Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America (Talia Lavin, Legacy Lit, 2024)

    When I picked up Talia Lavin’s first book, Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, it was December 2020. A few days later, after January 6th, I moved it to the top of my TBR pile. It would not fall victim to tsundoku! This year, I’m reading Lavin's newest book as we face down the “imperfect messenger” of the Christian nationalists for the third election cycle in a row. It’s all so exhausting. If nothing else, I think these texts are talismans that keep fascism at bay. Just like the deep faith of the Christians she discusses in the book, it doesn’t matter if the books work in this manner. I just have to have faith and then proceed accordingly; the world will fit into my frame, no matter what. So here’s to this text warding off fascist creep and fascist creeps!

    The stomach-turning details begin in the book’s earliest pages, where Lavin recounts a series of Satanic Panic related daycare lawsuits. Having recently read Kyle Riismandel’s Neighborhood of Fear (as you may know), I thought I was ready to gloss over these stories as old news. No, the ludicrous allegations of Satanic possession and demonic rituals levied against the daycare providers in the 1980s and 1990s were not featured in Riismandel’s text. I had never heard of them, either. It’s easy for me to think the Satanic Panic was all an overreaction to greasy teens playing Dungeons & Dragons while listening to IRON MAIDEN or MERCYFUL FATE in their basements. The stories recounted here show a much darker side to that story and presage the rest of the depravity evangelical Christians committed in their shaping of the world that Lavin will cover in the rest of the text. I was hooked.

    I thought of Riismandel’s text again while reading the next chapter, which features a section on the QAnon-amplified fears of child abuction. Riismandel explained in his book how these fears stemmed from Adam Walsh’s kidnapping and murder in 1981, and led millions of parents in the U.S. to be fearful of, well, everything. Lavin picks up that same idea in a modern setting when she breaks down the numbers of supposed child abductions in the U.S. She calculates that by the numbers QAnon followers cite, “a total of just over 8 million per year—or around 10 percent of the entire child population of the United States were kidnapped each year” (p. 51). As she points out, it would be absurd that everyone would just go on living if one in ten kids disappeared each year from this country. It’s one of those “they did the math” moments that reveals just how low the truth value of conspiracists’ claims are.

    But, as she argues throughout the book, even if these radical Christian nationalists are factually wrong, it does not matter because their wild faith will ensure they stop at nothing to dominate society with their version of reality. This idea later appears in reference to Christian nationalists’ ecstasy over the Dobbs decision. Lavin correctly points out that “the contents of [the Bible and the Constitution] are far less important than the act of believing in them: belief shapes things, turns civic texts into Holy Writ, selectively picks passages and rewrites them in letters of fire, wraps the cross in the flag” (p. 111). With that kind of zeal, there’s no need to let the facts get in the way. There is a vision to uphold and enact. It’s like a version of the Marines’ “Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out,” but instead it’s “let ‘em die and we’ll find the divine justification later.”

    Lavin spends plenty of time explaining some of the differences between various sects of evangelical or charismatic Christians, but one that stood out to me as particularly egregious at this moment are the Christian Zionists. Having followed news about the war in Palestine over the past year, I have seen plenty of Christians in the U.S. supporting Israel’s right to defend itself. This doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. The Christian Zionists, though, “love Jews like a hungry man loves a chicken wing; it’s an interest born out of need whose end is total consumption” (p. 85). Basically, Christian Zionists want the war to continue and want Israel to lose because that is the first part in fulfilling a prophecy of the Second Coming of Christ. Unhinged barely captures the way I would describe this position. It’s sickening.

    For a version of what that utterly nihilistic orientation to world affairs looks like closer to home, there is a chapter that explains how the Christian Right connected the dots between anti-integration, anti-abortion, and anti-public school ideals. After explaining how right-wing Christians opened segregation academies (i.e., whites-only private schools) in the South as a response to school integration, Lavin argues that “the rise of the Christian Right has its roots in segregationism and has grown to accommodate a generalized backlash against the social changes that accompanied the civil rights era” (p. 102). Really, anything that goes against the idea that white men run the world and that women and children in their lives are their property is anathema to the Christian Right. They have God on their side, after all, so they think they’re never wrong.

