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This book offers a new perspective on the theory of spectacle to explain the rise of Donald Trump and Trumpism in American society and politics. While Trump is inseparable from the existence of a mass consumer culture under capitalism, few have elaborated on that aspect of his identity and rise to the Presidency. Drawing on Guy Debord and his interlocutors, as well as others like Deleuze and Guattari and Walter Benjamin, this book conceptualizes spectacle as an embodied assemblage that includes the affective and emotional components of life amid a broader materialization of capitalism in the everyday landscape. Inspired by the methodology of Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, this book triangulates theories of the spectacle with (1) journalistic coverage of the 2016 Presidential campaign and its aftermath and (2) other journalistic coverage of contemporary consumer culture. Together, the spectacle appears as a bundle of intense feelings and sensations that enrol us into new relationships with commodities, technology and data, as well as the materiality of the consumer infrastructure itself, including built environments and the technologies therein. In total, we get a sense not only of how the State uses spectacle to govern, but how the spectacle came to transform the political sphere itself, thereby providing a context for Trumpism. The spectacle, then, leads not only to “post-truth” horizons, but more precise articulations with the far-right. As such, this book illuminates how Trump embodies the frightening potential of capitalist consumerism to intersect with and further enable fascistic forms of power.

This book presents a fresh vision for Christian theology that foregrounds the relationship between theological ideas and the experiences of Christians. It argues that theology is always operating in a vibrant landscape of feeling and desiring, and shows that contemporary theology has often operated in problematic isolation from these experiential dynamics. It then argues that a theologically serious doctrine of the Holy Spirit not only authorizes but requires attention to Christian experience. Against this background, the book outlines a new methodological approach to Christian theology that attends to the emotional and experiential power of theological doctrines. This methodology draws on recent interdisciplinary research on affect and emotion, which has shown that affects are powerful motivating realities that saturate all dimensions of human thinking and acting. In the process, the book also explains why contemporary theology has often been ambivalent about subjective experience, and demonstrates that current discourse about God’s activity in the world is often artificially abstracted from experience and embodiment. The book culminates in a proposal for a new experiential and pneumatological account of the theology of grace that builds on this methodology. Focusing on the work of the Holy Spirit in salvation and sanctification, it retrieves insights from Augustine, Luther, and Philip Melanchthon to present an affective and Augustinian vision of salvation as a pedagogy of desire. In articulating this vision, the book engages critically with recent emphasis on participation and theosis in Christian soteriology and charts a new path forward for Protestant theology in a landscape hitherto dominated by the theological visions of Karl Barth and Thomas Aquinas.