Here’s a post about Talia Lavin’s book Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America, the first book I’ve picked for my not-a-book-club book club; kicking things off with a nice, light, breezy read, yes?

As I think I mentioned, this book was not on my radar, rather, it slid across my line of sight at the exact moment I had started thinking that I should be doing more deliberate reading of this sort to either help me better understand the situation we find ourselves in or help me think through what can be done about it. This book—I’m not well-versed enough to place it or rank it in the greater picture of literature of this sort, of which I am woefully under-read—did help deepen my understanding, though I think it leaves the ball in the reader’s court when it comes to deciding what to do about it.

If literally nothing else: while post-election analysis all points at the economy as why things went the way they did, that hasn’t sat right with me, and this book helped remind me about the longer-running complexity that’s gotten us here. I mean, I don’t know, maybe it’s that simple, maybe it was the price of eggs. But I don’t think you neatly get from “gas prices are kind of high” to “let’s give an authoritarian rapist felon the nuclear codes” in a single hop. Things have been in motion for a long time and I think there’s a lot reasons, possibly 70-odd million reasons, why votes went the way they did. I’d like to try to do a better job, even if only for my own sense of reality, at facing these realities head-on.

One of the primary insights I took from this book, and shame on me if I should have already had more understanding about this going into the book but whatever, is that, for as much as I’ve naively presumed Christian nationalism was hypocritical to its core, a cynical sheen of religious veneer slathered over an otherwise transparent need for power at any cost, it’s actually much more complicated than that, in that there really truly is a disturbing amount of true belief across certain swaths of the U.S. population, true belief in things that to me simply read as patently, obviously crazy, which helps inform my intuitive sense that pointing out the hypocrisy of the actions of the right hasn’t worked nearly as well as it should have; with hypocrisy and faith acting in concert as two sides of a loaded coin, the challenge of combating it is significantly more challenging than I may have realized, or than I may have been able to put into words before reading this book. Obviously, yes, but. This toxic strand of faith can absorb or repel criticism in equal measures. What the fuck do you do with that, against that?

The first half of the book acts as a thematic history of the Christian right’s efforts to screw up everything for the rest of us, touching on topics like abortion and sex and gender as they are being attacked through means of literal faith and money and end-times prophesying. It’s a broad, topical primer on the last fifty years or so of Christian nationalist efforts to gain national power and influence the nation while using its zealotry to fold just about any bit of seeming nonsense into its corrosive systems of belief. There’s so many points where my eye just started to slide over the stories in the book because, again, I like to think I’m well-educated and I find it easy to reconcile the fact that my freedom shouldn’t come at the active expense of someone else’s; it’s hard, from that vantage point, to try to look at some of this stuff directly, in a new light, an exposing light, and to take it seriously. But it’s necessary.

From there the back half of the book turns the focus inward, toward the lives and social constructs of many evangelicals, in large part in terms of how fundamentalism impacts the lives of families, specifically women and children, both emotionally and physically, and how it’s all intertwined with blatant racism and patriarchal power structures. It’s all informed by direct interviews with former evangelicals, and was simultaneously easier and harder to read than the first half, with the increase of anecdotal reporting that, when it came to the issues of how these strains of religious communities are both supportive of and supported by child abuse, was really hard to stomach. Again, shame on me, my bubbled view of the world, but—spanking isn’t really a thing to me? I mean, like, I’ve been a dad for nine years and I’ve never considered it an option? Because it intuitively seems like a very terrible thing to do? To be reminded that some not only entertain it as a possibility but actively endorse it, even require it, makes for a horrifying gut-check.

All of which leads me back to—what do we do about it? When a powerful minority of the country has managed to seize power through violence and fear under the umbrella of religious and personal freedoms, when pointing out that their governmental leader is a straight-up heathen only serves to reinforce beliefs that the prophesied end-times are upon us and it’s great that the Jews are killing all the Palestinians because then it means Jesus can come back and kill all the Jews, and, again, they seriously believe this…where do you go from there?

I know there are no easy answers, I resist the urge to believe in easy answers, and yet I want to believe none the less that there’s still room to improve our marketing around these issues; looking hard at the thing and calling it out for what it actually is, better explaining the issues at play and helping anybody who can see to see what’s actually going on here. If some of this is missing from the conversation, we’re probably not doing the conversation right, even if the mere conversation feels like an impotent attempt at striking back, at this point. In some sense I’m a bit of a choir ready to be preached to on this and I’ve already voted Democrat up and down the tickets because again duh, I didn’t even need to know this stuff in this level of detail to know that it’s all bad, but if there are other folks out there who don’t understand what’s at stake and what one segment of one side of the country is enabling—how do you get that message to them? Isn’t there a better line of attack, here?

Anyways I’m struggling here and I’m sure I’m exposing weaknesses I’m unaware of; I’m interested in what other folks have to say, about this book, about whatever. No comments section on the blog these days but you can find me on the socials (links up top) if you want to point out my blindspots or share your thoughts.