In the Christian imagination, the hardship and suffering that human beings endure is seldom the result of bad luck, natural calamity, ignorance, or the folly of imperfect human beings. It is a function of intentionally malign forces and diabolical conspiracies inspired by the Devil. The only consolation is that Satan is destined to be defeated in the final battle of good against evil, as prophesied in the final book of the Bible—The Revelation of St. John the Divine.

The QAnon phenomenon is a case of political theology—the migration of religious ideas into the political domain. QAnon is eerily familiar because it echoes the Revelation, where the world is divided into forces of good arrayed against forces of evil. On one side is Satan, whose allies are the unbelievers, murderers, whoremongers, liars, idolaters, and the “great whore of Babylon.” On the other side is the heavenly City of God, with his angels, the woman who gave birth to the “man child” whose blood paid the wages of sin, and the faithful who follow the Lord’s commandments. The evangel assures the faithful that Satan will be defeated in the final battle of Armageddon. When the blessed day arrives, an angel will come down from heaven with a chain and a key to the bottomless pit where the Devil will be bound for a thousand years—hence the happy millennium at the end of history, before the end of the world and the final judgment. The whole project requires collaboration between the divine and the human. God needs an army to win this war. “Onward Christian soldiers!”

For St. Augustine and the Church, the defeat of evil will be a preternatural event at the end of the world. It will require no human participation. There will be no earthly millennium. The latter is a metaphorical description of life in this world, where the Devil is mostly bound. If God had let the Devil roam free, most believers would have been doomed. The radical Protestants who settled North America were not satisfied with this interpretation. They understood the millennium as an earthly utopia. War and poverty would end, justice would prevail, and Christians would rule.

This picture of the world is echoed in the QAnon phenomenon. QAnon followers believe that an international liberal cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles controls the global levers of power. This global child-trafficking operation involves the torture, rape, and murder of children whose blood these celebrities drink for their enjoyment or longevity. At the helm of this godless liberal conspiracy are the prominent Democrats that Donald Trump demonized: Hilary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, George Soros, and Anderson Cooper. Accordingly, QAnon supporters carried signs saying “Save the Children” and “End Pedophilia.”

Thanks to Paula White, it was not hard for Trump to galvanize the righteous anger of followers who believed that political foes were satanic forces. The televangelist has been Trump’s spiritual advisor since 2002. She is famous for speaking in tongues and commanding “all satanic pregnancies to abort.” She made millions detecting demons and offering various degrees of protection for a fee. Accordingly, all of Trump’s speeches had but one purpose: to name the demonic enemy. Imagine “Crazy Nancy” or “Crooked Hilary” as the great whore of Babylon, arrayed in purple and decked with gold and precious stones, sitting on the “scarlet colored beast with seven heads and seven horns” (Revelation 17:3–4).

Because God needs an army to defeat evil, Trump’s supporters understood that they were being called to a jihad. January 6, 2021, would be the day of reckoning when the corrupt government of Democrats and treasonous Republicans would be replaced by Trump’s military rule. This great day would be immediately followed by public executions, because “God needs to vent his wrath on the fornications of Babylon, whose children are drunk with the blood of the saints and the martyrs of Jesus” (Revelation 17:6). Drinking blood and consorting with Satan seem to be distinctive attributes of evil in the Christian imagination. The medieval Church leveled the same accusations against Jews.

The question is: Why? Why would wealthy, well-educated stalwarts of society worship Satan and drink the blood of children? The answer lies in Christianity’s flawed understanding of evil. In the Bible, Satan was an angel of God, but for no reason whatsoever, he rebelled against God and was expelled from heaven along with other rebel angels. The revolt had no purpose; it was not a means to some desirable end. It was irrational, incomprehensible, and gratuitous.

This conception of evil is not plausible. If it were, then detectives would be unable to solve crimes, because crimes are almost invariably in pursuit of some recognizable good or other, including revenge. In André Gide’s novel The Immoralist, the protagonist decides to commit a crime for no reason at all. He pushes a man he does not know off a moving train. The police find the dead man with a lot of money in his coat pocket. So they eliminate robbery as a motive, but they cannot solve the crime, because the attack was totally unprovoked. A crime that is an end in itself is anomalous; in the Christian imagination, it is the paradigm of criminality. This grotesque view of evil accomplishes one thing: it inspires rage. We saw that rage in the demeanor of the protesters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

People who believe that hideously unfathomable wickedness governs the world naturally long for deliverance. Q is an internet troll, a fraud, or a psychopath posing as a prophet of the apocalypse. QAnon believers think he is a spirit or a government employee with inside information. Accordingly, he provides clues, or “Q drops,” signaling the day of deliverance. When Joseph Biden was inaugurated, the date was changed. The church has employed the same tactic when the redemption that Jesus foretold did not happen in the lives of the disciples (Mathew 24:34; Luke 21:32).

When Biden signed seventeen executive orders on his first day in office, something did not add up. Q is the seventeenth letter in the alphabet! Could it be that Q sent him? This dangerous nonsense is the result of the penetration of a religion of expectation and transfiguration into domestic politics.