This article is a preview from the Spring 2018 edition of New Humanist.

Two years ago, before The Handmaid’s Tale became a TV phenomenon, I was asked to pick my favourite science fiction novel for a magazine questionnaire. I chose the Margaret Atwood novel, explaining: “There is nothing more frightening in SF or plausible, than a retreat to the irrational.”

The election of Donald Trump the following year made me revisit the messages of the science fiction I grew up on in the 1970s and 1980s and why they were disturbing me anew. Part of my fascination was the speed of the entrenchment of their ruthless authoritarian theocracy. In the Planet of the Apes film, simian clerics, like deniers of evolution, quote the holy text of The Lawgiver to shut down dissent and forbid any exploration of the human ruins that clearly predated their civilisation. Astronaut Charlton Heston, the viewer’s proxy, is a fearless rationalist challenging their false reality.

In John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, also set after a nuclear apocalypse, England has retreated to a superstitious mediaevalism, seeing even minor mutations as blasphemies to be hunted down and exterminated. According to the Wyndham Archive the original title was A Time For Change and in the US Rebirth.

Both alternative titles seem resonant in modern America. Kurt Andersen’s new 500-year history of the USA, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, connects the forces behind Trump’s victory to the growth of immersive theme-park-style-entertainment and what used to be regarded in the US as extreme fundamentalist Christian beliefs. Vice-President Mike Pence is on record as saying he won’t eat a meal alone with a woman other than his wife, or attend events where alcohol is being served without her.

Such a resolution would be impossible for a woman in politics, revealing the mindset and influence of a significant segment of the leadership in the Republican party and US government. It was eerily echoed in a scene in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale when the Commander’s wife, arriving in Washington, realises she’s going to be excluded from the new politics. We won’t make the mistake we made before, her husband is told. Gilead is its male politicians’ fantasyland made real.

Andersen suggests the US has always been a seedbed for extreme sects of Christianity, going back to the country’s earliest white settlers. By the early 20th century they were mostly regarded as crackpot but harmless phenomena, stamped down by the national rational consensus. Big city newspapers descended on Tennesssee to report the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial – the prosecution of a schoolteacher for promoting evolutionary theory – with open mockery and disdain.

Andersen’s thesis is that the 1960s anything-goes philosophy that took root across America released the already growing religious fundamentalist movements from constraint, as much as it enabled a hippie counterculture. Conspiracy theories and belief in the Rapture seem intertwined in this anti-establishment protest. Personal feeling was the new truth. Facts became disputable and digital technologies have normalised confirmation bias and endless infotainment distraction.

Andersen says his book took its inspiration from the 1990s, when George W. Bush’s policy adviser Karl Rove told a reporter that “the reality-based community believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality . . . That’s not the way the world really works anymore.”

We’ve assumed an inevitable progressive arc in democratic states. Religious freedom and equality? Yes. But who foresaw that, with the growth of faith schools, some would be promoting creationism and the subservience of women?

Restricting abortion, partly decriminalised in the UK since 1967, seems back on the agenda for some Christian conservatives with strongly “traditionalist” views. Jacob Rees Mogg is even paired as an “odd couple” double act by Sky News with Labour feminist Jess Phillips. In British politics too, an entertainment factor enables light-hearted distraction.

It seems the science fiction of my youth was prescient after all. Nuclear apocalypse didn’t happen, but when its shadow was lifted in 1989, a complacency took root. An assumption that certain facts and rights were uncontested – on racial and sexual equality, on history (Civil War there, Empire here). I don’t think any of us can afford to be so complacent any more.