The Peripatetic Preacher Reads “Fantasyland”

I am a voracious and eclectic reader. I go to a bookstore or library and reach for any book that strikes my immediate fancy, taking into account cost and time for reading in the succeeding weeks. Nothing gives me more pleasure than a languorous look at a large bookstore or well-stocked library to see what pleasures await my eager eyes. Last week, I had such an occasion to peruse a familiar bookstore, within walking distance of our new LA home, one the great perks of living here. As I moved lazily around the store, I was caught by a new paperback title with a stark white cover. Of course it was heralded on the top front as a “New York Times Bestseller,” as every paperback appears to claim. I had only vaguely heard of the book, but decided to give it a try, since I had, once again, and all too quickly, worked through my stack.

The book is Fantasyland, by Kurt Andersen. Anderson is a versatile writer, having written novels, screenplays, along with various kinds of nonfiction. He writes well, despite some very angry reviews of his work, catalogued on the Amazon website, reviews that call this work names that do not bear repeating. This book is nothing if not wildly ambitious. Anderson sets out to prove in 440 pages that America, quite uniquely in the industrial world, has been, since its founding by the Puritans, essentially crazy and delusional. He makes his case with a bewildering array of anecdotes, many hilariously recounted (despite again reviews that say he is “humorless,” a ridiculous assertion as far as I am concerned) that he imagines in aggregate demonstrates that he is quite correct in his bold assertion. The result of the discussion is that Donald Trump was elected president, and that he is the clear result of American’s inability to discern flim-flam from fact, our incapacity to see though the conman that Trump so obviously is. Trump was elected precisely because America’s long-time delusional reality made his election inevitable.

This book is challenging and fun to read, though finally I am less than convinced of its basic premise, and that for two reasons. First, an “analysis” like this is doomed, by its very nature, to cherry pick episodes and persons from American history that serve to make the point of our essential craziness. No one who knows anything about our history could deny that we have had our fair share of loonies during our first 400 years, and a glance at Anderson’s extensive index will bring some of them to mind, or back to mind if you enjoy history as I do. Who does not know of P.T Barnum and John Burch and Aimee Semple McPherson and Oral Roberts? Each of them, and a host of others, traded on the gullibility and wishful thinking of countless thousands who were bamboozled into believing “six impossible things before breakfast,” to quote Alice’s Red Queen. There can be little doubt that hundreds of thousands of Americans (not to mention many French, German, Italian, and British folk) have been led into all sorts of foolishness by all kinds of confidence men and women. Andersen hopes by piling up the sheer weight of these people that we will all be convinced that we are idiots, standing on the shoulders of morons, who in turn are informed by fools that preceded them.

He says again and again that this is a uniquely American problem, and that is because, he claims, of one stark fact—America is wildly and tragically and overtly religious. Unlike our European brothers and sisters, who have primarily shed most trappings of religiosity, having surrendered to the tide of rationality unleashed by the French Revolution and subsequent revolts in thought from Germany to England. Hence, the ability to be fooled by delusion is far less there than here. But right here is Andersen’s second problem with his thesis, and the problem that cuts most deeply into the value of his interesting ideas. He imagines ALL religion to be delusion, a collection of ridiculous beliefs, leading to equally ridiculous truth claims and practices that bear out the foolishness of such idiocy, and opens believers, especially Protestant Christian believers, up to all manner of delusionary ideas and fantasy that marked the American psyche from the very origins of the Republic and before. In this way, Andersen fatally reveals his utter cluelessness about the rich complexity of religious belief and practice in America, and thereby undercuts his central thesis about our supposed near-universal delusionary nature.

Of course, since I am an ordained clergyperson, I have a rather large vested interest in the perceived value of religious belief. In my 50-year experience as a United Methodist clergyperson, I am well aware of the nuttiness in my own Protestant denomination, and I have witnessed the decline of our influence and importance in the American landscape. But our decline is not due to a basic delusion about what we believe; our decline has more to do with our inability to take seriously what we believe and to live as if what we believe is really true. We are not deluded; we are rather confused and distracted away from the life and ministry of Jesus, that life that should serve as our model and guide.

Here Andersen is no different from other “new” atheists (see Hitchens, Harris, et.al.) who know about as much about religion and faith as I know about modern physics. In short, not much. To claim religion as delusional is to reveal a great deal about one’s ignorance and very little about what religion has been about and is about for millions of serious adherents. Yes, we have our Oral Roberts and our Jerry Falwell and our Jimmy Swaggert and our Kenneth Copeland and our Joel Osteen, and a host of mountebanks who trade on gullible souls to buy their jets and mansions and claim powers that they plainly do not have and never will have. I too can easily debunk their practices, acts I would name as evil and deluded. But they are not Christians in any way that I call myself a Christian. And naming them as representative of a deluded Christianity is like naming Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer as representative of typical human beings.

So then why read this book, if its basic premise is finally unconvincing? Well, it is fun, a romp through American history unlike any you will read this year. And it does hold up a mirror to any who imagine that American rationality has triumphed in every time and place. Andersen reminds us that after the 1925 Scopes trial in Dayton, TN, those who imagined that Christian fundamentalism had been vanquished for all time were dead wrong. It remains alive and well among us even in 2018, and threatens serious and rational believers still. And it does offer another explanation for the shocking election in 2016 of a man who represents so many of the facets of character and outlook of what Andersen calls fantasyland. After all, a man who has, by careful count of the Washington Post, uttered over 3500 outright lies publically during his 18 months in office, suggests that “fake news” and fantasy are the order of the day. Andersen certainly does not have the final key to understand Trump, but his jeremiad is not wholly vacuous and deserves to be read.

(Images from Wikimedia Commons)