American Gnosis

Abstract American Gnosis explores contemporary American spirituality as you’ve never seen it before. This startling book will change how you see contemporary society—reading it is like putting on a pair of the revelatory eyeglasses in the cult film They Live. In recent and contemporary American literature and films, as well as in political life, we find many elements taken from the early Christian heretical category of “Gnosticism.” In fact, new forms of Gnostic religion are found across the Americas, in all kinds of unexpected places. This phenomenon calls for a new name: “neo-gnosticism.” In American Gnosis, Versluis surveys the prevalence of neo-gnostic metaphors in films and novels, as well as in contemporary politics, primarily on the right. He provides case studies of some major contemporary neo-gnostic figures and demonstrates how neo-gnostic thought contributes to critiques of politico-technological dystopian contemporary American and global society. American Gnosis introduces and discusses major neo-gnostic figures, some for the first time in scholarship, and also explores how neo-gnostic memes recur in social media and other sources, especially on the right. Versluis also explores the emergence of American gnosis in terms of perennialism, and as spiritually independent, reflecting the growing demographic category “spiritual but not religious.”