In part I, I began a recent exploration of the conservative Christian argument that the West is returning to paganism. As I suggested, the loss here is not a particular belief system, and certainly not a return to an imagined paganism, but a crisis of authority in matters spiritual and religious. In this next post, I want to explore the contours of this crisis by examining a gnostic shift in popular American culture, which has been exported with American capitalism.
Gnosticism as a Religious and Spiritual Modality
Gnosticism evades easy definition, but the defining feature is suggested by the name: Knowledge. Of course, every spiritual and religious movement promises some kind of knowledge to its initiates; Christianity, Buddhism and Islam share that feature, which is why it is useless as a mechanism for distinguishing gnosticism from any other system. What separates the gnostic mode from most others is the suggestion that it offers knowledge that has been hidden by powerful forces. Gnosticism promises liberation from a mental prison that, before initiation, is invisible.
This is also why it is important to separate gnosticism as a particular religious movement of “heretical” Christians from gnosticism as a spiritual or religious modality. Although we associate Gnosticism with a particular form of early Christian spirituality, there are similar concepts in non-Christian, indeed non-Abrahamic, religious traditions. In the Hiyu Chapter of the Lotus Sutra, a famous text of Mahayana Buddhism, we find the Parable of the Burning House. In it, a wealthy man discovers, to his horror, that his children are playing with toys in a house that has caught on fire. Fearing that they will be consumed by the flame because of their distraction, he lures them out of the burning house with promises of new toys that exist outside of the house. Although they are lured outside with the promise of toys that do not exist, they are rewarded with a cart adorned with precious stones. The parable is capable of being read on multiple levels, but the wealthy man is the Buddha and the children are sentient beings saved from the raging fires of sickness, old age and death. The precious toy that is their reward is Nirvana or, at minimum, the esoteric teachings of the Lotus Sutra (the Lotus Sutra in particular is a very self-aware and self-referential spiritual work). The toys that the children were concerned with in the burning house were the sensory pleasures of our world, which distracted the from the reality: Their house was on fire, and they were threatened with the cycle of death and rebirth that characterizes the Buddhist cosmology of samsara, from which the teachings of the Buddha offer liberation.
Although most forms of “orthodox” Christianity claim to eschew esoteric or secret knowledge, the language of the gospels themselves, especially Mark, are to the contrary. In Mark 4, for example, Jesus tells his disciples that although they have the secret knowledge of the Kingdom of God, for outsiders those truths are delivered in riddles, i.e., parables. Indeed, this is a recurring theme throughout the Gospel of Mark, which is the earliest of the gospels accepted by “orthodox” Christianity: Jesus offers exoteric teachings to a crowd, and separately offers esoteric instruction to certain disciples. This has been called the “spatial shift” in academic surveys of Mark. See, i.e., ES Malbon, Narrative Space and Mythic Meaning in Mark (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986); EC Stewart, Gathered Around Jesus: An Alterative Spatial Practice in the Gospel of Mark (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2009). The esoteric teachings are delivered, importantly, away from institutional religious settings, in private houses or, harkening back to a central point of direct contact with the divine, a mountain setting. There is also a clear implication in Mark that certain forms of special prayer, esoteric in character, are associated with spiritual powers, including exorcisms, multiplication of loaves and even walking on water. In Mark 6, for example, before walking on water and calming a storm, Jesus retreats to a mountain in prayer. The esoteric character of Mark is diminished in subsequent narratives of the same events in Matthew and Luke, presumably because they had theological problems with its implications for the later Christian communities they were serving. See, i.e., Mara Rescio, “Demons and Prayer: Traces of Jesus’ Esoteric Teaching from Mark to Clement of Alexandria,” Annali di storia dell'esegesi Vol 31, Issue 1, pp. 53-81, 75 (2014)(“More probably, they felt the esoteric accent of the Markan version as problematic, and thus decided to rearrange the whole story by giving it a new focus and new ending.”).
I use the two examples above because they represent various difficulties in defining gnosticism, a problem that has bedeviled religious scholars for the better part of a century. See Dillon, Matthew 1963-. "Gnosticism Theorized: Major Trends and Approaches to the Study of Gnosticism." Secret Religion 2016: 23-38. Dillon surveys a number of approaches to the study of gnosticism, but the one that is most relevant to my approach is suggested by April DeConick, who turns to cognitive linguistics to theorize that gnostic spirituality is, above all else, a cognitive frame or mental shortcut that allows humans to quickly interpret information into coherent categories. According to DeConick, gnostic spirituality, so interpreted, have certain defining characteristics that transcend time and space: Personal spiritual knowledge, an experience of God or an innate, uncreated spiritual essence through mysticism or initiatory rites and practices, a transgressive hermeneutic which assumes that spiritual truth is hidden from the many, which requires a transgressive reading to uncover the hidden meaning of scriptures, and finally an inclusive spiritual outlook that focuses on metaphysical questions but incorporates diverse spiritual, philosophical and religious positions.
