In God We Panic: Religious Hysteria as American Tradition Part I: The Founding Delusion
In God We Panic: Religious Hysteria as American Tradition
Part I: The Founding Delusion
I.I
The Hoodoos, Tarot Card Readers, Orisha devotees and people who label themselves as just “spiritual” have been talking about it for years. But outside of these niche circles, talk of religious psychosis has been creeping into the mainstream again. Everything from officials at the Department of War labeling the current “conflict” with Iran a “holy war,” to the viral videos of people denouncing Black civic organizations, are being ticketed as “religious psychosis.” However, these things aren’t the same as your great Aunt swearing that she saw Jesus in her morning toast, or as the man on the street hoopin’ and hollering about how he’s been fighting the Archangel Michael for his soul–and yours. That last situation could be religious psychosis, but calling the former scenarios a form of psychosis could be the wrong word entirely, and not just because it’s clinically inaccurate. Psychosis is involuntary, it’s a break in reality that happens to you, not something you choose. For sure, religious psychosis is not something passed down through generations like family recipes for antiBlack, antiIndigenous oppression. What we’ve been witnessing for the past four-five hundred years is something that has built itself into the very foundation of this nation, and it’s far more insidious and far more voluntary: moral panic and its cousin religious hysteria, both spread through social contagion. Both are a social mythos and method that possibly hold as a mass psychogenic “illness,” yet doesn’t have the phenomenon of ergot in the rye to explain it.
What researchers call “mass psychogenic illness” or” mass sociogenic illness” is defined as the rapid spread of illness symptoms through a population where there's no infectious agent responsible for contagion. It's a constellation of symptoms suggestive of organic illness but without an identified cause, occurring in a group of people who share beliefs about those symptoms. The key word here is shared. It’s not an individual delusion, it’s the oppressors' practice of “each one, teach one.” It is a collective belief that spreads like wildfire through social networks and is amplified by emotional contagion (our natural tendency to unconsciously mimic and adopt the emotions and behaviors of those around us) . This could also be understood as what Stanley Cohen called “moral panic” when a society decides that something or someone threatens the very fabrication of civilization and that fear spreads–fast. The reaction is always, always disproportionate to the actual threat. The “conjuring of folk devils,” as Cohen called it is when we look at how a community under strain needs someone to blame for the cracks showing in their foundation: for the gas prices that are too high, for the jobs that don't pay enough, social benefits that don’t benefit you more than they benefit billion dollar corporations, for housing that is inaccessible, for when the crops won't grow, or the sicknesses that won't break, or for when the dissolution of loving relationships doesn't seem to stop. Everything is slipping through their fingers like water, and it ain’t nothing but the devil. They need a devil, and not necessarily the devil from their Sunday sermons or the devil with horns and the sulfur, but a devil they can touch. A devil that they can see, accuse, put on trial, lock-up, but most importantly a devil that they can destroy. Devils are made, just as Gods are.
“Gods always behave like the people who make them.”
Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
The devil we've been taught to know sometimes is not the devil at all. The devil is rarely who they say it is, yet their devil is usually whoever knows too much, or who practices a freedom that makes their limits visible, or whoever exists as proof that the whole system is built on theft and blood and nothing holy at all. There was never anything predestined about moral panic or religious hysteria, both are made by humans. Both then get weaponized and passed around from boardroom to courthouse to pulpit to pew to your neighbor's house to you. It transforms your neighbor into a devil maker who swears it was bigfoot that they saw in the woods. It turns structural and social violence into a sacrament that can make the whole lopsided ordeal moral, religious even. And the bizarreness of it all is that they believe they are righteous, they believe that their violence is heaven sent, with their cruelty now positioned as justified. They believe that the way they persecute people is holy, and they believe that the way they exclude people has been maintained or ordained by God. All of this keeps spreading because the society around them, and us all, conspires to make this hysteria look acceptable, necessary even.
