Wild Faith Quotes

“Americans have a tendency to believe that authoritarianism will arise here in a swirl of drama, obvious malefactors emerging from the ether to work their evil; even more, we have a sense that our democracy, the most powerful in the world, is immune to becoming a dictatorship, and this form of American exceptionalism has a tendency to blind us to what is directly before our eyes.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“It is the nature of reactionary movements to claim that their power is negligible until it is absolute. It is the nature of right-wing American Christianity to nurture a martyrdom that was never theirs, and never will be theirs, and use its sentiments to feed their animus.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“A judiciary branch linked at its core to a religious authoritarian movement cannot be trusted to preserve such a worldly value as a secular democracy. In particular, the multiracial democracy so dearly won by the fighters of the civil rights movement—the only time in the United States’ history that it has been a multiracial democracy is the past half century—that has allowed abortion, gay and interracial marriage, integrated schooling, public education, and social safety net programs. All of these are on the chopping block, and there is a hunger, everywhere, for righteous destruction of it all.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“A politics that arises out of a culture steeped in uncompromising punishment, punishment that falls hardest on the most vulnerable, is inclined to carry out a mimicry of private violence in the public sphere. It is not a coincidence that those who most publicly espouse their faith are also advocates of violent sweeps against unhoused individuals, jail sentences for miscarriages, the brutality of incarceration and the death penalty, and the elimination in toto of the social safety net. While brutality to children may not be the sole root of the cruelty of the Christian Right’s policies, it would be a mistake to ignore it — as most mainstream commentators do.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“The emergence of evangelicals as an active right-wing political force on the American scene came into full power in the 1970s, largely as a backlash to the civil rights movement and school integration.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“But according to survivors of violent childhoods under the aegis of Christianity, the fascism permeating the electorate stems from a system of conditioning that demands absolute obedience—and little more—from the children that controls.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“Within many evangelical homes, violent abuse of children is cast as a direct act of service to God, the showing it a grave, even mortal sin that puts children in peril of losing their eternal souls.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“The amount of violence in Christian homes is perhaps most directly reflected in the violence of the American Christian Right—and a contributing factor to just how violent a place the United States is in general.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“The Obama era saw a hitherto untold explosion of myth making and misinformation, the intimations of persecution made enormous from pastors’ pulpits, of the careful cultivation of anger, fear, and faith. It was from that deliberate cultivation of the faithful that the trump era arose, and in the present moment it is the faithful that seek its return/”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“The election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 sparked a renewed vigor in the Christian Right. It was the ultimate insult: the integration not just of schools but of the sacred and heretofore pure-white office of the US presidency.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“The Christian Right and the big-business lobby grew together and commingled, trading zeal for cash and spawning congregants in their thousands.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“According to the historian Randall Balmer, whose book Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right described the intricate path from the evangelical past to its present, the real awakening of the religious Right as a political force came not after the case of Roe v. Wade but after a different and far less famous one, Green v. Kennedy.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“In the slow unraveling of the Jim Crow legal regime in the US South, a new phrase, now an indelible part of the lexicon of American politics, was born (or born again), and achieved ubiquity: religious liberty. It meant: If we nail a cross over the door and say our school is private, we're allowed to exclude Black people. And keep our tax exemption.

It was the latter bit that ultimately woke the sleeping kraken of the Christian right, brought a new political force into its own, and turned churchgoers into politicians and politicians into holy guardians of a segregated Christian order.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“What does the GOP want? A kingdom of Christ on Earth ruled by his elect. In practice: to impose a nationally unpopular set of principles, many of them theocratic, and seal them into law; to purge the nation of undesirables; and to utterly dominate their inferiors.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“At the moment, in the national political landscape, there is ample evidence that the Republican Party and its far-right fellow travelers seek absolute power at all costs”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“They're coming for all of it: everything outside of the framework of a submissive wife and a patriarchal husband and a Cheaper by the Dozen-style fleet of children. And like the family structure blessed by the Almighty, the headship of this society is male, Christian, and white. A zealously policed theocratic society is the goal, and it's not one the Right bothers to conceal, as the stakes are high and it is not a fight it is prepared to lose.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“Religious freedom, for the GOP, means the ability to impose grotesque levels of control, particularly on bodies capable of pregnancy.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“Christian nationalism requires imposing a particular view of sex, sexuality, and gender on the public at large regardless of any individual's faith or lack thereof. In the case of gay and transgender people, this mandate is guided by bigotry and Leviticus; in the case of women in particular, it's guided by misogyny and Leviticus again, with its death penalties for various forms of illicit fornication.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“By the 1970s, the public association of southern white churches with segregationism had damaged the image of the Christian Right. In adopting the antiabortion struggle, evangelicals saw themselves as engaged in a battle for the civil rights of the unborn—a new conflict every bit as morally weighty as the struggle against slavery or Jim Crow. The struggle against abortion was the new abolitionism, and this time, they would be on the right side of history. That the adoption of an identity as abolitionists—explicitly, in some cases—was somewhat grotesque on the part of a group most famous for having stood fairly in the path of integration and civil rights was beside the point; it was a chance to redress a past moral failing by donning the very vestments they had once derided.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“Nonetheless, the truth is that the rise of the Christian right has its roots in segregationism and has grown to accommodate a generalized backlash against the social changes that accompanied the civil rights era.