Because this definition relies on human cognition, the gnostic mode can appear and disappear repeatedly in different spatial and geographical contexts. They can exist separately, without personally influence one another, or they can be imprinted in physical objects, like texts or art, to be activated through an encounter. In other words, we can read a gnostic text and have the same cognitive framing activated today. This helps explain why gnosticism has been a recurring historical problem for Christianity, and why certain modern trends can be classified as gnostic even without embracing that label.
Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Using Roswell as a Case Study of a Modern Gnostic Myth
Josh McDowell is a popular conservative Protestant apologist, responsible for authoring a number of mass produced works that argue for the truth of the Christian religion. McDowell often relies upon CS Lewis’ trilemma: Jesus was either lunatic, liar or Lord, and since we can conclude that he was neither lunatic nor liar, he must be Lord of the Cosmos. Without getting into the various problems posed by such a reductive reading of the historical Jesus, I think it is worth juxtaposing the trilemma with the Roswell event. This helps us understand how modern myths form, and why the gnostic mode is one that materializes even in the absence of overt religious framing.
Modifying CS Lewis’ trilemma, I propose the following: There is no dispute that the government claimed a flying saucer crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. This event is as much of a fact as the historical record of Jesus followers claiming that he had been crucified only to be resurrected, thus demonstrating that he was the Son of God. So you either believe that the flying saucer was piloted by aliens, or you believe that it was, contrary to the government’s initial reports, a weather balloon. These are minimal facts, of course; nothing requires belief, at this point, in a government conspiracy, hidden knowledge or the various claims that would later constitute the UFO conspiracies that materialized at the end of the 20th century. Although there was a press release that the military had recovered a “flying disc,” the claim was retracted and the military clarified that it had only recovered a weather balloon. The crash at Roswell largely disappeared from the public consciousness.
At the time that the crash was reported, there was a growing public consciousness of mysterious activity in the skies. During the Second World War, pilots in the European and Pacific theaters reported mysterious objects that outmaneuvered their own crafts, often described as glowing lights that appeared to be under the control of an unknown intelligence. Although these objects would come to be associated with the later UFO phenomenon, contemporary accounts suggested that they were part of a Nazi project. See, i.e., New York Times, Dec. 14, 1944, “Floating Mystery Ball Is New Nazi Air Weapon.”
This theory was no longer tenable after the war ended and the sightings continued. The Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting occurred on June 24, 1947, when private pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed that he saw a string of nine, shiny unidentified flying objects flying past Mount Rainier at speeds he believed were, at minimum, in excess of a thousand miles per hour, far beyond what was technologically feasible. This post-World War II sighting, along with several others that followed in the next few weeks, received national coverage, and led to the press describing these objects as “flying saucers” or “flying discs.” The Roswell crash took place in this context, less than three weeks after Arnold’s sighting.
The UFO phenomenon, including the Roswell incident, provides an interesting parallel to the alleged death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the formation of the Christian spiritual movement. As with the Jesus movement, a period of relative silence followed Roswell. In the late 1940s or early 1950s, Inez Wilcox, the wife of the Sheriff George Wilcox, responsible for law enforcement at Roswell, allegedly wrote about “a secret well-kept,” namely that the crash at Roswell actually was a flying saucer, and not the weather balloon that was reported. The accounts of Inez Wilcox are primarily attributed to her granddaughter, who produced an affidavit in which she alleged her grandmother had told her military police threatened to kill their family unless they kept quiet about the crash. This affidavit suggested that George Wilcox traveled to the crash site and witnessed four bodies, which he called “space beings.”
Of course, that affidavit is from 1995. By then, the Roswell story was part of a larger conspiracy theory that claimed the federal government had covered up a UFO crash, as well as the recovery of the bodies of the UFO’s occupants. Setting aside the historicity of those allegations, it is significant that the Roswell conspiracy began to pick up speed only after the Watergate scandal, which caused public trust in the federal government to plummet. This was preceded by a slow but steady erosion of public confidence in the national government that followed the Vietnam War and waves of campus protests and racial riots in the 1960s and 1970s.