    Although the first half of the book is worthy on its own, the true horrors await in its remainder. This section is where Lavin pivots from tracing the Christian Right’s influence on U.S. politics and society into doing a case study on what Christian families look like. She dedicates chapters to roles played by domineering husbands, submissive wives, and fearful children, as well as the long-term effects of authoritarian, punitive, disciplinary parenting on survivors in each of these population categories. The excerpts of interviews that she pieces together to describe the physical, sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse that happens in these homes are nothing short of traumatic. It is absolutely worth reading, given the scope of the problem and the attention she gives it here.

    That said, Lavin knows how to turn a phrase, so when she describes Ron DeSantis as being “a cunning, unscrupulous man who never met a suit that liked him and never met an evangelical who didn’t” (p. 150), I was glad to have a brief moment to laugh. I also couldn’t help myself when, in retelling the story of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the Biblical Garden of Eden, she referred to said fruit as “unspecified, later retconned as an apple” (p. 174). Anyone who knows anything about how the Bible was put together by human hands knows that there are many competing versions and interpretations of any given story. Still the use of retconned in this context implies the sacred texts are nothing more than a serial drama, soap opera, or narrative sequential art. Just delightfully hilarious, even as the rest of this half of the text delves into the hell that adults inflict upon children in the name of total control. That gift, of making the madness of this world somehow appealing to read about, even as she calls you to enraged action, is Lavin’s own. We are lucky to receive it at this crucial time.

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The Message (Ta-Nehisi Coates, One World, 2024)

    If nothing else, this book is about the power of storytelling. Coates took some time to write fiction after the one-two punch of “The Case for Reparations” and Between the World and Me. Now he’s back to using nonfiction to explain to us why telling stories, whether true, wholly imaginary, or somewhere in between, are crucial to how we form our identities and use them to navigate this world. The process is not so simple as that, though. If only a story could be guaranteed an audience, and if only that audience was required to listen, and if only by listening could that audience be moved to care for the ideas the storyteller conveys. If only life were that simple.

    Early in the first section of the text, which is about a trip to Senegal as an adult that seems to have been in the back of his mind for years, Coates relays a story from his youth about a gruesome football injury he’d learned about from an issue of Sports Illustrated. The purpose of its inclusion here is to establish that there are times, such as when a talented athlete becomes disabled as the result of a routine play, that evil seems to win, despite the efforts of all involved. (As I paraphrase this section of the text, I realize that Coates is implying some kind of equivalence between disability and a ‘bad ending’ that doesn’t quite sit right with me.) He reflects on the fact that this story haunted him as a child because it violated the idea he held about good guys winning and bad guys losing, or at least having a negative consequence of some kind. He later explains how “Books work when no one else is looking” (p. 87) and that seems to be true of any text-based genre a storyteller may use to convey their message (i.e., it’s not just books). The lesson that evil could win is not one that many people may encounter in the stories they read, so that is why it may take time for books to do their work. Reading is a solitary activity, and these private moments of insight may not come as immediately as we would think.

    The purpose of the storyteller, Coates later tells us, is to provide this clarity, even if it is delayed. Again, this clarity need not be concerned with nonfiction. Even inventive stories can help us understand how “the sharpening of our writing is the sharpening of our quality of light” (p. 19). This quotation is one of those that (as I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog) made me close the book for a minute and sigh as I stared into space. It seems so easy to understand and so obvious once someone else has put it to you that clearly and cleanly. He goes on to explain throughout the text how the light that these stories bring runs counter to the prevailing narratives that support darkness, in the sense that they are stories that venerate harm. Stories that may serve the existing social order at the expense of the marginalized. 

