Figures, features, fundamentals

The individuals in this group are not formally affiliated, but rather coalesce around certain online and offline platforms and write on shared themes and concerns (biblical prophecy, transhumanism, ufology, New Age spirituality, alternative history, conspiracy theory, and emerging technoscience broadly). Formerly congregating on the now defunct Raiders News Network (raidersnewsupdate.com), run by evangelical survivalist Thomas Horn, their primary hubs at present are SkyWatchTV (skywatchtv.com), coordinated by Derek Gilbert, and Prophecy in the News (prophecyinthenews.com), founded by Baptist minister J. R. Church. The group's print works are mostly published through Horn's independent publishing house, Defender, and since 2012 they have helped coordinate an annual 1,000‐ticket event, the Pike's Peak Prophecy Summit, at Colorado Springs, Colorado. Because of their shared platforms and themes but lack of strict formal organizational affiliation, I have elected to refer to this group as a “milieu.”

Horn is a pivotal figure in this milieu. Styling himself as “one of the most (if not the most) publically‐recognized [sic] Christian critics of transhumanism with a belief in prophecy” (, 3), Horn is the author or co‐author of multiple books, prefaces, and introductions, editor of three essay collections, and features in several documentary‐style DVDs on transhumanism viewed through his idiosyncratic demonology, which maintains that emerging technoscience will be used to create demonic angel‐human‐animal‐plant hybrids, or “Nephilim” (Horn , 194). While such oddities might cast Horn as marginal, he has been featured heavily on popular right‐wing conspiracist website WorldNetDaily (wnd.com), and has close ties to other parts of the Christian right through his ally Chuck Missler, serving as faculty at Missler's Koinonia Institute, a “non‐denominational but decidedly fundamental” religious school aimed at “training and equipping the serious Christian to sojourn in today's world” (Koinonia Institute , 3, 7).

Like many fundamentalists, Horn's milieu exhibits the dual tendency towards a belief in the Bible's inerrancy and divine inspiration and a (sometimes contrary) commitment to demonstrate that inerrancy empirically by comparison with historical and contemporary evidences (Harris , 15). This tendency, Matthew Avery Sutton notes, was influenced by the Baconian unity of faith and science. It treats “the Bible like a series of propositions that when properly arranged and classified unveil[s] the plan of the ages,” which is mapped onto and supplemented by material reality (2014, 15–16). This interplay of text and context is present throughout the milieu's works, which are conditioned by another, more specific hermeneutics. Both Missler and Horn, and the other members of the milieu, are part of the broader current of “Third Wave” spiritual warfare, a neo‐charismatic paradigm with dominionist influences that emerged in the 1980s and has become influential across the spectrum of conservative evangelicalism in the United States (see Holvast ; Warren ). Drawing on the biblical image of the holy warrior, this paradigm constructs a worldview in which the spiritual (heavenly) and material (earthly) worlds act as intertwined battlefields in a cosmic struggle for the human soul, one waged against Satan, who “has amassed an army of evil spirits that he is using to attack and demonize humans in an effort to win their souls for hell” (McCloud , 170). Analyzing spiritual warfare discourses in the United States, Sean McCloud argues that spiritual warriors use “a ‘supernatural’ hermeneutics of suspicion.” This model contests materialist hermeneutics of suspicion by identifying not economics or psychology as the bases of existence but the conflicts of unseen (angelic and demonic) entities, for which the struggles and exigencies of everyday life are mere superstructures (McCloud , 62, 115).

A clear example of this hermeneutics can be discerned in Horn's discussion of the causes and ends of radical enhancement. In his Zenith 2016 (, 261–70), Horn discusses the “Heaven” and “Hell” scenarios of human enhancement, drawing on Joel Garreau's Radical Evolution () and Francis Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future (). Characterizing Garreau's utopic “Heaven” scenario as naïve and delusional, Horn then outlines a number of hellish outcomes shared by more secular or less apocalyptically minded bioconservatives—that it will magnify inequality or produce full‐scale “race wars” between enhanced and unenhanced humans, or simply unleash death on a scale heretofore unfathomable (see Agar ). Horn then exposes the foundations of his hermeneutics by remarking that “the spirit behind the transhumanist nightmare will put the ‘hell’ in ‘hell scenario’ sooner than most comprehend” (Horn , 270). For Horn and others in his milieu, this “hell scenario” is not merely a or even the logical outcome of enhancement but an outcome that has been orchestrated by a spiritual hand.