Similarly, the Jesus movement materialized in a time of social and political unrest in ancient Palestine. Whatever one makes of the claims of the authors of the New Testament, they were operating in a social and political context defined by crisis. These are contexts in which conspiracy theories tend to thrive. See van Prooijen and Douglas, “Conspiracy theories as part of history: The role of societal crisis situations,” Memory Studies, 2017, Vol. 10. When high impact and rapid social change calls existing power structures and norms into question, there is a known psychological tendency to turn to narratives of malevolent and sinister hidden forces that are pursuing evil goals. These forces become easy explanations for both the apparent uncertainty of the time as well as the negative outcomes of social change.
Conspiracy theories, by their nature, share certain features with the gnostic spiritual mode. In gnostic thought, the true nature of reality is hidden, and this hidden reality can only be uncovered by secret mechanisms, which may take the form of transgressive or forbidden knowledge. This mode is also associated with a deep distrust of existing authorities. In the context of early Christianity, distrusted institutions were the Jewish religious authorities as well as pagan institutions associated with Greco-Roman society. But despite the differences between the Christian movement and these outside authorities, there were certain beliefs that were shared about the nature of reality itself. Spiritual powers were real, and they manifested themselves in society as well as the heavens. As we know, this included gods, angels, demons and other beings that operated beyond the world of the senses. Although the Christian interpretation of these phenomena differed from Jewish and pagan understanding, life was, for everyone involved, infused with supernatural significance.
Confidence in the supernatural had diminished by the Space Age. In the context of the UFO phenomenon, the primary explanation for proponents of UFO conspiracies was the existence of alien visitors. Over time, these visitors became associated not only with UFOs, but also alien abductions that were reportedly both benign or positive as well as sinister. In some narratives, a secret cabal within the government, sometimes called Majestic 12, was conspiring with the aliens’ sinister goals. In others, the government was hiding a kind of secret knowledge, often in the form of alien technology, that promised societal utopia.
In summary, as with Christianity, the gnostic mode appeared again to offer a cognitive frame for understanding the UFO phenomenon as well as public distrust in the national government. In the case of Christianity, the explanation was overtly spiritual and religious, while the new technological and scientific landscape of post-war America offered a new, scientifically plausible explanation for unexplained aerial phenomena: Visitors from another world. In both cases, the “truth” threatened the foundations of the existing order, with implications that could be either utopian or dystopian.
The Gnostic Turn in Modern Culture
The gnostic mode never disappeared. It has emerged in the form of historical heresies, as with Catharism in Southern Europe, as well as in spiritual movements like theosophy and spiritualism. But more significantly for the current moment, it has also emerged as a theme in the arts, including literature and, in the 20th and 21st centuries, film and television. In particular, science fiction has proven itself to be very receptive to gnostic themes, from the works of Philip K Dick, which were in part inspired by his own spiritual experiences, to more popular film and television series, including the Matrix franchise as well as the X-Files.
This trend seemed to peak in the late 1990s with several films that embraced the gnostic mode. There is, of course, the Matrix trilogy, which posits that reality is a simulation that is used to harvest the bioelectrical life force of humans, turned into energy for a race of malevolent machine intelligences. The protagonist Neo emerges as “the One,” imbued with the power to challenge the sentient programs that run the simulation and liberate people from its control. His role as the liberator of humanity is prophesied by the Oracle, a mysterious figure who turns out to be a sentient program and the “Mother” of the Matrix, juxtaposed with its father, the malevolent Architect, a sentient program who built the Matrix and solves the problems posed by human free will with a recurring cycle of creation and destruction, in which Neo is simply a pawn of the machines. In the film, the Oracle and the Architect are clear stand-ins for the gnostic figures of Sophia, or wisdom, and the Demiurge, or the false creator god who created the material world as a prison for human souls.
While the gnostic themes reached a kind of apex in the Matrix films, there were a series of films that explored similar themes. In The 13th Floor, an LA detective in 1999 is investigating the murder of an inventor who has created a virtual reality simulation of Los Angeles in the 1930s. During the course of the investigation, the detective discovers that 1999 Los Angeles is also a computer simulation, and he is in fact an artificial consciousness, one who is ultimately liberated by taking control of a human body from the “real world” of Los Angeles in 2024.
