I do not believe in God. I do not believe in the demiurge. I do not believe the material world was built by some lesser cosmic tyrant with a control fetish and a messiah complex. I am an atheist and a determinist. But I have to admit: if I were a Gnostic, I’d be having a hard time not feeling a little smug right now.
Because when you look at the current fusion of Christian nationalism, far-right grievance politics, apocalyptic fantasy, militarism, and that distinctly American style of smiling cruelty dressed up as moral clarity, the old Gnostic story starts to feel less like a discarded heresy and more like a field guide. Suddenly the whole thing looks almost too on the nose. A broken world governed by a lesser god who mistakes domination for goodness, hierarchy for order, and violence for righteousness? You start to squint a little. You start to wonder whether the ancient weirdos may have been onto something.
To be clear, I do not think they were right in any literal metaphysical sense. I do not think a demiurge sits above the clouds like some celestial middle manager botching creation and screaming at the interns. Humans are fully capable of producing nightmare systems on our own. We do not need supernatural help to build prisons for the soul. Still, as a metaphor, as a way of interpreting the far-right version of God currently being dragged across the American stage in a suit and a flag pin, the demiurge has real juice.
Because the God on offer in this political moment does not look like love. He does not look like mercy, humility, enemy-love, radical compassion, or care for the poor. He looks like power. He looks like borders, punishment, social hierarchy, masculine panic, and the ecstatic thrill of seeing the right people put back in their place. He looks like a God made in the image of grievance, a deity whose highest sacrament is domination and whose central miracle is the ability to turn fear into righteousness.
That is where the Gnostic lens starts to earn its keep. In many Gnostic traditions, the demiurge is not pure evil in the cartoon sense. He is something more embarrassing and, in a way, more recognizable. He is a deluded authority. He is sure of himself. He mistakes his jurisdiction for totality, his preferences for truth, and his power for divinity. He believes he is the highest thing because he cannot imagine anything higher than himself. He is the patron saint of every closed system, every empire, every little god-king drunk on his own reflection.
Tell me that does not rhyme.
What I see in the current far-right religious imagination is not some majestic return to transcendence. I see a furious little tribal god twitching beneath the stage lights, demanding loyalty, rewarding cruelty, and calling it order. This god is always under attack despite somehow controlling microphones, pulpits, legislatures, billionaires, media ecosystems, and half the country’s emotional weather. He is infinitely powerful and yet permanently aggrieved. He needs prayer in schools, commandments on courthouse walls, crosses in campaign ads, and a standing ovation every time he is invoked to bless another act of exclusion. He is a needy god. A paranoid god. A god with the emotional profile of a dictator and the spiritual depth of a Facebook comment section.
And then there is the end-times fever, that old delicious sickness. This is where the whole thing really slips from ordinary hypocrisy into metaphysical camp. Once you start hearing political leaders and their religious entourages talk as if war, catastrophe, and global escalation are not merely unfortunate possibilities but spiritually meaningful events, the mask starts to slide. There is something deeply diseased in the fantasy that destruction might hurry history toward its proper conclusion. When bombs begin to shimmer in the religious imagination as possible props in a prophetic drama, we are no longer in the realm of ordinary belief. We are in apocalyptic porn. We are in a theology of erection through ruin.
That, too, is why the demiurge fits. A god who can be pleased by escalation, who hovers above the rubble with an expression of stern approval while men with television makeup explain how this may all be part of the plan, is not a god of love gone slightly off course. He is a false god of power completely in his element. He is vain, theatrical, insecure, and absolutely delighted by spectacle. He mistakes the end of other people’s worlds for the fulfillment of his own story.
If I were a believer, I would find that god terrifying. As a nonbeliever, I find him depressingly familiar.
He is the oldest god in politics: the god who arrives after domination has already done its work and blesses it retroactively. The god who sanctifies the winner. The god who wraps brutality in moral language and calls the bloodstain holy. The god who always seems to hate the same people his followers already wanted to hate. Funny how often the voice of eternity ends up sounding exactly like local resentment with a Bible verse stapled to its forehead.
And that is the real utility of the Gnostic metaphor. It is not that it is factually true. It is that it clarifies a pattern. It gives language to the grotesque transformation by which a religion ostensibly centered on love can be weaponized into an instrument of hierarchy, rage, and national myth. It helps explain how “God” can become a brand identity for domination. It names the moment when transcendence collapses into authoritarian kitsch.
Not all Christians, obviously. Not all conservatives. Not every believer who still uses the old language of faith. That would be lazy, and laziness is one of the enemy’s cheaper drugs. But this particular god-form, this authoritarian deity of borders and blood, this paranoid national father draped in providence and grievance, deserves to be identified for what it is. It is not merely a harsher version of God. It is a corruption so deep it starts to resemble a theological counterfeit. It is the worship of power wearing religion like a stolen face.
Maybe that is one of the strange little privileges of atheism: I do not have to defend God from his followers. I can simply observe what kind of deity a movement creates when it takes its darkest instincts, polishes them, projects them skyward, and falls to its knees. A frightened movement will make a frightened god. A punitive movement will make a punitive god. An imperial movement will make sovereignty sacred and call submission peace. People do not merely worship their values. Given enough repetition, they deify their neuroses.
That is why the old Gnostic suspicion still bites. It refuses the cheap assumption that whatever presents itself as divine must therefore be good. It asks the rude question, the destabilizing question, the one every priest of power hates: what if the ruler of this world is not worthy of worship? What if the voice booming from the throne is not ultimate truth but organized insecurity with excellent branding? What if the god demanding obedience, punishment, purity, conquest, and endless enemies is not the highest god at all, but merely the cosmic patron of frightened men who cannot imagine a holiness greater than control?
I do not believe in the demiurge. But I understand the appeal. If I did believe in a false god of domination, an arrogant lesser ruler who confuses force with truth, wraps himself in righteousness, and presides over a realm of violence while demanding worship, I would have to admit that the current far-right version of God makes a hell of a good case for him.
Not because it proves Gnosticism, but because it reveals just how easily “God” can become the holiest mask power ever wears.