Review of “Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking over America”

And some similar books; plus some soothing art

Hello Friends,

Quite the week (once again!), huh? Big things are going on in the book banning space. On Friday, I posted about the Supreme Court case Mahmoud v. Taylor as well as updates on the Institute of Museum and Library Services and military school book purges.

Today I have a review of the book Wild Faith by Talia Lavin, but before we get into that, here are a few things you will enjoy:

• In a recent segment of his Banned Book Club, Ali Velshi discussed The Great Gatsby with two writers with Gatsby spinoffs: author Claire Anderson Wheeler (new novel: The Gatsby Gambit) and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Martyna Majok (new musical Gatsby: An American Myth). Since Gatsby has been in schools, it has a history of challenges and bans. As we celebrate its 100th anniversary, it speaks so clearly to where we are today.

• Reader Kendall Johnson responded to last week’s post with a link to his Seeing the Shifting Wild: Six Visual Poems in MacQueen’s Quinterly. The wildland close to him that he addresses at the center of these poems is the same one I included in this photo last week:

  

  An example of Johnson’s art:

The purpose of both the essays and the exhibit has been to explore Johnson’s Pasture with fresh eyes: as wildland facing imminent degradation caused by rapid climate change and political fracture.

The visual poems presented here address two issues: the changes in the land, as well as suggestions on how to see the place, and all such wild places, differently. These resulting images help me see that I can choose how I look at the world and, as a result, what I can see.

His artistic rendering of the place evokes its spiritual connections. Have a look. Take a breath.

• I read How My Book Came To Be #3: Leah Sottile From Sari Botton’s

  Memoir Land
  this week and now I had to add Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets and the Fever Dream of the American New Age by Leah Sottile to my TBR list. It’s right in the space I’m delving into now.

Sottile, a reporter investigating the origins and belief systems of the New Age movement in America states:

Working on my book, I went way, way, way down several rabbit holes so that I might answer those questions, and determine where exactly in the New Age world harm can happen. What I found was that, ironically, while on a respite from my work on political extremism, I was drawn toward a new way extremism manifests in America. At the foundation of New Ageism is a long, long history of hyper-nationalism, antisemitism, and harmful conspiracy theories.

Wild Faith by Talia Lavin

Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Bonhoeffer Quotes to Remember a Pastor Who Resisted Evil Unto Death”

The argument of Wild Faith is that the Christian right is trying to make the U.S. a Christian nation by force of law.

”It doesn’t matter that you didn’t start this war, or that you might not believe in its basic premises. It’s coming for you …”

So the object for the rest of us is to be aware and to counteract/countermarch in this war.

Wild Faith opens with the Satanic Panic of the 1980s when daycare workers were accused of being in league with the devil and abusing children. I remember the McMartin case the most from the news, but Lavin also discusses the terrible injustice of the Keller case, where a couple spent two decades behind bars, was declared “Actually innocent” and awarded 3.4 million in compensation for wrongful convictions.

Fast forward to 2020 and the Christin Nationalist hysteria. Lavin sees the same sort of behaviors. Paula White-Cain, a religion adviser to Donald Trump (round one), prayed in a sermon, “in the name of Jesus, we command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now. We declare that anything that has been conceived in satanic wombs, that it’ll miscarry. It will not be able to carry forth any plan of destruction, any plan of harm.” (23) Another faith leader, Jane Whaley, Founder of the Word of Faith Fellowship, is notable for routinely attempting to cast out demons through “the infliction of physical violence, such as punching, kicking, and slamming congregants into walls, including very young children.” (25)

That the US has some very weird and scary believers is one thing. But, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, evangelical Christians make up about 14% of the US population and about half of them are this fiery or fringe. (204) But Lavin makes the argument that they are the core and most active base of the Republican Party. She connects them to QAnon believers and their particular conspiracy theories. “Jesus says…Civil war is coming and it will be bloody…Pray for Donald Trump.:” (39) And again, there is the conspiracy theory that the left is sexually trafficking children. In reality, the vast majority of human trafficking is done by “boyfriends, parents, relatives, older acquaintances.” (51-2)

Yes, there is a great deal of money to be made by these religious schemers, and Lavin gives many examples. People who want to believe in conspiracies and who willingly part with their cash trawl the “conspiracy swamps of the internet” to find proof. (50)

The question for me is, although these things are true and verifiable, does the Christian right account for the success of Donald Trump? Does it, by itself, have the power to force Project 2025 on the rest of us, eventually eliminate democracy and install an oligarchic theocracy?

Lavin admits that we don’t know what people like “human yeast infection and slovenly right-wing ideologue Steve Bannon” (52) and others think about religion and the presence of an active Satan in the world, but she allows that their faith could be the foundation of their behaviors.

I have a hard time believing that. Grifters are going to grift. There is sooo much money to be made on people’s fears, and Bannon and his ilk have figured out how to cash in with their fake border wall schemes, cryptocurrency, and so much more. They and Trump have been wildly successful at stoking fear and rage in order to achieve their ends. And people raised in authoritarian Christian religions and cults are primed to believe some pretty crazy things. It’s a small step for them to give the same sort of authority to MAGA. These believers are a means to an end for the Bannons and Trumps of the world. The end is money (and thus control), not a relationship with a God/Jesus.