War of the worldviews

For the milieu, this outcome has been a long time coming, and the secularization of science, and Western society broadly, is central to its actualization. In a lengthy 2006 blog post, for example, Philip Collins sketches the following interpretation of history to explain religious resemblances in secular ideologies:

Historically, humanity has divided somewhat evenly into two diametrically opposed camps: those who subscribe to a spiritual, theistic Weltanschauung and those who do not… [T]he anti‐theistic and anti‐spiritual Weltanschauung adamantly opposes most, if not all, religions. However, most contemporary movements that have ostensibly eschewed a spiritual outlook have sociologically behaved like religions… How does one explain this paradox? It is this researcher's contention that the anti‐theistic and anti‐spiritual Weltanschauung was spawned by an older religion. This religion is purely occult in character and… remains deeply embedded within the ostensibly secular mind. (2006)

Collins is no longer in Horn's immediate circle, although he and his brother, Paul, were once both “regular contributors” to Horn's Raiders News Network (Collins and Collins ). However, the scenario outlined above reflects the milieu's core beliefs: history is seen as a site of dualistic struggle between incommensurable forces, one theistic and spiritual—and thus godly—the other atheistic and material—and thus satanic (see Hamp ; Horn ; Quayle ; McGuire and Anderson ). Modern secularism is figured as a variant of the latter. Perhaps unexpectedly, Collins identifies traces of “religion” in these secularized paradigms, resolving this conundrum by identifying secularism as a form of a religion: an older, “purely occult” system from which modern secularism emerges.

Collins () identifies the occult religion he views as the heart of secularism as the “religion of man” (hereafter, RoM), a term that is also deployed by fellow anti‐transhumanist evangelical Carl Teichrib (, 299). While this specific term is not always deployed—Horn, for example, uses “Promethean faith” (, 69), and Sharon Gilbert speaks of the “Dragon's dream” (, 357)—RoM encapsulates a number of features evoked by the milieu, serving as shorthand for an anthropocentric rather than theocentric worldview that aims to improve human life not through reliance on the divine but the work of human hands. RoM echoes a Baconian notion of dominion—in which humanity “compels” creation “to serve the purposes of human life”—but shorn of Christian trappings. The secularization of modern Western science is seen as a core element of RoM. In The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship (), for example, the Collins brothers frame RoM as central to a transhistorical “conspiracy of knowledge,” one waging a war of ideas by corrupting science—“initially a God‐given instrument for the broadening of human understanding”—in order to fulfil “the recreation of man in the image of their god” (, 2). For the milieu, the “god” alluded to here is Satan, viewed as an entity that (under many names) has orchestrated diverse systems of thought in religio‐political contexts ranging from ancient Sumer to the Global War on Terror (Horn , 29–40, 161–65).

The tenets of RoM are seen by the milieu as the heart of Satan's multifarious systems, which in the present include current and emerging science and technologies, secular humanisms, and contemporary spiritualities. Beyond secularizing science, key historic elements of RoM include the revolutionary political ideologies of Europe (notably France) and America. While these phenomena might seem disparate, in their construction by the milieu they share both a common feature—an idea of progress, evolution, or transformation—and a common source—Satan. Analyzed in the context of the milieu's demonologies, what emerges is a general demonology of becoming, a conceptual framework in which becoming other (from an original, God‐given state of being) is seen as becoming demonic. It is to this demonology that I now turn.

The Fall as evolutionary impetus

The foundational attribute of RoM is its championing of human artifice over divine nature. This leads to an emphasis on materiality and construction. Noting that Babel was “representative of Man's power via a unified objective,” Teichrib continues that “false religion—the abandonment of the true Yahweh for an alternative—is frequently accompanied by a tangible edifice or system” (, 301). Horn associates demons with a manipulation of biological matter (, 201–02), and McGuire and Anderson () and Jonathan Cahn () believe the modern skyscraper's surpassing of the height of Christian cathedrals was a key moment in the transition from a divine to a demonic world order. More important than the edifice itself, however, is the purpose for which it is built.

