(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Wild Faith by Talia Lavin

Recced by lirazel and I wanted to like it, but i found it really frustrating. The meat of it, and the part with the most original reporting, is the last few chapters where Lavin discusses the stories she got when she put out an online call for evangelical Christians to talk about their experiences and many of them shared stories of trauma caused by common evangelical teachings about corporal punishment for children and wives being subject to their husbands. This writing is genuinely harrowing and I think serves mostly effectively as a call for change.

But most of the rest of the book is scattershot ranting, full of lazy conflations and conspiratorial thinking. She uses the Christians who eat shrimp are hypocrites argument along with many other bad arguments. The book is full to the brim of unnecessary bodyshaming of the Christians she doesn't like. It spends a lot of time making fun of evangelical Christians for believing in the devil as if other Christians don't. It spends a bizarre amount of time, given that Lavin is a secular Jew who doesn't believe in any Christian interpretation of scripture, critiquing evangelical textual hermeneutics as if the problem is that they're reading the Bible with the wrong textual strategy. As a Jew who is perfectly happy making fun of Christians most of the time, this book kept insulting my intelligence and I resented it.

Comments

[lirazel]

Fair enough! I agree that the last section is by far the strongest and should have been expanded into a full book on its own.

I will disagree about the conspiratorial thinking. As someone who lived in that world...I think she's right about the danger this worldview poses and one of the reasons I appreciated the book is that she's one of the few outsiders who get it. I keep hearing this from people I respect who don't either come from or study this world: you're overstating it, evangelicals aren't really trying to overthrow democracy, you're being alarmist and conspiratorial. But...they are. Obviously not all of them, there are tons of people in the pews who would be horrified by my saying this (including my own family), but it's absolutely where the authoritarian worldview leads and the institutions and leaders of this movement are trying to dismantle democracy and impose their views on everyone else, and as they are incredibly well-funded and organized at a level I've never seen outside of that world, I do believe the Christian nationalist movement is capable of accomplishing many of their goals if we all sit on our hands.

[kass]

Those last few chapters were harrowing AF.