“Truth is not in desire’s nature.” – Jacques Lacan

A grim dream followed the tragically early death of a young boy. Deep in grief and fatigue after keeping watch over the sick child for days and nights, the father retired to the adjacent room and fell asleep. In his dream state, he saw his boy draw near beside him. How very happy he must have felt to see his son again.

Up in the real world, a candle lighting the boy’s room fell over and set the body ablaze. The smoke billowed up and seeped into the next room, filling the father’s nostrils and intertwining with his dream state. The vision collapsed as the boy leaned in to whisper: “Father, don’t you see that I am burning?”

What will result once our consciousness is fully organized around trauma and turmoil? As Western democracy careens toward a cliff ’s edge, we must not presume our institutions will inevitably stabilize or save us. As right-wing authoritarianism roars with aggression unseen for decades, and as we are instructed to tolerate violence, misogyny, or xenophobia as legitimate perspectives, we haven’t the time to pretend we all desire some vague “common good.” As climate change extinguishes countless species and pushes human civilization to the verge of collapse, we haven’t the time to pretend all is well.

Don’t You See Turmoil?

One force of degeneration today is white evangelicalism, which we must not casually dismiss as the irrelevant, revanchist faith of a dying generation. Perhaps our crises today will resolve themselves by natural processes when one generation ends and another takes the reins, but that’s a risky gamble. The old secularization hypothesis told us the world would keep learning and progressing beyond theism, but this proved desperately shortsighted well before 9/11 fatally wounded secular optimism. After the slaughter and our immeasurably worse retaliation, a grotesque violence drenched in our theological desire, we cannot pretend religion will slumber and fade. We’re at a pivotal moment today, for no perversion of any faith in the past ever held a candle to the destructive potential of white evangelicalism.

After all, the fantasy of a sexual encounter leads people to destroy their families every day—why shouldn’t a divine fantasy occasionally lead to the destruction of civilization? As the pandemic has made clear, mass evil today happens not as a killing spree but as a program invoked as a throwaway campaign slogan. Mass evil today is bureaucratic, indifferent, and deadly efficient, though it means well.

My argument isn’t about a particular moment that shall pass but about a plague of turmoil that will persist long after a particular administration or movement concludes. The plague needs analysis. I was politically formed within three historic moments during my graduate studies. First was the Great Recession along with its inadequate resolution. It was a catastrophic loss of the future, the incomprehensible trap of debt and the obliteration of possibilities, and the counter-pressure of Occupy Wall Street, where the taboo against publicly speaking ill of capitalism seemed briefly broken. I saw just how little concern the Boomer generation felt for the prospects of Millennials like myself, and it told me something about the accidentally banal cruelty that was possible without any hint of malice. Second, a more visceral awakening came as I watched the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and so very many others.

I caught the slightest glimpse of my privilege. I learned things that could only come from listening rather than trying to see things I couldn’t possibly see, and I learned how my very existence was caught up in systems of advantage and harm. I also saw white crowds justify murder, and I watched acquaintances and relatives expressing their hopes that those of us marching in traffic would be run down. I saw how truly controversial white people could find a simple request that a black life matter equally to any other life where officers of the state are concerned. The final moment is still unfolding, and it continually teaches me that no evil is too much for the culture in which I was raised.

In 2016, I wrote my dissertation on psychoanalysis, religion, and theories of populism in the midst of a presidential campaign. It was a peculiar time to discuss such a topic. The United States hadn’t seen a genuine populist movement in so very long and yet had vigorous developments simultaneously on the center Left and Far Right. I had presumed my research would yield nothing but a theoretical footnote to a bizarre period. In the early evening of Tuesday, November 8, 2016, we felt a collective shock as we realized the polls and forecasts were wrong. Suddenly my work took on a new meaning.

