A Satanic Master Signifier: The Prosperity Preacher, the President, and the Disobedient Virus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article presents an account of prosperity gospel preacher Kenneth Copeland’s unwavering support for Donald Trump. Employing an approach to discourse derived from Ernesto Laclau and Chantelle Mouffe, I examine two aspects of Copeland’s teachings and practices. First, I examine his infamous judgement upon Covid-19 (The Judgement), in which he declares war on the virus as a satanic plot. Second, I consider his spiralling teachings on faith, which, like The Judgement, pay considerable attention to the figure of Satan. Both of these aspects reveal Satan’s central role in establishing the stability of Copeland’s discursive world. Satan functions, in Laclau’s terms, as an empty signifier. I call this empty signifier the master signifier, a play on the master Satan. I claim that to understand Copeland’s commitment to Trump, Trump’s relationship to the master signifier is crucial. Copeland casts Trump as an anointed king, a central player in the cosmic battle to realise America’s divine destiny. To be a member of the prosperity gospel community, despite its twists and turns, is to be committed to standing with the anointed against the external foe, Satan.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".