For the milieu, the goal of Babel is human apotheosis. The act of building thus blurs into the second quality: an act of becoming (God) which is opposed to “being,” and specifically to “being‐in‐place” in accordance with divine fiat. Supplementing Babel, the milieu also draws here on the tale of the Watchers from Genesis 6 and 1 Enoch, in which the angelic Watchers desert their place in heaven and interbreed with human women to produce hybrid children. Horn writes that “[d]eparting the proper habitation that God had assigned them was grievous to the Lord and led to divine penalization”—here, Noah's Deluge (Horn , 195). As well as rebuilding Babel, emerging technoscience (especially genetic engineering) is seen as recreating the transgression of the Watchers—creating hybrid beings by crossing ontological and species boundaries in contravention of divine law—a repetition of act that will lead to a repetition of sentence (see Gilbert ; Hamp ; Horn ; McGuire and Anderson ). This destabilization of essential ontology tied to inevitable teleology is central to the milieu's demonizations of evolutionary paradigms, which include both New Age spirituality and Darwinism.

Both Babel and Watcher narratives can be construed as modalities of the Fall. Lambasting New Age and neo‐pagan notions of inner, personal divinity as attempts to recreate Babel by uniting all peoples under one faith, Horn writes: “Pagans argue [that a] principle of inner divinity is older than Christianity, which is true. The gospel according to such New Age concepts—a gospel of “becoming God”—is as old as the fall of man. It began when the serpent said to the woman ‘ye shall be as gods’ (Genesis 3:5 [KJV]), and it will zenith during the reign of the anti‐Christian god‐king” (, 93). The Collins brothers explicitly link this spirituality to Darwinian evolution, writing that the “occult concept of ‘becoming’” is disseminated to the populace as “Darwinism. Evolution is the means by which this purported transformation of man into God is to occur” (, 6). Claims that Darwinism is an exoteric form of an occult doctrine might seem strange, but the milieu is reacting to a specific genealogy. Evolutionary ideas were highly influential in the development of the nineteenth‐century occulture from which the forebears of New Age spirituality arose, notably the Theosophical Society, which repudiated “exoteric” Darwinian evolution but formed its own schema based on ideas of the spiritual evolution of the cosmos. Furthermore, as Per Faxneld explores, while Theosophy's core texts rejected ideas of Satan as a really existing entity, they saw the Fall as a positive event that set evolution in motion by “breaking free from stasis, disrupting equilibrium by eating the forbidden fruit” (, 216).

The milieu counter‐subverts this subversion, (re)integrating its principles into their apocalyptic narrative. Tying exoteric and esoteric strands into a demonological transhumanism, the milieu conflates ideas of evolutionary development with the notion that humanity should (therefore) guide its own evolution. Two members of the milieu, John McTernan and Douglas Hamp, articulate this explicitly. McTernan laments that evolutionary theory “detaches man from his Creator and being created in God's image and likeness… Man is now a free agent to tamper with his DNA under the guise of advancing evolution” (, 268), while Hamp claims that teaching evolution removes God, and, “With God removed, we can understand how mixing two different kinds of animals in order to ‘evolve’ to a new level raises very few flags… After all, they say we came from animals” (, 238). Sharon Gilbert, a close ally of Horn's, channels this association by way of Mary Shelley's gothic novel, Frankenstein. In an extensive email reproduced by Horn she writes, “Like Shelley's Modern Prometheus, Victor Frankenstein, today's molecular magicians play ‘god’ not by stitching together rotting corpses, but by reforming the very essence of our beings: our DNA” (in Horn , 278). Gilbert elaborates elsewhere that Frankenstein “embodied the ancient desires of fallen angels to eliminate man's innate DNA and replace it with [another]”—this corruption is “the Dragon's dream” which “sleeps within the dark thoughts of many scientists and New Age believers today” (, 357).

Lucifer as revolutionary archetype

By fulfilling this draconic dream, transhumanism will create “eschatological tools of transformation” that threaten “to rewrite the laws of nature and permanently alter the course of life” (Horn , 5, 34). However, before this endgame could be realized, RoM also had to transform the fabric of society. In the minds of milieu members, the tenets of RoM do not merely reside in the realm of personal, inner transformation but also in the ideologies and practices of revolution. However, here revolution is closely linked to the ascendency of secular science. Drawing on James Billington's 1980 Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith, Horn refers to RoM as the “Promethean faith” (Horn , 69), the idea “that science would lead men out of darkness into light” accompanied by a “millennial assumption that, on the new day that was dawning, the sun would never set” (Billington [1980] , 6).