    The purpose of the storyteller is to shed light on these harms and their perpetrators and to help us imagine a world that does not “root [its] worth in castes and kingdoms,” (p. 35) even if those castes or kingdoms would have the historically marginalized placed at the top of the heap. Simply installing a new ruler from a once-oppressed population does not change the fact that people are being ruled and that a hierarchy exists. He comes back to this idea later in the text, in the section on Israel and Palestine when reflecting on “the incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing” (p. 170). No matter what fate has befallen a marginalized people, there is no kind of overall scorekeeping that could justify using that past mistreatment to perpetrate future harms. This is an idea so large that I know I will still be considering it well after the book has closed. It’s a question that gets to the heart of what justice actually means in practice. It’s a place where pat answers remain unsatisfying and storytellers reveal their utility.

    Those uncomfortable questions about justice and victims occupy a large part of the text. In the second section of the book, Coates tells of the experience he had of joining a teacher in South Carolina who was facing disciplinary action from her school board for having taught from Between the World and Me in her classroom. Toward the end of the discussion of this case, he reflects on the larger picture of the book ban itself and remarks that schools that enact book bans are trying “not just to ensure the right answers are memorized but that the wrong questions are never asked” (p. 111). This comes after a section that discusses Freire’s critique of the banking model of education (i.e., teachers deposit knowledge and students withdraw it on tests or essays). That there exist books that put the lie to this idea of the banking model is threatening to people with power, and so they do not want students or their parents grappling with the uncomfortable, difficult questions about who victims are and what justice looks like.

    He continues his critique by describing how policy change at the local level is a consolidation of a school or village board’s collective imagination about what kinds of worlds are possible. What else informs that imagination but the very books they are trying to ban? If the stories in these books weren’t so powerful, then the powerful wouldn’t want to ban them. The narratives and language that storytellers use are what helps us shape a vision of the world we’d like to have. Policing the worldview of children through books when they have the open internet at their disposal seems less like concern for the children, or (I can’t write this with a straight face) parents’ rights. It’s just about control. Power, plain and simple.

    When he transitions to the final section on Israel and Palestine, he continues to demonstrate the power of storytelling and explicitly how it can be used to “erode claims to power” (p. 140). There can be nothing more terrifying to a colonial power than the witness who calls out its abuses of power. That’s just how he treats his visit to Israel. It seems so easy to see from his perspective as a Black American that Israel functions as an apartheid state. That simple conclusion belies hours and days of thinking, talking, and bearing witness to the abuses of Israel to its Palestinian counterparts. As an American who has neither a Christian, nor Jewish, or Muslim faith, he is able to connect with people across these communities and see what realities they experience in the Middle East as he works through his thoughts and tells his stories.

    He leaves with a clear idea (again, writing sharpens our quality of light!) that he is visiting an apartheid state no better than the Jim Crow United States. He puts it plainly, stating that “race is ultimately a species of power” (p. 126) when considering what his Blackness means when crossing security checkpoints in Israel. Again, the idea of abolishing a hierarchical society screams off the page here. What else could you want from your continued existence? Wouldn’t you feel better if you didn’t have to exert so much energy putting systems in place that continue to tell you that you deserve to be at the top of the heap? You would, but you might be too afraid to admit it. Maybe you, too, can learn that lesson from this book when no one else is looking.

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Blacktop series (LJ Alonge, Grosset & Dunlap, 2016-2017)

    This is maybe the fifth book (series) on basketball I’ve read this year, and the only one that is fiction. It’s also the one that grabbed me the closest as I was reading it. Completing the series didn’t feel like a chore or something that I would kick myself for abandoning later on down the line. It was a treat and it left me wanting to hear more from the characters and their lives and world. I think I finally understand the purpose of fan fiction.

    I first learned of the series when SAMMUS (a.k.a. Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo) posted a few years ago that her then-boyfriend, now-husband had written a few young adult books on kids who play pick-up basketball on the courts of Oakland, CA, and who may or may not get along when they are off the court. As a kid who grew up reading Matt Christopher sports novels, I was definitely intrigued. One cool thing about the series is that each book focuses on a single character’s perspective. The four title characters (Justin, Janae, Frank, and Toni) each appear in the grand narrative that stretches across the books, but it is not a case of changing narrators each chapter with differing perspectives on the same events. That’s fine as a narrative device, but I really preferred how Alonge kept us focused on the thoughts and feelings of each individual player for an entire book. You get to know them on and off the court and see how each of their lives intersects and informs the others. It’s built for re-reading.

