Anamnesis
One of the slogans of the 2020 Trump re-election campaign was “promises made, promises kept.” It was an audacious slogan, given the administration’s track record. The perpetually promised-and-delayed “infrastructure week” had become a running joke. The border wall had never materialized. Obamacare was never repealed or replaced. Aside from gutting the EPA and achieving a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, I’m not sure which promises made were actually kept by the Trump administration.
But, incredibly, people believed the slogan. I watched a ton of interview footage from Trump rallies in which supporters affirmed that Trump was a man who kept his promises, explained that he was the only President since whoever to have achieved what he set out to achieve, and espoused belief in a secret plan overcome whatever real or imaginary obstacles remained in the path toward “greatness.”
I’ve been thinking lately about the mindset that makes it possible for people to believe something like “promises made, promises kept,” and how it shows up elsewhere in life. It’s a common for cultists to convince themselves, in the face of any negative evidence about their leader, that it’s all either a misunderstanding, a malicious misrepresentation of the facts, or part of some plan of the leader’s own devising which has yet to bear fruit or reveal itself. One might call this habit of mind a belief in providence, but it’s bigger than that.
There’s something peculiar about the way such people relate to their own memories that differs from merely trusting that some authority figure has everything under control. It’s not just a sense of docility; it’s an active willingness to obscure or elide awareness of contrary facts and information. It’s the habit of only remembering things that confirm one’s faith in the authority, and bracketing everything else.
It calls to mind one of the most widely used Marian prayers, the Memorare:
Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thine intercession was left unaided. Inspired by this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, my mother; to thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in they mercy hear and answer me. Amen.
The prayer doesn’t really invite scrutiny. It makes a flat assertion. No one who has ever gone to Mary for help was left unaided. The thing is, if one is praying this prayer, chances are one has some intention in mind. And so the next time one prays it, if one has the wherewithal to pause in the midst of one’s pious thoughts, it’s possible to ask whether last time you were aided in your petition—whether in fact the confidence you placed in Mary was merited.
This is where the usual mental runaround applied to petitionary prayer comes in. The Memorare is vague—the phrase “left unaided” sets an arbitrarily low bar. You were praying for help overcoming some spiritual or emotional struggle? You asked for a cure for a sick family member? You prayed for consolation? Well, even if none of those things were provided, chances are you were helped in some way. I mean, between then and now your legs could have been broken, or you could have lost an eye. You could have been hit by a car! That didn’t happen, so I guess in some unknowable way the prayer can still be true. “Never was it known” indeed.
But “never was it known” gets heavier and heavier over time. What if you’re praying for the same thing for years, and you never receive perceivable aid? It’s hard to maintain the illusion. It’s hard to keep believing the pious assertion that Mary is guaranteed to help. It becomes gradually clearer that this way of thinking is aspirational hokum without anything really backing it beyond some miracle stories and apparitions that feel like pious legends.
Nevertheless, many persist in believing such things. What’s funny is how similar the religious and non-religious expressions of this tendency are to each other. In the post-election insanity of 2020-21, a large portion of Trump’s political supporters drifted fully into QAnon-based conspiracy theories. There was wave after wave of assurances and predictions. The phrase “trust the plan” became commonplace. Trump was going to call in the national guard. Trump was going to overthrow the “deep state” and return triumphant to the White House. Somehow he was still pulling the strings, even after Biden took office. He still had the nuclear codes! At one point a crowd of thousands gathered at the grassy knoll in Dallas to witness Trump’s re-inauguration by a resurrected John F. Kennedy, Jr.
Such blessed assurance!
The Catholic analogues are too easy to point out: In the early years of the current pontificate, hundreds of articles were written by Catholic journalists explaining that the collapse of orthodox discipline in the upper tiers of the Catholic hierarchy was illusory. Somehow Pope Francis had a plan. He was drawing the heretics out of hiding. He was pulling off a daring gambit for the sake of evangelism. He was secretly, profoundly, on track with the restoration of traditional Catholicism and catholic discipline. Every particular contrary fact had an explanation, a rationalization. The interviews he gave with Eugenio Scalfari? Those were all misreported. Those things he said on the airplane? Fake news! Media spin!
