Really grateful for this endorsement of my book Reality In Ruins: How Conspiracy Theory Became an American Evangelical Crisis, from @iamfujimura.bsky.social

For friends at #AARSBL I’ll be delivering a paper on late fascism and evangelical rhetorics of freedom at the Evangelical Studies Unit this morning in Boston—via video. Hope to make it in person next year!

Disreality is not pathological. It is more existential. Less a clinical condition marked by a departure from facts, more an eruption of epistemological anxiety in which new facts are created or realities constructed towards the production of an unstable certainty

"The strange #history." Today's forthcoming-book pick from Damn History, a free monthly newsletter for readers/writers of #popularhistory. Congrats to author @jaredstacy.bsky.social & @harperonebooks.bsky.social! Read/subscribe to Damn History: damn-history-16d93f.beehiiv.com/subscribe

The (obvious) analysis: these directives give more plausibility to scenarios where free US elections are suspended or subverted in the name of "national security" In 3 years, will an American public too familiar with the military in our streets be able to recognize that scenario for what it is?

Deliver us from our Christianity

The point of disinformation in an authoritarian moment isn't to convince people of alternative facts as much as it is to sow mistrust in every source of information or truth outside of "the leader"

Next week! It’s not too late to register. Manitobans: note the free lunch on the Oct 23 option 👀

“It is disturbing…that a ‘faith movement’ can acquire character and weight simply by the use of violence in the manner of the political mass-meeting and the political demonstration for propaganda purposes” Karl Barth, 1933

I keep saying it: conspiracy theory is mainstream. We aren’t dealing with one narrative here or there, we’re living through a default on “reality” — with terrible consequences. Here is some advice:

Fascist theater: staged provocation in the political that codes/targets undesirables. It provides content for propaganda to normalize the previously unthinkable.

I mostly avoid reposting propaganda. But if I do, it’s to name it as antichrist. This is the power to crucify and it belongs to hell. Churches that bless it are Babylonian shrines. Do not confuse the power to crucify with the power of the Crucified One, who is peace.

Our elected leaders in the US executive branch are not departing from reality as much as they are creating one— a totality where their word is absolute and dissent is subversion.

Proofs are here. Feeling the weight of this book; what it stands for—naming the authoritarian nexus of falsehood & violence at work in white evangelicalism— and what it hopes in—truth for a common world.

On the Kirk memorial from the intersection of brutality and disreality…

The last week has only pressed me deeper into the message that led to this book—we are dealing not just with a war of facts, but the apocalypse (unveiling) of primal stories, of myths and their corruption. Here’s how we got here, and a way forward… Preorder + share here:

A lot of talk about “authoritarianism” — and I’m here for it. But we need specificity: the contagion of authoritarian movements today spreads by a vision of capitalism without democracy.

When I was doing my PhD research on January 6, I began to feel the weight of documenting words and preserving actions that might one day be erased, revised, or mythologized. I felt that weight all over again today reading how the DOJ is erasing studies on right wing political violence.

The Department of Justice has erased a study from its website; the study from the National Institute of Justice found far-right political violence & extremism outpaced all other ideological violence.

In the US, an information diet of conservative algorithms likely means rage at the nameless “left” has been nursed in no small part by Russian troll farms.

“The one who is beyond creation enters creation in order to change it, not to abandon it. Jesus broke the laws of this sinful age not by simple negation but by offering a new life to creatures in the middle of the lives they are already living. …

The authoritarian playbook is being run with precision across the United States. Much of our reliance on media obscures this pattern by reporting each play on its own without attention to the whole.

As Prof. Brock's new book has appeared recently, join him as he discusses things with @jaredstacy.bsky.social. Click through for more! jaredstacy.substack.com/p/living-as-...

Mercy on the children in Minnesota today. I believe their generation will grow up to condemn ours; we who collectively enable the terror and tyranny of gun violence in the name of “freedom”

My book on conspiracism in American evangelicalism has a title, cover and release date. More info at the link.

January 6 continues to be an apocalypse: unveiling the militant violence raging in the heart of MAGA that worships a rogue word, a paranoid Christ split between kingdom & country.

ICE is recruiting new agents by offering up to $60K in student loan forgiveness—a reminder that loan forgiveness by itself isn’t the issue, it’s who gets to wield it as a partisan weapon.

The invisible systems that organize our world (capitalism, nationalism, etc.) are *not* inevitable. It’s the task of the Christian to point to all the ways we’ve assumed they are “normal” or “ideal” and so perpetuate their own forms of injustice.

“Between January and June 2025, thousands were held in immigration detention…in Florida, under conditions that flagrantly violate international human rights standards and the United States government’s own immigration detention standards.”

“Why do you boast, you tyrant, that you can do evil; Whereas the goodness of God endures all the day long?” Psalm 52.1-2

“How do you not see it?” Many people don’t see the shadow of authoritarianism because Prime still delivers and Netflix still streams. It’s not zeal. It’s apathy born of automated convenience—just as dangerous.

“The German churches learned too late…it is not enough to resist with confession, we must confess with resistance” Rev. William Sloane Coffin

Conspiracy theories don’t need to be provable to convince people — they only need to be plausible. And the elements of Christianity are often pressed into service to prop up falsehood in the name of faith.

“The extremes which threaten the Christian life and bring cataclysm to our common world is the extremism that associates the Name Jesus Christ with the spirit of antichrist.”

One way we signal and practice our commitment to the truth in a world of deepfakes & disinformation means getting comfortable with, “I don’t know.”

I joined Personalist Manifesto(s) for a long form conversation on conspiracism, Christianity, and what we can do to name and resist the crisis.

Everywhere I look I see people more interested in being communally bound by natural laws/theologies rather than by the revelation of God given to us in Jesus Christ.

“Bad times! Hard times!” — this is what people are saying. But let us live well, and the times shall be well. We are the times. Such as we are, such are the times. —St. Augustine of Hippo, a sermon on prayer during the slow collapse of the Roman Empire

If it feels like this moment is too much, as if it’s all going so fast, in some many directions—that is by design. Authoritarian seizure happens through expansive acceleration.

Our time is an apocalypse (a revealing) of those who have been *shaped by* the story of the Scriptures and others who have only *seized* the story, shattering the whole into shards that sanction the aims of Empire.

Because the Crucified stands at the center of Christian faith, we come to see truths established by violence are not true and order enacted by terror is not peace.

The word for everything going down with Trump and Musk is “spectacle.” And politics-as-spectacle is a sign of a sick democracy. It makes totalitarian order and authoritarian security seem reasonable, and tech barons are ready and able to provide it.

The goal of human life is not death but resurrection. Karl Barth

2 highlights from today’s splendid BBCRadioScot Sunday Morning programme. 1st item is a revealing (& indeed personal) interview with @lamornaash.bsky.social. 2nd, 90mns in, @jaredstacy.bsky.social exposes the roots of the recent US Evangelical hostility to ‘empathy’ www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

My take distilled: 1) “empathy is sin” re-emerged in 2019 just as survivors of abuse in evangelicalism were going public en masse with their stories

Hey UK friends, I'm on BBC Sunday Morning for the next 30 minutes or so talking why empathy is *not* a sin, among other things!

The danger here is way beyond mass surveillance. DOGE has delivered citizens to Palantir; this company wields a new form of data-based power that is outflanking nation-states and occuping the hollowed out shell of democracy.

Whenever you feel like the scale of this collective crisis is too much, remember that attention itself is a resource in the struggle against authoritarianism