The milieu sees this faith as working behind various political projects, most notably the post‐independence United States (Collins and Collins , 119–21; Horn , 59–73, 104–21), but also communism and fascism (Collins and Collins , 57–60). The Collins brothers link it to their transhistorical conspiracy, noting that this faith, “which has underpinned a majority of contemporary crusades to establish a socialist totalitarian one world government, [and] revered science as the ultimate source of truth.” Moreover, with time's passage, “Scientific terminology supplanted the overtly mystical vernacular of the elite's occult doctrines and became the chief facilitator of humanity's deification” (, 10). This transition establishes a further element of mutability to RoM that contrasts the milieu's belief in biblical inerrancy. Eschewing a stability of text and truth, RoM shifts with the times, scientific language replacing “occult doctrines” according to utility.

Much as evolution is linked to the Fall, this revolutionary faith is also given an ancient pedigree. Horn remarks early in one work that the light towards which this revolutionary faith leads us “is derived from Lucifer, the light‐bearer” (, 40), and argues that the origin of human ego unbound from divine order began “in the distant past, when a ‘fire in the minds of angels’ caused Lucifer to exalt himself above God's creation” (Horn , 84). This claim ties ideas of revolutionary politics to Lucifer's failed rebellion, and implies a correlation between God and the ancien régime. This association is not fully coincidental or idiosyncratic. As demonizations of Darwinism and New Age draw from select genealogies, demonizations of revolution draw on others, notably that of “Romantic” or “symbolic” Satanism. Exhibited centrally in Romantic and Decadent literature and influenced by Milton's portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost, these discourses recast the fallen angel from architect of evil into an “image of expanding human consciousness and desire, rebelling against oppression and limitation” (Schock , 39).

This paradigm was not widespread, but was taken up by several occultural and political milieu, from Theosophy to socialism and women's liberation (Faxneld , ). For the milieu, however, the most relevant form of symbolic Satanism is its usage (occasional and ironic) by atheist humanists and transhumanists. One example, cited by Horn as exemplary of transhumanist attitudes to Christianity (, 63–65), is a 1991 op‐ed by transhumanist philosopher Max More in his magazine Extropy. Titled “In Praise of the Devil,” the article calls Lucifer “the embodiment of reason, of intelligence, of critical thought. He stands against the dogma of God and all other dogmas. He stands for the exploration of new ideas.” More concludes the piece with an exhortation to “Join me, join Lucifer, and join Extropy in fighting God and his entropic forces with our minds, our wills and our courage. God's army is strong, but they are backed by ignorance, fear and cowardice. Reality is fundamentally on our side. Forward into the light!” (More , 1–2). More's plaudit encapsulates the principle features of symbolic Satanism—Satan's alignment with reality, reason, light, and novelty, against a divine order characterized by fear, ignorance, and unquestioned and unquestionable archaic dogma. Integrating More's remarks into their demonologies, Horn's milieu tie transhumanism into both an ancient conflict and a recent history of political and scientific emancipation from religious doctrine: that is, to secularization.

Diabolizing history, diabolizing humanity

Through selective appropriation of these genealogies, the milieu constructs a model of history split between divine order and demonic deviation. In reality, Western occulture, Darwinian evolutionary theory, and revolutionary ideology are multiform phenomena with complex and disparate, if occasionally intertwining, genealogies. In this brief overview I have not aimed to do them justice but rather to present them as they are utilized in the works of the milieu as parts of a shared whole with a shared source: Satan. More specifically, Satan's willful rejection of a divine order either in his lighting of a “fire in the minds of angels” or later in the mind of Eve. The Fall acts as a critical event for these currents, marking the forward thrust of time and the origins of RoM in the serpent's promise of human apotheosis. The Babel and Watcher narratives buttress this original promise, acting as failed attempts to fulfil it either via a united human effort to reach heaven or by direct demonic intervention in the essential (genetic) make‐up of the human.

