In many ways, the United States was founded by what current Americans might call a cult. The Puritans were a radical, high-control group with doomsday beliefs, a fact we rarely acknowledge. The group’s apocalyptic ideology never left us but became a foundation of American culture. The doomsday thinking of our founders has been more blatant than latent during certain movements in American history. It’s flaring now, in Donald Trump’s America, among a populace that craves an autocratic punisher, openly worships the wealthy, and easily succumbs to us-versus-them thinking—just as the Puritans and Pilgrims did. People often ask “how we got here” as a nation. The answer, as I argue in my forthcoming book, Cults Like Us, is the Mayflower and the Arabella.

The Pilgrims and Puritans eagerly awaited the end of the world, when the chosen would be saved and everyone else damned. So common was the expectation that kids recited lines from “The Day of Doom,” a long-form poem by the pastor Michael Wigglesworth that catalogs Judgment Day—when Jesus swipes everyone left or right—in gory, exhaustive detail. Published in 1662, it’s a cosmic middle finger to the masses presumed damned. New Englanders loved it. It’s been called America’s first bestseller.

This, after 363 years, is still America’s favorite narrative: An Edenic community is threatened by some evil, which law enforcement and government are either powerless or unwilling to stop, until an outsider arrives to rescue the community—through righteous, cleansing violence. That storyline eventually developed into the Western genre and comic books, and today undergirds superhero films. Ultimately, it traces back to the Puritan obsession with the biblical Book of Revelation. In most of the New Testament, Jesus is a gentle lamb. Yes, he knocks over the temple tables, but usually it’s, Bring me the children and Don’t stone cheating wives. In Revelation, he (the sacrificial lamb) appears out of nowhere to initiate merciless violence, eventually leading to the deaths of so many wicked that their blood creates a river flowing as high as a horse’s bridle for 200 miles.

Several real-life Americans have played the starring vigilante role in this narrative—think Oliver North and Kyle Rittenhouse—and they’ve always found a fawning audience. Trump often described the 2024 election as “our final battle,” an undeniable reference to Armageddon, whether he was cognizant of it or not. Adjacent to Armageddon are purgings, and Trump’s countless promises to root out so-called enemies of the state have long been a rallying cry among followers, from the 2016 “Lock her up!” chants regarding Hillary Clinton to his 2024 promises of mass deportations on “day one.”

Americans want to see the bloodshed. But in order to truly enjoy it, we need to believe the doomed are culpable—we’re a culture of righteous, not wanton, punishment. Still, it doesn’t take much to convince us: In response to massive cuts to the federal workforce, reporters asked Trump if he felt any responsibility toward the damned, and he basically said they deserved it. “Many of them don’t work at all,” he argued, without evidence. “Many of them never showed up to work.”

The purging of the wicked in Revelation relies on help from deputies: a variety of mafioso-type angels and locusts with human faces and women’s hair who are ordered to torture anyone lacking God’s seal. Today, the seal-less appear to be immigrants (or, in Trump tongue, “criminals” and “rapists”) as well as Trump’s Democratic and liberal opponents, i.e., “the deep state.” Trump relies on locusts too: Lackeys such as James McHenry, Emil Bove, and “Eagle” Ed Martin have fired numerous officials who worked on January 6 cases and criminal investigations into Trump. “We [will] come back and prosecute every single one of them for continuing the criminal conspiracy that they started from Russiagate,” recently installed FBI director Kash Patel warned in a 2023 interview, making a hard distinction between the sinners and the saved. “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media,” he added in a separate interview that same year. “We’re going to come after you.”

Meanwhile, actions taken by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of government workers, part of the careless “cost cutting” endeavor visually embodied by the gilded chain saw Elon Musk brandished at CPAC. DOGE has targeted those whom the far right maligns as “unelected” and “unaccountable” government operatives, who wield, they say, incredible and biased power in the shadows—an ironic description because it can be more aptly applied to Musk.

As for the chosen being saved, Trump pardoned, dismissed the cases of, or commuted the sentences of more than 1,500 January 6 participants charged with crimes, including assault. During his first term, he pardoned his pals Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn, along with multiple former Republican Congress members convicted on a variety of charges.

Those who cheer our president ultimately crave an autocrat, which results in part from that favorite Puritan narrative of rescue and punishment. Scholars Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence previously argued that this “monomyth,” as they called it, subconsciously encouraged the public to forgo the messy, laborious, and painstaking process of democratic cooperation and compromise—and instead wait for a superhero, who would be granted unlimited, unchecked power. (When parents complain that comics rot their kids’ brains, they’re actually kind of right.)

Polling of GOP caucusgoers in 2023 determined that Trump’s most autocratic statements made some voters more likely to support him. Since taking office this year, Trump has referred to himself on social media as “the king,” a status the Supreme Court has all but conferred on him, and has repeatedly floated the idea of a third term, which would violate the Constitution. In 2016, Trump spoke of a nation under various threats and said, “I alone can fix it.”