    The main reason I dig this series so much is that what I like about basketball is not the statistical analysis in debates about who is the GOAT, or the attempts to outdo God by chopping reality into instant-replay slices to determine possession. The game is unique and wonderful because it’s one of the only team sports you can practice entirely on your own. Add another person and you can get close to the feeling of a full game by running one-on-one. This series depicts those small moments that make basketball beautiful and that have nothing to do with leagues, whistles, and fans, though there is a brief interlude where the characters do participate in organized sports. It doesn’t go well, but that doesn’t mean the group has failed in any sense. It’s just another moment in their lives and doesn’t dull their love for the game in the long run. 

    Even better is how Justin’s book ends before letting the reader know which team emerged victorious in a pivotal game. It was enough for Justin to get a huge block at a critical moment and to bask in the glory of the few people there to watch, including his teammates. That choice not to Disney up the book with a triumphant win over a heated or hated rival is another aspect of the series that makes it so entertaining to read. It’s not about the wins or losses, but just those little moments that make playing sports special. It gave me space to reconsider meaningful and nearly perfect basketball experiences in my life. They range from seeing Jordan’s first game back at the United Center in 1995 to seeing Northwestern’s Nathan Taphorn pull off a full-court inbounds pass to Dererk Pardon for a layup to defeat Michigan in 2017 to playing two hours of 3-on-3 in the dark after leaving a shitty party on a Friday night in 2002 to driving over an hour to play 2-on-2 with some of those same people in 2015. These moments range in time and place and historical relevance but they inform my perspective on the game regardless. Alonge gets this idea and that's what makes the series so compelling.

    I look forward to revisiting Justin, Janae, Frank, Toni, and Mike (he doesn’t even get his own book) in a few months or years, once I’ve forgotten the details of their hoop dreams. I can’t say the same about When the Game Was War or Pipeline to the Pros, which are meticulously reported analyses of aspects of the game I love so much. The smaller stories in those nonfiction pieces sometimes reveal something interesting and magical about basketball, but the way Alonge explodes some of those same moments into fully realized narratives about fictional characters is even more engrossing.

    Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year comes the closest to getting at this point. For every LeBron who makes it to the league, there are dozens of other almost-made-it cases whose stories aren’t captured in box scores and highlights, so reports of their greatness don’t travel past the city limits. The whispers down the lane and the rumor mill can provide as much excitement or hype as any meticulously crafted game footage could, and with the power of imagination, can make being there to see or hear about it even more memorable. These books convey the excitement of that feeling and that’s why they’re worth savoring.

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Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture 1975-2001 (Kyle Riismandel, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020)

    Picking up a book that covers the years when I came of age in an American suburb, I figured I’d know plenty about what I was getting into. I thought I’d be reading mostly to confirm my own biased view of what it was like to grow up where and when I did. How wrong I was. It is a book like Riismandel’s that helps to give me a new lens on a topic I think I know something about. In this case, it is the idea of productive victimization that shakes me into a new way of looking at the world. Riismandel explains the term, writing “Rather than simply be imperiled, suburbanites responded by leveraging their endangerment through a process I call productive victimization. In actions posed as necessary to defend home, family, and neighborhood against new threats, suburbanites actually increased their control of local spaces and the people in them and further entrenched the suburban family as the paradigm of American values” (pp. 6-7). So, by positioning themselves as victims of society when they don’t get their way, suburban Americans only increase their power and influence. It’s one of those things that makes you sit and think and stop and stare right as you are starting to get into the book. I knew I wouldn’t be able to put this one down because that idea has so much explanatory power.

