When I was growing up, those of us who thought of ourselves as intellectually sophisticated (often there was no evidence for this) took it as given that religion itself was the problem, that religion inspired fanaticism, and that the only kind of humane religion was the sort practiced by people who don’t really believe in it very much — in which case, why not go all the way to a comfortable agnosticism if not all the way to a more militant atheism? We were, of course, wrong about that, as we were about so much. Salman Rushdie was brutally stabbed over a perceived slight to the Prophet Mohammed taken up as convenient political cause by an Iranian fanatic who died not long after handing down the fatwa against the novelist, attacked by a man who had not been born at the time of the original controversy. About the same time, an FBI office in Cincinnati was attacked by a Navy veteran enraged by a perceived slight to Donald Trump, who is being investigated for possible violations of the Espionage Act and other possible crimes.

There is a nexus between a certain kind of intellectually unmoored Christianity and Trump idolatry, but the FBI attack, like the fatwa on Rushdie, was essentially political rather than religious. But that distinction is not entirely airtight: Religions end up having political aspects: At various times, both Islam and Catholicism have been pronounced incompatible with liberal democracy on the grounds that they are political programs as much as they are religions. (Nobody much thinks that about Catholicism anymore, except for a few dotty Catholics.) Political movements take on cultic characters, both those organized around particular personalities (Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler, Juan Perón, Gamal Abdel Nasser, etc.) and those that are not exclusively personal, such as Marxism or environmentalism. (See “Tales from the Carbon Cult,” National Review, December 2, 2021.) Religious and political fanaticism, religion-analogues such as animal rights, diet and fitness fads, even non-political conspiracy literature (Who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays?) all work in the same way in that they offer insider positioning to outsiders (the secret knowledge makes one an initiate) and confer status through membership in a votive community. There is a reason there is so much crossover in conspiracy lunacy: Lyndon LaRouche, for a generation the most notable conspiracy nut in American political life, also cared deeply about the tuning of musical instruments: If you are not familiar with the “conspiracy” regarding A-440Hz tuning, you can go a long way down that rabbit hole and not hit bottom. Look at the political nuts or religious fanatics in your life and see how many of them are heavy into genealogy, another expression of our endless search for personal meaning.