Mass hysteria and moral panic work because they serve someone or something, in this case it serves white supremacy–not Christianity. Let's be very clear that white supremacy itself is a religion. Hold. Let’s make the case for white supremacy as a religion. Émile Durkheim, one of the founding theorists of western sociology, defined religion as. “ a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things that are apart and forbidden, beliefs, and practices which unite into one single moral community, called a church, all those who adhere to them.” Notice what’s not in that definition: God. Supernatural beings. Divine revelation. For Durkheim, religion was about the distinction between the sacred and the profane, and collective practices that brought communities together through shared beliefs. Religion is what happens when a group of people agree that certain things are sacred and set apart, worth reverence, worth killing over, and worth dying for. White supremacy fits every criterion. It has its sacred things: whiteness itself, “purity” of blood, the mythology of European civilizations that stood “novel” against the rest of the world, the doctrine of discovery. It has its profane: Blackness, Indigenous, resource sharing, anything that threatens the sanctity of white dominance. It has its rituals: lynching, bombings, the burning of Black bodies and churches, the paving over of ceremonial grounds and cemeteries. It has a moral community, those who adhere to the belief that whiteness is divine because the white body is the image of God, and that darkness is demonic. And the religion of white supremacy has always required moral panic that doubles down and morphs into religious hysteria to spread and sustain itself.
You can't build an entire economy on stolen land with stolen bodies and a select few on top of it all while claiming to follow a man who said “it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich person to enter heaven,” without inducing some level of cognitive dissonance so severe it manifests as collective delusion. White supremacy as religion required the following machinery from day one, society cracking under its own contradictions, a power structure that profits from pillaging the earth while dehumanizing and scapegoating humans, and a god flexible enough to call anything demonic that threatens the order of how certain humans want certain things. Colonial America had all three in abundance, had them written into law and liturgy both. The devil they screamed about from their pulpits and their politician podiums, the ones they burned and hanged and terrorized in the name of salvation, was never satan at all.
“Religious freedom” teachers taught us in elementary school, their voices honeyed with the mythology of pilgrims and Plymouth Rock and a Thanksgiving that was gentle and loving. Freedom, that word they loved to invoke while the hands of their forefathers were still sticky with indigenous blood, and while the smoke from the burning bodies had barely cleared the Virginia air.
“At the very moment that they are thinking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, for the right to worship God, according to the dictates of their own conscience, they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance, and makes it utterly worthless to a world lying in wickedness.”
Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? 1852
Pilgrims and colonists fled religious persecution in Europe, this much is true. What they don’t have stage directions for in those Thanksgiving pageants, and what gets lost between construction paper bonnets and cardboard mayflowers, is that most pilgrims didn’t flee persecution because they believed in freedom for everyone. They fled because they were being prosecuted and weren’t the ones doing the persecuting. Freedom of religion, for the settlers who built this nation’s mythology, was never intended to mean the freedom to believe differently. This nation needed the freedom to enforce beliefs on everyone else without interference, much like its fatherland. In its impact, what religious freedom meant in practice was the freedom to see Indigenous spiritual practices as demonic, the freedom to burn ceremonial grounds and outlaw sacred dances, the freedom to kidnap native children and baptize the “Indian” out of them in Christian schools that will really death camps with hymnals. Freedom of religion meant the doctrine of discovery, papal bulls that declared any land not “Christian” was available for Christian conquest, that non-Christian peoples could be enslaved and their land seized “with divine blessing.” It meant seeing polytheism, animism, ancestor veneration, creatures at the crossroads, and earth centered spirituality as proof of savagery and further evidence that these people weren’t people at all.
The same pilgrims and colonizers who cried persecution when they couldn’t dictate the state religion arrived on these shores and immediately began dictating everyone else’s religions and relationships with the divine. This is not ironic or hypocritical because that would suggest that the rubric was that of soul liberation, something that had ethical, moral standing and humanity. Their limits were the operating system working exactly as designed. These limits of the soul allowed for religious hysteria and moral panic to function in the colonies as intended. Europe had already shown them what they were capable of. Before they cannibalized Indigenous people, land, and spiritual traditions, they cannibalized each other, metaphorically in most cases. English Protestants and Catholics spent centuries burning each other at the stake, drawn and quartering dissenters, burning heretics alive. The war of religion turned the subcontinent of Europe into an abattoir where salvation was determined by which monarch held the executioner's purse. And when the soil got too soaked with their own blood, they looked westward and called it providence.
(I would like the following Instagram post to be inserted here: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWXmDj9Cfvg/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link )
Salem, Massachusetts, 1692: twenty people executed for witchcraft, the spectacle of colonial “Christian” hysteria turned inside out, consuming itself. Over the course of several months in 1692, more than two hundred women, children and men were accused of witchcraft. Historians describe it as one of colonial America’s most notorious cases of mass hysteria. Some describe it as a brief outburst that occurred even as the practice of witch hunting was already waning in most of Europe. The episode of religious hysteria, or moral panic with a religious undertow, was fueled by what some researchers named as political uncertainty following the loss of the Massachusetts charter in 1684, ongoing conflict with French colonists, the spread of smallpox, and even extreme weather that created misery. But it was also fueled by the presence of Indigenous Americans and African Peoples, embodied in that town by a woman named Tituba.
