November 27, 2024 • 50 mins
Molly Conger sits down with Talia Lavin to talk about her new book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America. Pre-order Wild Faith now, available in hardcover, audiobook, and e-book October 15.
Buy Wild Faith: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/talia-lavin/wild-faith/9780306829192/
Talia's Newsletter: https://buttondown.com/theswordandthesandwich
Original Air Date: 9.27.24
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome back to it could happen here in
your daily dose of the horrors that are, in fact,
already happening all around us. I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger,
and I am delighted to be joined today by the
critically acclaimed author of Culture Warlords, journalist researcher, sword enthusiast,
Sandwich expert, and my friend Talia Lavin. Hello.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Yeah. I once introduced myself at an event as a
Sandwich historian, which I think was the pinnacle of my
public speaking career. But this is a second pinnacle. Hey, Molly,
what's up?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Thank you so much for coming on today to talk
with me about your new book, Wild Faith is coming
out in just a few weeks October fifteenth, right.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Yeah, Wild Faith, How the Christian Right is taking over America.
Not the terrible B movie entitled Wild Faith.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah, the SEO is scrambled on that one. But the book, however,
is very good. I mean, first of all, I just
want to say, like I've been reading the gally copy
that you sent me, which I honestly made me feel
very fancy. I've never received a galley copy of a
book that's not out yet before. So I felt, you know,
kind of a kind of a broadcasting professional with my
special book.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
It's an exclusive club. You're one of like five people
thus read it.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Oh my god, that is that's very exclusive.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Yeah. Well it's aboud to become a lot less exclusive,
so feel special while you can, right.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
But I realized while I was reading it, you know,
I have my little sticky tabs because I'm reading a
lot more books lately, regrettably not not not a big
time book guy. It's always reading. I read a lot
of court documents, but I'm reading a lot of books
right now for research for my show, and it's like
my little sticky tabs. And as in reading it, I
realize I'm not marking passages that I think would be
(01:47):
useful for us to talk about in this interview. I'm
just putting my little tabs on passages that just like
punched me in the gut.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
You know, Ah, sorry for punching you.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
No, but I mean, I mean with the way the
power of your words, because like a lot.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
Of what I'm reading sucks.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
It's just right, Like I spent all day yesterday reading
like twenty five year old Issues of Resistance, which was
the quarterly magazine for a white power music label. So this,
I mean it's a real departure, So you know, really
just reveling in the richness of the pros and the
fact that it, you know, didn't want to kill me.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Yeah. No, I also have experienced neo Nazi research fatigue,
and also just like the sort of relentless grimness of
flowing through these like fundamentally hostile texts, and also like
academic texts, which are difficult in their own way. I
try to write accessively or just like excitingly. I find
(02:50):
that a lot of especially nonfiction sort of journalism me books,
tend to be a little dry, and I'm like, let's
not be dry. Let's be like spicy, and you know,
like form and function, Like you're more likely to be
moved by a message if you find the writing compelling.
(03:10):
You know, it's just you.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Have such a way with words. I mean, you know this,
You're a professional writer. I don't want to embarrass you
on the show.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
So I'm twirling my air like, yes, but I do
write for a living.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
If you'll indulge me, if it's legal, if the publisher
will allow this, I just want to read this passage
from the introduction that I think is a good jumping
off point, and it was one of the first things
I marked because I was just like, oh, hell yeah,
we're getting into this.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
There's good words in here, okay.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
The Christian Right is a force in American politics and
has been for decades, half a century to be precise,
during which it has steadily gained power. It started in
school rooms, continued in courtrooms, and perseveres with the aid
of people who are perfectly willing to call in bomb
threats to hospitals and attempt to overturn elections. It features
self proclaimed profits with a distinct interest in policy, newly
(04:01):
minted apostles with very definite ideas about spiritual battle and
its earthly components, and pastors eager to usher in the
end of the world. Its adherents have hymns and devotionals
and speaking tongues on occasion, and the showiest among them
are known to march their cities, blowing rams horns in
an effort to topple, as Joshua once did, the wicked
cities of the world. They have their own insular world,
(04:22):
their own media apparatus. They have legislators who could fire
in brimstone speeches from the badly carpeted rooms where laws
are made. They have lawyers too, and in case the
lawyers fail, there's always the promise of congregations that might
coalesce into mobs or arsonists. Who's burning holy zeal coalesces
into the tiny pinpoint of a Molotov cocktail. And I
(04:47):
knew from the intro that we were in for a ride.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Yeah, it's like cast of characters, the worst people ever,
but like, let's write about it in an exciting way.
