I kid you freakin’ not. And the use of “mystic” in this context creeps me out a bit given that I just wrote a piece for 3QD where I recount how I offered mystical religious belief as the foundation of my pacifism and hence my opposition to the war in Vietnam. We aren’t using “mystic” in quite the same sense, though they are allied.
Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat on Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics, NYTimes, April 25, 2025. The conversation is well under way at this point:
Klein: We tend to think of fortune now as synonymous with luck. But if you go back to Greek mythology, when you are touched by fortune, when you speak to the oracle, it often doesn’t work out that well. You get a clear prophecy that seems like it foretells your success, but laced inside of that is your downfall.
What kind of story, what kind of mystic structure, do you believe we’re in? Is it one that is providential? Or is it one where the gods often laugh at human design?
Douthat: A mistake that I think some religious people make is to see a kind of force of destiny at work in a particular figure and assume that force of destiny must mean that God, the author of history, wants you to be on that person’s side directly.
But in fact, if you read, let’s say, the Old Testament, there are all kinds of moments when God is working through figures to accomplish something in the world or to move history — the drama of salvation history, to put it in Christian terms — in a particular direction. But it doesn’t mean that the instrument that God is working through is, in fact, the Messiah or the chosen one. If God sends the Babylonians to chastise the wicked kings of Israel, that doesn’t mean that you’re supposed to necessarily say: Oh, hail Nebuchadnezzar, you are the chosen one.
I think you can see Trump in several different lights. You could say he’s a man of destiny, and therefore he is bringing about, in some weird way that we didn’t see coming, the New American golden age. And this is obviously what a lot of people on the center right wanted to believe, especially when it became clear that he was returning to power. Or you could say he’s a great man of history who is unlocking some sort of change that was necessary — but bringing chaos in order to do it.
I wrote a lot about the concept of decadence — this idea that the West and the developed world were sort of stuck in these cycles and needed to break out somehow. But the reality is you often can’t break out of decadence without a big mess. So maybe Trump is the agent of that mess. But that doesn’t mean he’s a good person.
Or finally, it could just be chastisement for everyone. “All are punished,” as Shakespeare said.
I think all of those possibilities have to be taken seriously as readings of the Trump phenomenon.
How well do you remember “Batman Begins”?
I remember it. The League of Shadows destroying Gotham?
I’ve had this joke in my head often in the past couple of months — as somebody whose mythic analogies tend to come from the Marvel or DC universe more than the Old or the New Testament — that is: Convince me we’re not being governed by the League of Shadows.
I went back and rewatched the part where Ra’s al Ghul reveals the whole plan. And he says: Look, we have infiltrated every layer of Gotham’s power structure. We tried to destroy Gotham’s economy through financial engineering. It didn’t quite work. Now we’re back for No. 2. And the fact that we are here is proof of your decadence. The fact that we could get this close shows that you deserve what we are about to do to you.
I’m not saying we are actually being governed by the League of Shadows, but when you brought up decadence, there is a dimension of that when you think about this in those narrative terms. It’s a reflection of very dark sides of our own society.
I’ve carried on a couple of different running arguments throughout the Trump era that are going to continue. And one is with people on the right who have a sort of League of Shadows view of the overall situation: Things are so bad that you might as well unleash chaos.
You saw a lot of this in response to the tariffs. Real politicians don’t say this, but people on social media who are like: Fine, we need a 10-year reset of the whole global economy because things are so bad.
I’ve spent a lot of time disagreeing with those people. I would prefer not to take the black pill. But I’ve also spent time disagreeing with the kind of liberals and, sometimes, never-Trump Republican critics of Trump, who I feel don’t quite grasp why he’s successful and what you need to do in response. Because I don’t think he could be this successful if it were enough to just elect Joe Biden to fix our problems.
Well, clearly that didn’t work. We tried that. And definitely trying to elect him twice to fix our problems was not the winning move.
A couple months ago, Bari Weiss had on her podcast Louise Perry, who’s a British conservative gender and sexuality writer. And Perry made this argument that I’ve been thinking about, where she said that the difference between Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate is that Peterson is a Christian and Tate is a pagan.
This might be unfair to historic pagans, but the argument she was making —
Depends on the pagans.