However, for the most part, we remember Salem because it was white women and white men accusing each other. We remember it because white people’s fears of their own shadows makes for compelling theater. All the witch hunt’s a stage, or not, what happened in Salem was an inheritance, the same religious fervor that burned witches in Europe saw the devil in every woman who knew too much about herbs simply crossed the Atlantic and found new targets. Outside of the bare mentions of Tituba, the other thing that they don’t teach you about Salem in history classes is that fixation on witchcraft had already been targeting Black and Indigenous people for decades by the time of the Salem witchtrials. This mass hysteria didn’t start with white girls in Salem having fits, although that is the most remembered point in American moral panic, it started at the moment Europeans decided that African and Indigenous spiritual practices were devil worship.
“When the Lord first brought me to these poor Indians on the Vinyard, they were mighty zealous and earnest in the Worship of False gods and Devils; … The Devil also with his Angels had his Kingdom among them; … by him they were often hurt in their Bodies, distracted in their Minds, wherefore they had many meetings with their Pawwaws, to pacifie the Devil by their sacrifice, … . The Pawwaws counted their Imps their Preservers, had them treasured up in their friends.”
Missionary Thomas Mayhew Jr. regarding the Wampanoags of Martha's Vineyard in 1652
Orange County, Virginia, 1745: Eve, an enslaved African woman, became the first and only Black person in colonial America to be “legally” burned at the stake. The charge: poisoning her enslaver, Peter Montague. The colonial authorities made a spectacle of her capital punishment. They ritualized it by turning her death into a public theater that was meant to terrorize every enslaved person who held knowledge about roots that grow, and roots that kill. Reports note that smoke from her execution was seen around the county. “Upon the execution of that sentence…the Montague estate was compensated £50 by the Commonwealth of Virginia for the destruction of its human property.”
Here’s where the founding delusion revealed itself most nakedly: the colonists saw enslaved Africans' working of what the Earth could do in the right hands as witchcraft, which is a continuation of what they saw in people in their countries of origin. They saw the continuation of African, now Diasporic spiritual traditions, medicinal knowledge, spiritual protection, and resistance practices as evidence of (at times) demonic possession or adherence to a “lesser” system of belief. When the slave people poisoned their enslavers, perhaps the only accuracy was in colonists naming the act as rebellion. However, they did not have the humanity to see it as self-defense, or the logical outcome of holding human beings in bondage. They saw it as audacious economic, social, and religious warfare. To them it was nothing but the devil working through African hands to attempt to destroy the dominion God had promised them.
“Enslaved people in the Americas, then, came from societies in which the slave trade was causing ideas about witchcraft and spiritual harm to change and where the idea of poison was always spiritually charged.”
Diana Paton, Witchcraft, Poison, Law, and Atlantic Slavery
Research by scholars like Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh has documented that poisoning by enslaved women was a direct response to intimate violence manifesting as rape, beatings, families, separation, and a litany of particular horrors that came with being held captive in White households. These women were “ using things like poison in response to the intimate forms of violence. They were being subjected to as a condition of their enslavement.” But to white colonizers, it was witchcraft as resistance. Any justice that enslaved Black people sought to gain for themselves was just further evidence of African peoples inherent demonization in their eyes.
“They did not fear death, the pain of the execution, or God’s judgment on their souls.”
Nikki M. Taylor, Brooding over Bloody Revenge
The same colonist who claimed to be Christian, who claimed to worship a man who said “blessed are the meek” somehow convinced themselves that kidnapping, enslaving, torturing, and working people to death was God‘s will. That raping, enslaved women and children and men was plantation management. That separating children from their families was an economic necessity. That burning a Black woman alive for the crime of remembering what her grandmother taught her about herbs was justice. They were convinced of their virtue by none other than each other. They built churches while they built auction blocks. They sung hymns while they swung whips. They prayed before they purchased human beings. The belief that this violence was righteous was at every dinner, table conversation, every sermon, every lullaby sung to white children who were taught that their humanities was predicated on someone else’s lack thereof. And they called this divine right. In the Bible they were supposed to be reading, here is what Jesus actually said: “whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do unto me.” The brand of Christianity that they practiced, the Christianity they use to justify genocide and enslavement, and the systemic destruction of Indigenous and African spiritual traditions, peoples, and land, bears no resemblance of the teachings of the man whose name they invoked.
