A shadow is rising in the East. Actually, it’s the West. It’s rising in the West. But it did rise east of here over seventy years ago.

Right-wingers have long been in love with Lord of the Rings. A lot of people have, Christians naturally included. But for the far right MAGA-inspired fascism of the past decade or so, Middle Earth has been a place to go for inspiration. Even as they fail to learn its lessons.

While Tolkien was a genius creator of fantasy—he practically invented modern fantasy—his work has its flaws, some of which he admitted. But the beauty of Tolkien’s work is in how its greatest messages outshine its flaws.

Middle Earth is a simple world in which the forces of good and evil are very apparent, unlike the contemporary Game of Thrones, where morality is gray and everyone seems tainted with corruption. Men are the good guys, elves are super-men, dwarves are a petty but sometimes noble other, and orcs are a race of pure evil. The men who are “eastern” have all sided with these brutes.

Now, given that Lord of the Rings is more than fantasy, we can look past the folly of its simplicity. It’s a fantasy about bravery, not political realism, about courage, not identity politics. It’s a new holistic myth for a make-believe Europe, not a re-telling of actual European history. It’s a psycho-spiritual allegory of the battle in the human spirit for choosing good over evil, not a guide for determining who the bad guys are based on their race and acting accordingly in warring fashion.

And most of all, it’s about destroying the ring of power, not using it.

As a Christian, when I come to Lord of the Rings, I love it for many things: the belief in good and evil, the courage of small people, the sacrificial nature of servant kings, faith in wisdom and lover over power, and a love of the good green earth.

But the love-affair the far right has with LOTR is…different.

Far right fans come to Middle Earth for a nostalgia of a different time, romanticizing a Europe in which everyone was only white, and everyone had a “traditional” lifestyle. Traditional how? Do right wingers want to farm without machines? Not the billionaire class, that’s for sure.

And as for the struggle of good versus evil, MAGA tends to interpret this as a story of America versus…everywhere else. It used to be Europe versus everywhere else, but the Muslims came to Europe, so now it’s up to America to not only be Christian, but wage physical war on places that aren’t. Just like Gondor defended against Mordor.

But in a way, it’s not just the far east, it’s D.C. Specifically Democrat D.C. That’s right. Just as good and evil are ideologically opposite and obvious in LOTR, Republicans are men and Democrats are Mordor. And Islam is Mordor. And gays, and illegal immigrants, and people on drugs. The list goes on.

Now, there’s no doubt that in the Christian imagination, threats to a healthy relationship with God are evil. But the love of enemy and the evangelistic zeal for lost souls the Gospel is replete with gives us no room to treat any group of people on the planet like…disposable orcs. The battle against evil is a spiritual one, and you must use spiritual tools like prayer and love. Not power and wealth.

A world that’s morally bankrupt doesn’t need a struggle of flesh and blood. It needs a spiritual struggle.

This is where the ring comes in. The thing that’s the main quest. The thing the books are named after.

What far right wingers get the most wrong about LOTR is what to do with power. Like Boromir, they look at the tools of the enemy and they say, “it is a gift.” Like Saruman, they want to create more tools of destruction and practice eugenics in order to defeat evil, even if it means joining evil. Like Theoden, they are under the spell of Wormtongue’s deceitful lies. They want to have Aragorn’s throne, but not his humility. They want Gandalf’s staff, but not his kindness. They want the glory of Frodo’s mission, but not the self-sacrificing necessity of it.

They want the ring so they can defeat Sauron with it. They come away with that part of the story.

A fan of Lord of the Rings doesn’t want gold-hoarding dragons, a bloated military, hooded men hunting after people at night, industries that destroy ecosystems, ethnic cleansing, or brainwashing creepy dudes whispering gossip and distortion in their ear. They want everyone to have a feast.

Tolkien didn’t write an epic fantasy world for fascists to fetishize it. He fought against fascists in the first World War, and he would have done it in the second.

I’m hoping that my MAGA friends can, like Boromir, redeem themselves before it’s too late.

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”