It begins, as these things so often do, with the Pilgrims. Not as beleaguered dissidents fleeing tyranny, but as proto-cultists burying their dead by moonlight and setting up strawman sentries—literal ones, posed corpses with muskets—to bluff the local tribes into thinking the colony had a functioning night watch. It’s a scene of desperation and delusion. For Jane Borden, it’s also the founding gesture of American political theology.
Borden’s Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America is a brisk, pop-cultural sweep through four centuries of American paranoia, tracing a line from Puritan apocalypticism to NXIVM, QAnon, and the Church Universal and Triumphant. Her thesis is at once expansive and personal: America isn’t just susceptible to cults, it is one. And not just a cult, but a particularly self-flagellating, purification-obsessed, apocalyptic doomsday machine with a messiah complex and a persecution fetish. “We are all in the cult of America,” she declares. The real question is whether we’re in the inner circle or still waiting for the Kool-Aid.
There’s a confident ease to Borden’s style, she was once a comedy writer, and that carries her through some fairly grim terrain: enforced child separation in early New England, the self-mortifying work ethic of Calvinist extraction economies, the gun-hoarding prepper hysteria of late Cold War Montana. At the heart of the book is the figure of Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the charismatic leader of a syncretic end-times sect who foresaw nuclear annihilation in the spring of 1990 and encouraged her followers to bunker down in Paradise Valley. When the bombs failed to drop, she simply revised the timeline, doomsday cults, like markets, are elastic. Her sermons, prayers, and “decrees” demanded divine retribution on the sinners of the world, including her own daughter. Like so many American prophets, she longed for the end of history and imagined herself at the centre of it.
In The Last American Prophet, I wrote that William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse survived because it made paranoia feel like participation. It’s a pattern Borden identifies as well, though from a more psychological angle. “Latent indoctrination” is her phrase of choice—those affective residues and dispositional grooves left behind by centuries of theological exceptionalism and frontier moralism. The American subject, she suggests, is pre-converted. What looks like charisma or coercion is often just the activation of old ideas in new clothes. Whether it’s a pastor, a podcast host or a fitness influencer preaching dopamine discipline and selling magnesium gummies, the underlying architecture remains cultic: confession, purification, hierarchy, and a promised reckoning for the impure.
This is especially clear in her discussion of the “American monomyth” the narrative structure identified by Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, in which a fallen world is redeemed by a violent outsider. The Puritans had their wrathful Christ; today it’s Jack Reacher. Borden connects the dots from colonial-era “Indian captivity” narratives to Taken, American Sniper, and Batman v Superman, seeing in each the same story: evil is everywhere, institutions are corrupt, and only the chosen man, rarely a woman, never a collective, can administer justice. The myth operates as a feedback loop: an Edenic community falls, an evil force rises, a saviour appears. It’s the same template Trump adopted in 2016: I alone can fix it.
But while Borden is sharp on symptomatology, she is less sure-footed on structure. Her references to economic precarity, technological acceleration, and the disintegration of public life are glancing rather than grounded. The result is a cultural diagnosis that often veers toward psychobiography. Her villains tend to be narcissists; their followers, trauma survivors. The language of Lifton’s “thought reform” is central to her framework, but so too is the language of dysfunction. Cults are places where the wounded go to feel whole, and where the predators go to sell the salve.
What’s missing, and here Borden’s approach diverges from mine, is a theory of capital. In The Anti-Imperialism of Fools, I wrote that conspiracism emerges not in spite of liberalism’s hollowing-out but because of it: when collective agency is foreclosed, grievance takes metaphysical form. It’s not enough to say Americans inherited a Puritan mindset. We also have to ask why this mindset has proven so adaptable to neoliberal precarity, to platform economies, to the gig-ification of identity. What is it about the structure of late capitalism that makes cultic belonging feel like the only remaining form of community?
In From Parody to Paranoia, I traced how satire curdles into sincerity—the Report from Iron Mountain goes viral, the joke becomes doctrine. Borden’s book is full of similar moments: the cults that start as comedy (improv theatre, wellness retreats) and end in coercion. But she doesn’t quite reach for a politics of counter-narrative. Her answer to doomsday thinking is still, in the end, individualist: awareness, critical thinking, maybe better mental hygiene. It’s a liberal inoculation programme against a pathology that is, at base, structural.
Still, Cults Like Us is a lucid and often funny primer on the shape of American ideology when it puts on a hood and builds a bomb shelter. It is most effective when it reveals how ordinary the extraordinary has become: how the line between startup culture and Scientology is thinner than we’d like; how prepping, gig work, and parenting apps reproduce the logic of spiritual warfare; how even the desire to opt out of the system is now marketed as a form of inner transformation. At the mass protests against Trump over the weekend, I saw a placard that read MAGA is a cult—except Trump would charge for the Kool-Aid. It landed because it’s true: American cults don’t just demand obedience; they demand a subscription fee. What Borden shows, and what the Trump movement proves, is that the American doomsday cult has finally been brought to market. You can buy your salvation in bulk, just don’t expect free refills.
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