I.III
The truth of the religion in the United States was and is white supremacy: a complete system of beliefs and practices that designated whiteness sacred and created rituals to maintain the boundary between white and non-white, built a moral community, and is unified by commitment to racial hierarchy rather than love of creation, or God. And like all religions, it required faith. Faith that politically designated white skin made you human, faith that everyone else was something less. Ultimately, faith that the violence to uphold this man-made construct was righteous. White supremacy as religion spreads through religious hysteria and moral panic. You couldn’t get entire communities to picnic at lynchings, view burnings, justify slavery without a collective delusion so powerful it took root and spread like kudzu, continuously manifesting as moral certainty.
Scholars like J. Kameron Carter have argued that Christian theologies can hold an unholy alliance with European imperialism that provided the seedbed of modern racism. Carter’s work demonstrates that “ the distinction of European Christian thought made between the Jewish Jesus and the universal Christ represented by a racialized body that must die before the other transcendent whiteness can reign, creates a theological foundation on which much modern white supremacy rests.” White supremacy rouged its lips and cheeks with the Indigenous genocide, padded itself on African enslavement, draped itself in fancy dress made from pages of the Bible, and declared that it’s stage name was holy. In this charade it became its own religion. Its church the stage of American monstrosity, complete with sacred texts (the Constitution with its three-fifths compromise and fugitive slave clause), holy sites (plantations, auction blocks, eventually Confederate monuments), rituals (lynchings, slave patrols, segregation), and a moral community bound by the shared belief in white divinity.
This entity, known as American religion of white supremacy needed to consume other spiritual systems to survive. It couldn't coexist with Indigenous place-based spirituality because that spirituality gave Indigenous peoples legitimate claim to the land. It couldn't coexist with African Traditional Religions because those religions gave enslaved Africans access to power outside white Christian control. It couldn't even fully coexist with Christianity as Christ actually taught it, because "love your enemies,”directly contradicted everything the entity needed to function. So it created a version of faith where enslavement was God's will. This faith also supported genocide was manifest destiny and would hold church where white skin was the image of God and dark skin was the mark of... Theologians like James Henley Thornwell at First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, South Carolina, preached that slavery was biblically justified. Ministers like those in the Southern Baptist Convention (which split from Northern Baptists specifically to defend slavery) turned pulpits into propaganda machines. The Christianity that blessed this nation's founding bore no resemblance to the teachings of a brown man from Nazareth who was executed by the state for challenging empire.
From early colonial happenings until now the legacy keeps living. Even now, anything outside of American “Christianity” is seen as less than, as dangerous, as un-American. Indigenous practices are either romanticized as relics or prosecuted when actually practice and African Diaspora traditional religions are still called superstition while mainstream American “Christianity” is called faith. Under this religion some groups get to discriminate while calling it conviction, while everyone else else’s beliefs are treated as lifestyle choices, subject to regulation. This particular American religion does not only live in white bodies. Many Black people in the states, believe themselves disconnected from our ancestral practices and some even adhere to this particular American religion as a way to keep surviving. Many of us were taught to fear what this American tradition labeled as witchcraft. While at the same time seeing the ways that some families used the Bible as a source of sorcery. We had altars. Our people were adamant concerning black eyed peas and greens for New Year’s Eve. Generations deep in spiritual double consciousness. The ways that we know and unknow ourselves are simultaneously fascinating and frustrating. We have been the defined making space within the world of the definers.
“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
Toni Morrison, Beloved
From the beginning, it was determined who got to define freedom and who got to be fully human enough to access it. It was determined who got to practice religion versus who got burned at the stake for witchcraft. And 400 years later we’re still living in that lie, still pretending the foundation wasn’t built on burned bodies and stolen spiritual practices of people who knew different names for God, still calling the hysteria righteousness, still mistaking white supremacist’s religion for truth.
The founding delusion is that religious freedom ever meant freedom. Colonizers who cosplayed as Christian never intended to coexist with other ways of knowing the divine. The further delusion is believing that they didn’t know exactly what they were doing when they wrote about freedom of consciousness or freedom of religion into the constitution, while Indigenous Turtle Islanders were prohibited from practicing their ceremonies, and Africans were beaten for administering medicines without their enslavers' expressed permission. This is American heritage: religious hysteria and moral panic as founding principles, mass delusion as civic virtue, all leading to white supremacy as the one true faith.