Against a technocratic neoliberal—highly qualified and predictable in equal proportion to a program of mildly uninspiring centrism—a bellicose game show host with no experience would now take the reins. There had never been a campaign drawing more appropriate examples of Godwin’s Law. He’d run a campaign born in bigotry that had drawn the support of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis, mocked the disabled, and proposed using the military machine to kill children; he was as brutal as he was racist, but still the white evangelicals did not protest. He promised to deport eleven million people, called for a Muslim ban, and faked conversion to their faith; he was deceptive as he was empty, but still they did not protest. He called climate change a hoax, encouraged violence at rallies, and bragged of sexual assault; he was as vulgar as he was cruel, and still they did not protest. His constituency was the sect in which I was raised, for they found in his vacuous soul a mirror of their own. After everything that should have disqualified him, still they did not protest.

In the aftermath, I heard a familiar series of questions about white evangelicals. Do they not grasp the notion of hypocrisy? Why the praise for charlatans? How could they not accept evolutionary or climate science? Why do they mock expertise and defund education? How could anyone inflict their children with conversion therapy? Why do they find the widely popular act of sex a threat? Whence comes the desire for fascism? To each of these questions, my response was a complicated historicization of problems impossible to analyze in the abstract. These apparent contradictions are networked, reinforced, and doing precisely what they are designed to do. The reactionary liberal’s fantasy supposes conservatives are dupes in need of education.

This deep miscalculation on the part of the liberal misses the point, and liberalism will not save us. Sadism and masochism invigorate a destruction machine resonating with neoconservative militarism and neoliberal economics, and such invigoration cannot be resolved by fact-checking. Nothing from the social media infographic to universal college education will save us; information is impotent against this machine. Cruelty operates not at the level of information but at the level of desire.

Don’t You See Anxiety?

A fundamental axiom of my work is that we are not subjects who desire to know but instead subjects who desire (full stop). You would think turmoil should be avoided. On the contrary, what happens when turmoil is enjoyed? My methods employ a mix of psychoanalytic theory, political philosophy, history, and survey data, each of which have strengths and weaknesses. My topic is the white evangelical in the United States, specifically their desires and fantasies, but I won’t propose a strict definition. Why the subcategory of the white evangelical? One need only glance at survey data or read the news to see how the subsection operates with drastically different commitments and stands as a consistent outlier.

Today, seven in ten people in the United States are Christian. Around a quarter identify as evangelical. White Christians account for 43 percent of the population, and white Protestants account for 30 percent. How many Americans self-identify as white evangelical Protestants? Estimates on the percentage vary between the mid-to-high teens. So far as I am aware, Pub- lic Religion Research Institute provided the lowest estimate at 17 percent in 2017, a significant drop from 23 percent in 2006.[i] Understand this: white evangelicalism is not entirely unjustified in its paranoia—it is a faith that’s dying, and it knows it.

Just how quickly it is dying is more difficult to gauge than the poll above suggests, because holding certain commitments does not necessarily mean someone self-identifies. For example, research on the “nones” indicates a resilient piety among those who claim no religious affiliation (many still pray daily and claim to have a personal relationship with Jesus), and many beliefs incubated within the faith proliferate well beyond evangelical confines. We know that well over a third of whites identify as “born again,” so there seems to be a specific revulsion associated with the term evangelical. In other words, when we say that only 17 percent of the population is white evangelical, understand there is almost certainly a far larger part of the population inflected with evangelical sentiment that will prove more difficult to measure. I cannot claim to know the scope of such influence. And just as the Republican party holds onto control as a minoritarian power, white evangelicalism exerts an amplified power through the Republican party. Though white evangelicals are only one in six of the population, over a third of Republicans are white evangelical.

