**4. Ideology and Belief as Social Construction and the Social Construction of Apocalypse**

The social construction of belief or ideology may therefore be seen through the lens of the sociology of religion—and the social construction of religion. Many religious people see theology as deriving from sacred texts. Many see religious assertions and practices as constructions emerging from social situations. Some look for a combination of the two. An ideology seems to be a person's or group's set of beliefs or assertions as a social construction to serve a theory or practice for the times. Religious tenets may be a combination of revealed theology and the social constructions of religious communities.

A theodicy is a religious account of good and evil that wants to offer a vindication of divine ways. Some ideologies, functioning like theodicies, want to account for difficult realities amidst massive uncertainty in a bewildered age. Recently some ideologies have morphed into conspiracy theories that explain events or situations by invoking sinister and powerful groups bent on evil. To some, these transpositions are no more than outrageous self-serving inventions out of nothing, while to others, they are satisfying explanations of evil and what to do about it, functioning as unifying, if bizarre, grand narratives.

Not every belief arrives as a virgin birth from religion itself. Social construction alludes to constructed beliefs and religious claims from materials at hand that amount to responses to secular ideology, cultural and economic norms, and political actions and processes in a sustained and systematic way. A religious ideology can refer to an entire system of belief or an ephemeral spiritual mood that arises from the times. To call it religious is to claim that it has ultimate grounding or that it participates in an apocalyptic movement—often alluding to what may ensue before Christ returns. Already in the Berkeley 1970s, a common bumper sticker was "Jesus is back, and he's pissed.".

Common themes in conspiracy theories are anti-science, anti-elites, anti-establishment, and anti-globalism. All these may arise during a pandemic to challenge old or new orthodoxies. These narratives are typically stoked by right-wing, often white supremacist political figures. The dictates of science, which are viewed as unreliable or authoritarian, are contrasted with one's own spiritual devotion for providing unseen, and therefore miraculous, protection. Science is seen by some as part of an intellectual elitism that also embraces critical race theory, LGBTQ, and trans movements and is, therefore, to be ignored and denounced. Survey after survey, for example, shows that religious believers identify with Q'Anon somewhat more than others (Cox 2021). The core Q'Anon theory is that of a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic sexual abusers of children operating a global child sex trafficking ring conspired against former U.S. President Donald Trump. Such a stark narrative is at once totally constructed based on prior convictions about a sense of a world in disrepair and, once constructed, further reifies just this worldview.

We may think about some of these recent phenomena that arise as apocalyptic responses to the times from within an increasingly politicized conservative evangelicalism. Reverend Tony Spell, a pastor of Life Tabernacle Church, a Oneness Pentecostal congregation in Baton Rouge, explained his defiance of the Louisiana Governor's order banning meetings of more than fifty people. He said: "It's not a concern. *The virus, we believe, is politically motivated.* We hold our religious rights dear and we are going to assemble no matter what someone says" (Vowell and Foster 2022). About three hundred people gathered on the Tuesday after the ban and over a thousand on the following Sunday. Reverend Spell handed out anointed handkerchiefs, preached against fear, and told his people, who are mostly bussed in from poor regions all around the city, that this was an extreme test of faithfulness brought on by the spirit of the antichrist. While this pastor saw himself as championing "faith over fear", he also provoked a petition calling for his arrest and prosecution for reckless endangerment, signed by over 7000 people. Some found this flirting with endangerment reminiscent of earlier Christian practices in Appalachia, in which members of some Holiness churches saw themselves as proving their faith and celebrating divine love and care by taking poisonous snakes out of their cages and handling

them in an ecstatic trance-like state, thereby taking a serious health risk to demonstrate God's protection.

Likewise, in the June 2022 issue of the *Atlantic,* Tim Alberta wrote about "How politics poisoned the church" (Alberta 2022). Pastor Bill Bolin of Flood Gate Church in Brighton, Michigan, fills each Sunday's worship with 40 minutes of praise music, 40 minutes of preaching, and in-between those two activities, 40 minutes of what he calls his *diatribe.* For a decade, Bolin preached to a crowd of about 100 congregants on a typical Sunday. Then came Easter 2020, when Bolin announced he would hold indoor worship services in defiance of Michigan's emergency shutdown orders. As word spread around the conservative suburbs of Detroit, Bolin became a minor celebrity. Local politicians and activists borrowed his pulpit to promote right-wing interests. Flood Gates' attendance soared as members of other congregations defected to this small roadside church—becoming a community of 1500 people. His themes are the election stolen from Trump and, ominously, hone in on how the left has made a power grab to systematically dismantle religion and banish God from the minds and hearts of believers.

This posture grew from apocalyptic concerns about the rise of secularism and the decline of religion. It was characterized by a faith affiliation that rose in light of politics, concerns about the next election perhaps triggering the nation's demise, with more and more Trumpers self-identifying as evangelicals (rather than the other way around). These movements had already arisen in part from profound distrust of Obama, which took the form of both questioning whether he was American-born and of the spreading rumor that he wore a secret Islamic ring. In response to all this, Pastor Bolin saw himself as the rock star who disobeyed the government. For good and for evil, Pastor Bolin saw the nation moving *from pandemic to endemic.* Radical change, God-pleasing or not, was on the way.

Apocalyptic thought, with a reach back into the Old Testament and continuing into the New Testament, is certainly an attempt to find God amidst the ways of the current perilous times, providing a nomos by delineating for God's people what to expect and how to respond. But both religious and secular observers are likely to see apocalyptic as a social construction in the face of disaster. If the world may be coming to an end or heading for disaster for God's people, then the idea of a *global reset* makes sense. A drastic religious response to COVID-19, or other disasters, is the projected coming of the anti-Christ and a self-conscious call for a complete change of view in the Christian worldview (Hitchcock and Kinley 2022). The apocalyptic preoccupation opens believers' eyes and alerts them to how world leaders are using their own concept of global reset to seize pandemics, natural disasters and catastrophes, civil disorder, political unrest, and other current events to reshape every facet of life—all pointing toward the universal economy and godless global government of the Antichrist. Some look back and wonder if COVID-19 is equivalent to the Biblical Flood (Hever 2021). Others imagine a future with the coming apocalypse (Hitchcock 2020). "After the rapture" is the keynote of others (Jeremiah 2022). Religion, in this respect, poses its own reset to counter an all-embracing secular reset—to keep the secular world from getting away with anything—as when science, and not God, is where one looks in responding to a disaster. COVID-19 is seen as unleashing a cascade of consequences that are now reaching far beyond the pandemic itself. Governments are seen as leveraging the coronavirus and even the vaccine as a power grab, setting the stage for further intrusions in the future. These accelerants are driving the world to the precipice of fundamental, irreversible transformation. The winds of change are blowing. Tectonic shifts are underway at every level.

To the apocalyptic eye, these realities are alarming by themselves. And yet, there remains a still deeper, more sinister agenda embedded within. According to prophecies found in the Bible, a one-world government will indeed emerge in the end times. According to a dominant interpretation of the book of Revelation among evangelical conservatives, a future unified government will encompass the whole earth, and Satan himself will be behind it for the ultimate purpose of ruling over all the earth and being worshipped by its inhabitants. While we are not yet in the end times, we are on the edge of the precipice. In

the ideology of "global reset" readers will discover not only the setting for the end-time scenario prophesied in Scripture but also the cosmic setting for the return of Christ.

To many on the right, being unable by government decree to practice corporate worship seemed catastrophic. Locking church doors meant that religious ritual and online worshippers were not happening in the same space, at the same time, in a way that evoked a sense of community—the very contravention of the *collective effervescence* Durkheim thought was the origin and heart of religion, necessarily including the emotional arousal resulting from an intense form of communal sharing that empowers us and touches us in deep, often implicit ways. Collective effervescence is the basis for Durkheim's theory of religion, as posited in his seminal work *Elementary Forms of Religious Life* (Durkheim 1912). When an entire group gathers together, they can become sacred and experience the transformation through the ritual of the present into the sacred beyond.

From the perspective of the one accustomed to this form of religious expression, forced isolation risks this essential dimension of religion. Although zoom technology arrived in time to meet the new challenge of access, churches found online services a little different from styles of worship with featured performers, particularly those that are heavily sacramental or emphasized an Orthodox physicality in daily ritual. Congregants had cause to ask: could the government be allowed to tamper with such basic religious freedom as coming together regularly? Can science and government constrain what Durkheim thought was the very inner dynamic of religion?