I think that one of the themes of the book
is really how these extra legal extremist movements like the
anti abortion terror movement, and the legal framework of a
(05:13):
movement work together. I actually initially heard about this from
a friend who was talking about how like during the
gay rights movement you had sort of the act up
builth demonstrations, the diants, and then you have the sort
of like more respectively coded like gay people who you know,
we're talking to the government and trying to get elected
and you know, really trying to influence research, and that
(05:35):
every movement needs sort of a radical outside and then
a respectable inside. And I'm like, oh, this works in
like the acratic movements too, where you have like this
you know, fringe that's burning down clinics, and then people
steadily working for fifty years to like ban abortion, and
(05:56):
they have the same DNA and they have the same goals.
They just go about it differently but complement each other.
And I think that's like a running theme in the book,
is that like you have lawyers and you have legislators,
and then you have mobs and they're sort of all
working towards the same goals. And that's really what we're seeing,
(06:17):
I think, on the Christian Right after decades of building power.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, one of the notes that I wrote down in
that vein while I was reading was that, you know,
the Christian Right drives its power across a spectrum, right
from the clinic bomber to the senator. But it's not
you know, you might say two sides of the same coin.
But to me it looks like this isn't two different
spheres of power too sort of separate but coexisting or
comorbid ideologies. They're just different numbers on the same dial, right,
(06:46):
it's turning up and turning down.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Yeah, it's like the hand that lights the torch and
the hand that puts it to the you know, pyre.
They perform different functions, but they have really the same goals.
And if like me, you view stripping half the populace
of its bodily autonomy, imposing a theocracy, hounding queer people
(07:12):
out of public life, slash into death as fundamentally violent goals. Yeah,
I don't think there's like a respectable iteration necessarily, there's
just cosplaying respectability and right.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
You can say it with a tie on on the
Senate floor, but it's it's the same message.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
Yeah, And I think so much of our media apparatus
and governmental apparatus is really sort of views like again
this like form and function, right, Like if you are
if you say something politely, it doesn't really matter what
you're saying, like if you say something with a suit
(07:53):
on in the register of like, you know, in a
calm sort of Mike Pencian, rush Limbaugh and decap As
he called himself a boy. She says, did he say that, Yeah,
that's what he called himself when he read it, did
a like evangelical radio show. Yeah, No, no matter what
you say, as long as you are like white and
you say it politely, like this is fundamentally sort of fine,
(08:14):
And then if you look at it from you know,
a step or two back, and you're like, no, actually,
no matter how politely say it, this is like a violent,
deeply unpopular theocratic agenda that like fundamentally is incompatible with
multiracial democracy. I also think, and I keep running into this,
(08:37):
like well meaning liberals being like, but isn't there a
separation of church and state? And I'm like, I don't know.
Do you fucking think there is? In Alabama? Do you
think there is an Arkansas? And all of these you
know in Texas, Like all of these figures are like
we're Christians. We're making laws for Jesus, and.
Speaker 4 (08:55):
We have covenant marriages and we want you to too.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Yeah, like we're gonna outlawe because of God. And like,
you know, women dying of sepsis in hospital parking lots
is what Jesus wants. And like, and I experienced this,
I think you probably have to when you like report
on you know, zealots and extremists, and people inevitably wind
(09:18):
up like measuring other people's weep by their own bushel.
In other words, they're like they can't really believe this stuff,
and it's like, no, they really do, they can't really
have these goals.
Speaker 4 (09:30):
First of all, they do, but also doesn't.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Matter, right, I mean the question of like impact versus intent.
