Religious Delusions, American Style: Manipulations of the Public Mind

By Blair Allan Gadsby

de∙lu∙sion n. 1. The act of deluding.  2. The state of being deluded or led astray.  3. A false belief especially when persistent.  4. Psychiatry A false, fixed belief, held in spite of evidence to the contrary. 

– Funk and Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary

The topic of religious delusions in American public life emerged as the result of the past ten years’ worth of effort attempting to decipher what I found to be a shocking and troubling truth: that is, the intentionally-obscured and distorted role of religion in national and world events, as told to us by educational systems, news media, and politicians. 

Fully, it’s not only that religion is used as a tool to achieve some goal or other, which on one level makes a certain amount of obvious sense. Instead, fabrications are deliberately told in its name in order to deceive people as to what to believe about religion generally, or a particular religion, or about a particular religious group that may be in question or at the center of some “affair” or controversy. 

Furthermore, the social consequences for populations holding religious delusions can range from benign (by being ignored and therefore un-influential), to bad (by inciting stereotypes and phobias about individuals or groups), to worse (by encouraging or extolling actions based in those stereotypes and phobias by means of discrimination, exclusion and persecution), and even to disastrous (by fomenting genocidal physical conflicts and wars). 

In fact, it can be surprising, if not shocking, to learn the depths to which we, the public at large, have been manipulated. The result is a certain control over the popular imagination as it pertains to religious topics in American life, and therefore a measure of control over how we respond both individually and as a society to any given event or crisis. To be sure, this control will be seized-upon if the population is not wary. 

In short, the thesis of this book is that we have been deliberately fed delusions about religion by the mass-mainstream and corporatized media at the behest of government officials and their policies (specific officials are relevant to particular cases and will be named in the respective chapters with no intent to accuse, but rather to seek explanations from those best-positioned to provide direct evidence or insight; the term “government officials,” after all, casts a very wide and meaningless net over a humungous bureaucracy). 

As a result, Americans carry-about many more than one or two delusions regarding religion – these delusions are espoused both from within religions and from without – and these are what this book strives to address in eight topics which unfold in a roughly chronological narrative of historical-religious delusions championed since the founding of the nation. They are in this sense uniquely American delusions, but they are based upon patterns that have existed since the organization of societies and civilizations. A word about such precedents will be made, but only after a brief remark about the nature of the genesis of the inquiry itself.

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