Christian nationalism – Northcoast Antiquarian

In the photographs taken within the Oval Office (2017, 2025), the seat of American executive authority has been transformed into something older and stranger—a sanctuary of royal consecration. At its center sits Donald J. Trump, head bowed, encircled by ministers and advisers whose hands rest upon him in the gesture of impositio manuum, the laying on of hands. Their eyes are closed, lips moving in prayer, yet their posture speaks less of intercession than of veneration. What unfolds in that moment is not simply political theater but a ritual reenactment of an ancient idea: that power may be embodied, sanctified, and made flesh.

The Reversal of Benediction

In Christian and pre-Christian rites alike, the laying on of hands conveys the transmission of grace or authority. The priest’s touch confers the Spirit upon the baptized; the bishop’s hand consecrates the king. Here, however, the direction of sanctification is reversed. The clergy do not mediate divine blessing to the ruler on behalf of the people; they draw legitimacy from him. The bowed heads and concentric hands create a living reliquary around the sovereign’s body. The Oval Office, ordinarily a stage for civil governance, has been re-imagined as an apse, its curved wall a secular altar niche. What was intended as prayer has become an act of anointment—without chrism, yet heavy with its symbolism. In 2025, the Christian supplicants’ language included a declaration of divine appointment: “You assigned him, you appointed him, you anointed him for such a time as this…”

The Living Law

Ernst H. Kantorowicz, in The King’s Two Bodies, described how medieval jurisprudence conceived the ruler as lex animata—the “living law.” The sovereign’s person contained within it both the mortal, fallible flesh (corpus naturale) and the immortal, juridical body politic (corpus mysticum). Law was not merely administered by the king; it was enfleshed in him. The maxim omnia iura in scrinio pectoris imperatoris—“all laws reside in the emperor’s breast”—expressed the same belief: that the sovereign’s will constituted legality itself.

Trump’s self-understanding, as revealed in his statements that “I (have) the right to do anything that I want to do. I’m the president of the United States,” and that he could even “declassify by thinking” alone, reflects this archaic conception of sovereignty. In the photographs, that philosophy becomes visible form. His body, ringed by supplicants, stands as the physical repository of authority: thought and flesh fused into the living source of law. The constitutional process is eclipsed by a medieval metaphysic—the emperor’s breast revived within a republic.

The Mystical Body of the Republic

In Kantorowicz’s analysis, the king’s dual body was not a theological curiosity but a political necessity: it allowed the continuity of the realm despite the mortality of its ruler. The body politic outlived the natural body through the fiction of divine investiture. Yet in the Oval Office images, the relationship is inverted. The ruler’s flesh absorbs the polity rather than the polity transcending the ruler. The praying ministers become members of his mystical body, as if the state were incarnate in him rather than he in the state. The photographs thus performs a political transubstantiation—the transformation of a secular office into a sacred organism whose head alone is divine.

Iconography of Idolatry

The camera captures only the back of the president’s head in one of the images, a composition that echoes the devotional art of relic veneration. The viewer’s gaze aligns with the worshippers’ hands, all converging on the same luminous focal point: the golden hair, haloed by the light of the room. The gesture is tactile worship, the contact-relic as conduit of grace. In medieval reliquaries, touch transmitted sanctity; here it transmits legitimacy. The image collapses the distinction between religion and politics, portraying a people seeking salvation through proximity to power.

The Return of the Arcane Sovereign

What Kantorowicz chronicled as a vanished theology of monarchy reappears in modern populist guise. The constitutional republic, built upon the rejection of divine kingship, finds itself haunted by its ghost. The sovereign’s “two bodies” are re-fused: the office and the man, the law and the will, the symbol and the flesh. Those who kneel do so not before the law but before its living embodiment. When the sovereign’s body absorbs the state, law becomes indistinguishable from will. In such a regime, dissent is not disagreement—it is heresy. The king’s body, once divided for the safety of the state, is whole again.

The danger lies not only in the man but in the myth reborn around him—the longing for the immediate, the personal, the sacred ruler who is the nation. In that longing, the modern citizen becomes medieval subject once more. And the Oval Office, once the seat of the people’s servant, becomes the sanctuary of an arcane sovereign whose heart, like the emperor’s of old, is presumed to contain all laws within its breast.

Early manuscript — Photo by silvia lusetti on Pexels.com

Recently, I read with great interest Hari Kunzru’s article “Doing Their Own Research” in the New York Review of Books (May 29, 2025). It is a piercing, sometimes surreal examination of the strange coalition now shaping American political and spiritual culture: a “New Weird Fusionism” of right-wing conspiracy, countercultural wellness, and mystical absolutism. The portrait he offers—of a society increasingly shaped by magical thinking, selective paranoia, and a weaponized imagination—was as disturbing as it was insightful.

