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In this episode, Matt is joined by journalist Talia Lavin to discuss her new book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America, one of the most fascinating and unique books published on the Christian right during the Trump-era. Lavin takes her subjects seriously, but not uncritically, and especially focuses on the wrecked and ruined lives left in the wake of conservative evangelicalism's more conspiratorial and authoritarian elements, from the Satanic Panic to James Dobson's parenting manual on how to beat a "strong-willed child" into compliance. Along the way, they talk about the triumph of QAnon, End Times theology, the importance of the New Apostolic Reformation, and more—all with an eye toward how these religious views and practices help explain conservative evangelicals' overwhelming support for Donald Trump.
Sources:
Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America(2024)
— Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy (2020)
— "The Sword and the Sandwich"
Listen again:
"The Prayers and Prophecies of Pat Robertson," Know Your Enemy, July 17, 2023
I know it's sort of taboo to judge the way people parent, but I wound up doing this very deep dive of looking into like 40 odd years of texts, you know, parenting manuals. And then at the same time, also talking to, I think roughly it was about 150 interlocutors. And I was shocked at just the utter brutality. All of it done like very much in the name of God. Let me elaborate kind of what we mean by this style of discipline. I mean, for one, it is corporal punishment. Spanking is highly encouraged. There is this idea that like sort of man's inherent nature is sinful. And this is manifest from like the time a child is born. There's no exemption because you're a three year old. Yeah, no, a baby is crying because it is selfish. And then you have this ritual of forgiveness afterwards, where you hold your child to let them know that you really love them. Yeah, so dark. It's just like how to cross wires 101. But I did talk to some parents who had raised their kids this way. And they were like, this is how everyone in my church was disciplining their kids. And I felt that if I didn't discipline my kids in this way, I would be condemning them to hell, like to this fate worse than death. And so there was an element in which I'm not saying that it hurt parents more than kids. But you know, there were parents who were like coerced into this method of parenting that's brutal and violent and like shattered your relationship with their kids. Yes, it probably was painful for many parents who their conscience, let's say, was saying this isn't right. But you hang over the threat of eternal damnation of their kids soul. What are they going to do? Right. And there's so much to unpack like the sort of intimate physicality of these kinds of ritualized beatings. Like the way it messes people up sexually like there's so much in it. Yes, I mean, as a gay kid raised in a fund on this church, like the kind of mix of physical punishment and sexual purity, whether straight or gay, I mean, it's neurosis inducing to be so fixated on sexual purity in this precise way. It's a really toxic mix. Yeah. And then the other piece of it and like, why I sort of spend so much real estate in a book that's about politics, is because I think it is a very functional and tried and tested method of creating authoritarians, the people who are both accepting of brutality and perhaps willing to commit it. This hyper fixation on obedience, this very consistent application of violence, often before children are even capable of speech. What you are creating is people who are accustomed to authority, meaning violence, people who are conditioned towards absolute obedience and, you know, know that to question anything can result in a beating. The psychologist and Holocaust survivor Alice Miller, with this book For Your Own Good, about what she called the poisonous pedagogy of the German turn of the century. And what she wrote was like, this is how you create a torturer by systematically subjecting them to violence and then teaching them that the only way to avoid that violence is obedience. And that's how you create people who obey any order and who crave violent authority and who empathize with the aggressor, because to do otherwise would be to acknowledge that your parents were wrong in the way they raised you, that you actually are victim and all sorts of things people don't want to say about themselves and their upbringings. And so you wind up with people who are more likely to commit violence in relationships or be the victims of violence in relationships. And you know, people for whom just like every day physical violence is sort of the way that they've been raised since before they could walk. No wonder violence and authoritarianism have such a space on their religious right. If you think about like the way people are raised from their earliest days, these are the conditions to create authoritarianism. [Music]
Matt talks to journalist Talia Lavin about her new book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America.