There has to be more that accounts for nearly 50% of the US voters selecting Trump and believing in the conspiracies and schemes of his cohort. I know plenty of people who voted for Trump at least once, and probably three times, though they became less likely to admit that as time went on. (It doesn’t read well in large swaths of California.) None of them believe in much of anything, spiritually. They are not evangelicals by any means, not even church goers. They don’t see Satan lurking around every corner, waiting to inhabit their bodies and the bodies of their children. They are not physically violent toward their kids or anyone else. They don’t think there are microchips in COVID-19 vaccines. They are not single-issue, anti-abortion voters. Premarital sexual purity is not something they value highly (or at all), and they use birth control. They are not worried about an apocalypse,¹ so they do not believe Donald Trump is God’s instrument in bringing one about. They don’t want medical care to be reliant on churches and charities that would refuse services to LGBTQ+ people.

But they vote for representatives who are lining up in those religious right causes and ideology. Through their votes, they, too, are working toward a world where those things will be true. I can’t figure out why, and I didn’t find the answers here.

That said, there is a lot of interesting information in Wild Faith about the practices of various fringe evangelicals. For that reason alone, it's well worth the read. Some of the things covered are:

• Authoritarian Christian parenting (including severe corporal punishment), popularized by James Dobson and Focus on the Family.

• The Gothard method of a patriarchal family run by a man as head of household and under the umbrella of God. Most people know this from watching the Duggars on Nineteen Kids and Counting. Families have a ‘quiverful’ of children (no birth control allowed, ever). They use corporal punishment on children as young as six months in order to break their wills. (This makes easy pickings for the politically savvy.)

• The Stay at Home Daughter Movement, where fathers select their daughters’ husbands for them in a highly constrained courtship ritual. Girls are always subject to men, so they are under their father’s ‘care’ until they are given away to their husbands.

• The Home School Legal Defense Association, which “exercises influence over the lives of millions of children, all without being known to most people.’ (234) While homeschooling can be a wonderful thing, it can also hide abused children from the public eye. HSLDA uses its legal resources to “insulate parents against child abuse charges and weakening state child-welfare agencies.” (239) In 2005, the HSLDA took on the case of Michael and Sharen Gravelle, an Ohio couple who adopted eleven children, some with disabilities, and kept them at home to be schooled. In September 2005, sheriff’s deputies found nine homemade cages of wood and chicken wire that reeked of urine, some with wired-in alarms, in the home. The children told authorities they were made to sleep in the cages at night; they talked about being hit with boards and having their heads held under freezing water as punishment.

HSLDA attorney Scott Somerville told the Akron Beacon-Journal, “[Michael Gravelle] told me why they adopted these children and told me the problems they were trying to solve. I think he is a hero.” (239)

“In a 2014 study of child abuse so severe that she described it with the term child torture, researcher Barbara L. Knox of the University of Wisconsin found that 47 percent of school-age victims she studied had been removed from school to be homeschooled.” (238)

There is an undercurrent of violence in all these practices, violence inflicted upon both the children and their mothers. Everyone except the patriarch needs to be kept in line. For me, this was the most important takeaway of Wild Faith. After interviewing numerous ex-evangelicals, Lavin states she realized she “was watching a gathering storm of societal violence built up in generations of homes that had imprisoned children under the rod and the policy doctrine of parental rights—a storm that threatens to upturn the golden land that was the subject of my ancestors’ dreams.” (254)

It’s good to know about these groups because, while only practiced by a minority of the US population—it seems about 7%—they are extremely harmful to thousands of people.²

I’ve researched the effects of religious cults on the lives of their members because my upcoming novel, Keep Sweet, is about a pair of siblings, hoping to escape a polygamist/high control cult. I have been reading the memoirs of women who have escaped cults. I plan to highlight a few in the future (Children of God cult, the Duggards, etc.). A few of these I have already highlighted in previous posts. You might be interested in these women’s stories:

The Stay at Home Daughter Movement:

Rift by Cait West

The Gothard Method (and various Calvinist churches, ‘wife discipline’/‘wife spankings’):

A Well-trained Wife by Tia Levings

Meanwhile, I’ll keep looking for a book that makes a more secure connection between the 14% of voters who are evangelicals and see Trump as their God-ordained salvation and the other 36% or so of voters who vote for him. How do these two groups see the world in the same way? Related to that, I read Cults Like Us : Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America by Jane Borden.

Thoughts on it coming soon.

If you know anything about any of these books, please comment!

Thanks for being here!

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading. My novel Keep Sweet is launching June 21. Now available for preorder from all the usual suspects. 😊 I’d be over the moon if you ordered it. 🌝

Here’s the publisher’s description.

1. Lavin notes that Biblical scholars believe the Book of Revelations is a thinly veiled critique of the Emperor Nero. The Mark of the Beast is his image on coins, seals, and stamps. The number 666 is the total of his name and title in gematria, which assigns a numerical b value to each Hebrew letter. So, the prophecies refer to events in the first-century Roman world.

2. However, the authors of Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States estimate that 20% of Americans/10 million people have identities “inextricable from fundamentalist Christianity, and who are willing to take spiritual warfare to the streets if necessary.” (229)