Book Review: Power Hungry Christian Nationalists Continue to Scale the Commanding Heights of American Society (original) (raw)
Talia Lavin’s second book Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America (following Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy) opens with a bold claim: “The United States is and always has been a Christian nation.” And while she acknowledges religious freedom as a cornerstone of America’s founding mythology, a deep dive into this notion, she writes, reveals fissures between the ideal of church-state separation and the reality.
While Christian dominance has waxed and waned over our country’s nearly 250-year history, Lavin reports that we are currently seeing a rising tide of Christian nationalism, some of whose Evangelical adherents have won seats in Congress, positions on the Supreme Court, and roles in state and local government.
For evangelicals, Satan is a literal devil who tempts us with pornography, drag shows, and queer and trans pride parades.
“All around you,” she writes, “there are laws unfolding: laws about schools, laws about teachers, laws about wombs, laws about doctors, laws about abortifacients, laws governing the gender of children. There are also laws concerning the way history is taught, lest anything come between growing minds and the big, grand story of a land chosen by God to be the fertile ground for his very own battle between good and evil.”
_Wild Faith_interrogates these policies and zeroes in on the doctrines that bind Evangelical Christian nationalists. Among the most potent are a belief in Satan, whose innermost desire is the sexual exploitation of children, making him a literal devil who tempts us with pornography, drag shows, and queer and trans pride parades. This is why, Lavin writes, the Evangelical right is working hard to dominate what it refers to as the Seven Mountains of Societal Influence: Arts and entertainment, business, education, family, government, media, and religion.
For these true believers, this is nothing less than a broad effort to provoke “a massive social transformation of the world into the kingdom of God,” writes Lavin. Turning the United States into an overtly Christian theocracy is but one step on this journey. Making large amounts of money — the notion that God rewards his (yes, God is always male) loyal acolytes with financial prosperity — is but one necessary tenet. Other tenets are political: Opposing abortion by all possible means; opposing marriage equality and queer humanity; opposing no-fault divorce in favor of hard-to-sever “covenant marriages;” opposing out-of-wedlock heterosexual sex; and opposing government social welfare programs like Social Security, food stamps and Medicaid.
Fervent support for Israel is also foundational for Christian nationalists, who view the country’s founding as the fulfillment of a Biblical prophecy. “Christian Zionists have spent more than $65 million in support of ongoing Israeli settlements within the disputed territories of the West Bank,” Lavin writes. Palestinians are seen as a pesky annoyance, “an obstacle to the Apocalypse” — an impediment to Jesus’ imminent return, in other words.
It’s a short leap from accepting the authority of a patriarchal father figure to accepting the authority of a pastor and the political leaders they support.
Perhaps this is why Christian-nationalist support for the genocide in Gaza is near universal, with nary a mention of the ongoing devastation that has left more than 40,000 dead and countless others wounded and traumatized. The somewhat murky rationale for this is grounded in the Evangelical belief that Israel will play a central role in Christ’s reemergence: “Before the Messiah can return, the nation of Israel must be restored; Jerusalem must be a Jewish city; and the Temple, the center of worship and sacrifice in the ancient Jewish world, which was last destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, must be rebuilt,” writes Lavin. But here’s the rub: For the temple to be rebuilt, the Jewish people have to be “purified with the ashes of a red heifer.”
Yes, really.
And that’s not all. Trump has strong support among Evangelical Christian nationalists, with many seeing him as chosen by God. Despite his obvious flaws, they liken him to King Cyrus who, in 538 BC, followed God’s order to rebuild the Second Jewish Temple. Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem solidified their support for him. As a result, this religious right cohort — 14% of the U.S. electorate is Evangelical — is expected to cast ballots for team Trump-Vance.
It’s a terrifying prospect.
Equally terrifying is Lavin’s depiction of the ways Evangelicals are trained to live in lock-step obedience to a vengeful and punitive God. Patriarchy is writ large, with a slew of predominantly white male ‘leaders’ demanding wifely submission and strict adherence to the homeschooling of children and the use of corporal punishment to beat sinister impulses out of their kids, from toddlers to teenagers.
The result, Lavin reports, is the undermining of psychological independence, making it a short leap from accepting the authority of family to accepting the authority of a pastor and the political leaders they support.
Although _Wild Faith_does not go into detail about the array of rightwing think tanks, policy, and legal organizations that promote an overtly Christian-nationalist agenda — and that dovetail with family and church enforcement of conservative political ideology — this is a small deficit in an otherwise chilling account of contemporary efforts by the religious rightwing. Pundits and media prognosticators tend to discount Evangelical Christian nationalists because their thinking is so out of sync with the mainstream, but we ignore them at our political peril. Lavin offers a cogent reminder of the high stakes of this dismissal.
Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America
By Talia Lavin
LegacyLit Books, 288 pages; available for pre-order
Release date: Oct. 15, 2024