The Demons That Rule Us

Peter B. Kaufman considers Whitney Phillips and Mark Brockway’s “The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-Liberal Demonology Possessed U.S. Religion, Media, and Politics.”

By Peter B. KaufmanSeptember 21, 2025

• Politics

• Philosophy & Religion

MORE THAN 150 YEARS after the book was first published, some debate remains among English translators and publishers about the proper title for what may be Dostoevsky’s greatest novel. The Russian title, a single word, Бесы (pronounced “besy”), properly translates as “demons,” but in bringing the book out in English in 1913, British translator Constance Garnett and her UK publisher gave it the title “The Possessed.” As the American translator Michael Henry Heim has written, voicing the objections of many others, they had goofed. The Russian word “means evil spirits,” Heim wrote, “not the people possessed by them. Had Dostoevsky wanted to name this work ‘The Possessed,’ he could easily have done so, Russian having an exact equivalent.” Demons is what it should be called—as indeed later English translations have been titled—because “demons” is what it’s called in the original, and demons is what it’s about. Nonetheless, Garnett’s version stuck, and it’s under that name that the book has entered the canon, its title focusing on people being affected by evil rather than on the demonic spirits themselves.

The demons that Dostoevsky portrays in the book, which first appeared in print in Russia in 1871–72, are ideas—radical, revolutionary political ideas that had begun to seep into people’s thinking at the time, and which in the years to come would transform Russia and indeed the world. Ten years into Tsar Alexander II’s 1861 emancipation of Russia’s serfs and his further progressive reforms, these were ideas about freedom, justice, equality, and new methods of getting there, including anarchism, nihilism, populism, and socialism—and, soon, assassinations and a violent revolution. And how did these ideas travel—from one mind to another and then from individuals into crowds? Not by flying through the skies, like witches and spirits are said to do, but by person-to-person communication and through the dissemination of messages sown through contemporary media. In the 1870s, Dostoevsky became his own book publisher, and for that reason among many, it’s no accident that the media he features in the novel—the manifestos, magazines, and books that his characters share and discuss, plus the printing presses and book binderies they hide and dream of owning—are all central to the story. The novel alerts us to how revolutionary ideas and counterrevolutionary and even reactionary ideas can spread and turn into action, whether in late-1800s Russia, colonial America, precommunist China, Iran under the shah, or among fanatical groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, or QAnon.

Many more modern media technologies appear throughout The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-Liberal Demonology Possessed U.S. Religion, Media, and Politics, an extraordinary new account of our own American demons that Dostoevsky would have loved. The book originated, as authors Whitney Phillips and Mark Brockway tell us, in an email exchange they had with one another on January 6, 2021, when they were “trying to make sense of the violence and chaos at the U.S. Capitol as it unfolded.” Phillips, an assistant professor of digital platforms and media ethics at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, and Brockway, assistant teaching professor of political science at Syracuse University, began work that day on what they call their “conjunctural analysis”—their long scholarly journey of synthesizing “decades of political science, religious studies, and media history research” together with profound analyses of “the biographies, communications, speeches, and published works of Evangelical leaders, rightwing media figures, and conservative politicians” over 80 years of American life. They stopped three-and-a-half years later, in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election and, with a preface penned just days after Donald Trump’s victory, now present the fruits of their investigation.

Lord, how one wishes this account were fiction too! Here is the paragraph that opens The Shadow Gospel—the authors telling it like it was:

In the days leading up to the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump accused the Democratic Party of being “demonic,” said that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was an “evil, sick, crazy” word-that-starts-with-a-B (“Buh-,” he teased), and openly fantasized about his enemies being shot. These statements aligned with the Trump campaign’s final messaging push about enemies within and enemies at the gates. Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, held a week before the election, embodied this spirit; speakers called Democratic nominee Kamala Harris “the devil” and “the antichrist” and described the “whole fucking” Democratic Party as “a bunch of degenerates,” among other invectives.

How could this have happened? How could Trump have won—again!—and after leading a violent, fatal coup attempt? How can so many of us believe in these people?

The book urges us to explore answers by looking beyond how Trump has managed to establish his cult of personality—which itself is hard to ignore, as his televised cabinet meetings, featuring successive testimonials of public fealty, often “go the whole Pyongyang,” as one commentator put it. The authors direct our attention instead to how Trump has built up this colossal “cult of demonology,” which, like much of what he started with, he inherited—from Evangelical Christians and Republican right-wing strategists who began treating liberals, leftists, and indeed any opposition as evil incarnate as early as the start of the Cold War. It’s that system, set atop an immensely successful, “sprawling rightwing media apparatus” ceaselessly incanting its curses and spells, which Phillips and Brockway ask us to focus on. Eight decades of these relentless efforts at painting political opponents with fire and brimstone—in churches, schools, books and magazines, on the radio, on television, and online—have released a whole swarm of evil spirits that have affected, infected, possessed tens of millions of Americans.

Thanks to the relentless messages that religious leaders, political partisans, and Fox News pundits have repeatedly spoken and read to us, transmitted, and broadcast over generations, millions of us and our families and communities now view our political opponents as active agents of Satan. And the demonologists keep encouraging us to do so. As The New York Times reported in July, under the headline “For Trump, Domestic Adversaries Are Not Just Wrong, They Are ‘Evil’”: “Anyone viewed as critical of the president or insufficiently deferential is [deemed] wicked. The Trump administration’s efforts to achieve its policy goals are not just an exercise in governance but a holy mission against forces of darkness.”

