The Origins of Conservatism’s ‘Gnostic’ Meme
You can thank Eric Voegelin for the right’s clichéd catchall critique for the left.
LIKE ANY SUBCULTURE, American conservatism today is full of extremely specific shorthand expressions, shibboleths, and clichés of both the conceptual and verbal kinds. Some of these emerged and rapidly became dominant modes of thought before passing away, as when conservatives early in Barack Obama’s administration interpreted their political opponents exclusively through the lens of Saul Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals because they thought liberals were all reading it. For their part, liberals and progressives back then started calling many objectionable things “neocon,” until eventually every objectionable thing was being interpreted as an expression of the ideology. Today, MAGA thinkfluencers accuse their political opponents of being “globalists,” which sometimes appears to be intended as a shorthand for “Jewish.” (The line between a counterpoint and an insult or rank slur can be difficult to see in the history of American political rhetoric.)
Sometimes a term bounces around the right-wing intellectual sphere for years before going mainstream. We might be on the cusp of such a case now. Check out the subtitle of conservative radio host Erick Erickson’s forthcoming book, out this summer, You Shall Be as Gods, which promises a study on “Pagans, Progressives, and the Rise of the Woke Gnostic Left.”
The argument that “the Progressive Left has developed a new pagan religion complete with all the trappings” is hardly new. But Erickson goes a step further by name-dropping an actual theological term of art: Gnosticism, a label applied to a heretical movement that found itself in conflict with the early Church. Gnostics are usually taken to have believed that the material universe is unbearably corrupt, and that salvation from it is possible only through the acquisition of esoteric knowledge—gnosis in Greek. The intricacies are probably best left to religious scholars. That’s why it’s so curious that the term has featured so prominently in conservative intellectual discourse going back to the early years of the Cold War.
For example, Gnosticism appears in an early issue of the foundational conservative magazine, National Review. In 1957, the Catholic scholar Frederick Wilhelmsen claimed an enervating Gnosticism “has worked its poison into the blood of our body politic,” preventing us “from acting today with that vigor which has ever marked the American character.” Wilhelmsen did not lack salient examples. His big one was President Dwight Eisenhower’s refusal to support the Hungarian uprising in 1956—the “most apt symbol” of this “Gnostic mist” of do-nothing amiability. Wilhelmsen’s use of Gnosticism might seem a bit strange compared with later uses, but that’s often how it goes for rhetorical innovators.
A year later, National Review’s in-house ideologist, Frank Meyer, drew on the concepts of both Gnosticism and James Burnham’s “managerial revolution” to explain why “Communism and collectivist Liberalism are both expressions of one world-wide revolution.”
In 1962, in front of 18,000 young conservatives at Madison Square Garden, another National Review alum, L. Brent Bozell, diagnosed a despair at the heart of modern liberalism. “Liberalism is anchored to the ancient heresy of gnosticism with its belief that the salvation of man and of society can be accomplished on this earth,“ Bozell droned. Even if nominally opposed to communism, liberals were united with Communists by an underlying Gnostic faith. And they were beginning to recognize that if the Gnostic dream were to triumph, it would be in Communist form. Hence the liberal neurosis.1
These are grand (and grandiose) arguments, sweeping in their scope, perilous in their depths. Gnosticism was becoming a vehicle for delivering a metaphysical payload over an enemy’s political positions. It engaged the attentions of religious audiences in new ways, reinforcing their sense of the spiritual hazards of liberal politics.
Each of these conservative writers who deployed the term in their work eagerly acknowledged the source that first delivered it to them: Eric Voegelin.
Voegelin was born into a Protestant family in Cologne in 1901. They moved to Vienna when he was nine. He studied at the University of Vienna under the tutelage of the legal thinker Hans Kelsen before his keen opposition to Nazi racism led him to flee post-Anschluss Austria. Voegelin eventually landed in America.
Despite his narrowly focused legal training, Voegelin took an expansive humanistic approach to scholarship. He had, according to Leo Strauss, read everything, and he drew on his extraordinary breadth of knowledge to develop a multivolume transhistorical analysis of the interaction between spirituality and history as it played out through culturally specific symbols. Published under the title Order and History, the project reflected the uniqueness of Voegelin’s point of view even as it showed the signs of his upbringing in the early-twentieth-century German intellectual world. It evoked the world-historical vantage points of Hegel, Marx, and Spengler but also retained a more niche academic concern peculiar to his German milieu: an interest in the religious history of Gnosticism.
The cultural moment in Voegelin’s adopted country could not have been more hospitable to his intellectual predilections. In the America of the Atomic Age, influential thinkers and writers were searching for deeper religious, philosophical, and ethical anchors for political and civil life following the horrors of the world war and the Holocaust. At both the popular and elite levels of society, religious thought and practice were experiencing a boom, while doctrinaire conservative intellectuals sought to set modernity on sturdier pillars than they believed procedural liberalism to be capable of erecting. Voegelin was a serious-minded fellow who also wrote matter-of-factly about God, Christ, and Salvation; in this context, he fit right in.