First of all, it's I think it's perfectly possible to
be both a grifter and a true believer at the
same time.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
That's just synergy, baby.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Yeah. And also fundamentally, this is a world premise done grievance,
where it's this idea that like, the world has got
one over on you. And so in a sense, grift
is just like, well, you know, the world's corrupt and
I'm fighting a righteous cause, so what does it matter
the ethics that I sort of skip on along the way.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
I mean, once you've amped the stakes up to you're
fighting the literal devil and everyone who's getting in my
way is animated by actual demons from Hell. I mean,
the stakes couldn't be higher. So you do what you
have to do.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Exactly, and it's this theory of power. And so then
people sort of standing outside of that paradigm who are
not keyed into this idea of like we're in an
ethical spiritual battle and we must create like a Kingdom
of Christ on earth. In America to win against the devil,
and then people outside being like, you're hypocrites, and it's
(10:40):
like it's not a valid criticism to them because they're like,
first of all, you're not like a Christian if you're
a liberal, but also like you're not on our level,
Like we're fighting Lucifer and you're probably a stand like
on his team if you oppose us. So, you know,
a multitude of apparent hypocrisies can be excused by the
(11:02):
idea that like this is a holy war and in
war there's like all kinds of avert behavior.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
That's together doing holy war crimes.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Yeah, exactly. I mean this is why, for example, you
see a lot of like prominent female figures from Philish Lafley,
you know, in the seventies and eighties, to like the
trad wives now, and it's like, how does this fit
in with your overall sort of idea that women should
be chaste and submissive and meek and silent. I mean,
first of all, tradwife stuff is often fetish Spanish content.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
But yeah, I mean Pilish Laughfly made a living professionally
saying that women shouldn't make a living professionally, but that
contradiction doesn't matter.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Yeah, I mean I think I call them valkyries for
feminine submission in the book. Yeah, I mean, at the
end of the day, like if you believe that this
is your your calling, your mission, you know, your mission
field in the service of the Lord to undo the
demonic sort of influence of feminism, Like of course you're
going to.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
Speak, You've been moved by God to do so.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Yeah. And of course, like female leaders with the evangelical community,
like sort of minority Republicans can be like knocked off
their pedestal quicker and easier, but like they still can
come out and exist and testify. And Schlaughley throughout her
very long prolific and lucrative career, you know, was like
(12:28):
I'm a housewife with six kids, and that was her.
That was how she defined herself, even while being this
incredibly prominent figure and one of the sort of key
architects of the current Christian right coalition of like right
wing Catholics. She and Paul Weyrick and Leonard Leo and
some other right wing Catholics brought these Catholic values of
(12:52):
being all about abortion to the evangelical right, which prior
to the seventies is like, that's a weird Catholic thing.
You don't really I.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
Wanted to talk about that.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
So I'm not sure how sort of common knowledge this is,
but the Protestant Christian community in the United States did
not care about abortion until the seventies. It was not
an issue in their communities. They were generally pro abortion.
They were you know, the Baptists were in favor of
Roe v. Wade.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
Yeah, the fucking Southern Baptist Convention came out in like
seventy four, I think it was, and was like, yeah,
we approve of Rob Wade.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
So it's not like, you know, opposition to abortion is
baked into Christianity. It is baked into the American Evangelical
Christianity of post nineteen seventy five or so because of
this sort of conscious cynical political decision. And that I
think is so interesting because you know, you get into
this conversation of well, what are their deeply held beliefs
(13:49):
and do they really believe it and does that matter?
But we can pin down the moment they started believing
this and we know why, and it's segregation.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Yeah. I mean, first of all, I would say, like
people can still like this is like several generations later
of like constant barrages of extremely violent propaganda against abortions.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
So right, so the belief is sincere today, but you
could look at it where it was born.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
Yeah, exactly, you should have been aborted, right, Yeah, no,
it definitely should not have been carried to term. But
like it's it's crazy. And in addition to Mooi's book,
Randall Baumer does some really good coverage of this. So
the sort of general arc is like three sort of
nineteen seventies, you had this like generally conservative population of
(14:41):
Southern Baptists who were like on board with McCarthyism, hated
the godless Reds, but kind of viewed politics as like
worldly and not really their sphere, and we're not particularly
politically engaged. And then brown versus a board of education
passes immediately, the white Christian populist just disinvests these from
(15:05):
the public schools, leaving multiple counties in the South without
functionally any public education at all. And this mushroom after rain,
kind of like patch of patches of parochial schools with
church or Christian in the name start popping up, and
they're all white schools. Their segregation academies is the sort
(15:28):
of term of art for these and they're explicitly under
a Christian agis they're religious schools. They're tax exempt as
a result. And then in like the late sixties and seventies,
the government was like, you can't be tax exempt and
like considered a charitable organization if you are segregated and
(15:51):
don't have any black students or minority students. And that
is what woke the sleeping dragon of the Christian right
really like, you know, get your filthy government hands off
our tax exemptions. Like they just went, you know nuts.