To the faithful, the shift from anti-integration to antiabortion activism came from the same source, the wellspring their pastors led them to: the infinitely malleable, infinitely instructive Bible, an indispensable tool for the sophist and the power seeker as well as the believer.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“Catholics make up 21 percent of the US population; 59 percent of US Catholics are white, and, according to a Pew Research Center poll, 49 percent of white Catholics in the United States are Republican. The math adds up to a significant addition to the ranks of the Christian Right. While evangelical Protestants were and are the primary constituents of the Christian Right, reactionary Catholics such as [Phyllis] Schlafly have been more than happy to go along for the ride even if some of the theology involved disagrees with their creed.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“In seeking to hasten the end of the world, evangelicals often make it worse for others who do not anticipate being snatched up into the clouds to sit by Christ's side as the seas boil and Satan takes possession of the earth. For those who are not perennially looking out for signs of Armageddon and awaiting it as a child waits for a father to return, the drama of the Apocalypse looks merely like a collection of people who, in waiting for the world to end, are actively worsening life in the present.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“If you are a self-determined member of the elect, schooled to await the Apocalypse from your earliest days with a combination of fear and anticipation, the end of the world coincides with the destruction of your perceived enemies and your elevation to the ranks of the angels. The exultant reaction to the Israel-Hamas war, coupled with demonstrations of public support for Israel, typifies this duality of agony and ecstasy.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“The necessity of such an annihilation is a major part of why Christians are so militant about standing with Israel: by eliminating Palestinians, Jews edge closer to the eschatological preconditions that will presage Christ's return.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“One particularly grotesque element of Christian Zionism is the fact that while its views on Jews are intensely utilitarian—they must own the land of Israel, then die en masse, as a trigger condition for Jesus’s return—their views on Palestinians are even darker. Palestinians, being extraneous to the Apocalypse, are viewed as an obstacle to its coming.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“Understanding American politics through the lens of prophecy didn't begin with Donald Trump, nor did the prophetic spirit begin here in the twenty-first century. Trump's theologically inspired champions have many historical analogues whose roots are deep in America's strange, God-soaked soil. This is a country that gives rise to prophets like mushrooms in the wet, that abounds with revivals and awakenings.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“Writing about the American Right without Christianity is like rendering the Mona Lisa without her eyes or creating a cup without a bottom. Christian viewpoints and principles, and the structures and social impetus of religion, are that central to it.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“There is an entire right-wing economy that works selling nationalism-branded, fear-tinged products that serve as both tribal emblems and defiant blows against a world controlled by ‘woke,’ venomous, liberal cabals.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“The Christian Right has set up a parallel universe of homeschool curricula and legal defense groups that fundraise off fear—fear of gays, fear of trans people, fear of the Marxist dictatorships of social studies teachers in small-town America—and use the funds to enrich the coffers of churches that oftentimes are busy concealing sex abuse scandals of their own. It's easier, really, to believe in a cabal of satanic pedophiles running the government than to worry that your kid’s youth pastor might be a predator.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America

“Q Anon and its descendant movements are also, at their core, suffused with evangelical Christian beliefs. The anonymous communiqués known as ‘Q drops’ frequently use verses in the New Testament to emphasize their cryptic messages, which inevitably warn Q believers of a conspiracy reaching to the highest levels of government.”
― Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America