His moment came in 1951, when Voegelin was invited to the University of Chicago to give a set of lectures under the auspices of a conservative program that had produced influential books by Leo Strauss, George F. Kennan, Daniel J. Boorstin and others. Voegelin’s lectures were gathered into a book, The New Science of Politics. It was through this book that American conservatives were introduced to the concept of Gnosticism in its political and ideological application.
VOEGELIN’S GRAND HISTORY begins with the priestly kings of antiquity who united the secular and spiritual order under their rule. Over time, the unity of their authority developed cracks, many of which resulted from the growth of Christian belief in an omnipotent God who is ontologically separate from His Creation. Society became more secular as the created world was de-divinized, but the spiritual energies were not scoured from the Western imagination—they were merely sublimated. This is where Gnosticism comes into play: For Voegelin, it names the true motivation of anyone who advocates any substantive change to the political order. It is the attempt to bring “our knowledge of transcendence”—our inchoate sense of the Kingdom of Heaven, the eschaton, the endpoint of history—into secular reality through politics.
Voegelin experienced the rise of both Nazism and Bolshevism, and he came to see Gnosticism at the motive core of both movements. “The totalitarianism of our time,” he wrote, “must be understood as journey’s end of the Gnostic search for a civil theology.” But Voegelin was interested in more than endpoints. He saw Gnosticism in a variety of dynamic and emerging ideologies including liberalism, progressivism, positivism, scientism, and still other outlooks and systems. Few could escape his novel, encompassing metaphysical critique.
If Gnosticism involves self-deception—no advocates of the ideological systems Voegelin targeted would accept it as a characterization of their true political motives—it also runs afoul of a self-defeating contradiction, Voegelin argued: Its gnosis, the special knowledge upon which these movements are based, is ultimately false. In his view, Gnostics see their program as an end state that they insist upon in defiance of reality. When Gnostics triumph politically, they only manage to build a dreamworld— fundamentally flawed social arrangements that create a “very complex pneumopathological state of mind”—which he elsewhere defines as the “condition of a thinker who, in his revolt against the world as it has been created by God, arbitrarily omits an element of reality in order to create the fantasy of a new world”—among anyone unfortunate enough to live under them, including the Gnostics themselves.
THE RIGHT-WING INTELLECTUALS seeking to launch a conservative movement at the beginning of the Cold War—especially the religiously devout political scientists among them—became taken with Voegelin. His was a name and a signature concept that provided them with a sense of prestige and intellectual cachet at a time when they were searching for legitimation. One important figure in the nascent movement, Willmoore Kendall, told Voegelin in 1959 that the first volume of Order and History had “become the major turning-point in my modest intellectual history—as it has for all the people closest to me in the profession.” Kendall drew heavily on Voegelinian ideas while writing a book on American political symbols.
While Voegelin’s conceptual language was deeply appealing to his conservative peers, he never came to wield influence comparable to that of his contemporary and fellow German émigré, Leo Strauss. Both Strauss and Voegelin offered methodological tools and a distinct framework within which to use them. But Voegelin’s method relied too much on his formidably broad but idiosyncratic reading. His metanarrative became the load-bearing feature of the architecture, and there was much that it could not support. Strauss, by contrast, offered more nimble tools for engaging a range of thinkers. He was also the more accomplished teacher, and his sometimes brilliant students contributed to a surpassing legacy in politics and political science.
Voegelin’s students had fewer influential appointments, and some of them took his ideas in directions that did much to alienate the larger intellectual community. One scholar, M.E. Bradford, used Voegelian concepts to criticize Abraham Lincoln. “Delighted” by this use of his ideas, Voegelin wrote Bradford a letter in 1970 in which he said that “Lincoln’s government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ is even more than a millenarian blasphemy than becomes apparent from your paper.” He linked the phrase to the Wycliffe Bible, Marcus Aurelius, and St. Paul. Over time, Bradford’s neo-Confederate attacks on Lincoln became pathological, eventually costing him an appointment to chair the National Endowment of the Humanities. It is unclear whether Voegelin, a cynic about the political motivations of his enemies, saw the truth of the motives of Bradford, his ally.
THE IDEA OF GNOSTICISM and Voegelin himself have certainly been name-checked a lot within the conservative movement, although generally in the realm of cliché.
Columbia professor of humanities Mark Lilla suggests conservatives who rejected Marx and Hegel found Voegelin appealing because he provided an alternate world-historical framework for cultural decline and totalitarianism. Voegelin also gave credence to conservative anti-intellectualism by dismissing liberal or progressive ideas as “gnosis.” Indeed, Voegelin dispensed with Marx (“a speculative gnostic”), Nietzsche (“also a speculative gnostic, but a more sensitive psychologist than Marx”), Hegel (“the greatest of speculative gnostics”), and Heidegger (the most “ingenious gnostic of our own time”). “The gnostic thinker really does commit an intellectual swindle, and he knows it,” Voegelin scoffed. For conservatives, the implication was clear: Liberalism need not be reckoned with on its own terms, because Voegelin had already exposed its true nature.
