The Pornography of the Capitol Putsch
by Andrew Monteith
“The press, by and large, featured the pornography of Jonestown—the initial focus on the daily revisions of the body count, the details on the condition of the corpses. Then, as more ‘background’ information became available, space was taken over by lurid details…. It was the language of fraud and insanity that dominated the accounts. There were several options: [Jones] began sincere and went mad; he began a fraud and went mad; he was always a fraud; he was always mad—or, sometimes impossibly, a combination of all of these…. There is neither anything new or perceptive in this all-but-standard list. There is certainly nothing that will aid understanding.
Our task is not to reach closure. Indeed, at present this is factually impossible, for we lack the majority of the necessary data. We know the pornography of Jonestown; we do not know its mythology, its ideology, its soteriology, its sociology—we do not know almost everything we would need to know in order to venture a secure argument.”
— Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Devil in Mr. Jones” (1982)
In 1982, Jonathan Z. Smith admonished scholars for refusing to analyze or meaningfully discuss the Jonestown massacre, an event in which over 900 people died at the insistence of Rev. Jim Jones. Smith took exception to scholars’ attempts to sidestep Jones as a legitimately religious figure, which ceded the narrative to the popular press who almost entirely focused on the “pornography of Jonestown.” By “pornography” I take Smith to mean not only the media’s fixation upon Jones’s sexuality, but also the broader sensationalism: the rising body count, the American corpses decaying in the Guyana heat. This pornography didn’t advance understanding Jonestown as a religious event, but instead supported a narrative in which the People’s Temple wasn’t really religious, it was “a cult” led by “a fraud” or “a madman” and therefore dismissible.
In January a mob of angry Americans breached the United States Capitol for the first time in two centuries. There are significant differences between this putsch and Jonestown, yet Smith’s critique resonates deeply with how this event has been covered. There’s been an overwhelming refusal to approach the religious actors who participated in the putsch as legitimately religious, alongside an insistence that any semblance of religion at the Capitol was either insanity or else a fraudulent appropriation. In a different vein, the Washington Post recently argued that the insurrection was partly a product of Americans losing touch with denominational/institutional religion.
There’s been plenty of putsch pornography, but the most regurgitated piece has to be the coverage of Jake Angeli, the “QAnon Shaman.” Angeli arrived at the Capitol shirtless, his body covered with arcane tattoos, wearing patriotic war paint, a coyote/buffalo headdress, and armed with a flag-swaddled spear. Few have tried to understand him. Instead, popular media representations dwell in the liturgy of dismissal—sensational quotes offered without context, television anchors’ nonverbalized eye rolls, the language of “crazy,” “a gullible schmo,” and “a failed actor who lives with his mom.” Even those who take seriously the religious categories that he might fit have tried to exclude him. Rolling Stone, for instance, contrasted him against “actual pagans.”
Academics have largely ceded interpretations of Angeli to the popular press, offering surprisingly little public scholarship. Of the few pieces which have emerged, most validate the popular dismissals of Angeli’s religiosity. The most egregious example (which for some reason comes from an architectural site) called his religious arguments “a cultish cipher” lacking “rational belief.” The lone exception is the January 25 episode of the Religious Studies Project, in which Candace Mixon expressed discomfort with the media’s “disregard” of Angeli’s claims and argued that “as religious studies scholars…we have to consider taking him at his word.” At the risk of ventriloquizing Mixon, I take her critique to be aligned with Smith’s.
There’s another problem with popular treatments of Angeli, and that’s been the ad nauseam representation of him as a Nazi. This interpretation makes sense as an initial read. Like many Americanists, back in January my university asked me to offer some impromptu thoughts about religion’s role in the Capitol occupation, and, like many Americanists, I felt underprepared. I looked at Angeli’s most prominent tattoos (the Mjollnir, the valknut, and the Yggdrasil) and recognized them as Asatru symbols. Asatru is a Neopagan religion that utilizes Old Norse/Germanic myth, ritual, and symbols. Because of its Norse/German content, many Neo-Nazis and white supremacists have been drawn to Asatru, although anti-racist Asatruar emphatically distance themselves from this faction. Since Angeli was photographed standing alongside Nazis in the Capitol, as a first reaction it’s reasonable to interrogate this. I forget now my exact wording, but it was almost certainly something like: “I can’t say for sure that he’s a Nazi, but…” Since January 6, that framing has become the go-to formula for explaining his tattoos.
Here’s the problem: he’s not actually a Nazi. We asked a legitimate question but then contented ourselves to leave it unanswered. Left unanswered, the story morphed into a narrative in which Angeli is not possibly a Nazi, but in fact is definitely a Nazi. That’s become the narrative about him, even internationally. Yet Angeli has consistently denounced Nazis, deploying them as examples of pure evil, and his personal politics aren’t easily compatible with Nazism. The meaning of his tattoos remains unclear, but given his explicit denouncements of Nazis it seems implausible that they represent such an allegiance, despite commentators’ insistence that these are “dog whistles” intended to secretly identify him as one. These are also the only tattoos which anyone seems to care about, and people try to explain them without reference to any of his other ink. Angeli also has the planetary astrological sigils tattooed on his hands in order from left to right. (He wore gloves at the Capitol, but you can see them clearly in this video, which an evangelical took while confronting Angeli for heresy.) Angeli’s religiosity involves a kind of occult bricolage, which means those sigils could hold any number of purposes, yet none of them would be casual. Sigils like that wouldn’t be decorative or purely semiotic, they almost certainly have some technological purpose. There appears to be no discussion of them, though, or how his Asatru tattoos might relate to them. Spectators have instead seized on the possibility that his valknut has Nazi potential and obsessed over this as though it were proven fact.