But what struck me most was the realization that the cultural atmosphere Kunzru describes makes it increasingly likely that contemplative works like my recent Liber Agglutivi will be not merely misread—but conscripted into the very worldview they seek to resist.

In that work, framed as a fictional medieval treatise on sacred language, I explore how language, when approached with reverence and silence, becomes not a tool of communication but a site of presence—how it may not only speak about reality, but participate in it. Yet as I read Kunzru’s analysis of conspirituality—the synthesis of conspiracy and New Age belief—I saw an eerie proximity between certain rhetorical structures in Liber Agglutivi and the thought patterns of this cultural formation: secrecy, marginalia, hidden knowledge, the recovery of “true” language lost to corruption.

The danger is real: in an age where every form of mystery gets weaponized, how do we distinguish between authentic contemplative practice and its paranoid simulacra?

It is precisely here that the contrast must be made explicit.

The Liber is not a manual for decoding reality through esoteric symbols or a codebook for revealing global plots. It is not a mystical justification for control, nor an invitation to gnostic certainty. Its words are not “keys” to hidden truths in the paranoid sense Kunzru describes. Rather, it is a contemplative experiment—a poetic, philosophical invitation to see language as something we enter with humility, not something we wield with certainty.

What conspirituality offers is often a form of linguistic inflation: a conviction that to name something is to master it, that to imagine is to manifest, that hidden truths are personal weapons in a war against “them.” This is not reverence for mystery but inflation through proximity to it. The practitioner of conspirituality approaches mystery as a puzzle to be solved, a code to be cracked that will grant power over reality itself.

By contrast, the Liber offers a theology of kenosis—a self-emptying approach to speech in which the word is not a sword, but a veil; not a control mechanism, but a site of transfigured listening. Where conspirituality seeks to decode, contemplation seeks to be changed by what it encounters.

Consider the difference in practice. A conspirituality adherent might read the Liber’s phrase about “memory that knows not what it remembers” as a hint toward recovering suppressed historical truths or accessing forbidden knowledge that “they” do not want you to have.

A contemplative reader approaches the same phrase as an invitation to sit with unknowing itself—to let the mystery remain mysterious while allowing it to transform one’s relationship to knowledge. The first approach inflates the ego; the second empties it.

Kunzru’s analysis is especially compelling in its treatment of magical thinking across the domains of politics, religion, and economics. It is alarming to witness the persistence of the nineteenth-century “mind-cure” tradition—the belief that reality is downstream of personal attitude—now manifesting as national governance logic.

That Donald Trump, among others, internalized Norman Vincent Peale’s message of mental affirmation to the point that factuality became irrelevant is not merely a character trait—it is a symptom of an epistemological crisis. Similarly, the self-help gospel of The Secret, evangelical prosperity teachings, and the memetic evangelism of internet conspiracists all illustrate a culture in which to believe is to make it so.

The boundary between wish and world is not merely blurred—it is denied.

The Liber Agglutivi, by contrast, insists that language’s creative power arises not from assertive will but from contemplative reception. The phrase “word that becomes the thing” does not mean that the self wills reality into being. It means that, in sacred silence, the word discloses what is already most true.

This is a fundamentally different ontology. It is not manifestation; it is reverent participation.

Kunzru rightly notes how easily mystical language can be conscripted by paranoid styles. The idea that “everything is connected,” which in contemplative practice leads to compassion and humility, in conspiracy often leads to reductionism and scapegoating.

The Liber speaks of memory that “knows not what it remembers”—a phrase meant to evoke mystery and presence, not cognitive shortcuts to hidden truths.

So while Kunzru’s essay is not a critique of my work, it felt like a necessary caution about the times in which such a work might be read. In an age of epistemic confusion and symbolic inflation, sacred language must be handled with even greater care.

We must distinguish between language as control and language as communion; between the voice that silences others and the voice that emerges from deep silence. We must recognize that in our current moment, the very practices that might lead us toward wisdom—attention to mystery, reverence for hidden dimensions of experience, suspicion of surface explanations—can be corrupted into tools of manipulation and division.

The Liber Agglutivi may look like a book of secrets, but it is really a book about unknowing—about hearing the spaces where speech begins. And in a world where every utterance is increasingly co-opted for political or psychological leverage, the commitment to silence, reverence, and the mystery of meaning may itself be the most radical stance available to us.

Words that reign do so only when they have ceased to serve the self.
In our age of weaponized mysticism, that may be the difference between wisdom and delusion, between contemplation and conspiracy.