Depends on the pagans. But it also depends on the Christians. But the argument Perry was making is that Peterson is, at least in his ethics, somebody who thinks a lot about the weak, who cherishes women.
Tate is more interested in power, in dominance, in driving his enemies before him and fathering a lot of children potentially from a lot of people.
And I’ve thought about that question — that war between, crudely, paganism and Christianity is playing out right now on the right and in the Trump administration. There are ways in which those strands seem braided through everything — the drive for power, for a renewed 19th-century masculinity, versus the more Christian dimensions of it.
JD Vance is an emblem of the Christian side of the administration. Elon Musk is an emblem of its pagan side, with his many kids from many different women.
And Trump is somebody who, in both his traditionalism and also his brashness and will-to-power, has both threads inside himself at the same time.
Maybe. Honestly, I think Trump may have come to some conception of belief in God after the assassination attempt — just observing his comments.
But I think of Trump as, persistently, a kind of pagan or heathen figure, much more than he is a Christian figure. Notwithstanding the attempts to claim him as a kind of King David or Emperor Constantine. There’s sort of an idea that you get from religious conservative supporters of Trump that you have these figures in the Bible or Christian history who are rulers and are sinful in various ways — but maybe, in a way, advance God’s cause, despite their sins and failings.
I don’t really think of Trump that way. But he is committed in an explicit way to Christianity. And to me, the bargain with Trump has always been, for religious conservatives, some mix of protection and support — a transactional bargain. And then more recently, a hope that some kind of renewal of American dynamism can bring religion itself back with it.
Which, I will say, is a hope that I have indulged in myself. It’s like: OK, you have different varieties of post-Christianity out there, and you don’t want to ally with the Andrew Tates, but you do want to ally with the people who have big hopes for the future, rather than a woke progressivism that just seems inflected with cultural despair.
That would be an argument that I think a Christian might say who was trying to explain to themselves why they are in alliance with Elon Musk. Better to ally with Elon, who has some good desires and believes that humanity is good in some way and wants a sort of more dynamic future than to take a purely pessimistic perspective — that climate change is going to kill us all and structural racism means we deserve it. That would be the argument.
A bit later Douthat observes:
As I said before, I think you have what you’re describing as Christian and pagan tendencies braided together in the Trump administration. And I think that not all but many of the things that you describe absolutely reflect more of a pagan sensibility than a Christian one.
I agree with you that particular steps the Trump administration has taken in this term are not Christian. They are anti-Christian.
I think it started with the cuts to foreign aid. I think you can completely justify some kind of renovation of the foreign aid program. Christians are not bound to support any particular set of programs.
But I think the way in which the foreign aid programs were reshuffled and cut off and so on was a failure of Christian duty in a pretty obvious way. The core motivations there were just different from the evangelical motivations of the Bush era, and reflected, frankly overall, the decline of Christianity in American life.
I will just say, though, since we’re taking a pretty hard line of critique here: You have watched this happen all the time on the left in different ways over the last 5 or 10 years, where people whom I considered to be sensible, good, well-meaning moderate people were in a coalition with people who had more intensity, more passion, more zeal, who made a certain set of demands on them that led, in people I knew and admired and respected, to compromise their own values in ways that also had real-world material consequences.
I don’t want to relitigate wokeness, but part of the nature of politics in a landscape where there’s no religious consensus, there’s no moral consensus, is that forces that appear to have energy behind them — world historical energy, perhaps — will draw people, who have convictions that should put them in tension with those views, into certain kinds of compromises.
Still later:
Klein: I don’t think a thing I’m saying here is going to convince somebody on the Christian right to turn around their view of Donald Trump. But I am genuinely curious how somebody of your politics and your religious background interprets somebody like JD Vance, so I’m asking you questions about it.
Douthat: Christianity does not provide some kind of incredibly strong bulwark against powerful people doing the kinds of things that powerful people do, which means self-interested conquest of various kinds and so on. What it does provide is an ongoing internal critique that those powerful people have to wrestle with and address in ways that are fairly unique in the historical relationship of power and piety.
So if you look at something like — to take the most famous example, maybe — the Spanish conquest of the Americas: In terms of what is actually done in the course of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, you can find plenty of terrible crimes that you, Ezra Klein, would say: Well, what good is your religion if your civilization commits these crimes?
