The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War
by Jeff Sharlet
WW Norton 2023

Spiritual warfare; The Great Awakening; getting Red-Pilled; the purge; The Storm; the shadows; secret truth; the omnipotent “they”; paranoia; deep rabbit holes; patriots; God and guns; martyrs. America since at least 2016 has been caught in the current of a complex network of such myths and memes, and we are being sucked out to sea, roiling and churning in a vertiginous “explosion and collapsing of meaning,” all clearing the way toward some kind of dream of revolution. In The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, Jeff Sharlet finds these themes and more while infiltrating protests and rallies, talking to an eclectic array of pastors, and following the trail of rippling Trump flags under the hot middle-America sun to talk to people about their thoughts on civil war, guns, and spirituality. He discovers that we are in a sort of cold war between the different parts of the body politic; that the body has already come apart and “the country’s already gone.”

Over the last two decades Jeff Sharlet has written an armful of books investigating faith and religion and how these give meaning to the stories we build our lives around. The Undertow is his most recent book in this line of thinking, where he picks apart the complex way the Christian Right and the politics of Donald Trump are stitched together to illustrate a picture of Whiteness, revolution, guns, and purity under fire. Sharlet is an academic from Dartmouth College and a self-avowed liberal journalist writing about conservatives, so his challenge in this work is to portray Americans with wildly different beliefs from himself impartially. He does so successfully, and what he finds is frightening.

Donald Trump is at the heart of what Sharlet finds on his travels. For many, since Trump speaks strongly about the so-called “right-wing rosary – borders, crime, stolen elections, stealing our guns” and abortion, he is often viewed as a savior figure. God himself in His divine authority has chosen Trump to usher in the return to a time when conservative Christian values were protected and honored. Trump’s believers say that “attending his rallies… was a calling” and that after they had realized this, they had “entered the light, undiluted and pure.” Some even think that changing political party from Democrat to Republican is a kind of religious conversion. Trump’s wealth and aggression become a glimmering exemplar of the prosperity gospel; follow what Trump says, do as he does, and you will thrive too.

A disturbing theme pervading The Undertow is civil war. Many people are preparing for it. Some believe it started when Trump’s supporters clashed with police on January 6 and infiltrated the Capitol, resulting in the death of Ashli Babbitt. Babbitt was a Trump partisan, assiduously researched and honestly represented by Sharlet, who is widely seen as a martyr for the conservative cause because she was shot and killed during the January 6 riot. Revolution and martyrdom fit easily into the MAGA movement itself, a dream to return to that edenic, fictional American past that Trump is virtuously shepherding us to, for which people are sacrificing their lives. The way we get there is through force and weaponry. Nearly everyone Sharlet met was armed, and many have personal arsenals or are part of militias, poised for war. For them, “the point of the gun was the promotion of peace.” But a gun was also used to intimidate Sharlet from talking to passersby about their beliefs. Civil war is already here in the minds of many, and the lines have already been drawn between allies and enemies. Sharlet asks, “how does a body come apart? How does democracy dissolve?” His answer: “it subsides.”

Is there a way to prevent an escalation to an all-out civil war, one that is more than just a hope of people who think our society needs to be reset? Sharlet proposes that reasonable discourse may be the answer, but that is difficult to do when we do not agree on the same facts and when we have built our own myths to suit our political beliefs; as the saying goes, “you can’t fact-check a myth.” Introducing guns into play does not help either. Sharlet’s solution is to “go through it” and reckon “with the haunted past… learning to love the smoldering days ahead.”

This slow civil war is our shared condition that we have to work through together. He reminds us that everyone is struggling, and we ought to try to understand the “sorrow and love” of our fellow citizens, even if they hold differing beliefs to our own. By grappling with the fragmented reality of contemporary America, The Undertow is Sharlet’s good faith attempt to do just that. It is definitely worth the read.

Lukas Killgore is a writer living in Los Angeles, CA. He has BAs in Philosophy and German from UCLA.