Following the 2024 US Election, Paul Bickley examines how American politics is turning into an existential battle between good and evil. 07/11/2024

Way back on 11 February the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers met at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas for the 2024 Super Bowl. For those not in the know, the Kansas City Chiefs claimed victory in a dramatic overtime finish when Patrick Mahomes connected with wide receiver Mecole Hardman for the decisive touchdown. They won 25–22, and so secured their second consecutive Super Bowl win. The halftime show contained all the usual glitz, showbiz and commercialism. TV coverage ran an allegedly funny Dunkin’ Donuts advert starring Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck. (Sadly, the joke didn’t last – the couple separated and filed for divorce in April.)  

Nine months later and the world is digesting the results of the US presidential (and other!) elections. This every–four–year event is like a political version of the Super Bowl. Large crowds, lots of money, and celebrities – often the same celebrities – endorsing the ‘product’ of this or that campaign. Two teams facing off on the biggest stage imaginable. No prizes for second place.    

American politics increasingly looks like a piling up on a series of binaries. It’s not just Republican vs Democrat, left vs Right. It’s urban vs rural; coasts versus flyover; pro–life vs pro–choice; and, in this election, men vs women. For the winning team – elation, power, and the opportunity to shape America and the world. For the other, a billion–dollar failure. Losers.   

Of course, religion plays a part in American democracy. By now we are familiar with the ways groups tend to break: white evangelicals for the Republicans (according to the exit polls of the Washington Post, making up around 1 in 5 votes and breaking 81% for Trump).  All other religious groups, taken together, lean Democrat, with Harris securing 58% of their votes. In this constitutionally secular democracy, both sides are still ‘going to church’.   

But there is something deeper at work, which should also be called religious. A Manichaean spirit has taken hold of American politics, perhaps also American society at large. This is not any anachronistic claim of the revival of the long dead religion of the prophet Mani, but it is something the resembles it. Manichaeism, a kind of mashup of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism that emerged in 3rd century Persia, taught that existence was a struggle between two equal and opposite forces of good and evil, light and darkness. Through ascetic practices of prayer, fasting, and confession the ‘elect’ could help release the light from its imprisonment in matter, which Manichaeans considered inherently evil.  

Not that different from Christianity, you might think. Indeed, Manichaeism was, for a time, an influential Christian–adjacent sect in the Roman Empire. But the church and its theologians more and more critiqued and distanced themselves from it. Finally, the Roman Empire suppressed it (as did the Sassanian Empire, where Mani is thought to have died in prison). Famously, Augustine of Hippo was a Manichaean until his conversion at the age of 31. He too became an ardent critic of his former religion. 

All this seems like a very long way from Washington DC, but I’ve been reminded of the Manichaeans as political discourse has begun to co–mingle with contemporary ‘conspirituality’, and as many of us have felt the temptation to cast politics as an existential battle between good and evil. We are too apt to see campaigns and elections as the purgative process whereby light will be released from the enmeshing darkness. As anyone watching will have realized, both camps in this election have indulged in this. If you were to believe the utterances of the opposing campaigns , this was a Super Bowl runoff between the Communists and the Nazis – two words which in America are equal and opposite evils, depending who you’re talking to.  

Why? Partly because with less social mixing, and more social media echo chambers, it is easier to believe that your political opponents are not only wrong but stupid, and not only stupid but evil. Partly its tactical, yet another way to whip up the base or get the vote out. Ultimately, however, it is partly because both sides believe it. Last Sunday, Kamala Harris spoke at a church in Detroit, Michigan:  

We face a real question: what kind of country do we want to live in? What kind of country do we want for our children and our grandchildren? A country of chaos fear and hate or a country of freedom justice and compassion?… Let us turn the page and write the next chapter of our history. A chapter grounded in a divine plan big enough to encompass all of our dreams. A divine plan strong enough to heal division. A divine plan bold enough to embrace possibility: God’s plan. 

I admire Harris’ effort to appeal to religious voters in a language that would make sense to them. Churlish though it may be, I can’t help but notice the weaknesses of the implicit theology of statements like this. I would be surprised if God’s plan did = Democratic Party platform, just as I would if it was the Republican Party platform. If it did, then God’s plan is now in tatters, and his purposes junked by swing voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan.  

One of Augustine’s complaints about this belief system was that God for the Manichaeans was not God at all. He was limited by matter and darkness. Somehow, it is God and goodness and light that needed to be saved. He also disliked the way Manicheans gave equal ontological weight to evil. For Christians, even those that do find themselves at a bleak moment in history, we are not in an existential Super Bowl contest between good and evil. The powers, said St Paul, have been disarmed and defeated. Christians cannot be Manichaeans.  

The pathology in American politics is not the evil of either side, but the tendency of both sides to elevate their politics to the level of cosmic struggle. They overestimate the transformative potential, or wisdom, of their own victories. They will see their defeats as moral failures. The worst are full of passionate intensity, as Yeats wrote. But the best must avoid this Manichaean heresy and hold out for the complicated middle ground of democracy as a means to work slowly, often indirectly, towards the common good.   

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