Fantasyland

A perceptive primer that helpfully establishes the credulous cultural and historical backdrop of atheism in America.

• “mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.” 

• the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty."

• “The disagreements dividing Protestants from Catholics were about the internal consistency of the magical rules within their common fantasy scheme.”
• “When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn’t mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: “We forgot.” 
• “A MAIN ARGUMENT of this book concerns how so many parts of American life have morphed into forms of entertainment. From 1980 to the end of the century, that tendency reached a tipping point in politics and the political discourse.”