America's Diabolical Pseudo-Religions

Reflections on our 21st Century faith communities.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. McCullough and I often marveled at the fanaticism with which the U.S. government pursued its mass vaccination program. As we describe it in our new book, Vaccines: Mythology, Ideology, and Reality, those in power erected a new religion that portrayed the new genetic shot as the liberator and savior of humanity. Our chapter titled “In Vaccines We Trust” concludes as follows:

The most astonishing feature of the Vaccine Religion was that the fervent faith of its votaries was not in the least shaken by the fact that the vaccine did not—as originally promised by its creators—prevent infection and transmission of the disease. Millions of vaccinated people noticed this when they repeatedly came down with Covid even after they received multiple boosters, probably due to antibody-dependent enhancement. Apparently recognizing that there was no way to obscure this reality, CDC director Rochelle Walensky publicly admitted on August 5, 2021, that the vaccines do not prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

With this admission, the entire rationale for COVID-19 vaccine man- dates in various professions, among federal workers, in the military—and for traveling, attending public functions, and even visiting hotels and restaurants in cities such as Washington D.C.—collapsed. Nevertheless, these mandates were maintained by the Biden administration for several months after Walensky made her announcement. Why? Was doing so a symbolic expression of faith in the vaccines and their miraculous benefaction, even though they didn’t prevent infection? Or was there some other motive?

We couldn’t help wondering if the fanatically pursued global mass vaccination program was an expression of a much bigger plan for all of humanity. But what exactly was the plan, and who was behind it? Was it some sort of test or conditioning exercise to determine if all of humanity could be induced to accept a loss of individual bodily autonomy? Contemplating these questions often took us into the realm of speculative metaphysics. The global Covid mass vaccination program strikes us as one of the eeriest episodes in history.

Reflecting on this strange new religion prompted me to reread a book authored by my philosophy professor, Roger Scruton, when I was in graduate school. Modern Philosophy was published in 1996, and his chapter on “The Devil” made a strong impression on me.

The chapter is a reflection on how modern society—in so many ways shaped by the impersonal qualities of the mass market and the scientific worldview—tends to leave many people yearning for meaning and a sense of belonging. They long to believe in something and to belong to a community of fellow believers. In this vulnerable state, they may become fervent devotees of strange new faith communities that seem to offer salvation and redemption.

To outside observers, the votaries of these new cults appear to be possessed by the doctrines they have embraced. This perception recalls Carl Jung’s observation that “people don’t possess ideas; ideas possess people.” Young people who join these cults may be whipped into a frenzy of emotion, including homicidal rage and exultation at the death of someone like Charlie Kirk whom they have been led to believe is “a fascist” and “spreader of hate.” When humans—especially young men—are seized by such thoughts and feelings, they become capable of every conceivable atrocity, which they imagine they are doing in the service of a greater good.

Someone recently sent me an image of a bearded young man who—at the spectacle of Charlie Kirk being shot in the neck—jumped to his feet and threw up his arms in triumph. The image reminded me of George Orwell’s final warning to mankind—which was filmed by a camera crew—shortly before he died.

This is the direction the world is going in at the present time. In our world, there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. But always there will be the intoxication of power. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who’s helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.

That night, after seeing the image of the exultant young man, I had a nightmare about the malevolent triumph that this image seemed to express. I described my nightmare to an AI program and asked it to recreate it in an image. This is what the AI program produced.

Nightmare Image of Exultant Young Man: Copyright John Leake

Roger Scruton, who was an active member of the Czech dissident movement in the 1980s, devoted much of his critical analysis to the Marxist pseudo-religion that swept Europe and Asia during the 20th century. As Scruton saw it, Marx and the intellectuals who carried the Marxist torch were themselves alienated and despairing men, and they sought redemption in the act of remaking the world in their image. The crimes they committed with their secret police and gulags may thus be conceptualized as “the devil’s work.” As Scruton put it:

The work of the devil is to persuade us to remake the world in the image of this despair, while at the same time exciting us to the heights of religious passion, so that we believe that, in doing so, we are acting for the greatest good. We should bear this in mind when considering the great events of the modern world, and in particular those extraordinary revolutions which, beginning from the despair of intellectuals, ended in the despair of everyone.

Marxism—or the crude iteration of it that is taught to college kids—is just one of many bizarre faith communities in America today. The most diabolical is the Transgender Cult —the ultimate expression of Scruton’s concept of “the devil’s work” in his 1996 book. Back then, transgenderism was limited to a few eccentric adults such as the talented British author, James Morris, who underwent a “sex change” operation in the 1970s and changed his name to Jan Morris.

Adult transgender propagandists feed like vampires on the insecurity and alienation that are natural features of adolescence for many kids. Adult proselytizers of this cult make the ultimate false promise to confused adolescents—namely, that all of their negative emotions will be resolved by “transitioning” to the other sex.

Transgender proselytizers bring to mind Jesus’s striking characterization (recounted in John 8:44) of the Pharisees who are trying to set verbal traps for him. As he proclaimed:

You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

Here we see the association of “the devil” (koine Greek diabolou) with the words “murderer” (anthrōpoktonos) and “lie” (pseudos). In other words, the devil is chiefly a murderer and a liar. This, it seems to me, is an apt characterization of the adults who make the false promise to children that their negative feelings will be resolved by “transitioning.”

Another diabolical faith community, erected in the United States in 2022, was predicated on the false promise that a happy future for Ukraine lay in eventually joining NATO against the Russians. Anyone who has seriously studied European and Russian history can see that this was a murderous lie.

The most likely path to a happy future for Ukraine lay in an Austrian-style neutrality deal. The Russians stated that they would feel secure with Ukrainian neutrality. Had a neutrality deal been struck—and had the Russians later violated it—then the West would have had a clear casus belli.

That the West never even considered a Ukrainian neutrality deal is prima facie evidence that its leaders wanted to bait Russia into war. Thus, the war in Ukraine—and the fervent Ukrainian nationalism that metastasized into Western countries, including the U.S.—is accurately characterized as another stupendously destructive outcome of a diabolical pseudo-religion.

A paradoxical feature of the Ukrainian Cult in the United States is that many American citizens who regarded the Biden administration as odious and untrustworthy nevertheless believed that Russian President Vladmir Putin should have trusted the assurances of the Biden administration in the fall of 2021 and winter of 2022.

A common feature of all of these cults is that it is far from clear what exactly their leaders want apart from gratifying their apparently boundless pride, greed, and lust. Jeffrey Epstein is suspected of using beautiful young girls to seduce influential men so that he (or whoever he was working for) could blackmail them into complying with his wishes. He is regarded as an evil man, but it’s important to remember that his scheme would have gotten nowhere without the willing participation of those who yielded to the temptations he offered them.

In keeping with countless literary descriptions of the devil, Epstein never tried to conceal what he was about. I have heard multiple eyewitness accounts of meetings with him in which he made it clear that his world was one of debauched sex with young girls. On occasions he was hyperbolically theatrical about it.

I get the impression that many of the old men who now run the world are experiencing a desperate struggle to come to terms with their mortality. The diabolical pseudo-religions they have erected are an expression of this. Instead of retiring from public affairs, many of these men are apparently determined to hold onto their power for as long as possible. It seems they want to remake the world in the image of their despair.