Finally, there’s an optimistic hope I must quickly dismantle, namely, the now-repetitive subgenre of journalism in which young evangelicals are highlighted and their beliefs interrogated, as if to suggest the next generation will moderate. There’s a massive generational gap, given that 26 percent of older Boomers are white evangelicals while only 8 percent of younger millennials identify similarly. Each time these prophecies of moderation erupt, the structure is just the same and the predictions just as futile as the previous iteration of the argument. I have no data to back up my claim here, but I will confidently make it all the same: white evangelicalism will not moderate. It may die off, and it may even suffer a blip of embarrassment with its bigotry too exposed at the surface, but no new generation will moderate a religion built on whiteness, nostalgia, and chosenness. If this faith continues to decline and my work becomes irrelevant in the years ahead, I will consider it a welcome mercy.

White evangelicalism is also a practically young faith, a fact its practitioners would surely reject. It is not quite a different religion, but it is more than a different denomination; it is a new sect. It is a reactionary, theological improvisation around whiteness. By calling its religious features a reactionary improvisation I am claiming its enduring commitment is to supremacy rather than to evangelism, moral values, or whatever else people wish were the defining features of the faith. As a political project in current form, it stretches back no further than the mid- to late-twentieth century.[ii]

In the latter half of the twentieth century a coalition formed between neoliberal capitalist interests, segregationists, and conservative Christians such that the desires merged into a novel iteration of the faith. The first hint of this coalition in political production was the failed Goldwater campaign, its emergence as a powerful force was the Religious Right of the Reagan era, and its perfected form is today’s Trumpism. Aside from the disposable window dressing of doctrines quickly abandoned, all that binds this faith to anything historic is its commitment to whiteness. Whiteness curates commitments they genuinely believe to be rooted in faith. The faith covers for something more nefarious, and those who disagree with me on this point needn’t read any further.

If you want to see past the surface, you must refuse to listen too closely to justifications and instead read actions as evidence of desire. Obsessive religious rituals are locations of enjoyment, though the enjoyment will often incur turmoil and anxiety. Shame-heavy rhetoric can be boasting in disguise. For example, when Calvinists tell us they’re sinners saved by grace, they don’t experience shame but instead turmoil. Far from shame, they are boasting! If they feel the turmoil of God’s judgement, they enjoy it alongside confidence in predetermined salvation. This narcissism justifies indifference at best, cruelty at worst. In turning inward to obsess over her standing with God, the believer never need ask whether she’s destroying everything else around her. The unconscious will speak, and we must listen.

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) taught that truth is not in desire’s nature and that we effectively hallucinate our worlds. This might be a critically important lesson today when, all around us, so many people foolishly obsess over questions of how fanatics succumb to misinformation or conspiracy theories. Instead, whoever believes the facts will compel reactionaries—as if factchecking or information were the problem—is the one most duped. Facts have vanishingly little to do with fantasy.

Lacan located anxiety and turmoil as outer limits of frustration.[iii] Because they lend a sense of security or clear standing, I wager anxiety and turmoil are actually sources of enjoyment rather than some- thing subjects prefer to avoid. There is a precise order to the relationship. Lacan put it up on the blackboard for us:   

The early Freud believed anxiety was a response to repression. Later in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, Freud argued anxiety arrived first such that repression was a response to (rather than a cause of) anxiety. Put differently, repression is the (attempted) solution, and the symptoms that result from repression are the “return of the repressed.” Symptoms proliferate and gather even more anxiety. Inhibition, symptom, and anxiety are part of a triad always found together. The subject begins to enjoy the trap they’ve laid, then the cycle launches again.

For Lacan, anxiety was intractably linked to a question we ask the Other: Che vuoi? (What do you want? or What’s bugging you?). This is only one half of the relationship. We also feel anxiety when the Other asks the same of us. When we ask another—a parent, a significant other, a boss, a god—what they want, anxiety rises precisely because we don’t know what they will desire. When the same question is asked back to us, we feel doubly anxious if we don’t yet know what we want. If a faith is built around sub- mission to a big Other, anxiety blends seamlessly into feelings of security. When a believer prays the question “What do you want?” and no answer returns, the believer externalizes her own narcissistic desire as a God telling her what to desire. Fidelity and security are rooted in turmoil and anxiety, which turn out to be a curious mode of (self) co-dependence.

