The first thing wrong with Tom Bissell’s current New Yorker review of Adam Morris’ new book, “American Messiahs,” is that there’s not even one mention of Mormonism. But hold on South Park fans, there’s more. The review is titled “How Cults Made America.” If you so choose, you can read it here. But I don’t recommend it: It’s spotty coverage of an uneven topic balanced at the apex of a precarious premise: That there is something peculiarly “American” about messianic cults and religious extremism. In a word, “Really?
And in another word: “REALLY?”
Gimme a break, man.
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Every measurable phenomenon in the natural world can be said to conform to some variant of a Gaussian distribution. Another name for this distribution is “normal.” When plotted on a graph, it looks something like this:
The vertical line peaking at 1.0 on the y-axis is known as the “mean.” The 1-2-or-3 numbers on the x-axis represent “standard deviations” from the mean. Of course, not all distributions are perfectly “normal.” Sometimes the curve is skewed right or left. Sometimes the peak, i.e. the “max,” is higher or lower, thus making the hill-shaped-curve either sharper for flatter. But you get the picture.
Way out on the 3-standard-deviation horizontal ends where the Gaussian tails approach the x-axis are what are called the “asymptotes.” The data points lying way out here are known as “outliers.” (That’s a book title – which I hate – by Malcolm Gladwell… but that’s another story for another day.) Suffice to say, the asymptotes are also where the most virulently messianic strains of American Christianity – indeed, of all extremism, religious and otherwise – are to be found. But to hear these guys tell it, Jim Jones and his ilk are square in the middle. Talk about skewed.
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Do I even need to point out the world-wide span of religions? Or of extremism? Or of the unhealthily large overlap in the Venn diagram of these two subsets of normal human activity? I will grant the author’s point that the average Puritan arriving at Plymouth Rock in 1620 was more extremist than not. Further, it’s true that his descendants in American evangelicalism today share a good bit of the same cultural DNA. But as a defining character of what it means to be American, I contend it’s “freedom” rather than “exceptionalism” that holds sway. And choosing Jim Jones as class representative? That’s just crazy-talk.
The thing about freedom? Its effect on human behavior across the spread of a normal distribution tends to push the peak downward and inflate the curve at the asymptotes. In plain English: Freedom – by definition – encourages diversity. And not just “diversity” in the conventional progressive political sense, but in every sense. Remove the strictures usually held in place by culture, tradition, and history, and what happens? The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The smart get smarter and the dumb get dumber. And the crazy? You guessed it. They get crazier.
In one sense this notion runs counter to my argument. There’s no denying American freedom has made us exceptionally adept at stuff like technological innovation, entrepreneurial drive, and artistic creativity. It also has encouraged less laudatory stuff like the bloviators of talk radio with various axes to grind. Conspiracy theorists on the Internet, set free by the First Amendment, are now blessed with a world-wide platform and all-too-gullible online constituencies. Oh, and let’s not forget your garden-variety Second Amendment wing-nut bearing an assault-rifle with a high-capacity magazine and a bump-stock: Not to put too fine a point on it.
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Into this bubbling melting-pot, throw in a healthy spoonful of the Cayenne-pepper of religion, and waddaya get? Well, Jim Jones, for one thing – there’s no denying it. But my point is, however wide and flat the Gaussian distribution becomes, a guy like Jim Jones is not now, never was, and never will be anywhere near the middle, the mean, the average. How-many-ever fringe followers he has, or had, they are all still – always and forever – out at the end of the asymptotes.
Furthermore, how-ever-good a story-spinner Adam Morris (or Malcolm Gladwell) might be, the case for normalizing cult practice just won’t fly. Not even in a country as free-wheeling – or in times as tumultuous – as ours. It’s like saying that, just because they both lived in early 20th century America and both presented ideas the general public at first found exotic, therefore Madame Blavatsky (the great psychic) and Albert Einstein (the great physicist) are equivalent. Sorry, no. One ended up a farcical footnote in the history of science. The other authored the Theory of General Relativity. “Physics” and “psychics” may sound alike. But all other similarities are purely coincidental.
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So, what’s the bottom line? If you’ve followed me this far, you’re probably persistent and astute enough to realize that human behavior is a rich stew. Settling for an easy answer like “Cults Made America” is dumb. But maybe it’s not so surprising, given how diverse (some might say “lazy“) our discourse has become? That’s freedom for you: Lots of leeway allows more inhabitants of the Gaussian curve to loiter out on the extremes… <wait for it>… sitting contentedly on their fat asymptotes. (And to quote Forrest Gump: “That’s all I’ve got to say about that!”)