Yeah in the Shadow Gospel book we spend a LOT of time talking about the various precursors to all of this...in the 90s you see an interesting shift from Evangelicalism being the hub of a lot of the liberal/leftist/Dem devil talk (and it was very very literal in those networks, with all kinds of overlap with talk of the actual apocalypse) to what we call the Church of Fox News, where the evil liberal becomes a good television character. It's all so enormously strange but does account for the fervor you see that goes so far beyond disagreement over policy! We talk about it as quasi-religion, but it's not God that's at the center of the discourse...
Yeah in the Shadow Gospel book we spend a LOT of time talking about the various precursors to all of this...in the 90s you see an interesting shift from Evangelicalism being the hub of a lot of the liberal/leftist/Dem devil talk (and it was very very literal in those networks, with all kinds of overlap with talk of the actual apocalypse) to what we call the Church of Fox News, where the evil liberal becomes a good television character. It's all so enormously strange but does account for the fervor you see that goes so far beyond disagreement over policy! We talk about it as quasi-religion, but it's not God that's at the center of the discourse...