This week, we’re sharing an interview with Talia Lavin, author of Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy. In this chat, we speak about her more recent book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America. There’s a lot in the book, most of it pretty disturbing (especially, I’m sure, for anyone who is ex-vangelical) and there is discussion of hateful ideology and child abuse and corporal punishment, though not in lurid detail, so listener discretion is advised. We hope to cover related topics in the future.

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Links:

• Newsletter: https://buttondown.com/theswordandthesandwich
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/taliainteralia/
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/swordsjew.bsky.social

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Featured Track:

• Voice Of God Is Government by Bad Religion from How Could Hell Be Any Worse

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Transcription

Talia Lavin: Hi, my name is Talia Lavin, she/her. I live in New York, and I am the author, most recently, of Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America, which came out late last year and, I think, is unfortunately all too relevant in the current hellscape that we live in. I’m very happy to be here and to chat with your audience.

TFSR: Thank you. I’m sorry that you’re here because of how important the book is, but I’m very happy to have you here to have the chat.

Talia Lavin: When you write a book about grim topics, you have to delicately contend with a lot of situations, like, “Ah, your book gave me nightmares, but I’m so glad you wrote it,” and I’m like, “I’m so sorry.” Or like, “I wish your book wasn’t so relevant,” and I’m like, “You and me both.” But if we have to live in a horrifying hellscape, it’s better to know your enemy and know the lay of the land, I think.

TFSR: Yeah, absolutely. Your prior book, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, covers white supremacists online, their online spaces, and their meetspace ramifications. What made you pivot to write your 2024 book, Wild Faith, about the Christian right in America? Was it much of a pivot, or did it lead well into this second book?

Talia Lavin: Actually, the initial proposal was on a history of terrorism in America, and then as I was looking through histories of American homegrown violence, and also looking at the ways the political landscape shifted between presidential elections, it became increasingly clear to me that while I learned a lot from studying these fringe groups and from gaining a working knowledge of antifascist movements and methods, I felt that if I really wanted to keep my audience appraised of radical right threats that increasingly the vector of threat had moved from the radical fringe to more or less the center, that there has been this radicalization of institutions, and that’s part of the story.

The other part is that I became very interested in child abuse within evangelical communities, which is something I focus on very heavily in the book. Child abuse and systematically violent child rearing as a vector for the ways in which society can become more violent. So I spend a lot of time—some book critics have argued an inordinate amount of time—talking to survivors of child abuse, talking about evangelical methods of child rearing.

What’s significant about it, first of all, it’s always a privilege to have survivors share their stories with you. Oh my god, it’s so validating as a writer and author to be entrusted with these really difficult stories that some people were telling for the first time, let alone to a total outsider. But what I wound up postulating, I suppose, is that a lot of the violence in American society, which I think we can all agree is a pretty hyper-violent place, I think can be traced back to really inter-generational trauma, to these ways in which many subcultures, but particularly the white evangelical parenting subculture, are astoundingly violent.

I wound up groping my way from there into, let’s explain the last American half century and how things get so amazingly, confusingly fucked up. It definitely turned in a different direction than I or my editor was expecting but I felt that not to turn from the fringe to the mainstream would be to marginalize my own understanding of just how drastically and quickly things were changing at the very top and really at the beating heart of American politics.

TFSR: It’s interesting to talk about turning from the fringe to the heart of American politics in that way, to watch, just over the last decade or so, Nazi groups, virulent white nationalist, white supremacist groups, or at least spokespeople from within those groups, turning towards variant Christian sects, following certain trends in Eastern Orthodox churches, or becoming reactionary Catholics. They’re following those trends, so it’s almost like a drop in the water that leads you to see this back-and-forth feeding between the not vocally Christian fringe, but also engaging a lot of the same value sets and a lot of the same methods and approaches towards power, between, as you say, the center of American politics and those fringes. Does that make sense?

Talia Lavin: Oh, yeah, totally. You’ve got your Trad Caths and your would be Orthodox priests and so on in the far right, in the neo-Nazi sphere. And they definitely exist. To me, that’s much more an aesthetic phenomenon, sort of on par with the ways certain white supremacists will adopt Norse Neopaganism or Satanism or whatever, and it winds up being a way to be in community with fellow white supremacists and more or less an aesthetic for your tattoos. I’m not a theologian. I’m not here to police anyone’s expression of faith, but I think in many cases, it doesn’t really go necessarily beyond, “This is my flavor of how I express my hate.”