They were really mobilized, you know, like these are the
people who are like throwing tomatoes at Ruby Bridges, Like
(16:13):
you know, they're really politically motivated for the first time
because they're experiencing like a consequence for segregation. And so
this is when like Jerry Fowell and Ralph Reid and
you know, James Dobson start sort of coming forward and
being more prominent. And then by the sort of mid
(16:36):
seventies to eighties, you had these like savvy or political
operators coming out and saying, hey, guys, segregation now, segregation tomorrow,
segregation forever is like it's great that it really fired
y'all up, but it has sort of a limited appeal.
Speaker 4 (16:54):
And they shot George Wallace. It's over.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Yeah, Like there's going to be a ceiling on that,
and a lot of people think you suck. So why
are you getting on the ground on this new civil
rights struggle abortion where you can fight for the unborn
who conveniently will never disagree with you.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
Right, their voices don't have to be centered here. We
can speak for them.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
I mean, they're the most convenient political constituency in history.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Right because they're so innocent and you can't milkshake duck
a fetus.
Speaker 4 (17:23):
He's not even here.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Yeah, he can't talk, but he's not gonna say shit.
So I mean that's like the very capsule history. And
then of course it becomes this idea of like the
(17:44):
moral majority and where the guardians of America's soul and
we're gonna get really weird about sex. Also, it's just.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Like if you strip it all the way down to
the studs, Like the core of this is women are
bleeding to death in hospital parking lots because Gary Fowell
didn't want to pay his taxes or stop being racist.
Speaker 4 (18:04):
Yeah, I mean that's not fair.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
No, people sometimes like are a little skeptical when I'm like,
all of the hatreds are interconnected. But then you look
at like concrete historical examples of like this world historical
wave of misogyny. I mean, it's not that this population
wasn't like weird about sex or weird about women like
to start with.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
I mean maybe they would have gotten here a different way,
but that's how we got here.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
Yeah, we got here by just like no, we will
pay taxes on our segregation academies. Bob Jones University's inter
racial dating ban is perfectly great, and we're gonna mobilize
about it. And so what you have then now is
just like fifty years of political lock step because and
(18:52):
you see this in like other religious communities. I mean,
like I know, like it's sort of notorious how much
corruption slides by in New York because like the that
a communities vote as a block, like it is very
useful to have a congregation that all votes the same way.
It's politically useful.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
I mean, what other populations can you get together once
a week as a captive audience and speak to with
authority if you can mobilize those people. And that's what
Jerry Folwell saw, right, is like this is a great
way to get a lot of people to vote the
way I want them to vote.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
Yeah, And you know, the church has always been like
a really prominent institution in American civil society, especially as
the rest of sort of civil society has fallen away
and degraded. Like churches are some of the only social
outlets that Americans have. And what's interesting when you talk
to evangelicals and next evangelicals is just like being a
(19:47):
Republican is like part of their religious identity in a
major way. It's like this is how you vote, and
this is you know, how you dress, and this is
how you go to church and so on. But like
the idea of being a Democrat is like not only
you know, a little bit out of step with your community,
it's heretical.
Speaker 4 (20:06):
I mean, that's how the demons give in.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Yeah, yeah, demoncrats, I mean, and like, yeah, it's stupid,
But it's also like half of the people saying demoncrats
like literally mean democrats are aligned with Lucifer.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
And I think that's a point that I don't want
to get lost on the listener this you know, this
idea that people literally have demons in them, that demons
are active in the world, that demons are motivating the actions.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
Of their enemies. It is real for them.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
And I'm not saying that to be derisive or you know,
it's real.
Speaker 4 (20:36):
It's real.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
It is an animating factor for a lot of these people.
And that's hard to wrap your mind around. I mean,
I struggle with the idea that that is real for them.
But like that's how you get things like satanic panic,
and we see echoes of satanic panic in this idea
of you know, groomers in kids' schools. They really have
this fundamental, like foundational belief in this, you know, whether
(20:59):
or not they're calling it demons, that the existence of
some sort of ontological evil that is coming for their children.
And like once you arrive at the place where, like
where you understand that that's real for them, their actions
make more sense. Like they're not behaving irrationally if you
if you truly believe that these things were happening, you'd
act crazy too.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
Yeah, I mean it's really hard to get people to
step outside their own worldviews and in both directions, right, Like,
I don't believe that demons are, you know, abroad in
the world and motivating like every element of political action
to someone who.
