservative oppression by liberals, followed a similar mythmaking process. The ubiquity of these messages lengthened the shadows of Christianity and conservatism. They also helped facilitate a smooth transition into the deeply demonological Reagan era.

“The Culture Wars Are Satanic” (chapter 4) challenges the assumption that the dominant catalyst for the rise of the New Right in the 1970s was faith in God coupled with ideological overlap between conservative Christian and Republican platforms. We argue instead that it was demonology–particularly the expediency of the devil and resonance of apocalypticism–that cohered the New Right. By reframing a well-known story, the chapter highlights the influence not of Christianity as such, but of a shadow Christianity wholly preoccupied with the dangers of an amalgamated liberal evil. It also foregrounds the overlap between demonological pro- frames, anti- frames, and intense satanic conspiracy theorizing, allowing for a novel critique of the culture war thesis, encapsulated in the Republican Party’s 1994 “Contract with America” and the Christian Coalition’s “Contract with the American Family.”

This background is foundational for “Religion without Religion” (chapter 5). Evidencing strong Evangelical influence, the shadow gospel messages that circulated in the 1980s and early 1990s emphasized the cosmic, good-versus-evil clash between messianic conservatives and a litany of satanic reiterations. However, what these wraparound, decontextualized, highly amalgamated messages ultimately promoted was Revelation Lite: an end times narrative that centered on fighting the liberal devil and that’s it. Fox News led this charge, ultimately overtaking Evangelicalism as the hub of shadow gospel messaging. The result was to transform the liberal devil into a good television character.

The above chapters focus on what the shadow gospel did to help mainstream demonological conservatism. “The Left Hates America” (chapter 6) explores what the shadow gospel did to liberals, at least, to those who found themselves absorbed into the anti-liberal shadow realm. In so doing, the chapter reveals how and when anti-liberal demonologists howling about the dangers of “the left” have been squaring off with an enemy of their own encoding. For decades, white conservative women have played an especially important role in drawing up the blueprints for an allegedly vast complex of liberal influence. The chapter gives these women the credit they’re due. It also explores how self-identified liberals have similarly, if inadvertently, fed into liberal shadow boxing. In particular, it highlights Democratic politicians’ demonological messaging in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a political landscape littered with American flag lapel pins.

The book’s conclusion, “The Devil You Know,” assesses the Trump-Biden years using the two interconnected elements in the shadow gospel, the gospel itself and the shadows it casts. Regarding the specific messages of the gospel, anti-liberal conspiracism is the most conspicuous and of course most visually stunning in the case of January 6. But the gospel’s anti- framing (anti-woke, anti-trans, anti-critical race theory) and, even more pernicious, its pro- framing (pro-family, pro-America, pro-speech) remain enormously powerful in sustaining a shadowy realm over which Donald Trump currently reigns as messiah. All three levels of shadow gospel messaging contribute to an even more vexing outcome: an intensifying demonology that, first, does not hesitate to feed even the most staunchly ideologically conservative Republicans and Evangelicals into the jaws of the shadow realm’s demiurge and, second, is harnessed by people across the political spectrum to cast demonological aspersions on key institutions like journalism, science, and government. Having surveyed this political hellscape, the conclusion then turns to the question: What do we do now?

We do not pretend to have any easy answers. What we do know are the stakes. The shadow gospel is incompatible with a functioning democracy. It needs exorcizing for the benefit of all Americans, regardless of their political affiliation or religious identity.

The only way to start that process is to develop literacy around what the shadow gospel is, beginning most basically by naming it and explaining how to recognize and decode demonological messages. This need is threefold. First, our existing religious and political frameworks, including the tendency to understand our political woes as left/right polarization and to presume that things that look and sound Christian actually are, don’t get us where we need to go. What this book offers is a new way of describing the problem so that proposed solutions–including political communications and community outreach efforts–can be more targeted and strategic. Second, literacy around the shadow gospel is needed because of just how easy it is even for people who identify as liberals and Democrats to feed into its minoritarian, morally corrosive messages and framings. The third reason is political, though not exactly partisan in the traditional sense. Whatever the outcome in the 2024 presidential election, the shadow gospel is on the ballot. It is time, long past time, to drag it out into the light.