Whereas, on the other hand, when you’re talking about the Christian right as this political movement, it is quite a bit broader and numerically quite a bit larger than the neo-Nazi fringe. Not to denigrate anyone who does that work. I did that work. It’s really hard. It’s hard psychologically, it’s hard emotionally. It involves getting door-knocked by the FBI, like, “People wanting to rape and kill you,” and you’re like, “Oh, I know,” and all sorts of fun like that. The antifascist researchers I’ve known have been some of the most courageous and interesting people around. But for me, especially in the contemporary Trump 2.0 era, it began to feel a little narrow.

And also these sorts of fascist movements, particularly the alt-right movement, I watched them become victims of their own success. Their ideas so successfully penetrated the mainstream that it no longer made sense to study them not in abstention, but in isolation, and not to be talking about the ways their ideas are influencing the main cast of characters in American politics right now. I look at the ideology I studied… When I was looking at incels in Culture Warlords in 2020, and then, when I read about the Christian right’s stated goals for women in 2025, to me, the picture is far more similar than it is different, even if it’s couched in different terminology and uses different proof texts. Maybe it’s not “The Fourteen Words,” maybe it’s The Book of Paul, but the essential idea of dominating, controlling, subverting, and destroying women’s freedom is still there and is still at the core of the ideology.

TFSR: Yeah, thank you. There are a few terms that you use in the book that are common today, but their boundaries and overlaps, I think, are worth investigating. What is the Christian right that you describe in the book? How is that distinguished from Christian nationalism? Who do these terms cover, and what beliefs do they share? How widespread are they?

Talia Lavin: You know, the categories are a little bit blurry. The Christian right is a group of people, whereas Christian nationalism is an ideology. So you could have Christian nationalists who are very often part of the Christian right, but one is sort of a noun about an ideology, and another is a noun about the group of people that perpetuate it. So that’s one answer, maybe not the sexiest answer in the world, but there you have it.

In terms of understanding how widespread it is and what the numbers are… In my book, I focused a lot on white evangelical Protestants, and that number is pretty well established. It’s right around 14 million people, so not the largest group in the US, but certainly not small.

When I talk about the Christian right, I’m talking about people who are the direct spiritual descendants of these titans of the movement that emerged in the ‘70s and ‘80s, people like Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, whom younger listeners may not have any knowledge of. Essentially, these televangelist titans who started organizations like the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family and really proclaimed themselves as the arbiters of American morality, all that stuff about Christians being the guardians of the American family and decency.

Yes, Christian morality in a Christian hegemonic country has always had this outsized role, but the idea of American Christianity being this force for social conservatism, and explicitly also a major force in right-wing politics, is really something that’s been building over the last 50 years. What we’re seeing now in the Trump administration is the apotheosis of that, this patient view to eternity, building of temporal power. We’re seeing the results play out in real time, you know, the judicial capture, the wild amount of power over state legislatures, and I don’t see that necessarily going away anytime soon. So in the interim, I would argue it’s a defensive tactic to understand what these groups believe and where they’re coming from.

There is a certain tendency, particularly among liberal commentators, to say, “Well, these folks can’t really believe these things that I personally find abhorrent, right?” There’s this sense that everyone secretly believes in this secular, rationalistic worldview at their core, that everyone has this scientific skepticism that they approach belief with, and that is just fundamentally not the case. People, and especially people in the media, really tend to look at this kind of belief as either a cynical grift or a comic sideshow. It can be comic, and it can often be grotesque, but I think at your own peril do you say, “Well, they can’t possibly really believe that anyone who politically opposes them is the tool of the devil.” No, they absolutely can.

I certainly found in my research on neo-Nazis that the biggest single clue to figuring out what a group of people believes, if you earnestly want to do that, is to read what they have to say about what they believe. It’s just this one weird trick: reading what they write, especially to one another in community. The evangelical right has a lot to say about the ways it wants to see America run, the ways it wants women and gay people to have roles in public life, AKA minimal or not at all. The ways it views women, work, welfare, and all sorts of things. And you are currently seeing many of those policy prescriptions being played out under the Trump administration, which is both very frightening and also, to me, at any rate, a significant impetus to really dig down and get to know who these folks are and why they want what they want.

And so I did a lot of reading of stuff like Christian marriage manuals, Christian parenting manuals, Christian relationship blogs, and so on so you don’t have to. I did that. I cite my sources. You can read them if you want. But they’re not hiding what they want. It’s not a hidden agenda in any way. It’s very open. You just have to have the capacity to say, “Boy, yeah, these are ideas that they truly believe and very much want to implement on a national level.”

TFSR: You mentioned listening to what people say and believing that, especially when they’re talking to each other, they’re being honest and this is a good way of appraising the intentions and possibly doing a threat analysis of where they’re going. I think that people, especially with what might be called a liberal humanist gaze, might scoff at, “Ok, well they might believe that they want women in the kitchens and pregnant, barefoot, out of the workplaces,” this sort of stuff. And terrible as that is, they might also scoff, understand that, and say, “Ok, well, this is something that feminism has been fighting for a long time. This we can understand.”

