On the volcanic, sunbaked island of Tanna in Southern Vanuatu, there lives a group of people who worship the British Prince Philip as a deity, even after his death. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip visited Vanuatu in 1974, and the reverence shown to them made a lasting impression. The Yaohnanen tribe has an ancient legend about the pale son of a mountain spirit, and they believe that his spirit will still return to them in some form. They came to believe Philip was this spirit, and would bring great treasures, or cargo, with him due to his connections to colonial power. As a symbol of great colonial power, Prince Philip is worshipped. This remote group is not alone; there have been several other historical cults like this, including a cult on New Hanover Island in Papua New Guinea that worshipped United States President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960’s and 1970’s. This cult even offered the U.S. government $1000 to send Johnson to be installed as their most honored chief.
These curious cults are named cargo cults by anthropologists, due to the expectation of great cargo to arrive from a colonial power. Cargo cults are, at their root, a form of nationalism, that Benedict Anderson defines as “imagined communities.” Cargo cults shape a communal imagination of a group of people in relationship to an outside colonial power. While this term has been seen as outdated, some scholars are reviving it to analyze cultish behavior as it relates to colonial power. Anthropologist Dorothy Billings understands cargo cults as political theater infused with religion, creating a shared reality that is less articulated than it is acted out. Cargo cults are political theater imbued with religion.
Anthropologist Peter Lawrence argues that, “The most obvious signs of a cargo cult’s emergence are generally its devotees’ preparations for the arrival of the goods they expect.” The goods anticipated from a cargo cult are not simply the stereotypical crates long-awaited at a shore or at facsimile airstrips, but also take the form of modern-day military power. This can also be translated into a fear of withdrawal of that military power. Cargo cults are concerned about receiving or maintaining colonial power, which can come in the form of weapons.
Anthropologist Andrew Lattas writes that cargo cults also bear a “mimesis [that] reinvents and transforms both the original and the copy, to make them other than themselves.” This involves a performance of “mimed. . . symbols, discourses, institutions, and practices, but in ways that were oddly out of context.” Cargo cults mimic the colonial culture they worship in ways that are odd and bizarre. In his incredible book Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, Michael Ignatieff writes that “cargo cults are caricatures of their original. Yet caricatures reveal a truth, as fairground mirrors do.” Cargo cults essentially cosplay whatever colonial power they worship.
Finally, cargo cults are millenarian movements. They require a promised future arrival (or return) of a deity, which includes a rapture of the faithful. They narrate, perform, and ritualize this promised redemptive future.
We can condense all these markers of cargo cults to say this: cargo cults involve political theater merged with religious ritual. They involve a fixation upon receiving or maintaining colonial goods or weapons. They embody a bizarre cosplay of colonial power. They promise a millenarian future return of that colonial power and a rapture of the faithful.
Does any of this sound familiar in our United States political climate?
I believe the curious case of cargo cults can shed light on Christian Zionism in the United States. The occupation of Palestinian homelands by the State of Israel is settler colonialism. Israel is a colonial power, a power that is in many ways worshipped by Christian Zionists in the United States. I am not arguing that the United States is a cargo cult for the State of Israel. And yet, there are echoes of the cargo cult in the ways some evangelical Christians in the United States revere and militantly worship the modern State of Israel. We might just find that this somewhat-antiquated idea of the cargo cult can help us begin to better understand Christian Zionism in the United States.
Apocalyptic scholar (yes, that is a thing) Tristan Strum argues, “In the case of U.S. Christian Zionists, they revere, even consecrate, a group of people, Jews, with whom they do not and cannot belong, and a territorial state, Israel, they usually cannot gain citizenship from. This nationalism is religious at its core, sprung from a set of interpretations of the Bible that identifies the Jewish return to Israel as a prophetic sign of the imminence of the Apocalypse. This is religion as nationalism. For Christian Zionists, it is U.S. politics that functions for their theological interest to serve God’s covenantal destiny. This is true even when at the expense of all other geopolitical considerations, their fellow Christians, and the United States itself. Christian Zionists are religious nationalists par excellence.” Christian Zionism is the poster child of Christian nationalism.
This essay was born from my viewing of the 2020 film ‘Til Kingdom Come. It tells the story of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ), through which evangelical Christians in a Kentucky church support the State of Israel. They do this in order to usher in the Second Coming of Christ and the rapture of the faithful. As I watched this documentary, I kept hearing cargo cult echo in my mind. When this group of militantly evangelical Christians paid money they did not have to support the colonial power of the Israel Defense Forces in the West Bank, I heard cargo cult.
When I watched their millenarian theology of dispensationalism justify any means to achieve Israeli settlements for the sake of Jesus Christ, I heard cargo cult. When I heard Boyd Bingham IV, one of the pastors of that church, claim that “Palestinians don’t exist” right after meeting a Palestinian Christian pastor, I heard cargo cult. When I watched the Jewish director of the IFCJ, Jael Eckstein, attend a Christian worship service where the Star of David was transposed over the cross, with a menorah as decoration, I saw her discomfort at this cosplay of Jewishness in a Christian setting. In the bizarre mimicry of Jewish identity, all the while denouncing Jews as not-quite-saved, cargo cult all but shouted in my ears.
Is this form of United States Christian Zionism unequivocally a cargo cult for the State of Israel’s colonial power? Probably not. I don’t think they map onto one another perfectly. But isn’t there something of the cargo cult happening here? Isn’t there an echo that can teach us how cultish behavior can be entangled with religion and colonial power?
I believe this helps us see Christian Zionism less as a faceless monolithic terror in our time and more as a collective cultic (and deadly) delusion by humans who are worshipping colonial power. Delusions can be dispelled. Cultic brainwashing can be deprogrammed. Political theater can be named for the funhouse mirror it is, and we can begin to see the truth behind the playacting of Israeli Jewishness by evangelical Christians in the United States. Perhaps beneath the cosplay, they are terrified of feeling powerless to effect the return of Jesus Christ that they believe will bring them great power. Perhaps they are even subconsciously terrified of being victim to the nuclear might of the Israeli military themselves. And so they worship it. But something that is worshipped can be cast down. Idols can fall, including the idol of Christian Zionism.
Because when Jesus does return, it will not be with a cargo cache of weapons, and it will not be in an occupied land with divine colonial power. The time and manner of his return is not up to us; Jesus was very clear on this.
I believe when Jesus does come, in the manner and time of his choosing, he will bring compassion and collective healing in his wake. We do not look to the skies or to the blood-soaked earth of Palestinian lands to divine or effect the moment of Jesus’ return. We open our eyes now. We break the collective cultic delusion by recognizing Jesus breaking in here and now, as he leads us to tear down idols of colonial power, Zionism and nationalism. And finally, we begin to see the long-awaited truth of what we have been all along: human beings made in God’s image; precious cargo, to be treated with care.
Rev. Whitney Wilkinson Arreche, ThD, is a pastor and public theologian wondering at the intersections of theology, race, power, and language. She is a Presbyterian minister serving as Pastor of Emmanuel Presbyterian Church in Bedford, Texas, and has also served churches in Northern Ireland and North Carolina. She received her ThD from Duke Divinity School in 2022. She has written for Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, The Christian Century, The Presbyterian Outlook, Political Theology Network, and contributed to Confronting Racism and White Supremacy in the US: 21st Century Theological Perspectives and Liberating Church: A Hush Harbor Manifesto. She enjoys solo church pastoring, reading, spending time with her spouse and dog, and drinking too much coffee. Her website is whitneywilkinsonarreche.com.
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