prophecies

No developed country has anything close to America’s population of religious fundamentalists: believers in angels, demons, miracles and prophecies, all wrapped in a determined provincialism.

In doing that, he’s playing off of many of the evangelical sentiments and literal prophecies about him that have built this quasi-messianic spiritual ethos around him.

One sign of the fictional nature of this line of thinking is the way prophecies of the end of the world are routinely, in Kermode’s words, “disconfirmed without being discredited.”

It all feels like the final stage of a cult, when the leader's frantic efforts to retain control result in escalating dictates and prophecies that become increasingly hard for followers to make sense of.

A belief system that may have the highest proportion of logical inconsistencies, irrational dogma, failed prophecies and broken promises of all major worldviews is one now on the upswing in the Western world.