But when it comes to some of the spiritual ideas, some of the eschatology, or some of the concepts… What’s the term I’m looking for? (It’s probably too complicated, so I shouldn’t try to say it.) The idea of spiritual warfare. Basically, the framing that a lot of people in the Christian right have towards the implications of the outcomes of the struggles that they’re in. It’s not just about keeping women out of the workplace, it’s not just about taking away their right to choose when to have children, but it might be about the struggle against demons or one of your opponents actually being taken over by Satan, and that the end of the world and the second coming of Christ are right around the corner—“If we just do the right things, we can survive to see it or participate.”

I thought that was an important part of the book, a point that you’ve brought up a couple times, and you also have brought it up in a few interviews that you’ve done, that you don’t have to believe it too, but understanding that someone does, that these are the scales on which people are judging their activity, sometimes their terrorism. What’s at stake is beyond what the courts will adjudicate correctly—It’s in the hands of God. Can you talk a bit about some of the shortcomings of this—you might have a different name for it, but I’m gonna say—liberal humanist or science-driven approach towards understanding opposition, what’s at stake, and also what people are willing to do to get done what they think has divine ramifications?

Talia Lavin: Yeah, absolutely. I think you already nailed it. The stakes are very high in this culture. They’re ramped up to this degree that’s so intense that it’s hard to imagine the stakes getting any higher, because functionally, they are about how to bring about Jesus’ return, how to thwart Lucifer in a perpetual war of the Spirit that’s constantly going on just outside the mortal realm. If you look at the visions coming out of the ‘70s and ‘80s, and if you look at the prophecy movement and charismatic Christianity in all sorts of ways, there’s really a sense that the battle for Christian souls and Christian virtue is really this very literal battle between angels and demons that’s taking place in the American public sphere, that angels and demons not only have a place in the American political sphere, but they’re already there. The warriors of light are doing this incredibly important job of literally being God’s messengers and warriors within the world.

When you posit that the end is nigh, and we can make it nigher—which is something we want—depending on our actions, that’s step one in this belief. And then step two is “What we’re doing is thwarting the devil and bringing back Jesus, and anyone who stands in our way is standing on the wrong side of God.” So that becomes very existential very quickly. It really becomes about this battle between good and evil. The stakes are extremely high, and you’re really playing with demonic fire really quickly. That can be very hard to assimilate as someone who is secular. You feel like, “I don’t believe in any of this stuff, and this isn’t my worldview, so how can it have such a massive impact on politics when it’s so alien to me?” But once you understand that these are the stakes for the people involved, some of the extremity of their actions makes a lot more sense, and I think that has value.

And it’s also worth knowing that you’ve been more or less drafted into a spiritual war that started way before you were born, for most of our listeners, and will continue with or without you. It’s just that you’re on the devil’s side, whether you signed up for it or not. So you’ve been enlisted into the army of the unrighteous because you disagree with the Christian right’s stances on stuff like gay marriage, gay people existing, that trans folks should be able to go to the bathroom, and really wild stuff like that.

We talk about culture war all the time in American media, and it’s very often this irritating shorthand for “This group believes in civil rights, and this group doesn’t. Let’s call it a culture war.” That’s always been irritating to me, just because I think it’s a dishonest, belittling framing of these issues that are so vitally important to so many people. But even beyond that, it’s not even a culture war. It’s a clash of fundamental worldviews. Like do you believe that your actions are led and driven by the prince of darkness and his minions or not? To call that a culture war, I think is a bit reductive.

TFSR: You had mentioned a few thinkers who were influential to the formation of the Christian right as it stands now, and I’d love to pick at some of that and get some more names in a moment. I grew up Roman Catholic, not all that devout, but most of the determination of the discussion is decided by the Vatican, by the central authority. There’s some orthodoxy in the interpretation of these books that are included, you know, the so-called Bible or whatever. Maybe this is the ex-Catholic looking at the Protestant movements, but I get the impression that decision-making for what is scripture and how the interpretation should be is a really decentralized thing. With the Christian right, are there any movers or shakers currently that are helping to determine these stakes and determine these interpretations that are being shared? It’s not just the Southern Baptist Convention, right?

Talia Lavin: That’s a pretty big influential group, the Southern Baptist Convention. But no, it’s not just them. One big watershed moment was (I don’t know what to call it) a petition, declaration, called the Manhattan Declaration. It was signed during the Obama years, and it was hundreds of pastors from across different denominations essentially signing this proclamation that they would not obey laws that conflicted with their Christian faith as they interpreted it. You had people from all sorts of denominations, Catholics, Orthodox, all kinds of folks, but primarily white evangelical Protestants. And essentially, it was an argument against being “forced to recognize gay marriage,” all about the gender ideology that they hold very dearly. You know about one man and one woman, and the woman is submissive to the man. It’s funny, they talk all the time that everyone else is indoctrinating via gender ideology, and then they have this incredibly rigid indoctrination via gender ideology.