No individual fact is strong enough to counter a conviction one needs to hold onto. And, just as with Trump’s loss and the Q theorists, when that conviction became too difficult for Conservative catholics to sustain, they resorted to darker and more bizarre conspiracy theories to explain what was “really” going on. Taylor Marshall is a perfect illustration of this. Ten years ago he was a milquetoast blogger writing catechetical essays in the style of Jimmy Akin. Today he’s the Catholic version of Alex Jones. A number of people I once knew to be sane and level headed went a similar route. When presented with a choice between giving up their conviction in the providential workings of the system and devising increasingly paranoid theories about reality, they took the second option and never looked back.
Here’s the deal, though. It is entirely possible to see through this stuff if you loosen your ideological grip enough to allow the facts in for a moment. The Memorare says “never was it known.” Well, actually, it was known. It is known. The evidence that prayers to Mary on balance do absolutely nothing is overwhelming. All you have to do is bother remembering what’s actually happening in your life, and keep a loose mental record of things you’ve prayed for. Similarly all the Q believers had to do to wake up from their delusions was bother remembering how many times “the plan” involved specific predictions and guarantees which came to nothing. In reality this stuff is pretty falsifiable, if you allow yourself to check.
Once you bother reckoning with the facts and realize that the convictions you’ve been holding on to so tightly really don’t hold water, it becomes clear that you were deceived. But who really did the lying? Sure, the people who fed you these delusions lied to you. The priest who taught you the Memorare. The friar who inducted you into the Angelic Warfare Confraternity. The teacher who gave you a miraculous medal. The friend who told you to pray that novena. Jesus when he made all those crazy promises in the gospels. None of it was true. Infrastructure week never happened. You were being strung along.
But over the long run, who really did the lying? Who knew that it was all false and went on asserting it anyway? The answer isn’t complete without acknowledging that I myself was an agent in the deception. In the face of such absurdity, such bold and flagrant dishonesty, I, the one chose not to believe my own memory, who chose to bracket the evidence of experience week after week, year after year, I am the one who lied to myself. And I did it because I needed the lies to be true, because I was afraid of the consequences of their being false. I did it because I didn’t want to let go of the cocoon of order and intelligibility they provided me, and because somehow they formed part of a bedrock assumption about who I am and how the world works.
So if one is going to start pointing fingers at clergy and catechists for lying, one should also point the finger at oneself. But pointing fingers isn’t generally very helpful. Instead, what’s helpful is trying to understand how this system of self-deception works.
This theme of memory, conviction, and deception relates to one of the original core rituals of Christianity: the act of anamnesis. Christians gather to remember the presence of Christ among us, to recount his deeds, his teachings, his sacrifice. Core to that idea of collective remembering is the giving of testimony—Christians telling each other the stories of how Christ met them, how their problems were solved, how they found forgiveness and redemption in the blood of the lamb. Growing up in the evangelical world, the sharing of testimonies was a core ritual of christian gatherings. It exists, as far as I can tell, in all Christian denominations, because the testimony of converts is a way to reaffirm the faith of the community that their beliefs are true, that Jesus makes a difference in people’s lives, and that their way of living is superior to the alternatives.
But just as in the cases already discussed, Christian anamnesis is always haunted by the necessity of forgetting. Conversion narratives necessarily elide the difficulties, the failures that come with one’s “new life” in Christ, the extent to which that new life is often barely different from the old.
And reaching further back, into Scripture, Christian anamnesis engages in a great deal of forgetting there as well. For every Old Testament prophecy that’s been assigned an interpretation related to Christ’s advent and passion, there are a dozen disregarded passages with no accepted meaning or significance at all. For every Christological allegory in the pentateuch there are a dozen stories with no messianic horizon at all. For every instance of moral wisdom and divine illumination, there is some other story that glorifies brutality and treats humans as faithless vermin at the mercy of a fickle god.
Myth-making happens in part by eliding the inconvenient facts in favor of some more meaningful, more harmonious account of things. Christian anamnesis thrives on forgetfulness, achieved not directly by denying the truth, but indirectly, by constantly asserting universals without any regard for contrary facts. And what’s interesting is how this ritual of half-remembering is sustained—not just as an individual activity, but as a collective discourse. It’s not that there is some central committee devising the lies we all tell ourselves and each other about all this stuff. Together we participate in the act of selectively remembering what fits, and forgetting the rest.
The result is that, extraordinarily, we end up believing that infrastructure week did happen, that it was a huge success, that Mary answered all our prayers abundantly, and Jesus kept all his promises. It is by collectively remembering these falsehoods over and over that we forget all the little facts and experiences that render them absurd.