Selected Bibliography: Academic Work and Other Sources

Alberta, Tim. The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. New York: Harper Collins, 2023.

Baddeley, Gavin. Lucifer Rising: Sin, Devil Worship, and Rock & Roll. London: Plexus, 2016.

Baker, Kelly J. Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017.

Balmer, Randall. Evangelicalism in America. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016.

Balmer, Randall. The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1972.

Başpehlivan, Uygar. “Cucktales: Race, Sex, and Enjoyment in the Reactionary Memescape.” Journal International Political Sociology 18, no. 3 (2024): olae026, https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olae026.

Binder, Amy. “Constructing Racial Rhetoric: Media Depictions of Harm in Heavy Metal and Rap Music.” American Sociological Review 58, no. 6 (1993): 757-767. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095949.

Bivins, Jason C. The Fracture of Good Order: Christian Antiliberalism and the Challenge to American Politics. Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2004.

Bivins, Jason C. Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism. London: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Brackett, John. “Satan, Subliminals, and Suicide: The Formation and Development of an Anti-Rock in the United States During the 1980s.” American Music 36, no. 3 (2018): 271-302.

Brock, Michelle D, Richard Raiswell, and David R. Winter. “Introduction: Giving the Devil His Due.” In The Routledge History of the Devil in the Western Tradition, edited by Michelle D. Brock, Richard Raiswell, and David R. Winter, forthcoming. New York: Routledge, 2025.   

Burge, Ryan. “How Has Partisanship and Theology Shifted in America’s Religious Traditions?” Religion in Public. May 22, 2017. https://religioninpublic.blog/2017/05/22/how-has-partisanship-and-theology-shifted-in-americas-religious-traditions/.

Burge, Ryan. “44 Years of Religion and Politics in One Graph.” Religion in Public. May 11, 2017. https://religioninpublic.blog/2017/05/11/44-years-of-religion-and-politics-in-one-graph/.

Burge, Ryan. “American Religion in 2030.” Religion in Public. October 24, 2019. https://religioninpublic.blog/2019/10/24/american-religion-in-2030/.

Burge, Ryan P. “Evangelicals Show No Decline, Despite Trump and Nones.” Christianity Today. March 21, 2019. https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2019/march/evangelical-nones-mainline-us-general-social-survey-gss.html.

Busch, Andrew. Reagan’s Victory: The Presidential Election of 1980 and the Rise of the Right. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005.

Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

Cooper-White, Pamela. The Psychology of Christian Nationalism: Why People Are Drawn in and How to Talk Across the Divide. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2022.

Cramer, Katherine J. The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Denker, Angela. Red State Christians: A Journey into White Christian Nationalism and the Wreckage It Leaves Behind. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2022.

Dochuk, Darren. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Donovan, Joan, Emily Dreyfuss, and Brian Friedberg. Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.

Engels, Jeremy. The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy. Penn State Press, 2015.

Fanestil, John. American Heresy: The Roots and Reach of White Christian Nationalism. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2023.

FitzGerald, Frances. The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017.

Gilbert, Jeremy. “This Conjuncture: For Stuart Hall.” New Formations 96, no. 1 (2019): 5–37. http://dx.doi.org.uoregon.idm.oclc.org/10.3898/NEWF:96/97.EDITORIAL.2019.

Gore, Tipper. Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society. Nashville: Parthenon Press, 1987.

Gorski, Philip and Samuel Perry. The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and its Threat to American Democracy. London: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Grossberg, Lawrence. Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Hankins, Barry. American Evangelicals: A Contemporary History of a Mainstream Religious Movement. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.

Harris, Harriet A. Fundamentalism and Evangelicals. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

Hartman, Andrew. A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Heyward, Carter. The Seven Deadly Sins of White Christian Nationalism: A Call to Action. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.