So these are figures like John Piper. These were really leaders from all over the modern right. And there is a very significant Catholic element in the modern Christian Right. It is huge. Leonard Leo, the leader of the Federalist Society, I believe, is Catholic. You’ve got Amy Coney Barrett on the court and JD Vance with his “I’m a Catholic convert far-righter” vibes. Not to mention some of the OGs, like Phyllis Schlafly, who was Catholic. She was this female warrior against women’s rights and really can, unfortunately, take a lot of credit for defeating the Equal Rights Amendment. So terrible job on that, Phyllis.

TFSR: Or Father Coughlin.

Talia Lavin: Yeah, right. That’s really going far back, but sure, yeah. He was a priest who basically did a lot of antisemitism and racism on air, likely had a paramilitary, that sort of thing, during the ‘30s. There has always been a Catholic right. In the ‘80s, there was really a quite savvy decision to bind the Catholic and Protestant right together into, I would say, a Protestant-led but mutually beneficial movement focusing on abortion and restricting abortion reproductive rights.

This white Protestant right really awoke politically in the wake of Brown versus Board of Education and also subsequent Supreme Court decisions that argued, in essence, that segregated religious schools could not be tax-exempt. Famous decisions involving Bob Jones University, but also lots of other parochial schools across the South that you haven’t heard of that were so-called “segregation academies.” After Brown versus Board passed, there was this really wild movement of emptying out of public schools across the South, bleeding funds from public schools, all white students withdrawing, and then this rash of Christian schools cropping up to fill the void for white students and white students only. If you looked at NAACP reports at the time, they said the quickest way to identify a segregation academy is to see if it has “church” or “Christian” in its name.

The initial political awakening of the Christian right was this violent segregationism centered on schools. You can still see echoes of that in the way their rhetoric is constantly about protecting the children, and the ways their rhetoric and actions are so hyper-focused on and deeply hostile to public schools. That really comes from the founding DNA of this movement. But essentially, what you had in the ‘80s were some savvier political operators like Paul Weyrich and Phyllis Schlafly saying, “Hey guys, we get that you’re passionate about segregation. We don’t disagree, but it’s not going to win you a lot of converts outside the South and outside your congregations. It makes you look unsympathetic to the Americans who have reluctantly decided to give some semblance of racial equality a try.”

What emerged out of the mid to late ‘70s and ‘80s was this new coalition of the Moral Majority, the Christian right, who became hyper-focused on repealing feminism, gay rights, reproductive rights, and all of these movements that had defined the ‘60s and the decade in which there was a real backlash against segregation, against all these values that these groups really held dear and felt very fundamentally about. What emerged was the sense of, “Ok, let’s attack it from a different perspective. If we’re going to defeat feminism, we’ve got to frame this as if we are enacting a civil rights movement of our own, the struggle for the civil rights of the unborn.” And the movement very quickly started adopting the language of the very civil rights movement that they had so recently literally turned the hoses on. It was the sense of, “This time we’ll be on the right side of history.”

One thing that’s interesting to me, and that I do bring up in the book, is that most of these movements that led to the sense of violent dislocation and this backlash that really awakened white Protestants as a political force for the first time in modern American history, many of these protest movements, whether we’re talking about gay rights, feminism, civil rights, or ending the war in Vietnam, were led by young people and students. And so what you have also emerge at the same time is this biblical parenting movement that advocates for extremely harsh, punitive, and controlling parenting, really brutal ideological indoctrination. You have the rise and subsequent meteoric legislative success of the homeschooling movement. And so, essentially, what you have is this really intense movement from within the Christian right to control the youth, this sense that, “The youth is out of control. The youth is causing all of these movements that we find morally abhorrent and socially disruptive, and so we’re going to develop this method of parenting that is so harsh and so punitive that it is essentially rebellion-proof.”

I talked to a lot of folks who left those milieus, but leaving those milieus is really hard and fraught with pain, in large part because the indoctrination is so complete, because the abuse is so physical and also so scarring mentally. Also, when you leave, as I know personally from growing up an Orthodox Jew and leaving it, when you leave a totalizing faith and a faith community, you leave behind a lot of really great stuff that’s really lacking in American society writ large. You leave behind the meal trains when you’re sick, these sorts of instant, casual connections you can create within a faith community, into the atomizing and unknown loneliness of contemporary America. It can be a very jarring and alienating transition, and it was for a lot of people I spoke to.