Turmoil shifts back and forth, sometimes appearing as angst or other times as security. Turmoil is “the evocation of the power that fails you, the experience of what you lack in need.”[iv] If the believer hopes to stay included in her community, she must continually do more to balance her lack. She must listen to a new sermon, attend to a Bible study, add a spiritual discipline, etc. She’s sure she’s never good enough. As Lacan’s graph suggests, turmoil can actually be the goal if we believe we should feel distressed. She is the symptom of her dependence.

Or, as Freud simply put it, guilt is preferable to anxiety. In the turmoil of guilt, there’s a clear debt owed to the Other. If you know you’re guilty, you don’t have to wonder anymore. Just knowing you’re guilty can be a relief. However, in anxiety you don’t know what the Other wants—but you’re on the hook for it nonetheless. My thesis claims white evangelicalism is a faith organized around fantasies curating the enjoyment of—not the flight from—turmoil and anxiety.

Don’t You See There Is Only One Doctrine?

What’s the role of fantasy? Fantasy is part of desire, and figuring out what we desire—especially if it’s a question of doubting what we “should” desire—is a venture riddled with anxiety.[v] Psychoanalysts read anxiety as an affect: it signals a problem, and it doesn’t deceive. Anxiety doesn’t get repressed, but instead the various signifiers mooring anxiety in its place get repressed. For example, when I’m anxious, it will display as various symptoms even though I won’t necessarily know precisely why I’m anxious. The affect is on the surface, but the signifiers attached to it submerge. If the Other’s question “What do you want?” (or What should you desire?) leads into anxiety, then we’re exploring a very obscure relationship between anxiety and desire. Anxiety is in the interval between desiring something on the one hand and enjoyment (jouissance) on the other. The catch, of course, is that one never desires without fantasy.

A few banal fantasies float across white evangelicalism. It seldom tires of arguing over hell, substitutionary atonement, or biblical inerrancy, and it never misses an opportunity to judge women or non-heteronormative sexuality. But if my claim is that white evangelicalism (as a political project) is quite recent, then I’m also claiming these older ideas are utterly irrelevant to the vacuous believer wishing to argue now. This faith holds only one doctrine: an already forgiven and shameless choseness. They saw a story of Abraham’s blessing and coveted that story; in their hands the story mutated into a Christianized simulacrum cobbled together from election, gratuitous pretentiousness, and white settler colonialism. Every other doctrine is improvised and disposable.

Chosenness is its ultimate fantasy. Chosenness captures so many more specific doctrines—atonement, afterlife, perspicuity, predestination, the inability to lose one’s salvation, and so on. Chosenness means the believer has direct access to a divine knowledge that the unbeliever does not. Taking chosenness for its own use was a double-theft committed by its supersessionism and its racism. Theological chosenness bleeds into racial or national chosenness like a manifest destiny. The chosen believer rests assured she’s a member not only of the true faith but the correct lifestyle, the blessed nation, and so on. Every other doctrine can and will be shown disposable, and as white evangelicals drop the theological jargon and identify more directly with white nationalism or the alt-right, the true doctrinal core remains. Chosenness means never second-guessing your narcissism or cruelty.

Fantasy isn’t a pejorative term in my work. Yes, in a sense fantasy is a rejection of the world as such, but it’s also a way to enliven the world. Fantasy sustains desire; desire requires fantasy. We can fantasize about fictions until the imaginary seems more visceral than reality. Fantasy infuses turmoil with the excitement of some divine mission, as if to say: God wants you to feel this way, so be grateful! “Am I saying this to explain the difficulty of his desire?” Lacan asked of the submissive obsessional neurotic who wishes to be told what to desire. “No, rather to say that his desire is for difficulty.”[vi]

