Religious faith can be a balm to the soul, a healer of the heart, a way to push back at the ever-present knowledge of mortality. It can also be a door through which con men slip if they speak the right language of belief, of war, of the unholiness of social change. And terror is a gap so wide that even the clumsiest of grifters can stroll right through it, carrying a hatful of promises, a sack of black seeds to plant in the fear-lush heart.