TFSR: Yeah, I think is a really important insight that invites us as people who envision alternatives to that society, and as people who envision alternatives to not just the goals of those theocratic movements, but recognize the alienation of the society that we’re in, I guess maybe that gives us some clues as to things that we should build into how we form community here, how we welcome people out of those experiences, people who have come out of evangelical or other repressive communities that are totalizing. How could we take the good out of those and invite people in? Because people, even as adults who grew up in this more fragmented neoliberal society of individuals, get drawn towards totalizing movements that give them the answers and make them feel love bombed, or even just help them take care of the day-to-day that’s so difficult under capitalism.

Talia Lavin: Yeah. I mean, are you doing a better job making people feel less alone, more taken care of, and helped out than movements that are all about brimstone, hellfire, and how trans people are an abomination unto God? No amount of potluck suppers makes up for that being your central message. But what people gain from those communities is a sense of certainty, of purpose, and of community, a sense that they’re not alone in the universe, and also often babysitting, help with childcare, and meals when they’re sick. What are we doing to reproduce that sort of hands-on care in our communities? I don’t know that we are doing as good a job as we could, although I know a lot of leftists who are engaged in mutual aid efforts in a very direct, open, and wonderful way.

It is a challenge, and I think we’re all so used that our loneliness being a subject of private shame and not something you’re supposed to admit. You’re always supposed to be doing fine. And who among us is doing fine right now? I think a lot of us are struggling, and a lot of us are needlessly carrying the burden of that struggle alone when all of us are carrying the same weight, and it might be lighter together. Just knowing that you’re carrying that weight of despair, alienation, or displacement in company is something that, even if you just want to be purely utilitarian, can be a defensive tactic for our communities against movements that are predatory and have fundamentally anti-social goals. I think sometimes we take out our emotions, sort of testing and raging at one another, because we feel powerless in the grand scheme of things, and it’s a lot easier to yell at the Trotskyist next door for not being sufficiently ideologically pure than it is to comprehend one’s own utter impotence in the face of ascending Christofascism. I don’t know.

But I’m not here to be like, “This is what the left is doing wrong.” It’s more like when you look at why it’s so hard for people to leave movements that have led them to be beaten from literally before they could talk. First of all, there’s this natural human desire to please your parents and stay close to home. It takes a lot of really tough questions to yourself and about yourself and what you’ve been taught that not everyone is inclined to do. But you also do pay quite a heavy price to leave, and I think that price might be reduced if there was more care and more attention paid to people who have not only left these movements, but often are some of the loudest voices against these movements that have some really totalizing and really painful goals for all of us.

TFSR: Yeah. One thing I really did appreciate about the book—I think either Molly Conger or you pointed it out in your conversation—is that the whole second half or part two of the book is less about the historical movement, although you’re bringing in all of this documentation, and more about the impacts on people. And a lot of it, as you said, is talking to people that survived, have moved beyond, and given you these interviews or these insights. I think, listening to the person who is affected by the thing, you’re going to get the most insight. It’s not only a sign of respect for someone who’s willing to open up that part of themselves, but they oftentimes are going to be the best source.

Talia Lavin: They also know the tactics. They know the language, the tactics, the lies that they were taught to tell. So, talking to ex-evangelicals is about respect for testimonies of abuse, and I don’t want to minimize that part of it, but it also just makes a lot of strategic sense. These are people who are like, “Hello, we were inside this movement. It is evil, and we want to fight it.” And they are the first and the loudest people to tell you, “Yes, these folks really do believe that you’re an agent of Lucifer. They really believe that they’re the only ones who are on the right side of Satan, and they will fight accordingly, because those are the stakes.”

TFSR: Yeah. Can you talk about what some of them have said about those sort of pressures to fall within the vision of what it means to be a boy or a man, a woman or a wife or a girl, a child, the sort of framing and physical reformation and pain that was applied to people and how they go about unlearning some of that? That was pretty powerful for me to read some of those personal statements.

Talia Lavin: Yeah. Just before that, I do want to say there is one thing I think that distinguishes this book from other books Christian nationalism. And there are many. I’m so glad. The more the merrier really. It’s such a pernicious and widespread phenomenon that I think there really can’t be enough books exploring this threat. But most of them are by Christians, which I am not, never have been, and never will be. And so often what you see, particularly from a liberal Christian perspective, is the sense of, “They’re doing Jesus wrong,” and that’s sort of the primary complaint. You often see this as, “They’re not real Christians” as the primary complaint against Trumpist Christian pastors and members of the MAGA movement, who are prominently Christian, and so forth.