Hochschild, Arlie Russel. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: The New Press, 2018.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Control the Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics in America. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

Ivie, Robert L. and Oscar Giner. Hunt the Devil: Demonology in US War Culture. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015.

Johnson, Jessisa. “White Terror and the Great Replacement.” Paper presented at SPAWN 2022: White Supremacy, Misogyny, and the “New” Terrorism. June 25, 2022. Syracuse University.

Kovel, Joel. Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

Ladouceur, Lisa. “The Filthy 15: When Venom and King Diamond Met the Washington Wives.” In Satanic Panic: Pop Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s, edited by Kier-La Janisse and Paul Corupe, 158-172. Surry: FAB Press, 2015.

Layman, Geoffrey. The Great Divide: Religious and Cultural Conflict in American Party Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Lewis, Hyrum and Verlan Lewis. The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America. London: Oxford University Press, 2023.

Luca, Tom De and John Buell. Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers!: Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics. New York: New York University Press, 2005.

Martin, Lerone A. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.

McDaniel, Eric L., Irfan Nooruddin, and Allyson F. Shortle. The Everyday Crusade: Christian Nationalism in American Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

McManus, Matthew. The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism: Neoliberalism, Post-Modern Culture, and Reactionary Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Mitchell, Travis. “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace.” Pew Research Center. October 17, 2019. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/.

Nuzum, Eric. Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America. New York: Harper, 2001.

Olson, Laura R. and Adam L. Warber. “Belonging, Behaving, and Believing: Assessing the Role of Religion on Presidential Approval.” Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2008): 192–204.

Omer, Atalia and Joshua Lupo. Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023.

Onishi, Bradley. Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism--and What Comes Next. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2023.

Pagels, Elaine. The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics. New York: Vintage, 1996.

Phillips, Whitney. This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2015.

Putnam, Robert D. and David E. Campbell. American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012.

Robin, Corey. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. London: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Rogin, Michael. Ronald Reagan: The Movie. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1988.

Schäfer, Axel R. American Evangelicals and the 1960s. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.

Smith, Gregory A. “More White Americans Adopted than Shed Evangelical Label during Trump Presidency, Especially His Supporters.” Pew Research Center. September 15, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/15/more-white-americans-adopted-than-shed-evangelical-label-during-trump-presidency-especially-his-supporters/.

Steensland, Brian and Eric L. Wright. “American Evangelicals and Conservative Politics: Past, Present, and Future.” Sociology Compass 8, no. 6 (2014): 705–17.

Stephens, Phillip Jr. “The Demonology of Satanism.” In The Satanism Scare, edited by James T. Richardson, Joel Best, and David G. Bromley, 21-41. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Stephens, Randall J. and Karl W. Giberson. The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Swain, Carol M. The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Whitehead, Andrew L. American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2023.

Wilcox, Clyde. “America’s Radical Right Revisited. A Comparison of the Activists in Christian Right Organizations from the 1960s and the 1980s.” Sociological Analysis (1987): 46–57.

Wilcox, Clyde. “Sources of Support for the Old Right: A Comparison of the John Birch Society and the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade.” Social Science History 12, no. 4 (1988): 429–49.

Wilcox, Clyde. “Evangelicals and the Moral Majority.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 28, no. 4 (1989): 400–14.

Wilcox, Clyde and Ted Jelen. "Evangelicals and Political Tolerance." American Politics Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1990): 25-46.

Wojcik, Daniel. The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Wojcik, Daniel. “Modern Mythology, Visionary Art, and Techno-Reenchantment.” Keynote presentation for the conference, “New Approaches to ‘Re-Enchanted’ Central and Eastern Europe.” Institute for Theoretical Studies of the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design of Budapest, April 7, 2022.

Wolfinger, Raymond E., Barbara Kaye Wolfinger, Kenneth Prewitt, and Sheilah Rosenhack. “America's Radical Right: Politics and Ideology.” In Ideology and Discontent, edited by David Apter, 267-269. New York: Free Press, 1964.

Zeskind, Leonard. Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.