To be clear, I am not writing an apology for Angeli. I find his participation in the Capitol occupation objectionable, and his counterprotesting of Black Lives Matter even more so. Yet as Smith said of Jonestown, “to interpret, to venture to understand, is not necessarily to approve or to advocate.” Religious studies has changed quite a bit since Smith wrote, yet the project of making the unfamiliar comprehensible still remains at the heart of our field. If we just passively accept the narrative that Angeli is a crazy, cultish Nazi, we not only fail at that task of understanding, we also validate longstanding cultural norms about what gets to count as “authentic” religion.
Although some material was purged from the internet after 1/6, many of Angeli’s viewpoints remain easy to find; he self-published a book about the Deep State, and he’s given numerous interviews. Many of his claims fall well outside the confines of my own plausibility structures. I consider it deeply unlikely that Hillary Clinton ever ate breast milk, blood, and semen as part of a Crowleyan magic ritual, that the US government has teleportation technology, or that they have a political alliance with interdimensional aliens. What I personally find plausible isn’t especially relevant though when trying to make sense of someone else’s religion.
Like many religious agents, Angeli’s religious views and his politics are related. Angeli self-identifies as a shaman, by which he means that his physical body is not the same thing as his Self and that his spirit can occupy more planes of existence than just the physical. He feels that the physical body and the spirit are connected, and neurobiology matters for this connection. He argues that what someone ingests affects their cognitive and spiritual performance. Like many Neoshamans, Angeli embraces psychedelics as a spiritual tool. In fact, he credits this with his departure from partisan Republicanism. Psilocybin allowed him to recognize his previous viewpoints as intrinsically selfish, as more about “being right” rather than being just. He explains that psychedelics also helped him recognize how corporate greed was callously destroying the environment, that Bush’s war in Iraq was produced by the military-industrial complex, and that the media were complicit in that warmongering by inflating an artificial security crisis.
Like many Neoshamans, Angeli champions what we might professionally refer to as “soul flight.” Entheogenic substance use offers one path, but he considers that the human mind is naturally built to allow the Self to venture onto other planes of existence. (He doesn’t use the term astral projection but it represents a close analog.) Angeli asserts that the real Self is both a vibrational pattern and a form of energy, a concept common to a variety of alternative American religions. This Self can venture beyond the four dimensions (length, width, height, and time) into the fifth dimension, which we might think of as possibility. If time is the ongoing experience of the present, the fifth dimension is the experience of potentiality—all the varieties of events that might happen. Psychedelics allow us to interact with other layers of reality, but there are deleterious substances, too—things that can obstruct our capacity for soul flight (e.g. fluoride, electromagnetic radiation). Angeli also argues that these soul flights disclose evidence of what the global elite wish to hide. He sometimes expresses himself in Christian idioms, but at the end of the day he is working with an occultic bricolage in which Christianity is only one part. He argues that “to beat this evil occultic force you need a light occultic force, you need an occultic force that is of the side of God, of love, on the side of the angels.” Angeli understands himself to be in league with those positive occult forces.
Angeli also embraces an idea common in contemporary American spiritualities, that of intentionality. Drawing on sources common to that discourse (e.g. Masuru Emoto’s experiments with emotions and water), Angeli claims that our attitudes and expectations can alter the physical world around us—we effect changes whether we mean to or not. All humans have this power innately, yet aggregated attitudes and intentions matter more for the general outcome than what any one individual does. If the masses have a negative attitude, this will produce negative results, but positive attitudes could bring environmental healing, universal enlightenment, and radical egalitarianism. He has utopian dreams and visionary experiences quite similar to those of the late Terence McKenna; he foresees a religio-political telos in which the oppressed overthrow their dominators and recover humanity’s original, natural harmony. The global elite, however, have a selfish agenda and seek to control the common narratives for their own gain, and the media represent a particularly potent phalanx of this effort. A handful of media networks (including FOX) control the story and promote false narratives, which manipulates public opinion. Yet their lies are also fragile. Angeli thinks that words have power (he doesn’t use the term “magic,” but it fits), and he understands his mission to be non-violent enlightenment. If he makes a spectacle of himself at political rallies or in shopping malls, unusually garbed and screaming about human trafficking cabals, it is because he believes that these are true words that have the power to disrupt the falsehoods that imprison us.
