Religion and Manipulation Theme Analysis

In addition to government and media, Alderman also examines how power manifests in another influential institution: religion. One of the main characters in The Power, Allie, escapes abuse in Alabama and travels to a convent, hoping to find safety. She feels, however, that she will never be truly safe until she is in control of the convent—and later, in control of the world. She uses her power to ignite a new religion, but her new faith is only the means to an end, instead of something she truly believes. Thus, Alderman takes a very skeptical view of religion: she acknowledges that faith can be a truly powerful thing, but shows how it is also something that can be easily manipulated and used as a tool of deception.

Initially, Allie uses deception to craft her identity in the convent—not as a means of manipulation, but out of a need to survive. After killing her abusive foster father, Allie runs away to the convent and renames herself “Eve,” worried that she might be found by the police if she uses her real name. Using her power, Eve is then able to cure a girl who experiences seizures, though she does not tell the other women how she is able to do it. They start to believe that she is capable of making miracles, and even bring her other girls to heal. Eve begins to understand that others having faith in her is a kind of protection, because people look to her for guidance and she is thought to be a channel for a divine being. Even though she’s not religious herself, she plays into others’ ideas of her and starts to lose a sense of her life as Allie.

Now leaning into her deception, Eve starts to teach her own religious ideas. But rather than preach a new faith entirely, she borrows and twists ideas from other religions to suit the beliefs she wants to preach. Thus, Alderman implicates Eve’s religion as being solely a manipulation: she puts forth ideologies that simply uphold what people already want to believe in order to get them to follow her. After Eve starts to create seeming miracles, she tells the other girls in the convent that God is a woman. The first time that she calls God “She,” Alderman writes that to the girls, this is “very shocking. But they understand it, each of them. They have been waiting to hear this good news.” With the shift in power, they have already started to recognize the supremacy that women can have, and God as a woman represents the ultimate supremacy. Eve gradually gains power when her teachings wind up on the internet. She records a message for the masses, telling them that God is simply showing a different side of herself. She announces, “Jews: look to Miriam, not Moses, for what you can learn from her. Muslims: look to Fatima, not Muhammad. Buddhists: remember Tara, the mother of liberation. Christians: pray to Mary for your salvation.” She is not changing the religion, but simply altering the narrative around it. This principle is emphasized even further when Alderman later writes, “They’re finding Scripture that works for them, rewriting the bits that don’t.” Eve is manipulating the existing power structure in order to create one that emphasizes and upholds the newfound power of her and her followers, giving people even greater faith in her.

It is worth noting that Allie’s belief in something higher stems primarily from a voice she hears inside her own head, which she believes may be God. But Alderman eventually reveals that this voice is a form of Allie’s own self-deception, again reinforcing the argument that faith is promulgated primarily through deception. Allie reveals early on in her storyline that she hears a voice in her head that guides her and counsels her through the various hardships she has faced. Allie thinks variously that the voice is the voice of God, or the voice of her mother, or perhaps even the voice of the devil, leading her through life. The fact that she has so little certainty in what the voice actually represents proves her faith’s insecurity and instability, and illustrates that Allie is simply relying on it because it suits her deception. At the end of the book, when Allie tries to reconcile what the voice really is, the voice confesses, “Look, I’m not even real. Or not real like you think ‘real’ means. I’m here to tell you what you want to hear.” The voice, therefore, is not a guide, but is really Allie’s own way of convincing herself that she is doing the right thing.

Ultimately, Allie/Eve decides that the only way for her and other women to feel safe is if they rebuild a society where women have always been in charge. She calls upon her followers to begin a war that will blow society back to the Stone Age, in order for it to be rebuilt as a matriarchy. Thus, the eventual purpose of the faith is not some kind of moral clarity; rather, it is to manipulate her followers so that she can accomplish her goals and maintain her power.