When desire begins to fail, or when the fantasy is revealed as a farce, what perverse vicissitude must it take to keep the subject happy in her turmoil? What does it mean when one increasingly defends the indefensible with the acknowledgement-excuse structure of “Yes, but even so . . . ”? Isn’t this acknowledgement and immediate disavowal everywhere on the Right, the preferred option for being real about denying reality? Yes, but even so . . .” is a perverse defense at its simplest, for we have the ego’s acknowledgement “Yes” followed by the immediate disavowal of what it knows to be true with “but even so . . . ”

Fantasy justifies cruelty, entices with a sense of loss, and ignites a drive for revenge. The Right loves loss. This is the serious lesson, for conservatism and fundamentalism thrive when they feel they are losing. The fantasy of loss lets them kill and feel righteous while killing.

The result is acting-out posing as the passage à l’acte (passage to the act). These are two ways to think about a response to tension in terms of whether we want our response to be seen. One person acts because they feel compelled to flee some unwelcome intrusion from the world (passage à l’acte). Another acts because they want to display themselves for attention on the world’s stage (acting-out). It’s at the moment of embarrassment or some other situation demanding response that we act, and the passage à l’acte commits us on a new path in the world. It isn’t necessarily well-calculated, but it puts us on a trajectory. Perhaps it’s ending a relation- ship or deconverting from a faith. It might be a slap for one who’s wronged us, or it might be a pledge of loyalty. It’s a moment of commitment that might be, but usually isn’t, well calculated. The passage à l’acte commits us on a path when we must make a fateful choice.

On the other hand, acting-out displays angst as if it’s an actor on a stage. It’s showing off and seeking attention. The child acts out to display frustration, the adult has a midlife crisis to show himself virile or less dull, and the liberal technocrat declares himself a member of the #Resistance. Acting-out might produce real effects in the world, but its purpose is to display, to justify, and to express itself. What becomes of a faith ostensibly beginning as genuine conversion (passage à l’acte) before devolving into flippant, ridiculous, narcissistic, and callous behavior (acting-out)? Its fantasies are a rejection and enlivening of the world, but its harmful masochism and sadism is always a display for the big Other.

The masochist enjoys suffering because he imagines the big Other is enjoying, or, to put it in Christian language, he must suffer because God is testing his faith. If it turns into sadism, what the sadist is seeking is not the other’s suffering but the other’s anxiety.[vii] For instance, don’t we see a lot of talk now on the Right that gloats over triggering the other with some racist or misogynist slur? This is the sadistic intention of one who cannot formulate their desire. When a faith aims not for the benefit of the world but for the approval of a big Other, acting-out turns into its chief virtue.

In effect, this is my claim: the subject prefers turmoil or anxiety and wraps themselves up in these states as a protection against the shame they couldn’t bear. The interesting thing is that shame and indifference can manifest the same on the outside. Shame doesn’t defend itself but instead shuts down. Shame is the sense that I am seen too much by the world. Indifference likewise doesn’t defend itself, because indifference recognizes no need to do so. Shame is the worst of feelings; even death is preferable. People will do anything to avoid it. However, isn’t shame a good thing on occasion? Isn’t the problem not that religion creates zones of shame but instead that it invests shame unwisely? White evangelicalism says you should feel ashamed of sexuality, but actually they should really feel ashamed of, for instance, locking the immigrant child in a cage or destroying breathable air for future generations.

Deserved shame is the opportunity for a new master signifier,[viii] but shame is typically avoided like the plague. Those without eyes to see nor ears to hear must avoid reckoning with their sins. The subject is doing all she can to avoid shame, and that is why she enjoys the (comparably easier) state of anxiety and turmoil. It’s true of all human subjects, but white evangelicalism seems particularly adept at propping up shamelessness. Fantasy justifies shamelessness and moves them back toward the true goal, which is to be completely free of and indifferent to the trauma of the world.

