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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