While both are integrated into a narrative of (demon‐inspired) human attempts at apotheosis, however, the Babel and Watcher narratives are not fully comparable. One leads to forced diaspora and the other to annihilation, one to an elimination of means (language is diversified, people scattered) and the other to an elimination of existence (all life is ended). This difference plays into the milieu's demonology of transhumanism. As skyscrapers surpassing cathedrals marked a transition of worldly order from godly to demonic, the transhumanist desire and technological means to undo not just worldly order but the “essence” of the human is seen as threatening to irrevocably transform creation. Like the Watcher narrative, this transhuman endgame has a biological element, and Gilbert's positing of DNA as “the very essence of our being,” for example, establishes a biological essence to the human. Horn ties this into apocalyptic soteriology, arguing that the Mark of the Beast (Revelation 13:16–17) could be a result of genetic tampering that, by introducing non‐human animal DNA into the human genome, would make the bearer actually “part ‘beast’.” He continues that since these individuals would no longer be “‘entirely human’… the individual could no longer be ‘saved’ or go to heaven” (, 277).

It is possible to consider this demonological transhumanism as simply a hyper‐religious and imaginative form of bioconservativism broadly summarized by Thomas Douglas as the view that even “if it were technically possible and legally permissible for people to engage in biomedical enhancement, it would not be morally permissible for them to do so” (, 236). Horn, Gilbert, Teichrib, and others might articulate their views in a language of soteriology, eschatology, and origins, but their arguments against transhumanism still rest on the idea that “these technologies might undermine our human dignity or inadvertently erode something that is deeply valuable about being human” but that is not necessarily quantifiable (Bostrom , 203). While true, interpreting the milieu's demonologies only in this way obscures specificities in their narratives. On the one hand, their theological bioconservatism reflects a privileging of being, especially stasis or being‐in‐place, over becoming. Proper ontological order must be maintained—angels must remain in heaven, humans must remain uniquely human, and the social order must not be overturned. To transgress god‐defined limits, to shift from a state of being to one of becoming, is to court catastrophe.

On the other hand, beyond a focus on maintaining the stability of ontological borders, the milieu's narratives reveal deep anxieties about the continuing place of (their) religion in a secularizing world. They do not just demonize transhumanism, but rather cast it as the endgame of a historical movement tied to broader demonizations, to that “older religion” remaining in the “ostensibly secular mind.” RoM is an attempt to explain the trajectory and continuities of a history that has deviated from their prescriptions and expectations. As such their demonology of becoming can be seen as an attempt to comprehend a growing sense of evitability to their inevitable ending—one tied to the workings of the very secular modernity they are attempting to explain.

Religion, secularity, temporality

Since the millennium, a burgeoning field of scholarship has interrogated the intertwined nature of “the religious” and “the secular.” While these interrogations are diverse and multifaceted, certain aspects are able to shed light on the demonologies of Horn's milieu, notably those that explore the theological origins of “the secular” itself. This question of origin is particularly important since, as explored above, the milieu's demonology orients itself around ideas of divergence from originary stasis, becoming other as becoming demonic. Fixations surrounding progressive evolutionary schemata (whether political, spiritual, or biological) have, in the demonologies explored, hinged on notions of secularization as a forgetting or rejection of authentic theological origin. These fixations, as I will demonstrate, are grounded in a particular reading of the historical development of the binary secularity/religion, emphasizing distinctions in concepts of temporality.

The sociologist of religion José Casanova has noted that while the categories of religion and secularity are mutually constituted, the mechanics of this constitution has shifted over time. While “the secular” is increasingly seen in the West as reality tout court, to which religion is superstructural and superfluous, the concept of the secular originates in Christian theology as part of a binary dividing the world into sacred and profane realms (2011). This division is illustrated by the early Christian usage of “secular” itself, in which the Latin saeculum designated “earthly existence” in contrast to “eternal life with God,” and marked the time counted until history's end, when Christ would return and it would be supplanted by eternity: “It was temporary, a time of waiting, not simply years stretching infinitely into the future.” Crucially, this time‐space was not neutral but “the world of temptation and illusion” (Calhoun , 341). As Craig Calhoun elaborates, the “contrast of sensuous and corrupt to ideal and pure is mapped onto that of secular to eternal. For one thread of the ensuing conceptual history, the secular is associated more with the fallen than simply with the created” (Calhoun , 342). Theologically framed, the secular world comes into being at the Fall and ends with Christ's Second Advent; “the secular” thus theologically names the time‐space of that fallen creation.