But from the very beginning, in Spain itself, in the heart of the super Catholic Counter-Reformation era of Spain, there’s an ongoing and agonizing, sometimes intensely legal and practical, sometimes high-level philosophical and theological debate that subjects the behavior of the Spanish conquistadors and others to this sustained critique and leads to — at various times, sometimes successful, mostly unsuccessful — reform efforts driven by the Catholic monarchy of Spain.
It ultimately builds out and influences everything from the antislavery movement in the 18th and 19th centuries that’s ultimately successful, down to contemporary ideas about human rights and international law that, again, today’s secular liberals take for granted as a kind of scripture.
All of that emerges out of the efforts of serious Christians in a context of profound historical temptation and constant sinfulness to generate from within the resources of their religion.
And if you take the Trump administration — for instance, it’s not as though you cannot find Christian critiques of Trump administration cruelty. They just are not, at the moment, the primary thing I would expect. I mean, we’ll find out.
We’re three months into a shock and awe administration, and I think people have been baffled and surprised by some of the turns that things have taken. But certainly people I take seriously within conservative Christianity have spoken out against things like the cuts to humanitarian aid and anything like that.
But I completely agree with you that history supplies constant tests of what your religion is for, and there’s no end — until the end — to the testing. And sometimes you succeed. More often you fail. But hopefully you do something that has good effects down the road. And sometimes you fail entirely and then maybe God sifts you and finds you wanting.
I’m not kidding here. It is important to see every moment as a potential moral test that you might well be failing.
And then wooosh! the conversation flows in a different direction. And now Douthat is using “mystical” in the sense I used it in my article for 3QD:
So one of the various arguments in my book is that disenchantment is fake, fundamentally. The idea that you can enter a secular age where, once upon a time, people had wild religious experiences, but now we inhabit the iron cage of modernity, and all of those are off the table — that just doesn’t describe reality.
Mystical experience, religious experience — it’s not just the impulse. I think secular liberals are very comfortable saying: Oh, well, there’s always a religious impulse.
But it’s more than that. It’s that people have encounters with God — whatever God may be — some kind of higher reality that enters them and transforms them and gives them visions and gives them intense experiences. Or maybe they have them on the verge of death and come back to tell about them.
This is just a feature of human life. It’s a very profound and important feature of human life. Maybe it can be explained in nonreligious terms. Maybe there’s some reductive explanation. But there isn’t a good one on offer right now.
I’ve talked of my own encounter in various places. Here, for example: It Shook Me, the Light. Back to Klein and Douthat, they continue the conversation along those lines, talking generally about religious experience, materialism (as a philosophical stance), various religions, Catholicism (Douthat himself is Catholic), Judaism, etc. And they eventually get around to psychedelics, though I had to skip over a lot of stuff to get to it.
Klein: Tell me about your views on psychedelics.
So I have never taken psychedelics. I’ve never been to an ayahuasca retreat. This is entirely based on reading and conversations.
My view is that some psychedelics almost certainly open you to contact with nonhuman spiritual entities, and that they do so in a way that is different from other forms of spiritual experience. Again, not in every case, but they can be a shortcut.
But that shortcut means that you’re entering these landscapes without the kind of preparation that not only the traditional religions but the shamans who use ayahuasca in the Amazon — or wherever they use it — would say is necessary for these kinds of encounters.
And there’s a social media joke about getting one-shotted by a six-dimensional Mesoamerican demon, or something like that, that people make about these kinds of drugs. And that’s a joke, but I don’t think it’s entirely a joke.
So I think that possibility is real, and it does not at the same time mean that lots of people can’t take these drugs and have mystical experiences that just sort of convince them that there’s more to reality than just the material. And that is a correct view.
So in that sense, the drugs teach you something real about the world. But it can be like anything in human life. And one of the points I try to stress is that religion is not out there in some compartment where it’s totally different from every other thing, and you can’t argue about it the way you argue about other things and so on.
No. Like in other aspects of human life, dealing with the supernatural is like dealing with the natural. There are good things and bad things and dangers and opportunities. And you just want to be aware of that before you throw yourself into a realm of experience that you might not be prepared for.
I’ve had one very powerful experience with LSD, early in my life, but after that musical experience I linked to above. They get around to an experience Klein has had...but I’ve offended the IP gods enough with these long quotations. Let’s just say the conversation keeps on going. You should check it out.
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