    Early on, Riismandel discusses the Three-Mile Island meltdown and explains how confusion about what was actually happening in the reactor near Harrisburg led to compounding human errors on the site of the reactor itself. As a result, the competing perspectives of local government officials, company spokespeople, local and national reporters, and expert scientists became jumbled and led to mass confusion about how to best inform the public about a) what had even happened, and b) what they should do to seek safety. People who can operate the machinery involved in a nuclear power plant recognize that its operation requires distributed institutional knowledge that may be difficult to understand in a setting such as news conference. As Riismandel explains, this complexity led to many in the area to express NIMBYism out of fear. Although this response is entirely reasonable, it becomes a problem when the idea of NIMBYism is used as a cudgel to prevent any kind of governmental project to happen. Because the failure of an incredibly complex system, people end up not trusting the government or valuing expertise. You can see how these developments primed the pump for Reagan’s famous quip about the nine most terrifying words in the English language. Moreover, Riismandel quotes The New York Times’ William Glaberson on how NIMBYs were strategic in how they would vanish after making their voices heard. In contrast to other kinds of political organizers, suburban NIMBYs come with built-in clout, so they and their concerns are taken seriously from the start, and they don’t need to sustain any kind of momentum once they reach their goal. They can simply fade into the background until the next cause rears its head. In that way, the Three-Mile Island meltdown and its public response provide a clear example of how productive victimization operates.

    In the chapter on the carceral suburb, Riismandel uses the kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh to explore how suburban fear grew into the home security industry. One of the most illuminating cases in this chapter comes when Riismandel contrasts the public response to Walsh’s murder with the murder of nearly 30 children in Atlanta only a few years prior. In Walsh’s case, the idea that a neighborhood watch of white adults and cops driving around in the suburbs, peeking into people’s windows was commendable. In Atlanta, the idea that a neighborhood watch of Black teenagers with baseball bats (because the cops wouldn’t come to their neighborhood) was terrifying, and further evidence of urban decay. You can see the racist double standard from a mile away.

    I was glad to see a section on southern California Hardcore in the book. It’s handled well, with all the usual suspects included (MIDDLE CLASS, BLACK FLAG, CIRCLE JERKS, DESCENDENTS, YOUTH BRIGADE, etc.). There’s even discussion of Flipside, Maximum RockNRoll, and The Big Takeover as well. In this section, Riismandel strikes a solid balance between being informative to someone who might not know about these bands and treating the music and scene with a depth of knowledge that shows he knows this information well. This chapter also addresses arcades and malls as places where teens rubbed up against the social norms, including the paradox that mall managers needed teens to be feeding coins into machines in the arcades, but if there were too many teens all at the same time, chaos might ensue. In the eyes of suburbanites, both hardcore punks and coin-op loving mallrats present a threat to the social order merely by wanting to get out of the supposedly safe suburban house to find a community elsewhere. 

    In the final full chapter, Riismandel hits on a powerful idea when discussing the PMRC. Having established that Reagan’s America was deeply distrustful of government solutions, that meant the suburban family needed to be its own problem solvers and the suburban home needed to be the laboratory where those problems were solved. So, no experts in “medicine, science, education, or public policy” could help suburbanites with the problems they faced. It was all down to “proper consumer choices;” in other words, what you could buy is the only thing that could ever save you (p. 145). If nothing else, the folly of trying to purchase your way out of a social or personal or health problem should be the lasting critique of the late 20th century American suburb. There are experts in fields of inquiry for a reason. They have dedicated their lives to studying the issues that make us human. We should listen to them.

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Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (Henry Grabar, Penguin Press, 2023)

    Beginning my entry into this book on an 'L' platform this summer made me feel so self-conscious about owning a car that I thought I might explode. Grabar introduces early on the idea that people think parking should be free, convenient, and available, but that only two of these three features are usually present for any given parking spot. I had parked my car a few blocks from the end of the line because I didn’t want to pay the cost of parking in the provided lot. So, my parking choice that day was free and available, but moderately inconvenient. Had I parked in the lot itself, it would have been convenient and available, but not free. If I lived in that neighborhood, I could have left my car in my driveway for a spot that is free and convenient, but unavailable to anyone else. 

