Thirty years ago, when the anthropologist Susan Friend Harding began seriously to study American fundamentalist Christianity—study that eventuated in a remarkable account, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics—she discovered that her colleagues were deeply suspicious of her interests: Why would someone want to investigate such weird and obviously unpleasant people? “In effect,” Harding wrote, “I am perpetually asked: Are you now or have you ever been a born-again Christian?” Many readers will recognize Harding’s sly echo of the question posed to hundreds of people by
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