The Cult of America Must Be Destroyed

How Cults Like Us exposes the delusion at the heart of American identity

“The avatar of our country's founding was a doomsday group. We've been iterating on its prototype since,” Jane Borden wrote in her new book Cults Like Us, referring to the Puritans, who established America's first theocracy in New England. On sale today, March 25, 2025, in print, e-book and audio formats, Cults Like Us is a gripping read which helps to explain our current authoritarian predicament. A recurring theme throughout the book is “The American Monomyth,” which is a variation on Joseph Campbell’s universal monomyth of the hero’s journey—departure, struggle, purification, reunion. The American version describes “an Eden-like society helpless in the face of evil but rescued by an outsider, a superhero, who then disappears again.”

This theme recurs in nearly every American context, from the story of the Pilgrims, to our puzzling worship of religious and political demagogues, to Hollywood narratives of “vigilante justice” and the “conquest” of “savage” lands and peoples. Without fail, The American Monomyth valorizes mavericks and renegades, while deploring “elites” and odious government “tyranny.” A consequence is that empathy, cooperation and social cohesion get short shrift in our national imagination, setting up an enduring tension between the diversity of our national melting pot composed of the descendants of enslaved people and immigrants—and the perpetual monomyth of the “real American” (white) savior.

Borden’s outstanding work originates not from the experience of a cult insider, but from her background in journalism and religious studies along with five years of painstaking cult research which included interviews with my sister Erin Prophet and me.

Borden’s key insight is that “cult” and “democracy” are diametric opposites, and that cultic tendencies within our nation have served to undermine its quest for democracy since well before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. You don’t have to join MAGA or some doomsday group to be in a cult. You’re already in one. It’s called America. And it’s addicted to the illusion of salvation—a childish yearning for magical solutions that strikes at the root of the hard work and citizenship required to sustain democratic self-rule and secular governance.

Our fascination with divine rescue even includes our enduring preoccupation with “UFOs” and “aliens.” Sometimes that takes the form of fears about ‘lizard people’ or other unseen puppet-masters. Where there are divine heroes, there also must be devilish villains. This explains why the United States has always been an outlier among “advanced” democracies in our hyper-religiosity. In Borden’s view, religious “leaders” represent yet another version of capitalist hucksterism, using The American Monomyth to sell “Jesus” as the solution to the nation’s mounting difficulties, while mocking science and intellectualism as tools of our ever-growing cadre of imaginary “enemies.”

Jane Borden signs her new book Cults Like Us for Sean Prophet at Skylight Books, March 24, 2025

Attending Borden’s book-signing and listening to her speak has sparked some new reflections on the authoritarian coup in progress. While I won’t ever downplay the seriousness of our current predicament, it’s refreshing to understand that we’ve always been heading precisely toward this moment of national reckoning. Indeed, it’s the New Deal and the Civil Rights era that represent anomalies—exceptions to our national obsession with cult-like thinking. Everyone born after 1964 (the year of my birth) was fed a steady diet of myths—about justice, about equality, about progress. But the Trump era didn’t betray those ideals. It revealed how paper-thin they’ve always been.

The American Monomyth is our shared reality, despite our stubborn conceits of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and the notion that “all men are created equal.” These flowery phrases from our founding documents represent core hypocrisies more than any core founding creed.

The men who wrote those words were enslavers, and the men who rule us now—with their private jets, oil money, and dog-whistle fascism—are their ideological descendants, cut from the exact same cloth. Rather than some dastardly coup hijacking who we really are, the Trump years represent a “reversion to the mean,” in both senses of that double entendre. We were never a nation of empathy or justice, and we’ve always been hooked on the political heroin of scapegoating our problems onto everyone but our white, European, Puritan selves.

This has led me to some much-needed perspective, as I contemplate my own future in the Cult of America. Like many others, I’ve been tempted to explore options for leaving the nation of my birth—to cut bait, as it were—and to live out my golden years in a place more tethered to physical reality and less impacted by cult-like thinking. Many have written recently about the growing authoritarian menace of our Federal government, now weaponized against truth and justice and freedom of expression. The second Trump administration represents an unprecedented threat to the rule of law and such basic human rights as habeas corpus. Plenty of hyperventilating think-pieces recount the harrowing stories of people who waited too long to flee Weimar Germany, and got caught up in Hitler’s anti-Semitic, anti-gay and anti-human rights dragnet. Many of those met their end in Nazi death camps.

It may yet come to the point when there will be no choice but to flee the United States. The establishment of The Dual State is well underway. (See Ernst Fraenkel’s 1941 analysis of Nazi Germany’s legal bifurcation in The Dual State, which legal scholars are increasingly applying to modern autocracies.) In Fraenkel’s model, some civil and criminal laws regarding enforcement of contracts and petty crimes would remain intact, while other laws become subject to selective enforcement and the whims of bureaucrats who punish citizen “disloyalty” and require either payment of bribes or acts of public contrition and collaboration with the regime. For example, newly weaponized federal bureaucracy could make the issuance of passports or business licenses conditional on public submission—or the repudiation of past criticisms of MAGA. This reflects the stated intention of current regime architects such as Stephen Miller. The regime may also suspend civil liberties, or even revoke citizenship of natural-born Americans—deemed insufficiently compliant—outright. Once this cult consolidates its power, the state itself becomes the de facto enforcer of its dogma.

However, fleeing the country may not be a solution at all. America’s influence in the world is far-reaching, and its military might is vast. It may seek to conquer its former allies such as Canada, Europe or Central American countries which will be increasingly populated with US expats. Our government could also easily disallow social security payments to such “traitorous” expats, rationalizing in “America First” terms, that by leaving the country, they should forfeit their benefits. (Which, in grim reality, might be slashed even for domestic retirees).

In short, there is no escape from the Cult of America. It must be overthrown, shamed, decimated—obliterated at the root. The Cult of America is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. As I plan my future, it’s that goal that consumes my attention. As it should consume all of us.

This cannot—and will not—stand. We must redouble our efforts to form Abraham Lincoln’s ‘more perfect union’—or the entire planet will be swallowed by the rising tide of American-backed authoritarianism. If the Cult of America isn’t broken, it will break the world.

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