    Just as I methodically walked you through that simple idea Grabar presented, he carefully explains the kind of truths that seem screamingly self-evident as soon as he reveals them. You think, “how was I not already aware of this issue?” each time he delivers a new consequence of the car-centric U.S. One of the most galling ones begins the book. A woman named Ginger Hitzke wished to convert a city-owned parking lot into an affordable-housing apartment near the ocean in San Diego, but was stymied for years because of locals’ objections to the building due to its lack of parking spaces. That dispute was a proxy for wanting the people who’d live in the building, low-income residents, to not be in the neighborhood. Even though she demonstrated that many of the people who intended to live in the units did not even own cars to begin with, it was not enough for the NIMBYs and she eventually gave up out of years of frustration. It sounds exhausting because it is.

    Another one of those simple ideas that seems so intuitive that you feel silly needing a book to understand it is that parking garages should be cheaper than on-street parking in high-demand areas. The reason I was riding the 'L' is because I had an appointment in Streeterville and needed to get there from the suburbs. It was cheaper to ride the 'L' both ways than to pay at least $15 an hour for a parking spot near my appointment, and that’s without considering the cost of gas. (There is also an entire chapter on the city of Chicago getting fleeced by investment bankers who now have a 75-year contract to service these meters.) The idea is that no one wants to leave their car in a space that charges $15 / hr when meters are closer to $4.75 / hr. What does that mean? It means people will circle the block for 45 minutes because it is literally going to save them about $10 / hr to do so. Stated another way, drivers are incentivized to create more traffic and gridlock in an already popular area by circling the block because if they are lucky enough to get a metered spot, they will save more money even if they lose a little time. So, Grabar presents proposals that would turn that idea on its head. Make the on-street parking spots $15 / hr and the garage $4 / hr. That way people will more frequently leave the on-street spots because they are so pricey, which will reduce traffic because people who would have circled the block will instead go straight to the garage and keep their car there longer. It seems so simple but getting cities and private parking lot owners to agree to this change is also difficult.

    Later on, Grabar discusses parkitecture, the idea that buildings have to be constructed to code based on the number of spots per each unit or per a certain amount of square footage. Buildings that people know and love could not be built now because of laws written based on past ideas of car ownership and parking usage. As you can imagine, there is not a lot of science or history informing the laws about parking minimums that currently exist. Grabar tells of a lawyer in L.A. who leads tours of the “forbidden city,” where such buildings stand, but could not be built today because their lack of parking spaces would violate the city code.

    As an aside, Grabar mentions that the JONI MITCHELL song with the refrain that gives this book its name is the only song about parking itself. I can think at least two songs besides that one that I know are about parking: “Take ‘em Up” by Maumee, Ohio’s NECROS (be advised this song’s conceit is spitefully tasteless) and “Pay” by Bloomington, Indiana’s GIZMOS. I am under no delusions that these songs are anywhere near as known as JONI MITCHELL’s ubiquitous tune but they still exist. Can you think of any others? There are so many songs about loving or hating the act of driving, but none about arriving at the destination. Or even if they are at the destination, it’s about reaching home, not where you leave your vehicle. Sure, the boys are back in town, but where will they park? Surely they don’t want to have to stage another jailbreak if they get arrested for excessive unpaid parking tickets…

    There is some hope, but the feeling I get from finishing this book is that cars are not the way forward (electronic or not). The congestion itself is still there, no matter how the cars run. Similarly, appified solutions such as SpotHero, which Grabar also addresses, will not solve the problem. The idea that there is a massive game of musical chairs happening every day in big cities and small towns means that there are always parking spaces available; you are leaving your spot free every time you leave your house. Consider that malls are built with massive parking lots that may only ever be full during the 10 days before Christmas and you can begin to see how wasteful it is to allocate land in this way. That these lots are taking up space that could be used for housing people is the bigger issue. More public transportation and more public housing will help to right this wrong, but man, there are a lot of obstacles in the way.

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