Whereas for me, I don’t care, just fundamentally. I’m not here to defend Jesus’ brand. I don’t have my own personal Jesus that I carry around in my pocket to rebuke people with. I’m just like, “Ok, cool. So you have this faith-inflected vision of what you want America to be, and this is what Christianity means to you.” I’m not here to question it. I’m not a theologian, and I’m not gonna debate who has a better version of Christianity than whom. What I want to know is what is being done in the name of God and why? What’s the internal reasoning here?

But at the same time, I grew up Orthodox. I grew up in a world where my life was organized around faith: what I ate, going to school—half my school day was conducted in Hebrew. And so when people talked about the degree of influence and control faith and religious institutions had over their lives, I didn’t have that kind of secular journalist’s “Whoa. Are you serious? That in itself is crazy!” I’m like, ‘Ok, no, that makes sense to me as a former super religious kid. But let’s talk about what that looked like.”

And what it looked like was there were some really, really strict ideas about what being a girl meant, what being a boy meant, and what being a child meant. So I read dozens of Christian marriage and parenting manuals spanning from the ‘70s or earlier to quite recent ones. Some of the manuals I looked at were from the 2010s or even early 2020s, and what struck me was the hyper focus on obedience. Obedience as the chief virtue of a child, the chief virtue of a wife, the chief virtue of a Christian. It’s a very literalized patriarchy, this real intense, like the husband rules the family, and then God rules the husband, and the woman and man each rule the children. There are these literal diagrams depicting the hierarchy of the biblical family and so on. To me, it felt very alien and intense, but it was useful in the sense that it was the subtext of so much of Republican rhetoric just laid bare.

But also, the degree of violence prescribed in the parenting manuals was astounding. I mean, you were instructed to beat your children in many cases, and we’re talking pretty mainstream best-selling manuals that sold over a million copies, in some cases, like James Dobson, may he rest in hell (When he gets there. He’s still alive). In his books, Dare to Discipline is the first and most prominent, but also The Strong-Willed Child. The strong-willed child, just to be clear, is a bad thing, and you want to beat the strong will out of them. These are prescriptions for intense, ritualized physical violence against children as young as 15 months old. Some of the more sociopathic parenting manuals like To Train Up a Child by Michael and Debbie Pearl prescribe starting even earlier, when children are infants. It comes from this worldview that mankind is inherently sinful, that even an infant is prey to the frailties of the flesh. Like a baby is crying not because it’s helpless or hungry, but because it is inherently subject to the frailties of the flesh and the evils of man. I mean, really intense stuff.

And the marriage manuals are all about how to submit yourself, how to submit yourself completely to your husband. Everything in these manuals, every unhappiness, up to and including in some of the more extreme ones physical abuse… Most of these manuals have a kind of cover your ass disclaimer about physical abuse: “Get out if he’s abusing you.” But with everything else, it’s just about obeying your husband, even if he makes you unhappy, even if he’s less competent than you would be at managing the household. The natural God-given order of things is that you, as a woman, should submit, and therefore feminine submission is necessary. And if you are in pain, if you hate your husband and you hate your marriage, submit harder. There isn’t really an alternative method.

There’s a lot of literature and reporting bearing out the disastrous ways this kind of totalizing ideology of submission is played out in churches and marriages. And a lot of people I talked to who had escaped the church had also been encouraged to marry very young, had entered into abusive relationships, and had been physically abused their entire youthful lives, and simply did not have either the language or the capacity to leave an abusive relationship because it was abusive. That was a really sad piece of it, the way that physical abuse as a child can lead to relational dysfunction as an adult. It’s a pretty one-to-one scenario.

TFSR: Just to point to a specific thing that you underline in the book, the ramifications, I think, of which are pretty stark. You discuss the rhetoric of parental rights. You quote statistics about legal marriage of children as young as 10 years old, with parental approval, often girls married to grown men in the US, and if that weren’t enough, the inaccessibility of no fault divorce to children who were sorted into arranged marriages. Can you talk about that nexus?

Talia Lavin: I mean, it’s really messed up, right? You don’t think about it, and then once you know about it, you can’t un-know it. Hundreds of thousands of underage girls are married off to adult men every year. Every single year. It is just a pretty routine thing that happens, because what you need for that to happen is parental consent. And if your parents are all in on an ideology that more or less views you as a tradable commodity/baby factory/obedience school trainee-graduate… There’s a lot of child marriage that happens in the US. A lot. Way too much, disturbingly. I mean, there’s no amount that would be fine. We’re not even talking about the Romeo and Juliet 17 and 18-year-olds getting married because they’re just two crazy kids who can’t wait, right? It’s 12-year-olds marrying men in their 30s or 40s, and as long as you have parental consent, it’s fine.