This binarized relationship between secularity and religion is reinforced and complexified by the ways that ideologies of secularism adopted and adapted aspects of their theological parent. Casanova argues, for example, that secularism appropriates and transforms a Christian model of linear, telic history in order to construct a “universal teleological process of human development from belief to unbelief, from primitive irrational or metaphysical religion to modern rational postmetaphysical secular consciousness” (, 59). That is, they co‐opt a model of Christian salvation history, culminating not in a second advent of divinity but in the secularization of the world and concomitant erasure of “irrational” religion. By doing so, Talal Asad observes, secularism partakes in a complex structural reversal: while “the secular” was “a part of theological discourse… [now] ‘the religious’ is constituted by secular political and scientific discourses, so that ‘religion’ itself as a historical category and as a universal globalized concept emerges as a construction of Western secular modernity” (, 192).

This structural reversal would seem readily assimilable into the demonologies of Horn's milieu. The triumph of secularity over religion (signified in the rise of the skyscraper, de‐theologization of science, and overturning of the ancien régime) was construed by them as one of the central reflections of growing demonic influence over worldly order. The passage of science—“initially a God‐given instrument for the broadening of human understanding” (Collins and Collins , 2)—into a secularized form of critical inquiry shorn of its scriptural roots is here emblematic of Satan's attempts to co‐opt God's creation for his own ends, a relationship reinforced by the milieu's associations of Satan with the evolutionist and revolutionist paradigms of secular modernity. If the secular world is seen—as the milieu sees it—as a demon‐ridden time‐space oppositional to divine eternity, then the secular's subsuming of the religious in modernity becomes easily coded as a (more or less transient) triumph of that demon‐ridden time‐space over that of eternity.

Any construction of a straightforward binarization between divine eternity and demonic secularity is troubled, however. Secularism's relation to its Christian origins is one of continuity as much as reversal. While for the milieu the secular/religious binary is mapped directly onto that of satanic/godly, to paraphrase Charles Taylor the West becomes secular because rather than in spite of its religious heritage (, 791–92), and Graeme Smith has argued that secularism itself is a form of Christian ethics shorn of the structures of Christian belief (). Indeed, enduring traces of theology in Western secular ideas of progress, reason, and perfection have prompted Jean‐Luc Nancy to question if “the West may be Christian in its depths” (, 34).

Transhumanism's secular transcendences

Such direct mapping is contestable, however. Asad argues that, although Christian narratives like redemption might have galvanized secular modernity's social projects, it does not necessarily follow that these projects are “essentially Christian.” For Asad these projects have a distinctive politics (democratic, anticlerical), a different morality (focused on the sacredness of individual conscience and rights), and an understanding of suffering as “subjective and accidental”—to be medically treated, as corrective punishment, or merely as “the unfinished business of universal empowerment” (, 61–62). Taken together, these characteristics construct the agents of worldly salvation as also worldly; immanent, not transcendent; human, not divine. This paradigm not only maps readily onto the milieu's concept of RoM, it relies on its own mode of temporality: it eschews clear ends in favor of endless perfectibility. This secular model of redemption is exemplified by transhumanism's technoscientific projects, which deploy a secularized language of perfection in which humanity becomes the perfector that is perfected. Transhumanism's rearticulation of theological concepts is not just a continuation of secularism more broadly, however. Rather than replicating secularism's progressive narrative wholesale, transhumanism envisions its own eschatologies, its own transcendences—ones that unsettle the milieu's own.

Transhumanism's reproduction of religious concepts and terminology is well documented within the current scholarship. Braden Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz note that one need not analyze its language deeply “to recognize an agenda for human betterment that in other contexts marks the domain of faith and spiritual practice… Immortality, perfectibility, dominion, transcendence” (, 17–18). Hava Tirosh‐Samuelson goes further, discussing the explicitly millenarian logic underlying many transhumanist soteriologies, one which imbues “human‐made technology with salvific value: the Kingdom of God will be realized on earth through technology, thereby making salvation both imminent and immanent” (, 165). Tirosh‐Samuelson here highlights the emphasis on artifice that is central to RoM. However, her remark on the immanence of salvation points to transhumanism's imbrication in the worldliness of secularity, and via this to the fulcrum of the time/eternity binary.

