WHY IS A SHAMAN PRAYING TO A CHRISTIAN GOD? Part 1 of 2

“My punishment is more than I can bear. ¹⁴ Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”

– Cain (Genesis 4: 13-14)

“Screw you guys; I’m going home.”

– Cartman, from South Park

I’m sure everyone is familiar with the “QAnon shaman,” otherwise known as Jacob Chansley. During the 1/6 insurrection attempt, he stuck out, because, well, look at the photos of him. Examples HERE, HERE, or HERE (for reference to the photo) – . And, video of his time in the Capitol can be seen HERE, where his prayer starts at about 7:56.

My initial reaction to him was a complex and visceral mix of disgust and laughter. And, it occurred in the context of my traumatic horror in watching 1/6 unfold. It was also, thus, partly because I see him as my enemy. The title of my blog post (stolen from THIS tweet), then, could easily be read as a critique and a warning that signals the need for setting boundaries around abusive behavior. And, in some sense, it does function that way. I have come to trust, however, that one element of loving my enemy is, rather than dismissing him with disgust, seeking to understand him. This means getting an image of the setting of his actions, as well as both where he’s coming from and the direction he hopes his path takes him, his beginning and end. It also means having some idea of the character he plays in the environment we all share together. In other words, it means getting a sense of his story. In turn, entering inside the particulars of the QAnon shaman and his story means touching things outside his private world. Of course, then, the title of my blog post could be read that way, too.

FREEDOM

1/6 being an insurrection to overthrow the government, the QAnon shaman’s story is a political one. And, we live in a politic dominated by the story of revolution, whether French, American, or other. “Off with the king’s head!” is a visceral cry we carry with us, take for granted, and according to which our Founding Fathers say our government is organized and structured. Braveheart’s cry for “freedom!” is so ubiquitous in our minds and hearts that it could mean we’re clocking out of work on Friday afternoon.

David Graeber and David Wengrow’s description of what they call our “three primordial freedoms,” which they say were taken for granted for most of human history, are as follows: “the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to create or transform social relationships” (p. 426 of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity). Is this the “freedom,” exactly, with which we associate in our politic?

Primary elements of this historical stew from which the pot of QAnon emerges include Second Amendment rights and willingness to die to maintain religious and political freedoms. Out of a similarly visceral sense of freedom, dominant QAnon language includes the common idea of thinking for yourself – in the form of “Do your own research” – references to the coming of a “great awakening,” and invitations to “take the red pill.” “Think for yourself,” and you’ll find the natural freedom that rightfully belongs to you.

INEVITABILITY

In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow also very clearly articulate the dominant narrative and interpretation of our history I grew up being taught and by which I understood my world. It goes basically as follows. Human community started in the form of small bands of hunter gatherers. As agriculture was discovered and animals domesticated, communities grew in size and complexity. This led to and required hierarchical models of organization combined with the institution and reach of administrative powers. Such an inevitable and necessary combination of sovereign power plus administration formed what we now know as “the State,” which progressed to the form the Nation-state. The fact that the entire globe is now covered in such Nation-states, they note, reinforces our sense of the inevitability of this story of evolutionary progress from primordial origins of the state.

Notably, the QAnon shaman was taught the same version of our history as me. Outside of QAnon’s specific conspiracy theories, their “awakening” essentially means escape from deceptive stories of our freedom and, instead, seeing the dominance at the heart of the state’s administrative apparatus. In their language, “sheeple” are those who don’t seem to see this, those who are not truly free, and are thus immersed in “group think.”

ABSTRACTION

We are all immersed in a world that consists of abstractions. We can hardly say there’s anything concrete about most of what dominates our lives, including “the nation” itself, “the people,” formal mathematical processes and calculations, and even money, now digitized. And, it would be difficult to honestly describe a global politics of universalizing values and neutral principles – on which our liberal democracy is founded – as in reference to that which is materially concrete. Consider, thus, our abstraction as you read the following bit of the QAnon shaman’s prayer from inside the US Senate chamber (full transcript available HERE).

“Thank you divine, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent creator God for filling this chamber with your white light and love, your white light of harmony.”

QAnon Shaman’s prayer inside the Senate chamber

What, exactly, does he mean by “white light”? Is it an explicit statement of White Supremacist ideology? After all, 1/6 functioned to, as the law states it, obstruct and impede an official proceeding – namely, our Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s election as President of the United States of America in November, 2020. Regardless of the fact that what this actually meant was an attempt to suppress the legitimate vote of those who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), our racialization is itself an abstraction (see The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, by Willie Jennings).

Or, rather, does “white light,” for the QAnon shaman, represent a longing for a version of spiritual purity, an aspiration to connection with the Uncreated and immaterial source of created reality? Both his prayer and his persona excluded anything associated with the particularities of Jesus’ human personhood or Israel’s specific role in our salvation history.  