It happens often under the aegis of religious institutions. It’s just another example of the stunning laxity of American laws around religious freedom. And you know, religious liberty, incidentally, as a movement really directly arose out of the pro-segregation religious schools movement in the era immediately following Jim Crow. So that’s where that term comes from. It’s a brilliant marketing coup, you know. It’s like literally their freedom is the unfreedom of others, and that’s just how it’s been for a long time.

Their freedom is the freedom to exclude Black people from their schools. That’s where it started. And then it got some nice additions, like the freedom to not have to live in a society where women can control their own bodies, the freedom to never get divorced. The word freedom can be really twisted around in all sorts of ways, where their notion of liberty, or what they might call liberty, is fundamentally a story about restricting the freedom of other people. Like Kim Davis, the court clerk who became this Christian martyr figure for refusing to validate a gay couple’s marriage license. Her “religious freedom” was not letting some other folks get married. That’s this marquis case. She raised tons of money and was literally all about restricting other people’s freedom, quite literally being like, “You can’t get married.” She’s the poster child of religious freedom, and I think that tells you quite a bit.

I mean, there’s so much I can say. It’s a long book, but the staggering focus on obedience and the sort of monoculture of thought really threw me. That was something that I was not super familiar with or comfortable with, the physical violence to ensure obedience. And then subsequently, these hyper-obedient Christian children become used as a means of propaganda. People talked about being taken to the park and shown off as the examples of kids that didn’t cry, kids that didn’t have tantrums, and kids that didn’t embarrass their parents because they were good Christian children. This was a tool called “witnessing,” a very popular term, a way of demonstrating faith to the faithless.

Ultimately, what’s so disconcerting, in addition to just the sheer amount of violence that props all that up, is also that this is very explicitly a goal not just for Christian communities, but for the entire United States. This is a theocratic movement that wants to see a theocratic government, and because their freedom is the unfreedom of others, wants to impose this very specific, and to my mind, extremely damaging and frightening set of values on America. It’s just you want to live separately in our communities. That’s bad enough. You know, it’s not like these are abuse-free havens. But no, it’s not sufficient. It’s about imposing this incredibly rigid view of gender, view of childhood, view of sexuality on the entire United States. Whether you have a different faith or none, it doesn’t matter. It’s the faith militant. It’s a conquering faith, and America is going to be a Christian kingdom whether we like it or not.

Those are their goals. They’re very total. They’re not messing around. And so I think it’s worth at least knowing that for countering it with a similar energy for the right to be cacophonous and messy and non-obedient and ourselves.

TFSR: Yeah, that sounds like a good place to start from, for sure.

Talia Lavin: I mean, it’s a trickier message because it’s not onward, christian soldiers, marching in a line. But, OK, so we march to lots of different drums.

TFSR: I feel a little embarrassed to admit that I’ve been re-watching The Handmaid’s Tale in preparation for the new fifth season that’s coming out. The representation of gender roles, the question of divorce, the concept of childbearing and child rearing rights, the role of the child, and the murder of queerness in Gilead feel really pertinent when thinking about the vision of many close to power in the US these days. I wonder how you feel about how this work of fiction, whether it be the books or the TV series (which feels a little more accessible), compares to the visions put forth by many of the subjects of your book.

Talia Lavin: Yeah. I mean, I stopped watching after season one, just because at a certain point I was like, “Oh, man…”

TFSR: It’s really rapey.

Talia Lavin: Yeah. Especially when I was doing research for this book, I was like, “Really, I’m gonna watch this in my free time?” But it’s worth noting that it is not a coincidence that Margaret Atwood wrote this book in 1985. She was writing it in direct response to the rise of the Christian right. You know, Serena Joy, I think, is based on Tammy Faye Bakker, who was a specific female televangelist at the time. There are real-world analogs in the Moral Majority in the Christian right figures at the time who were militantly anti-feminist and militantly anti-queer. It’s interesting that the TV show came out now, but the ideas come straight out of the ‘80s and have just been building and building and building and building their power ever since.

If we live in Gilead, it’s not because we weren’t warned that Gilead was being built all around us. Atwood is just one of a lot of voices who’ve been saying it is worth listening to what they have to say about what they believe and following it to its logical conclusion, which is essentially a form of enslavement for anyone with female genitalia and an erasure of queerness from public life. And we’re seeing that happen right in front of our eyes. The reason why her writing feels so prescient and so, “Oh my god, I can’t believe she predicted that,” is because what she was looking at and then basing her dystopia on were the people she was seeing on TV and in the papers, who were openly saying, “We want to take away women’s bodily agency, and we will absolutely set off bombs and perform acts of terrorism to make that happen.”