Yes, now the fix is in, but it’s not the one his working-class followers might have expected. DOGE claims to be saving money, but other funds are earmarked for the wealthy via tax cuts. Trump’s endorsed budget plan includes $1.1 trillion in tax cuts for the top 1%—the combined amount that the plan instructs the Energy and Commerce Committee and the Agriculture Committee to slash, with the cuts expected to mainly affect Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). This is America, a plutocratic oligarchy run by a small number of rich people—for their benefit.

We’ve arrived at this sad state of affairs because our Puritan roots have primed us to equate the number in a person’s bank account with their moral character. The Pilgrims and Puritans deemed hard work a foundational way to glorify God. Since money is a natural outcome of hard work, striving for wealth itself eventually became expected. The richer you got, the more evidence that you loved God—and the more he rewarded you in turn. These religious beliefs created an economic engine that propelled New England to dominate Atlantic trade, and that still has us reasoning that the rich deserve their wealth, no matter how it’s generated.

So, if the wealthy are righteous, then the poor must be sinners. This corollary has inclined Americans to assume for centuries that the impoverished deserve to struggle. We’ve been conditioned, through us-versus-them thinking, to believe that if someone falls below the poverty line, they’ve chosen to be poor by not working more. If that’s not true, then why do welfare-reform initiatives so often require recipients of government assistance to be employed in order to receive benefits?

Unfortunately, welfare-to-work programs are ineffective. A 2016 study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that “such requirements do little to reduce poverty and, in some cases, push families deeper into it.” Even so, the poor are routinely blamed for their own situation by Republicans. “Get off the couch,” said one congressman during a recent Fox Business spot. “Stop buying the medical marijuana and watching television. You’re gonna actually contribute now.”

Us-versus-them thinking is a hallmark of not only Puritan thought but also all cult-like movements. In fact, it’s baked into us as a species. Research suggests that humans shot to the top of the food chain by learning to cooperate—specifically via intergroup competition, which often occurred in the form of fighting off or conquering outsiders. Today, us-versus-them thinking still triggers us for battle, a reality Trump easily exploits by fashioning out-groups and suggesting they pose a threat. The Puritans’ “them” was Catholicism. If Protestantism was the true religion—that much was assumed—then whoever opposed Protestantism opposed God. Therefore, they reasoned, the Catholic Church was Babylon, the prophesied evil geopolitical power; the pope was the vague and shadowy Antichrist figure; both were being led by the devil; and soon this would all culminate in a fiery, world-ending battle, with the in-group emerging victorious.

In addition to scapegoating immigrants and the trans community, Trump, his Cabinet, and his supporters have methodically weaponized diversity, equity, and inclusion. DEI has become such a facile bogeyman that the far right will seemingly lob it at anything, including DC’s midair collision in January, which resulted in the deaths of 67 people. During Los Angeles’s deadly wildfires in January, Musk circulated photos of a years-old “racial equity action plan” from the Los Angeles Fire Department, writing, “They prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes.”

When in-groups are pitted against out-groups, both become isolated. Isolated groups inevitably trend toward violence, the result of losing social feedback, suffering from groupthink, and becoming prone to shared psychosis (i.e., hysteria). The Puritans, at least, did not avoid this trajectory. Some scholars believe the Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693 developed specifically in response to strict and isolating patriarchal structures. First, these radicals left England in order to live in seclusion beyond society. Then, over the decades, church magistrates increasingly tightened their grip on power by closely regulating who was and wasn’t allowed inside.

Consider the case of Anne Hutchinson, a radical Puritan who dared to criticize church leaders and be charismatic enough to recruit others to her position. The magistrates responded in force. They tried, convicted, and banished her (see: Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger); the practice of questions and comments following sermons was cut (see: the GOP’s insistence on forgoing town halls); and they forbade any town from accepting strangers unless or until those strangers had been vetted by council members or magistrates (see: Trump’s immigration platform). Finally, over the years, they made it increasingly difficult even for community members to gain entry into the church (sounds like Trump’s policy on birthright citizenship). Out of a paranoid belief that just about everyone was out to get them, Puritan leaders ultimately made dissent impossible and, as a result, isolated themselves more than moving across an ocean already had.

In the Salem hysteria, 19 were hanged, one was pressed to death with stones, and at least five died in custody. Americans aren’t pressed to death today, but other forms of outré violence have been increasing: In 2020 domestic terrorism reportedly saw a 244% increase from 2019 and a 275% increase from 2017. The US was home to 1,221 active hate and anti-government extremist groups in 2021; by 2023, that number was 1,430. Since Trump’s recent January 6 pardons, the previously quieted online spaces home to far-right extremism have, per USA Today, “come roaring back to life.”

Violence typically develops just before a high-control group expires. It is not a coincidence, in my opinion, that the witch trials in Salem occurred around the time the Puritan experiment in Massachusetts ended. England had revoked and replaced the colony’s original charter just years earlier. In a few more years, the Puritans would blend in with the larger British colonial culture. As America trends ever closer to autocracy, and exhibits more and more hallmarks of high-control groups—including violent acts against its own members—you have to wonder: Is our own experiment reaching its conclusion?