Alex Sayf Cummings Aneurysms, Best of, Donald Trump, film, politics

A Festus for the Rest of Us

There’s almost nothing Americans like more than cults. Much of the United States’ political history breaks down on the question of whether the nation was founded by religious zealots (“America is a Christian nation”) or the secular deists of the Founding Fathers’ generation. Whoever wins in that debate, it remains true that a strain of religious psychosis is in our cultural DNA. We’ve had a couple Great Awakenings, along with communes in Indiana or upstate New York where the charismatic leader drank out of a puddle and decided he was the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. There’s a reason why that most distinctly American of organizational forms — the multi-level marketing scheme — is extremely popular in Utah.

There appears to be a cultural moment for cults (no pun intended). From the 2018 epic Wild Wild Country on Netflix, about the Rajneesh bioterror cult in Oregon, to the more recent Love Has Won documentary, we appear to have a bottomless appetite for both joining cults and hearing about them. Perhaps the cult-doc genre is just another variant of the protean True Crime obsession, or another type of horror — as in every Lifetime movie or murder podcast where a seemingly nice guy turns into a killer, we can all picture ourselves or someone we love falling into the clutches of a David Koresh or Mother God. Some kind of libidinal, vicarious instinct drives us toward the woes of others. Maybe it makes our lives less boring, or makes us feel better about our ordinary lot — much like seeing a homeless person on the street reinforces our conformity and obedience. (It could be you!)

Whatever the root cause of our cult obsession might be, it keeps on keeping on. There’s even a podcast about the intersection of conspiracy theories and spirituality — Conspirituality — which, at first thought, seems like a premise that could not power a years-long, ongoing podcast, but it turns out they have no shortage of material. Then there’s QAnon Anonymous, which reports on a similar beat. (We’ve never tried to conceal our love of QAnon insanity on this blog. When I told my therapist I was really into QAnon, you should have seen her face fall.)

In any case, the news brings us tidings of yet another deranged grouping of humans. A classic American grifter started cults with seriously metal names like the Celestial Dragon Covenant and the Church of the Acolytes of the Seven Thunders — seriously, were they just brainstorming band names? — before landing on St. Sophia’s Antecedent Orthodox Church, the kind of impenetrable word salad that religious psychos adore. St. Sophia’s is located in Festus, Missouri, which seems like one of the places that probably kicked Joseph Smith out as soon as he got off the Greyhound bus. Predictably:

Polygamy is practiced in the order, and Merseal teaches that when a man has sex with a woman, the two are considered married, and male members of the group are allowed to have two or three wives… Merseal’s teachings focus on end-of-the-world ideas and secrets that only he and the order members are privy to.

Leech said she remembers once when Merseal said he had to perform an exorcism because someone had summoned something that could end the world.

As members move up in the group’s hierarchy, Leech and Jerashen said, they learn more and more about Merseal’s secretive practices and rituals.

Sound familiar? It’s amazing how much of the economy is just organized around dudes trying to get laid.

In related news, there’s a movie about Donald Trump coming out. Our affinity for cults somehow mirrors our pathological fascination with the Great Orange One; though we don’t want to think about him, for some reason we can’t stop. The film charts Trump’s tutelage by the world-historically evil Roy Cohn, presumably trying to show how a sociopath gets born. Writing in Variety, critic Owen Gleiberman rhapsodizes about whether the movie really gets to the core of who Donald Trump is — when did he decide to become evil? Was he always evil? After all, not everyone who has a cruel, imperious father turns into a career crook and a rapist.

While this is a reasonable question, it misses the point. There is no there there. Inside friend-of-the-blog Donald, there is nothing. A more poignant story could be told about a man with such a vortex of oblivion inside himself that he can never be happy, no matter how money he (supposedly) makes, or how many gals he (supposedly) nails, or even winning the White House. Realizing that this is a man who can never truly enjoy anything is just about the only thing that could make Donald Trump sympathetic or relatable. You could call the movie Anhedonia.

In any case, we do officially love the idea that the big Trump hit-piece movie is directed by an Iranian guy. Big ups to Ali Abbasi.

Here are our reading picks for the week: