The argument that “the Progressive Left has developed a new pagan religion complete with all the trappings” is hardly new. But Erickson goes a step further by name-dropping an actual theological term of art: Gnosticism, a label applied to a heretical movement that found itself in conflict with the early Church. Gnostics are usually taken to have believed that the material universe is unbearably corrupt, and that salvation from it is possible only through the acquisition of esoteric knowledge—gnosis in Greek. The intricacies are probably best left to religious scholars. That’s why it’s so curious that the term has featured so prominently in conservative intellectual discourse going back to the early years of the Cold War.
For example, Gnosticism appears in an early issue of the foundational conservative magazine, National Review. In 1957, the Catholic scholar Frederick Wilhelmsen claimed an enervating Gnosticism “has worked its poison into the blood of our body politic,” preventing us “from acting today with that vigor which has ever marked the American character.” Wilhelmsen did not lack salient examples. His big one was President Dwight Eisenhower’s refusal to support the Hungarian uprising in 1956—the “most apt symbol” of this “Gnostic mist” of do-nothing amiability. Wilhelmsen’s use of Gnosticism might seem a bit strange compared with later uses, but that’s often how it goes for rhetorical innovators.
A year later, National Review’s in-house ideologist, Frank Meyer, drew on the concepts of both Gnosticism and James Burnham’s “managerial revolution” to explain why “Communism and collectivist Liberalism are both expressions of one world-wide revolution.”
In 1962, in front of 18,000 young conservatives at Madison Square Garden, another National Review alum, L. Brent Bozell, diagnosed a despair at the heart of modern liberalism. “Liberalism is anchored to the ancient heresy of gnosticism with its belief that the salvation of man and of society can be accomplished on this earth,“ Bozell droned. Even if nominally opposed to communism, liberals were united with Communists by an underlying Gnostic faith. And they were beginning to recognize that if the Gnostic dream were to triumph, it would be in Communist form. Hence the liberal neurosis.
These are grand (and grandiose) arguments, sweeping in their scope, perilous in their depths. Gnosticism was becoming a vehicle for delivering a metaphysical payload over an enemy’s political positions. It engaged the attentions of religious audiences in new ways, reinforcing their sense of the spiritual hazards of liberal politics.
Each of these conservative writers who deployed the term in their work eagerly acknowledged the source that first delivered it to them: Eric Voegelin.