In “Whose Salvation? Which Eschatology?” the theologian and ethicist Brent Waters argues that transhumanism and traditional Christian theologies operate using incommensurable models of soteriology and eschatology. He lists a number of areas of incompatibility, such as transhumanism's apparent disdain for material, embodied existence and its emphasis on “the desire of the will to become the perfect being that it wills itself to be” (, 171). Whether these are truly incommensurable aspects is debatable. Transhumanist disdain for materiality can be traced to strands of orthodox Christianity, stemming from Augustine, that privilege the mind as the site of God's image that marked human uniqueness (Deane‐Drummond ), and some, like Philip Hefner, have attempted to reconcile transhumanist and Christian models of perfectibility (). However, Waters's thesis serves as a useful lens for exploring Horn's milieu. This is particularly the case in the context of one of Waters's incommensurabilities—temporality. Waters argues that transhumanists and Christians both agree

that the finite and mortal human condition is far from ideal… that humans require release from their current condition. For transhumanists this release is attained through technological transformation, whereas for Christians humans are transformed by their life in Christ. Both agree that death is the final enemy; transhumanists conquer this foe by achieving the immortality of endless time, whereas Christians are resurrected into eternity, where there is no time. (Waters , 164)

After describing a commonality in intent, Waters hits a point of crucial (dis)similarity: while both strive to overcome death, the means of achieving this end rely on differing temporal modes. Waters's critique focuses on death, arguing that transhumanism fixates on death as medically curable (on the model of secular modernity's attitude to suffering noted by Asad), and so devalues the embodied nature of life in the process. What Waters does not discuss is how such a temporal division replicates that of the religious and the secular as the differentiation of “earthly existence” from “eternal life with God” (Calhoun , 340).

Secularizing demons

By articulating salvation as the “immortality of endless time”—whether this is achieved by substantial genetic modification, cybernetic augmentation, digitization of consciousness, or another method—transhumanism constructs a model of soteriology that is irreducibly secular. Its vision of transcendence is immanent, worldly, based not on escaping time but stretching it into the future. If one adopts Waters's distinction, transhumanist salvation hinges not on transcending secular time for eternity but on secular time's becoming infinite. And if, like Horn's milieu, one adopts a perspective of the secular as not just the created—which, although he describes transhumanism as “an idolatrous religion proffering a counterfeit salvation,” Waters broadly seems to do (, 173)—but the fallen, the demon‐ridden “world of temptation and illusion” (Calhoun , 341), transhumanism's danger becomes clear. It marks not merely a system of belief proffering “counterfeit” salvation, but the technoscientific possibility that this salvation might be (im)possibly attained.

Like many evangelicals with an apocalyptic or millenarian perspective, Horn and his milieu ultimately turn to a sovereign God, who will intervene to rectify errant history. However, this foregone conclusion—increasingly deferred—does not detract from the milieu's continuing attempts to wrestle with a secular world in which it finds itself hopelessly entangled. Rather, it is a symptom. The demonologies of the milieu wrestle with their entanglement by drawing on specific genealogies of the secular (both as a model of temporality and the immanent space of modernity), and of the Devil as theological instigator, advocate, and symbol of that secularity. They filter these genealogies through their ‘“supernatural’ hermeneutics of suspicion.” Yet while other spiritual warfare discourses deploy this framework to explain “economic recessions, school shootings, [and] individuals’ problems with poverty or addiction” (McCloud , 115), the convergence of spiritual warfare, conspiracism, and bioconservatism in the milieu prompts Horn and his allies to construct a demonization of secular modernity in toto.

Framed within the scope of this demonological hermeneutics and the selected (and selective) genealogies of secularism, the reading of transhumanism provided by Horn's milieu becomes (more) understandable. Guided by the hands of secularizing demons, secular modernity assents to the Fall. It accepts the temporal space of fallen reality and redefines it as reality as such. This alone would be anathema: secularism's immanent frame sits in stark opposition to spiritual warfare's worldview, hinging on the co‐existence of earthly and heavenly realities and the relation between spiritual causes and worldly effects (or vice versa). But the trait that makes transhumanism specifically threatening to Horn's milieu is its construction of a model of salvation set within that fallen reality, one emerging technosciences might (im)possibly actualize. Fitting into secular attitudes to suffering as “the unfinished business of universal empowerment” (Asad , 62), transhuman soteriology centers not on transcendence from the saeculum but the becoming‐transcendent of the saeculum itself.