One of the things I study is spiritual practices – which I’ll define (for simplicity’s sake) as the things people do to enhance their capacity to live in accordance with chosen ideals. Those ideals can be defined in religious terms (for instance, as salvation, enlightenment, or unity with God) or in more secular and philosophical terms (as happiness, success, glory, power, longevity, and the like). They can be abstract (salvation, happiness) or concrete, specific, and even personal (Jesus, Guanyin). What makes the practices spiritual is that they cultivate capacity. Their goal includes the assumption that there is something in us that can grow, improve, or increase in its ability to act upon itself in and with others (with those others sometimes being cosmic others).
In the Christian historical context, the concept of “spirit” has been juxtaposed against an opposite — matter, the body, the flesh, “the world” — that is considered inferior and opposed to it. But today’s popular usage has mostly supplanted that idea. When we speak of “team spirit,” someone being “spirited,” or something that is “in spirit rather than in letter,” we acknowledge this more generic use of the word. Spirit is what motivates us, what gives us strength, what makes us lively, vibrant, and connected to the world outside of ourselves.
In the current political moment of “the interregnum before the Interregnum” — where the second denotes the formal period between an election and the new leader’s assumption of power, while the first denotes the informal period between the vote and the announcement of its results — we see all kinds of spiritual practices in evidence.
Patience and restraint, and the need to cultivate both, are one kind of response to the agony of not knowing who will be your next president. (Hail, Biden.)
President Trump’s response has been different not only because of his narcissistic drive to never be a “loser.” It is different because of his own spirituality, which he picked up as a young man from Norman Vincent Peale’s gospel of “positive thinking” and then transformed into a projection of personal desires via the magical arts of branding, marketing, and reality-simulation. This magical Trumpism has in turn insinuated itself into an array of political subcultures, from QAnon and the Pepe the Frog alt-right to the very strange marriage between Trumpian white nationalism and Evangelical Christianity. The “meme magic” of the alt-right has been remarked upon and analyzed in other places (see here, here, and here for a sampling).
Reverend Paula White’s performance yesterday is an indicator of how important this moment is for the latter group of Christian nationalists:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/embedded-video/mmvo95408709868
A few things need to be said here.
(1) Prayer is generally considered by those who practice it to be not primarily a way of concentrating one’s own powers on what’s important (though it is that, with self-confirming effects), but a way of connecting with the “powers that be” that one believes to have some efficacy in the situation. There’s nothing specifically Christian in this. Invoking the American Constitution or a recently deceased loved one is the same kind of thing as invoking Jesus, Quan Yin, Mother Earth, or the angels in Africa (as White is doing above). Whatever these things mean for the invoker — as metaphor or as reality — is what is being invoked into presence, what is being connected to, and what one is aiming to become a channel or “conductor” for.
(2) The rhythm of the invocation helps to establish the intensity of focus and concentration, which gets amplified by neural entrainment as one’s mental state transforms into a heightened, intensified, or trance-like state. The ecstasy of this state itself is one of the rewards of the practice (when one does it well, and when one is predisposed to those states, which not everyone is).
(3) A public persona (such as the “president’s spiritual advisor”) doing this at a time like this is performing not just for herself and those angels being invoked, but for the rest of us as well. The fact that the video is being watched, disseminated, added to and even remixed with other elements is part of its power. We are all “hearing the sound of victory” as we hear her recite that pronouncement. At the same time, the spoofs aren’t simply repeating and conducting its “power.” They are doing their own magic — memetic magic of a performatively misdirective sort — on Paula White’s magic.
(Here’s a starter to Paula White victory chant remixes, but a simple YouTube search for “paula white victory remix” results in many creative détournements. And see these responses.)
Memetic “magic” and even video remixes in this sense may qualify as a kind of spiritual practice of the political (where the political might involve countering, with humor, the politics of spiritual warfare that has descended upon the mundane practice of democracy).
The remixes make me think of one of the inaugural moments in remix culture: the 1981 release of Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and the religious objections and cultural queries that followed its mashup of dance music and samples from evangelists, exorcists, and religious and gospel singers from around the world. We’ve come a long way since then. If Paula White still strikes us as exotic, it’s because we haven’t been paying attention.
With that in mind, while we wait for an election result to be announced, we might as well acknowledge that we live at a time when not only is America waiting “for a message of some kind or another,” as Byrne and Eno’s interlocutor puts it here, but that the whole world is waiting for a message of some sort or another:
What I mean to say is that the spiritual is alive and well, in America and in the world. It’s also very diverse, and very divided. In a world as divided and challenged as this one, we are all waiting for a message of some kind or another.
In the meantime, we practice.
Added later: Much, much more can be said about magic (and spiritual practice) and politics in the present context. There is the magic of the ballot counters: the magic of the bureaucracy of democracy, which has itself been a spiritual practice of the civil religion of the American state. There is the magic of political branding, sloganeering, and “political technologies” more generally. There are the various spiritual practices of the American political republic — from “positive thinking,” American exceptionalism (and making it “great” again), and the “city on the hill” to the street fight and the tea party. And there are the actual religious denominations’ (and spiritual streams‘) roles in U. S. politics. Consider the above piece no more than an impressionistic snippet of the current moment.