Every ‘Q Drop’ whose “crumbs” the QAnon Shaman “followed” was lacking concrete specifics. Or, their meanings were open to vast worlds of interpretation. I find it fascinating that this actually fostered open curiosity, but I also have to wonder if abstraction along such lines registers for some of us as a path to what we believe to be or imagine as freedom. I know such abstracted escape from concrete particularity has functioned that way for me in the past. But, is abstraction really freedom?

IDENTITY

Part of what governs the story of our political history, which is a large and significant part of what gives shape to the setting of the QAnon shaman’s story, is the notion of “civilization.” The term generally refers to technological, scientific, and cultural achievements, whether of a people or over the course of eras. Our imaginations are shaped by a particular story of civilization that’s wedded to the above noted image of political origins, history, and progression.

In the Greko-Roman world, the term “civilization” bore meaning not so much in opposition but in comparison with the “barbarians,” which was essentially just in reference to those who didn’t speak Greek or Latin (see Bruce Shelley, Church History in Plain Language). For ancient Greeks and Romans, to be civilized was to be better than being a barbarian. So, as discussed by Graeber and Wengrow, for our political history to progress inevitably to current heights of the Nation-state, with its organization according to a combination of state sovereignty and administration, is also to become more civilized. This history was obviously built into the QAnon shaman’s persona, into his clothing himself in Norse and Viking symbols. He didn’t show up to the Capitol Building in a suit for a professional business meeting.

For the Greeks and Romans, seeing themselves as better than barbarians, particularly in association with their achievements in culture, knowledge, and technology, shaped their particular sense of identity. So, we find ourselves in a situation where Progress to the Nation-state of liberal democracy gives us a sense of superior identity, particularly in comparison to others, whereas, at the same time, the universal values and neutral principles of the Nation-state of liberal democracy work to erase our sense of particularized identity.

Of course, a particular civilization is tied to its land. And, through the course of 1/6, the blood of multiple people – in reference to the voice of God in our story of Cain and Abel – “cries out to me from the ground.” In response to such murderousness, God says to Cain: “Now you are under a curse and driven from the land…you will be a restless wanderer on the earth.” Cain’s response? “My punishment is more than I can bear.” As noted above, we have also now taken up higher levels of abstraction as part of this exile from the land and its concrete particularities. I’ve never killed anyone myself, nor participated in a murderous insurrection attempt, but I can identify with Cain. The QAnon shaman is my enemy, but I am beginning to be able to identify with him. “Screw you guys; I’m going home!” – Cartman, from South Park. It almost seems like we’ve participated in our own punishment. Perhaps abstraction doesn’t equal freedom!

Bruno Macaes explores a global discourse that addresses these tensions in his June, 2020 article – HERE – called The Attack Of The Civilization-State:

“Nation-states are a Western invention, naturally vulnerable to Western influence. Civilizations are an alternative to the West.

The BJP’s strong victory in India’s 2019 election, where it captured more than 300 further seats in the lower house of Parliament, shows how powerful that attitude turned out to be. As the political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta put it, Modi was able to convince voters that they should rise against a power structure that is essentially made up of Anglicized elites and that a Western philosophy of tolerance had become a symbol and a practice of contempt for Hinduism. There was a time when that liberal philosophy was taken seriously almost everywhere. Many of the independence movements in what used to be called the ‘third world’ fully subscribed to it and used the language of human rights and the rule of law against the European colonizer.

The shift now taking place is arguably deeper and more radical. By accusing Western political ideas of being a sham, of masking their origin under the veneer of supposedly neutral principles, the defenders of the civilization-state are saying that the search for universal values is over, that all of us must accept that we speak only for ourselves and our societies.”

Proponents of the Civilization-state include strongman leaders of China, India, and Russia. As noted in Macaes’ piece, a common refrain he kept hearing while visiting China was, “Always remember that China is a civilization rather than a nation-state.” Some folks also associate Christian Nationalism with the Civilization-state. My friend Glenn Runnals refers to their movement, because of their historical ties to “freedom” as compared to explicit authoritarianism, and because of the USA’s unique relationship to ancient history, as an approximate or incomplete form of longing for a civilization-state.

The Civilization-state is also, in part, about recovery of a relationship with the land with which a people identify, a relationship lost in the Nation-state’s graphic – i.e. abstract – means of drawing territorial boundaries (see, for example, stories of the Sykes-Picot line). Also from Macaes’ piece:

“As a civilization-state, China is organized around culture rather than politics. Linked to a civilization, the state has the paramount task of protecting a specific cultural tradition. Its reach encompasses all the regions where that culture is dominant.”  

So, it becomes notable and relevant here that much of QAnon’s language is steeped in the vocabular and tradition of a particularly Christian identity. Does not “the storm is coming” echo the apocalyptic language of the prophets, and of Jesus on his way to the cross? Q’s “The Great Awakening” wouldn’t be an intelligible phrase without our particular Revivalist history. It’s also no surprise, then, that those who research QAnon find that part of the draw to it is a sense of community it fosters. This is admittedly quite different from how, say, Deuteronomy 4:5-8 identifies the people of God. I am not, however, primarily writing a critique of but, instead, asking why a shaman is praying to a Christian God.