Wild faith How the Christian right is taking over America

The Christian far right is eviscerating children's welfare in order to raise up an army of "soldiers... instructed in a totalistic environment," according to this eye-opening account. Journalist Lavin (Culture Warlords) begins by recapping the past several decades of the Christian nationalist movement in America in an attempt to explain mainline Christianity's embrace of Donald Trump's authoritarianism. She finds that the inflection point is QAnon, which, by "mixing the language of Old Testament mysticism with contemporary right-wing conspiracy theories," has caused anti-democratic ideas long-inculcated by the far right to blend seamlessly with popular religious narratives. While well-told, this history isn't particularly innovative; far more revealing is the book's second half, which draws on hundreds of interviews with adults who suffered corporal punishment as children in evangelical households. Pairing their stories with an examination of the Christian right's promotion of "parental rights," Lavin convincingly positions child abuse as a central tenet of the Christian far right's extremist politics ("Their objective... is to exact complete obedience"). Though Lavin's account is limited by her focus on ex-evangelicals, whose '90s-era recollections give the narrative a throwback sheen, and her understanding of Evangelicism at times feels sensationalized, her reporting on child abuse is important and shocking. It's an infuriating glimpse into a cloistered world where abuse is encouraged. (Oct.)

A full-bore attack on Christian nationalism's crusade to remake America. A reader of her book, warns peripatetic journalist Lavin, is "an enemy combatant in a war of the spirit that began before your birth and is being waged every day by determined, ordinary people you wouldn't look twice at if they passed you in the street." Those people, Lavin asserts, are a small minority; evangelicals represent just 14% of the populace. Still, that's nearly 50 million people, and they have an unshakable goal for which they're willing to play a long game: namely, to establish "a Kingdom of Christ on Earth ruled by his elect." That kingdom would make possible scenarios worthy ofThe Handmaid's Tale: women, in the Christian fundamentalist order, are definitively second-class beings, meant to bear children and do the dishes. Children are meant to be obedient, and if they're not, they're subject to severe corporal punishment. On that point Lavin lingers too long, repeating assertions that "obedience to God requires doing violence to children" and its variants for page after page. Nonetheless, her analysis of where home schooling figures into the equation is disturbing: some children reject the indoctrination, but most, she holds, "live to be the future of the faith militant." The unremittingly alarmist tone makes Lavin's book a chore to read at times. Still, her overall points are well worth noting, particularly when it comes to looking at the long game: the evangelicals, allied now with supremacists and nationalists, have been concentrating quite effectively on transforming key aspects of American governance, especially the judiciary, into which the Trump administration has rushed to appoint lifetime judges committed to preserving "religious liberty," which according to Lavin means "anything they did or said came under the stamp of morality, because it was they who were saying it." Often repetitive, but with a point: the culture war is a real war, and the fundamentalists have their eyes on the prize. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.