The ‘80s and ‘90s were the site of some incredibly brutal crimes against abortion clinics and providers. The guy who bombed the 1996 Olympics was also a clinic bomber [Eric Rudolph]. Countless arsons, stalkings, murders, the anti-abortion terror movement, the manifestation of Gilead at that time was incredibly violent and incredibly successful ultimately. What you have in the overturning of Roe v Wade and the continual chipping away and surveillance of women’s bodies is a terror movement that worked in conjunction with legislators and made being a provider of particularly late-term abortions so physically dangerous that they became rare because there was a solid chance you might get murdered. And now tens of millions of American women cannot get abortions, and their goal is that all American women can’t get abortions.

I mean, these goals are very stark, but they’ve been laying them out since the ‘80s. They’ve been in the public sphere for a long time. And this unwillingness to listen, and frankly, the undue deference that has been given to the Christian right and any Christian movement in a Christian country, which America is… Hegemony is a powerful drug. That’s why The Handmaid’s Tale feels so pertinent.

TFSR: In your book and subsequent interviews, you explore Alice Miller’s study on authoritarianism around World War II Germany, on the role of brutal regimentation, corporal punishment, and the generational impact on empathy that paved the way towards the Shoah. If children are the future, what futurity does the Christian right envision for humanity and their own kids?

Talia Lavin: In many ways, what we’re seeing now, this Christofascism, which I define as everything being about the power of the hyper-centralized mono-ideology state, is the fruit of the biblical parenting movement that has been going on and growing again since the 1980s. The people I talked to about the trauma of this kind of upbringing ranged from 22 to folks in their 60s. This has been going on for a very long time. These ideas have been in American homes and at American kitchen tables, leading to American children getting spanked for expressing independent thought.

Alice Miller, in her book For Your Own Good, studies early 20th-century German pedagogy. Like me, she read a lot of unpleasant parenting manuals. She was a German-Jewish psychologist who survived the Holocaust and subsequently wrote a book about it. It spends a great deal of time psychoanalyzing Adolf Hitler, which is not something I’m as gung ho about, but what she does do that I think is really interesting and unique is that she goes through the German parenting manuals from the turn of the 20th century, i.e., the people who would have been in their 30s in the ‘30s, right? And reading them, I was just like, “Oh, my god,” this could be straight out of any of the evangelical parenting manuals I was reading at the same time.

The similarities were remarkable in the sense that it was all about obedience, instant, joyous obedience enacted through physical punishment, and the sort of ritualistic nature of the corporal punishment, the ways in which you are instructed to beat your child for their own good in order to make them a better citizen, a better Christian, a better person, and this implication that should you not enact brutal physical violence against your own child, you would be neglecting them. You know, in the Christian context, literally you are condemning them to hell if you don’t render them sufficiently obedient to yourself and then to God. It’s really dark stuff, right? I mean, if I sound like it’s a bummer, it’s because it’s a bummer.

What she says is that the kind of people who grow up inured to pain, who grow up empathizing with the pain-giver rather than the pain-receiver, because to do otherwise would mean condemning your own upbringing and condemning your parents, which is a hard thing for most folks to do, people who grow up that way make the best torturers. That really stuck with me. I felt like you become so thoroughly identified with the person who’s beaten you and enacted cruelty on you, that for you cruelty becomes a natural ground state of being.

I think that we really see that playing out in sort of gleeful responses to violence that are taking place, in response to deportations, in response to the increasingly violent tactics of ICE, and also in this persistent evangelical obsession with comparing Trump to a punitive father who’s here to come discipline America. And this is viewed as a great thing, a healthy thing, wholesome for the country. We need punishment. I think that speaks more eloquently to the cycle of depravity than anything I can say.

TFSR: Talia Lavin, thank you so much for the time, for writing this book, and for having this chat with me. I really appreciate it. Are you working on anything you want to mention right now that people should keep an eye on or any social media presences or websites that folks should check out to keep up?

Talia Lavin: Right now I’m primarily on Bluesky, just because I got really fed up with Twitter under the reign of Musk. And so I’m there, @swordsjew. I write a newsletter called “The Sword and the Sandwich” (you might sense a theme) where I write about both the far right and American politics. Lately, it’s been a lot about the Make America Healthy Again movement and its flirtation with eugenics. I also write about food. I write about sandwiches. So you can find that on Buttondown, or just search “The Sword and the Sandwich”, and it’ll come right up.

TFSR: Awesome. Thank you. I’ll make sure to link both of those in the show notes, as well as where people can find the books.

Talia Lavin: Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to have this long, involved, thoughtful conversation with me and these great questions. You know, I never wondered for a second if you’d read the book, which was lovely.

TFSR: [laughs] That’s good. Yeah. It was a hell of a read. It was definitely some dark times. But I appreciate you waiting through it and pulling out the diamonds.

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