Angeli’s promotion of contemporary QAnon conspiracies dovetails what he sees as a larger historical pattern; his book tracks a history of powerful betrayals and cover-ups. Some of his conspiracy claims fall far beyond what most of us would accept. (Hillary Clinton isn’t a sex trafficker.) However, some of his assertions are merited or at least plausible. He notes, for instance, that the US government deliberately infected Tuskegee’s black community with syphilis during long-term, racist, and deeply unethical medical experiment. He identifies Nazi Germany as an exemplar of sinister fascism but observes that the US held few reservations about hiring Nazi scientists to federal posts after WWII. He writes that American Indian protesters at Standing Rock have entirely legitimate grievances and sharply denounces their violent suppression as an example of the federal government licking corporate America’s boots. He argues that Jeffrey Epstein made use of sex trafficking without remorse and that powerful people knew about it and participated. Most of these claims are reasonable and well-documented. The difference between Angeli and what the majority of us find plausible lies in discerning where the conspiracies stop. Most of us are content to think of conspiracies as the exception, but Angeli considers them as the rule.
Given his worldview, some of Angeli’s politics are perplexing, particularly his love for Donald Trump and his rejection of BLM. His dismissal of BLM is perhaps easier to situate. A common theme in QAnon conspiracies (which are saturated by white supremacy) is that BLM is actually an Antifa façade. The QAnon narrative transforms BLM from a legitimate protest into a fractious, violent mob intent on exacerbating racial discord. Angeli is clear in his book that he thinks identity-oriented politics divide Americans, keeping us from the unity necessary for dethroning those unholy powers that prefer us ignorant and submissive. Angeli has denounced racism in word and rejects it conceptually, yet by corroborating the QAnon explanation for BLM he’s taken a position that dismisses the plausibility of legitimate Black resistance to police brutality. There’s an irony to this since there are multiple examples of specific police departments covering up race-motivated violence—in other words, conspiracies. Angeli’s devotion to the QAnon narrative undermines his egalitarian goals.
Angeli’s unrecognized racism isn’t extraordinary, though, and this is one of the other problems of allowing the “he’s a Nazi” narrative to repeat unchecked. Angeli lacks the confessional racism of the Dixiecrat or the naked malevolence of the Neo-Nazi. Instead, he manifests the banal, ordinary racism that comes from white folks refusing to self-examine or take Black voices seriously as credible witnesses of their own experience. It’s the everyday racism of selective listening and of assuming that the white Arizonan experience is universal. I genuinely think Angeli wants to be antiracist, and at times he takes legitimately antiracist positions (such as with Standing Rock). At the same time, Angeli’s position that identity-based liberation movements are divisive distractions rather than honest cries for justice forecloses any possibility of legitimate dissent since his position turns criticism of racial injustice into a facet of the enemy’s strategy. That’s not Nazism, though. It’s a cookie-cutter kind of myopia. If we insist on relocating his racism to the sphere of the severe rather than accepting its banality, we end up missing that the boring racism of white nonchalance can produce significant manifestations, too.
Angeli’s support for Trump is the bigger puzzler, since Trump (at least to me) is openly self-interested and willing to throw almost anyone under the bus if it helps him retain authority and clout. Angeli offers two explanations. One is that Trump’s a double agent, working within the Deep State, yet secretly sabotaging its efforts to maintain power. The other is that he feels Trump has been treated unfairly, that Trump has been bullied and scrutinized for every last moral failing. In particular, Angeli expresses sympathy with this and relates to it personally, having experienced that kind of mean-spirited judgmentalism himself. This answer feels honest. We may envision religion as fully coherent and explainable, but none of us operate robotically with every aspect of our worldviews cohering systemically to our chosen hermeneutics. Sometimes—maybe even most of the time—we let our gut lead and then fill in the blanks later. This may be all it takes for us to reconcile a love for Trump with a religious worldview that should by all accounts repudiate him.
It’s true that much of Angeli’s worldview assumes certain cosmological and epistemological points that diverge from normative views, but we don’t have to agree with him to make sense of him, nor is this a criterion that we ever demand of other religious subjects. Ignoring Angeli (as we have mostly done) or attempting to classify him as inauthentic, absurd, or a cultist (as the media have mostly done) is to work as religious referees rather than as those seeking to understand. Such approaches quickly become pornographic exercises, moving away from interpreting Angeli as a complicated, religious individual, and instead embracing him as a clownish spectacle whom we can deride. January 6 and his anti-BLM positions are objectionable, but we should deal with those problems with integrity rather than half-truths and ad hominem attacks. Some of his views are respectable and some of them are cancerous, but all of them—even the more challenging ones—are interpretable. Pornographizing him as an incoherent, irredeemable monster not only fails to contribute anything meaningful, it quietly masks what Smith wanted to highlight: religion isn’t always good.
Dr. Andrew Monteith is Assistant Professor and Distinguished Emerging Scholar of Religious Studies at Elon University (Elon, North Carolina). His teaching and research focus on American religion, especially the areas where the boundaries of religion become blurry. He is under contract with New York University Press for a forthcoming book on religion and the early War on Drugs (1875–1940), tentatively scheduled for publication in 2022. Monteith received his PhD from Indiana University in 2018.