Heretic: A Memoir

by Jeanna Kadlec

It would be a grave mistake to believe that the church and state are, or have ever been, truly separate in the United States. “The idea of ‘religion and politics don’t mix’ was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country,” Jerry Falwell Sr., the founder of Liberty University, a prominent developer of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, and one of the most influential leaders of the early Religious Right, said. These last four centuries have been defined by consistent affirmations of Christian dominance at all costs, now fully championed by the modern-day American evangelical church. Today, heretics are symbolically executed. Non-evangelicals are punished on a social and civic level: you don’t ever have to have stepped foot in a church, let alone left one, to feel the efforts of American evangelicals pressing on your life. There are the obvious newsworthy incidents like Muslim bans and racial profiling at the airport, court cases about bakeries that don’t want to do a wedding cake for a gay couple, and government workers who refuse to issue a marriage license for lesbians. There was the early gutting of the Voting Rights Act. But the everyday way the evangelical faith functions to govern and guide communities across the United States is a lot more in keeping with what philosopher Louis Althusser called ideological state apparatuses: via the ostensibly apolitical social institutions (churches, schools) that ultimately function to serve the state in trainin...