Voegelin’s writing and his ideas flattered other conservative—and especially Christian conservative—assumptions. In a very short book on Gnosticism written in the late 1960s, Voegelin wrote that for Gnostics, “the aim always is destruction of the old world and passage to the new. The instrument of salvation is gnosis itself—knowledge.” Gnosis “has its own magic, and this magic is not harmless,” because you cannot wish away reality. It “will not destroy the world, but will only increase the disorder in society.” For a conservative objecting to Wokeness who sees the Black Lives Matter protests as a lawless rejection of society, this looks pretty prescient.
Voegelin’s grand narrative of history, for example, created a theoretical and quasi-religious link between reformist liberalism and totalitarianism. Moreover, he defined it almost as secular heresy—a “Gnostic experiment in civil theology,“ that is “fraught with dangers, flowing from its hybrid character as a Christian derivative.“ This is very familiar and very appealing framing for a conservative Christian.
Not only did Gnostic movements seek to fill the void left by civil theology, Voegelin argued. They tended to shift from Christian “spiritualization” or “reform” movements to open anti-Christianity. Once again, this closely aligns with Christian conservatives’ own understanding of modernity, in which they see a secular encirclement of Judeo-Christian beliefs and values. Putting a fine point on it, Voegelin claimed “the murder of God . . . is of the very essence of the gnostic re-creation of the order of being.”
The dreamworld created by Gnostic political triumphs become societies where the dominant ideology conflicts with the truth. Amid the resulting disorder, speakers of truth are violently attacked by Gnostics. Likewise, acts that should be “considered as morally insane” because of their effects “will be considered moral in the dream world” because of their intent. Today, a conservative will see the direct relevance of these arguments for any number of current issues: cancel culture, speech codes, trans issues, DEI, or progressive policing, for example. And of course, having the ‘courage’ to say what ‘they’ don’t want you to is another conservative cliché.
But living in defiance of reality, Voegelin warns, creates a prison. “It forces the spirit into the rhythm of deception and self-laceration.” This is a convincing insight for conservatives who believe the progressive left is full of unhappy, unfulfilled people.
Whether he intended it or not, Voegelin’s overbroad definition of Gnosticism all but ruled out any challenge to the existing political and social order.
BECAUSE OF THE WAY Voegelin wrote, and his often brutal attacks on liberals and liberalism both in public and in private, conservatives often assumed he was a religious man, even specifically a Catholic, and that he too identified as a conservative. Certainly, their interest in his scholarship—and the grant money they could sometimes secure—flattered him. But Voegelin held them at arm’s length, rejecting efforts to publicly identify him with the conservative movement.
Voegelin’s religiosity is ambiguous. He wrote so authoritatively about God that his conservative readers mistook him for a practicing Christian. And he does appear to have been a mystic of sorts. Nevertheless, Voegelin kept quiet on his most fundamental commitments, and his analysis implicated Christianity in the decline of spiritual order and rise of Gnosticism. Once, Strauss and Kendall debated Voegelin’s faith. Eventually Strauss inquired, “Mr. Kendall, can you imagine Eric Voegelin on his knees, praying?” Kendall replied honestly, “No.”
In the long gap between volumes in Order and History, Voegelin did not do what his Christian conservative supporters wanted him to, which was provide an “apotheosis given over to Christianity and history.” One sympathetic critic found it “regrettable.” Another, “deeply disappointing.” Frederick Wilhelmsen even called Voegelin “a latter-day Pilate” for his abdication.
The ambiguity in Voegelin’s life and writing about Christianity actually illuminates the conservative intellectuals’ engagement with him. After all, wasn’t Jesus Christ the first to “immanentize the eschaton”? What separates the Son of God from other Gnostics? Perhaps this is at the heart of Voegelin’s unwillingness to truly grapple with Christianity in History and Order. By the same token, what conservatives want from Christianity is ambiguous. They often want the order, the majesty, the strict moral code—and the Voegelinian alternative to secularism. But it almost never comes with a serious reckoning with Christ’s commitment to the poor and repudiation of worldly power.
In the end, Voegelin gave the conservative movement “Gnosticism.” Most often, its use is simply as cliché. When it’s not, the concept is broad enough to mean whatever contemporary conservatives need it to mean—or, often more importantly, to deny any idea they need to deny—not because it’s internally inconsistent or unsound, but because of the perceived motives of those behind it.
The rally’s headliner was Barry Goldwater, and he hated this excursus enough that he threatened to leave if Bozell didn’t vacate the stage. Bozell recovered by calling for the renewal and eventual triumph of Western civilization, another popular rhetorical theme for conservatives over the decades.
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