Across six chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, Phillips and Brockway explain how this realm of shadow gospel—a dark and evil preaching bearing little resemblance to real religion, yet with shadow apostles now installed everywhere—has grown to seem so unshakable. The chapters are in essence chronological, although the reader is sometimes whipsawed back and forth in time. Anticommunists painted communists as devils and their ideas as demons in the 1940s and ’50s. Billy Graham took over some of the messaging from Joe McCarthy. William F. Buckley and Henry Regnery took over from them. Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Phyllis Schlafly took over from them. And Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and Pat Buchanan from them. And now Rupert Murdoch and Trump. The gospel isn’t religious at all. So many messages of hate, consistently directed and choreographed by one powerful group after another over 80 years, have managed to spellbind tens of millions of Americans into handing the keys to our republic to these false prophets.

The system will outlast Trump, the authors tell us (although that seems as frightening and unlikely to me as outliving Keith Richards). Do not focus on the one “shadow messiah,” they tell us; instead, focus on “the realm.” The realm is what will endure. “The prognosis the book offers isn’t a good one,” the authors write. But the first challenge in countering the problem, they say, is to recognize and name it.

There’s an echo of the early Christians in their telling. The authors refer us to one of their scholarly muses—Elaine Pagels, an expert on the origins of Satan—who has stressed, as they summarize it, that “among early Christians, conflict took on a very specific world-sustaining importance.”

Opposition was a supernatural force, with the fate of the world always hanging in balance. Being threatened in this very particular kind of way—threatened cosmically—was central to early Christian identity and community formation. Satan was so important to the story the gospel writers were telling about Jesus that […] their writings “would make little sense without Satan.”

Responsible academics that they are, Phillips and Brockway identify the other cultural critics and thinkers in whose footsteps they are following—philologist and philosopher Roland Barthes, sociologist Erving Goffman, and linguist George Lakoff, who all specialized in understanding popular frameworks of perception, signs, and symbols. Barthes would describe myths that were, in the authors’ words, “claims about the world that position themselves as universal, timeless truths” but which are, in fact, nothing of the kind—they are, rather, “historically contingent, something that could have been otherwise.” Historian Richard Hofstadter also earns a special mention. The extensive bibliography is a treasury for those who want to dive more deeply, although one could add to it a list that includes historians of American populism like Alan Brinkley, of American hate like W. Fitzhugh Brundage, and experts on early American religion and culture like Michael Kammen and Perry Miller, as well as experts on money and the American Right such as Jane Mayer and Nancy MacLean. And while we’re at it, a little more Émile Durkheim. And maybe some Thomas Kuhn, too, for how different are scientific revolutions from religious or political ones?

What happens amid all the demon-calling—the pandemonium—is that many of us, especially the infected or possessed, wind up missing the presence of the actual evil among us, which is to say the real roles that these monsters play in befouling everything from our air and water to our political processes. Are there any lessons in the book for us, or any prescriptions? Together, these demon hunters have built their own communication networks, their own “ideas industry,” as the authors call it, including an archipelago of conservative, often extremist, public-facing think tanks. And every day, they thrust their followers and listeners and viewers into the middle of an exciting “cosmic end-times drama.” How do we counter that?

The book is light on the concrete steps we should take, such as revisiting comprehensive media regulation (the long, slow deregulation of radio and television is a fascinating subtheme of the book) or mobilizing our own information networks (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is disbanding even as I write). Still, this is a transcendent, boundary-breaking work about “the need to recognize, decode, and resist demonological messages.” As the authors have written quite presciently, “the push to translate shadow gospel bombast into bureaucracy is a long-term policy goal for conservative demonologists.” Just look: we are now run by a government whose officials (whom we pay, and who act in our name) are cruel, derisive, and drunk with power. And neither Jesus nor the Apostles, nor anyone truly preaching benevolence, has anything to do with it.

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Dostoevsky served 10 years in Siberia. On his way there, as one of his biographers tells us, he was handed an early Russian translation of the New Testament by the women—including wives of the Decembrists, a group of revolutionaries punished for an 1825 uprising—who were following his train east. The Bible plays a central role in Dostoevsky’s 1866 novel Crime and Punishment and serves as its own kind of frame for Demons, with one passage from the Book of Luke serving as an epigraph (it is also read aloud toward the close). That passage centers on a public exorcism that Jesus himself performs near Galilee, where he is said to have driven demons out of a man and into a herd of swine. Dostoevsky quotes from Luke 8:32–6:

Now a large herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside; and they begged him to let them enter these. So he gave them leave. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned. When the herdsmen saw what had happened, they fled, and told it in the city and in the country. Then people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus, and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. And those who had seen it told them how he who had been possessed with demons was healed.

When the passage is read aloud at the end of Demons (the book that James H. Billington, the great Russian scholar and former librarian of Congress, called the most searching work of fiction ever written about revolutionary faith), a key character reacts (in Robert A. Maguire’s translation):

[Y]ou see, it’s just like our Russia. These demons who come out of the sick man and enter the swine—these are all the sores, all the contagions, all the uncleanness, all the demons, large and small, who have accumulated in our great and beloved sick man, our Russia, over the course of centuries, centuries!

Today, alas, the herd of mad swine roams in Washington, and the whole country is being led by the shadow prophet who infected them. Phillips and Brockway are calling upon us to understand how that happened, and to learn from it.