I’m influenced by Wright (among others) in this. It is this recent manifestation of Gnosticism that has so many Christians here in America buying into every last “left behind” or “rapture” trope and conspiracy theory. Everybody is thirsty to imagine they are holders of “some secret knowledge”. Of course, it doesn’t go by that name; nobody attends a church called “First Church of Gnostic Heresy” - but that doesn’t make the actual content of that heresy any less potent or present; in fact its stealth status makes it even more so. Deism could be a thing too among some for all I know - nothing surprises me among the American “Christian” crowd any more. But I do know that a couple centuries back, deism was embraced by many of the American founding crowd. Here is a sample of what N.T. Scholar, Wright, has to say about Gnosticism.
From N.T. Wright in “Surprised by Hope”:
Gnosticism is always an eclectic phenomenon—are found in some of the seminal thinkers and writers of the last two hundred years in our culture. The writer and playwright Stuart Holroyd, himself an unashamed apologist for Gnosticism, lists Blake, Goethe, Melville, Yeats, and Jung among others as representing this stream in the modern West, and though their insights have often been cross-fertilized with other types, he has a point that should not be ignored. Basically, if you move away from materialistic optimism but without embracing Judaism or Christianity, you are quite likely to end up with some kind of Gnosticism. It should be no surprise that certain elements of the Romantic movement, and some of their more recent heirs, have been prone to this. The discovery of the Nag Hammadi scrolls (a library of Gnostic texts found in Upper Egypt) has in our day fueled a desire to reinterpret Christianity itself in terms of a supposedly original Gnostic spirituality that contrasts sharply with the concrete kingdom-of-God-on-Earth announced by the Jesus of the canonical gospels. Travel far enough down that road, and you will end up with the blatant and outrageous conspiracy theories of a book like The Da Vinci Code. But there are many who without going that far now assume that some kind of Gnosticism is what genuine Christianity was supposed to be about.
Most Western Christians—and most Western non-Christians, for that matter—in fact suppose that Christianity was committed to at least a soft version of Plato’s position. A good many Christian hymns and poems wander off unthinkingly in the direction of Gnosticism. The “just passing through” spirituality (as in the spiritual “This world is not my home, / I’m just a’passin’ through”), though it has some affinities with classical Christianity, encourages precisely a Gnostic attitude: the created world is at best irrelevant, at worst a dark, evil, gloomy place, and we immortal souls, who existed originally in a different sphere, are looking forward to returning to it as soon as we’re allowed to. A massive assumption has been made in Western Christianity that the purpose of being a Christian is simply, or at least mainly, to “go to heaven when you die,” and texts that don’t say that but that mention heaven are read as if they did say it, and texts that say the opposite, like Romans 8:18–25 and Revelation 21–22, are simply screened out as if they didn’t exist.
Wright, N. T.. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (pp. 89-90). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.