Before the Matrix, the film Dark City, another noir detective story, explores an urban landscape that seems to resemble a city from the 1940s. Eventually, the protagonist discovers that the city is in fact a construct built by aliens who are interested in harvesting human corpses as hosts and analyzing human individuality, and experimenting on humans, for their own sinister purposes. The protagonist is one such experiment, and with his powers he overthrows the aliens and reorients the city, part of a large starship, to face the sun that it orbits, reconstructing the city as one that experiences light and saving humanity from the alien overlords.
The deconstruction of reality was a popular theme as the 1990s closed. David Cronenberg also played in the same box with eXistenZ in 1999, and the 1998 film The Truman Show posits an artificial prison created by a television producer that traps the protagonist in a 24/7 TV show. These films, along with similar works in literature and television, provide a fascinating re-interpretation of religion and spirituality using the gnostic mode to undercut our confidence in reality. It is perhaps no coincidence that they became popular as reality television and other forms of infotainment began to saturate the airwaves.
Our fascination with aliens, UFOs and the idea that reality is a simulation did not begin in the 1990s, and of course it has not ended there. In the last few years, the government has been forced to disclose ongoing reports and investigations into what it now describes as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAP, a word that describes the same phenomena encompassed by UFOs. The simulation theory has morphed into something resembling a religious belief, with philosophical arguments in its favor, including a new trilemma suggested by the philosopher Nick Bostrom that has been used to argue that a simulated universe is not simply a possibility, but a probability.
Last year, a documentary called Glitch in the Matrix explored this in greater detail. This was my first encounter with the phenomenon of “the Matrix defense,” a kind of insanity defense that has been put forward by accused murderers, in at least one case successfully. See Schone M., “The Matrix Defense,” Boston Globe, November 9, 2003. And while there are not many people who believe that the simulation argument justifies murder, it is revealing that the mentally disturbed killers profiled in Schone’s article and the documentary turn now to a belief in the simulation as opposed to, for example, the voices of God, the devil or other malevolent spirits.
In addition to the above, there has been a miniature revival of overtly gnostic spirituality. Several gnostic groups operate across the globe, and a number of popular podcasts, websites and social media outlets promote gnostic spirituality. This includes the popular Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio, a podcast that is run by Miguel Connor. While Miguel Connor identifies as a gnostic and appears to embrace the hermeneutic strategy of interpreting Yahweh as the lower god known as the Demiurge, the guests on his podcast include a wide range of spiritual seekers, scholars, authors and entertainers. His podcast also covers a wide range of topics that are of interest to modern gnostic enthusiasts, from the simulation hypothesis to the use of hallucinogenic drugs as a method of spiritual exploration. Connor’s work, and others, give modern spiritual seekers alternative pathways to explore and create their own spiritual paths.
The Revival of Gnosticism as a Modern Heresy in conservative Christian Discourse
As I suggested in the first part of this series, what I believe we are witnessing today is a paradigm shift in religious and spiritual beliefs brought on less by shifting beliefs than a swift and disruptive change in technology. And while it has resulted in certain shifts in spiritual and religious beliefs, it has also led conservative Christians into a tizzy over various perceived enemies. The popular evangelical author and Anglican priest NT Wright, for example, condemned “confusion about gender identity” as “a modern and now internet-fueled form of the ancient philosophy of Gnosticism.” As the English historian of the New Testament and early Christianity Candida Moss explained back in 2017 (https://www.thedailybeast.com/christian-leader-says-trans-people-are-the-oldest-most-dangerous-kind-of-heretic?ref=scroll), this is an argument from considerable historical ignorance. The ancient gnostic heresies described by Irenaeus, from whom Wright’s arguments originate, were fairly diverse and in any event do not correspond to any of the theories of gender and sex that are part of modern discourse on gender identity.
On the other hand, the gnostic spiritual and religious mode is also, as I have suggested, a cognitive frame, and not simply a historical curiosity. And it is perhaps revealing that both Lilly and Lana Wachowski, the directors of the original Matrix trilogy who transitioned from male to female following the end of the series, have described the Matrix as addressing trans themes, if only from a closeted perspective. The character of Switch, for example, was so named because the creators originally intended that Switch’s gender flipped when moving between the real world and the simulated world of the Matrix, from male to female. Because the Matrix and other gnostic trends suggest an illusory character to reality, it is perhaps inevitable that the revived gnostic modality will cast doubt on the reality of not simply gender, but human sex.
In Part III, I intend to examine in more detail the way that conservative Christian discourse about gender identity, sexuality, transhumanism and other topics uses gnostic spiritual modality as a specter that haunts these modern trends, as well as the way that gnostic modes of thought have affected political ideologies today. Stay tuned.