Look, I don’t want to go too far in praise of shame. I’m deeply skeptical of liberal attempts to compel new thoughts through something like shame or guilt, which quickly break down solidarity in the working class. Shame is simply a check on excess, a check which reactionaries rightly discern must be exorcised for the demonic to flourish. Solidarity, on the other hand, is what might reconfigure the death drive.

What I might have done is follow a happier schema for white evangelicalism. Perhaps I should have followed David Bebbington’s definition of evangelicalism through four pillars: conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism. I don’t disagree entirely, but rather I find the underside of each of them to be where helpful analysis begins. For example the underside of conversionism and crucicentrism is chosenness, and the underside of activism and biblicism is the hegemonic or supremacist desire to conform the world to one’s wishes. An axiom of psychoanalysis is that the descriptor one evokes for oneself is already an effort to censor the truth. We need to listen to self-descriptions, but they tell us the truth in disguise.

Alas, I am not an impartial or kind observer. If the reader wishes me to follow a more amiable definition of evangelicalism such as Bebbington’s, or if the reader thinks the faith could not possibly decay into the hierarchies of fascist contempt, or if the reader finds it ostentatious to suggest desire in humans is often filled with fantasies of self-harm and sadistic cruelty, or if the reader wishes me to talk about something other than what white evangelicalism in the United States plainly is today, then cast my work aside and ignore me.

Don’t You See the World is Burning?

Truth be told, it feels odd expending academic energy researching such an improvised and regularly ridiculous religion. However, we live in dangerous times and cannot afford to ignore the threats around us.

If climate change is indeed the greatest threat civilization has ever faced, then a faith aiding and abetting it must face analysis. If it desires a feudal lord, it threatens democracy. If it fantasizes the eternal torment of its foes, merciless policy shall follow. If it covers a xenophobic genesis, its future will be ever more cruel at worst and indifferent at best. If it holds power within the most powerful military and economic apparatus the world has yet seen, the danger is magnified. It is like what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “new religion of whiteness” where “the one virtue is to be white,”[ix] desiring to own the earth with a strut and arrogance hinting it felt ownership was its birthright. A century after his claim, has it not proven capable of destroying the inhabitants of the world it owns? My claim is nothing short of this: white evangelicalism is far and away the most dangerous faith the world has yet known. Let us consider its justifications, appetite, seduction, and catastrophe.

In the vision of the burning son from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, the father woke up at a precise moment. But why? A simple and fair explanation might suggest the body’s response to threat. Yes, but what if a dream is indeed a wish? Don’t we awake from nightmares when they’re too much to handle, when the anxiety reaches a threshold? In a sense, does he not wake up in order to remain asleep—to flee from the horror of loss? However much he desired to see his son again, the sight was too much to bear. Let’s take seriously the notion that this father awoke with a conscious- ness organized around the turmoil. When a culture sees real trauma—from common cruelties to the possible extinction of humankind—how does it opt to ignore the real and prefer the fantasy? Once more, as Lacan said, “truth is not in desire’s nature.”

The father looked away. This is the emergency of our moment, for we cannot afford to look away. If democratic civilization survives, it will be for lack of competence on the part of its opponents, not a lack of their desire. We have seen the unmasking of authoritarian desire in our neighbors, and we must analyze those fantasies underwriting the sadism.

We must not look away. We live in a time of racism, xenophobia, and rampant misogyny; a time of nationalism, capitalism, and open bigotry; a time of climate collapse and mass extinction that may well count us among its casualties. So many of us are adherents or former adherents of a most dangerous faith the world has yet known. My friends, don’t you see the world is burning?

Tad DeLay, PhD is the author of three books, most recently Against: What Does the White Evangelical Want? (Cascade Books, 2019). He teaches philosophy and religious studies in Colorado and Michigan.

This essay was reprinted with modifications from DeLay, Tad. Against: What Does the White Evangelical Want? Eugene: Cascade, 2019. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers