How America got so weird: The Pilgrims made us do it

Jane Borden's "Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America" develops a simple thesis: The English Pilgrims who famously landed at Plymouth Rock were essentially a doomsday cult — even if they lacked a charismatic leader — and together with the Puritans who followed them passed on seven key elements of belief that have shaped America ever since. Even as some aspects of their beliefs have faded, these key elements survive in multiple different forms and settings, from pop culture to multilevel marketing schemes and a wide range of spiritual practices and beliefs that migh otherwise seem to have little in common. 

There are more complex ideas behind this thesis, as Borden draws on a wide range of insightful research, lending nuance and depth to her argument. But her basic argument is so clear and compelling, one can only wonder that it wasn’t made before. 

Even movements led by feminists and Black separatists resonate with the same constellation of beliefs, as Borden demonstrates with harrowing examples. But it’s not the exotic extremes that should concern us most, she argues, but rather the fact that the patterns she traces can be found almost everywhere in our culture.

Any one of Borden's fascinating chapters could warrant an interview in itself. But I felt it was most important to highlight the range of Puritan credos she discusses, which best convey the full power of her argument. I reached out to ask specifically about those. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You begin your book with a brief description of the Pilgrims as a doomsday cult, and go on to say, "We’ve been iterating on its prototype since. We can’t stop re-creating our first trauma," although it remains "largely unacknowledged." What led you to see the Pilgrims as America's foundational cult?

 Well, around 2018 I became very preoccupied by the division in our nation, the cultural and political division. I'd been reporting on cults at the time, and I knew that cults feed off division and that division is fueled by cults in turn. I started to see cultic thinking in America everywhere in pop culture, entertainment and politics, and I just started pulling on the thread. How long have we had this knee-jerk anti-intellectualism? Why are we so obsessed with the illusion of perfection? I just kept pulling that thread and it took me all the way back to the 1620s and 1630s.

You write that you find seven of the Puritan credos "to be most pervasive and problematic" and you devote a chapter to each. The first one is about "our innate desire for a strongman to fix our problems and punish those who aggrieve us." You discuss the findings of the 1977 book, "The American Monomyth" by Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence. What did they mean by a "monomyth"?

Jewett and Lawrence were trying to figure out how Americans could possibly stomach the incredible violence of the Vietnam War, which was coming into their living rooms for the first time. They found something hiding in plain sight, a narrative in American pop culture that they named the American monomyth. It goes something like this: A small Edenic community is under threat and unable to save itself. The police are inept. The politicians are corrupt. What are they going to do? Then suddenly out of nowhere appears this outsider, or sometimes this loner from within the community. This person saves the community through violence.

It's always violence, and it's precise violence. There are no innocent casualties. Only the bad guys die, and therefore it's cleansing violence. It's righteous. This narrative is most common in superhero genres, Western genres, we see it in vigilante films, disaster films and doomsday films, but it's even more pervasive than that. 

I believe ultimately it comes from the Book of Revelation. It's a story of divine rescue, which is what apocalyptic narratives often are, and the Book of Revelation is in particular. The Puritans were obsessed with that story; they couldn't get enough. They retold it in a dozen different ways, and it's still very much with us. 

Three movies came out just last month that follow this American monomyth: "The Amateur," "The Accountant 2" and "A Working Man."

So the second credo concerns "the temptation to feel chosen, which justifies acting on our base desires." You begin with John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, a utopian religious group in the mid-19th century. How did that differ from the Pilgrims and the Puritans, and how did it continue a main thrust of their thinking?  

The commonalities were basically this idea that perfection is achievable, that we can reach God in that way. I would say it's paternalism, the idea that the leaders know what's best for everyone else and therefore can act for everyone else, and the idea of being a chosen people, of exceptionalism.  

But by the time the Oneidans came around, the culture had changed. There was no longer the belief in predestination, the idea that God has already chosen who will and won't be saved and there's nothing you can do about it. Instead, they thought the story of Revelation was maybe a little more allegorical, and actually humans are moving toward New Jerusalem ourselves. God wants us to help get there, and we have the ability to do so. New Jerusalem itself became somewhat more allegorical, no longer a literal city that would descend from the sky, but just the idea of living in perfection with God. 

So things had changed a bit, but the main foundational thrusts for the same. Noyes believed he had himself become perfect, meaning free of sin, and he declared one day that their community was heaven on earth. They had achieved it. They'd gotten there, and everyone else could, too. All you had to do was be sin-free, and of course he had various ways he thought he could get there, one of which was through having lots of sex.

Third is "knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism." In this chapter, you describe cults and conspiracy theories as "kissing cousins," noting that America has its own favorite flavor of conspiracy theory, with three key ingredients.

The classic American conspiracy theory always has an evil leader or group of leaders behind it, who are unfathomably powerful, typically world leaders. That comes from the story of the Antichrist. The second characteristic is that these evildoers are brainiacs, they're incredibly intelligent. They use that intelligence — which is part of what corrupted them — to prey on more simpleminded folk who are virtuous. That anti-intellectual tradition is still with us, of course, and traces back to the Puritans' culture of the simple. They lionized simplicity of manner and thought. The third element is that there's something we can do about it, gosh darn it. That's the rebellious American streak. I could give you a very long-winded response to that, but I think the shortest way to say is that the word "protest" is in the word "Protestant." 

Fourth is "our impulse to buy and sell salvation on the open market." Here you discuss the New Age leader John-Roger and his Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness as a prime example of group awareness trainings, whose popularity peaked in the 1970s and '80s. How did they relate to earlier examples, and what can we learn from their evolution?

Our Puritan forebears believed in the possibility of becoming perfect and one with God. New Jerusalem, they believed, was quite literal. Later, the idea became more allegorical. In the 1970s, we see the idea of New Jerusalem becoming an inner state. New Jerusalem moves into the mind. People believed that instead of reaching perfection as a community of chosen, as members of the true church, an individual could achieve perfection, specifically through self-investigation and self-improvement. 

As a side note, the Puritans were also obsessed with self-investigation. They literally made themselves sick with the practice. They were mostly self-investigating by trying to figure out whether or not they were chosen, whether or not they could be a member of the church. They believed no one knew who was and wasn't chosen, but they were pretty sure they were, and that they could find out if they just looked within. So these trials of self-investigation have always been with us and self-help is now a $5 billion industry. It isn't helping. We're less happy now than we've ever been.

The fifth Puritan credo that’s still with us is "hard work is holy, while idleness is a sin." Here you discuss Amway specifically and multi-level marketing in general. How do these organizations reflect this belief and reveal its destructiveness?

The Puritans believed the way to worship God was to work. On the other hand, they also believed that if your neighbor was in need you should give to your neighbor, whether or not you thought you'd get the money back. So I think the Puritans would be very upset with the current state of late-stage capitalism. They'd be very critical of late-stage capitalism and multilevel marketing, which I see as more or less the same thing at this point. 

Over time, this idea that work is holy became a justification for acquisitiveness. Because if you're working a lot to show how much you love God, you're naturally going to accrue wealth. Isn't that wealth just a sign also that God loves you in turn? And if that's true, wouldn't it also be true that those who don't have money are not loved by God, or are not working enough to worship God? So we begin to conflate the number in a person's bank account with their moral character. Particularly during the Gilded Age, you see a lot of rhetoric around sinners deserving their poverty. Why help them? It's their own wrong thought that's led them to the almshouse. 

We still see some of that today. A few weeks ago, I saw a GOP congressman on Fox News saying, "You gotta put down the medical marijuana, put down the Cheetos. You have to get up off the couch and work now if you want SNAP benefits." It's the idea that it's the fault of the poor that they're poor. If that's true, if they're sinners, then why help them? Sin should be punished. 

The flipside of that is this idea that the wealthy deserve what they have. John D. Rockefeller was known for saying that he got his money from God. I would argue we tend to worship the wealthy in this country, where there's the cult of the self-made man, this idea that if someone is wealthy, they did it all on their own, without the backing of government subsidies that are usually happening behind the scenes or generational wealth or whatever other support systems go unacknowledged. 

How is that reflected in multilevel marketing?

With multilevel marketing, what we see is people at the top making a lot of money, because it's a pyramid scheme, it's a wealth redistribution system, and claiming that they got all their money through hard work. In reality, the money was taken from the recruits at the bottom of the pyramid, who are told, "Look at us! Look at all this wealth! If you don't have it, well that must be your fault. You're not working hard enough, or you're not following the plan." These people internalize that shame and keep trying, they keep spending money making people at the top rich. Eventually they burn out and leave, and they don't tell anyone about their experiences because they're ashamed. That's how the system perpetuates itself. 

I believe there are some really upsetting commonalities with late-stage capitalism — and I'm reluctant to use the word capitalism, because capitalism is great. Adam Smith was a cool dude who had great ideas. What's happening now is something very different. People use the phrase "late-stage capitalism," so I will too, for lack of a better one. 

But I want to give you some stats. Between 1975 and 2020, $15 trillion have moved from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent. This is exactly what happens in MLMs — money moves from the bottom to the top. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans own about the same amount as the bottom 90 percent combined. Those numbers are nauseatingly similar to a typical MLM, in which the top 1 percent makes the same as the bottom 94 percent. 

I believe the American dream has become a pyramid scheme. I don't think it was always that way. I think the American dream used to be realizable by a huge and booming middle class, and that's been pilfered. We see this in a variety of ways — lobbying for tax breaks and removing regulations for risky behavior, moving manufacturing overseas. All these things that facilitated the redistribution of wealth occur, in my opinion, because of this doctrine that work is holy and therefore wealth is a sign of being chosen and poverty is a sign or sin. 

Sixth is "how quickly and easily we fall into us-versus-them thinking." But this chapter seems to get at the underlying dynamic behind the whole book: That thinking has origins in our evolutionary past, but our cultural evolution has produced a distinctive Western mindset, expressed most fully in America, which is in tension with that past, and the inclination to join cults reflects a reaction to that. I think that sums it up, but I'd like to hear you elaborate on that.

First of all, thank you for noticing that and getting it. There's a lot to unpack there. We could probably do a full article just on that. But the first thing to acknowledge is that cults increase — both participation in individual cults and cult-like thinking at a societal level — during times of crisis. Times of technological upheaval, social upheaval, general crisis, natural disasters, all these things that cause someone's world to wobble and shift can lead us to cult-like thinking. 

That's in part because cult-like thinking offers a very ordered world. There's a hierarchy, everyone plays a role, there are a lot of rules and boundaries. What people don't often realize is that they're ultimately ceding control to the leader, who 99 percent of the time is going to exploit them. That's also happening at the societal level. When cult-like thinking is being utilized, it's usually by a demagogue who's just trying to activate people to behave in a way that benefits the person pushing our buttons.

To get back to the kind of cultural evolution that I cited in the book, I gleaned this from the work of anthropologist Joseph Henrich and his team at Harvard. They basically discovered something that they called "WEIRD society," where WEIRD is an acronym: Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. Because psychologists have, for the most part, studied people from those kinds of societies, in the field of psychology we thought for a long time that was representative of all people. In fact, WEIRD society is a small part of the global population and when you look at all of history, it's brand new. WEIRD society only began developing around the year 1100, give or take. 

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I get into this work in my book, and I would recommend seeking out Henrich's book, "The WEIRDest People in the World." The idea is that we evolved in kin-based communities: your family, your tribe. Everyone knows that. Kin-based communities look a lot like cults. There tends to be one leader in charge, who often has a lot of wives. There's a lot of fear of outsiders. There are firm boundaries. There's a lot of us-versus-them thinking. They're very cult-like. We evolved in these kinds of groups. 

But what's happening in WEIRD society is completely different. We're all individuals. It's a trust-based economy. It has to be, for markets and contracts to exist. In kin-based communities, nepotism isn't a thing, it's just common sense. But in WEIRD society, we think, "Oh no, that's not fair." WEIRD societies have this obsession with what's fair and not fair. In kin-based communities, it's much more black and white. 

When I interviewed Henrich, I said that it seems like when we turn to cults in times of crisis, maybe we're just turning back toward the kinds of communities we evolved in. He said that sounded right. Our kin-based tendencies are always with us. They don't go away and they kind of flare up from time to time. It happens when we feel unmoored, when our world wobbles and all of this trust-based society and structure looks a little unsafe. 

America is the apotheosis of WEIRD society. It's the most individualistic of all Western nations. Social media, which has divided us even more, has atomized community so much that I think the pendulum has swung just about as far as it possibly can away from kin-based organizations. I wonder if the huge uptick in cult participation and societal cult-like thinking is a result of that — not only of the pendulum swinging so far, but also of us being at a time of huge crisis. 

You can argue that climate change is the biggest crisis facing humanity. But I would say the most pressing crisis facing Americans is being chronically under-resourced: As I mentioned earlier, 90 percent of Americans are in debt, living paycheck to paycheck, because the 1 percent took all the money. There's nothing that makes your world wobble more than being chronically under-resourced.

The last Puritan theme you examine is "an innate need for order, which makes us vulnerable to anyone screaming, 'Chaos!' and then offering control." You chose a seemingly counterintuitive example: the atypical cult called Love Has Won, whose leader called herself "Mother God" and ended up starving and poisoning herself [in 2021]. Why that group, and what does their example show?

A lot of people who found Love Has Won did so after searching for alternative health care. They had been shut out of the health care system and were looking for alternatives. A lack of health care is one of the circumstances that can most lead someone's world to wobble, and as a result, lead them to look for some kind of control. 

Yes, Amy Carlson was a very chaotic and messy leader. You could even argue whether she was a leader at all. By the end she didn't seem to have the reins. Certain members of her community were so eager for control that they began running the show and basically designed a role for her to fit into. Her death — which the coroner said was caused by anorexia, alcoholism and poisoning by colloidal silver — has been called by the director who did a documentary on the group, "death by addiction, aided and abetted by her community," as often happens with addicts.

What was so heartbreaking is that there were times when she asked for help, when she was ready to go to a hospital and they wouldn't let her. In part, that was because of this worldview that she'd created, this idea that evil spiritual forces would get her if she were in hospital, and that she'd be safe if she were with them. She created this worldview that ended up killing her. It was very tragic, and I am also interested in the fact that she was anorexic, a disease often associated with anxiety and efforts for control. Anxiety levels are soaring right now as Americans seek order and control. 

You also note that throughout the book you explore an eighth credo, the divide between "grace" and "nature" that "distinguishes and creates a hierarchy between humans and the rest of the planet." What role does that play? 

I didn't give it its own chapter because it's so foundational that it's in every chapter, more or less. It's like the foundation of the foundation, the original hierarchy. It undergirds authoritarianism, the search for perfectionism, the illusion of control. Those things are only possible because of this idea of a grace-nature divide, meaning that humans have grace, which is of God and holy, and separate from this evil natural world. Everything in the world is evil, and it can only be made good if we use it to better ourselves. 

As you would probably notice from hearing that, the grace-nature divide has fueled runaway extraction economics. It's in the mind-cure movement, in the idea that the physical world is false or can be controlled by the mental or spiritual world. And when you pair it with the notion that poverty is a sin, it's also used as a justification to plunder the lower classes, when even groups of people are seen as natural resources. We see that most egregiously, of course, in the transatlantic slave trade and the extermination or resettlement of Indigenous communities. I believe that's what's happening now in the economy. Because we see wealth as a sign of being chosen and poverty as a sign of sin, the lower classes have become sinners in our eyes. They are part of nature, and therefore something that can be mined without compunction. 

So the grace-nature divide is everywhere. Another reason why I didn't try to explore it more on its own is because some of these tendencies are more common in human nature, and some are more specific to the radical Protestants who founded our nation. This duality of the natural and spiritual world is not wholly unique to radical Protestantism, but it has certainly showed up in a variety of deleterious ways.

You conclude a note of optimism, which is evident in your tone throughout — I enjoyed your lighthearted snark. What gives you hope? 

We're facing some big problems, but I don't think there's been a nation as innovative as ours. I think we are equipped to handle big problems. I think, in fact, that figuring out the solutions to our problems would be relatively easy. The hurdle to the problem-solving, in my mind, is the division. There's not going to be any political will to solve any of our problems — the most pressing being the wealth redistribution we've seen from the bottom to the top since 1970 — if we don't first bridge the division. 

One of the easiest ways to start fixing the mess we're in is to minimize cult-like thinking and cult participation. And that, in some ways, is as easy as revealing a magic trick. That's what I'm trying to do with this book, to reveal the magic trick. This is how we're being exploited. These are the ideas that bad actors are using to exploit us. And when you see it, when we can acknowledge it and start to recognize it, we stop falling for it. When we stop falling for it, we no longer see each other as enemies. What's happening is that we respond with cult-like thinking when we see a threat, when we see an enemy. But often the threat and the enemy are manufactured. They aren't real. It's an illusion.

I just want to point out the illusion. Then I think we can begin to bridge divides. We can bridge cultural divides and political divides, and we can also bridge divides within ourselves, that grace-nature split. When we start to see these splits as illusory — because they are, they don't need to be real — we can view ourselves more as a community and begin to problem-solve and collaborate. Which is what shot humans to the top of the food chain to begin with: cooperation and collaboration. I think it would be very natural for us to get back to that kind of state. 

Finally, what’s the most important question I didn't ask, and what’s the answer? 

We talked about the chronic under-resourcing of the poor, or really of most Americans at this point. I think that's the takeaway I most want to spread. Otherwise I would say it's the conversation around power, and the effects that power has on people psychologically. I say, almost as a joke, that we should consider testing people for narcissism before putting them in positions of power, although I acknowledge that would not really vibe with the U.S. Constitution. But power, I believe, functions like a psychological parasite. When you get some, if you don't have checks on it, it just wants more and more and more of itself. It causes us to behave in ways that seek out more and more power and there is no end. 

Power can never have enough, it can't be sated. And so when we see something like Jonestown, where 900-plus people were murdered, that is power's ultimate path, because the ultimate exercise of power is control over life and death. When we see the sexual exploitation that happens in cults, that's about power. Financial exploitation — that's power, because money is power. Most of the studies that are done on power are done on wealthy people because they equate so closely to one another. Greed, you could say, is just power seeking more of itself. 

Cults are situations where there are no checks on power. The reason America has been so successful is because of checks and balances. We learn that in second grade. When you don't have checks on power, that's when everything goes to s**t. Whether you're talking about corporate governance or our current flirtation with autocracy or about a cult who have moved off the radar onto an island somewhere, what you're dealing with is the danger of unchecked power.