Speaker 4 (21:33):
You're starting to see them some places, but generally, I.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Know, to someone who does my viewpoint is incomprehensible and
vice versa. So I think part of I mean not
that I'm like one of those people that's like polarization
is the big problem, like you know, as opposed to
anything with like concrete policy, like you know where it's
like the big problem is we all don't like each
other enough, and I'm like, no, the big problem is
(21:57):
like people are espousing policies that will cause deaths, and
like also that people like believe their political enemies are
like literally agents of Satan. I would say, is like
a bigger problem than polarization in the abstract. But yeah,
I mean this this doctrine of sort of spiritual warfare,
which if you like google it, it's just like, oh,
this is the mindset and it's like you, the listener
(22:18):
to it could happen here, like you've been drafted into
the spirit war from like birth.
Speaker 4 (22:23):
Congratulations private, and.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
You're probably in the side of the devil, so good job.
I mean, I don't know, like a lot of Americans
believe in angels and demons, and that's fine, but it's
like when that starts impinging on the political sphere in
a very serious way. It's like, how far would you
go if you believed your opponent was under the thrall
(22:46):
of like Satan, you would go pretty damn far's.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
I mean, that's why you know clinic bombings were and
I guess are on the rise again, right, Like these
arsens of clinics. It's not like other kinds of crime
in my mind, right, It's not a crime of passion
or an interpersonal dispute. It is people who have been
motivated by this belief that this is a place where
a genocide is happening, that there's a holocaust going on
(23:10):
in there, that people are ripping you know, actual living babies,
limb from limb, And if you really did believe that,
their actions make sense. And that's why it happens so often, right,
because these people are motivated by this belief that God
commands them to take this action.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
Yeah, I mean there's your dual element to that. I mean,
first of all, absolutely, yes, Like I've read some anti
abortion terror manuals speaking of extremely unpleasant research and it's
just really like these people are murderers. It's mass murderers,
Like you're like killing Hitler, right.
Speaker 4 (23:41):
And wouldn't you wouldn't you kill baby Hitler exactly?
Speaker 3 (23:44):
But poltical about baby Hitler in like a countrywide scale.
And when specific abortion doctors have been mentioned in right
wing media, those guys end up dead and that's not
a coincidence. So there's that element of it, which is
the majority of it. It's huge. But there's also this
idea of demonic geography, where like demons can possess sort
(24:07):
of places like abortion clinics or institutions like planned parenthood
or even the Democratic Party, which you know, I read
a lot of demonology books like Taxonomies of Demons. Pigs
in the Parlor was this really big hit in like
the seventies, and it's been like reissued and reissued and
millions of copies, and it's just like, on one level,
(24:29):
it's really compelling because it's like are you tired, are
you sad? Are you feeling clumsy? Do you have like
persistent stomach aches? It's demons and here's how you deal
with that. And like, in a country with shitty healthcare,
I can totally see why someone who's like really depressed
might go to like an exorcist or a deliverance minister,
(24:52):
which is the Protestant.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
If you'll try anything, and this guy's going to do
it for free.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
I watched so many videos of deliverance ministers doing their thing,
and it's like crazy. It's like people, you know, are
just like sitting there and they're like people praying over
them and screaming in their face, like and they wind
up vomiting and crying and it's all very like intense.
And you know, if you think about it from a
placebo effect perspective for like one second, you're like, obviously
(25:18):
this person would feel a weightlifted from them they've had
this ecstatic experience. And this isn't the majority of it.
This is about fourteen percent of America identifies this as
white evangelics, so many Protestants and still so many people
because people keep asking me, like how many people really
believe shit like this? And I'm like, well, about eighty
(25:40):
to ninety percent of like people who identify as white
Evangelical Protestants espows most of these beliefs.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
So that's like third, that's like thirty million people yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
Yeah, and then you add in the Catholic right.
Speaker 4 (25:51):
Which is getting weirder every day.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Yeah JD Evans, I hate women exist to reproduce breed
you filthy now. But like even beyond the adult Catholic
convert style weirdness, like right wing Catholics are an integral
part of the Christian right, like Amy Cony Barrett, you know,
antonin Scalia, that kind of thing. That's another bunch of millions.
(26:17):
So this reactionary force has like numerically significant constituency. On
the other hand, it definitely punches way above its weight
in terms of right.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
They have an outsized influence of both you know, on
the legislative floor and when it comes to you know,
who's racking up the most bodies.
Speaker 3 (26:36):
Yeah, And also even like the culture wars right, like
the sort of loudest culture warriors tend to at least
come from like a background of I'm speaking for God
or Christ is King or whatever it is, Like how
many times have you and I encountered that an extremist
contacts But also like the sort of more mainstream me,
(26:59):
what the fuck the mainstream is? I don't know, it's
full of piss, But like the more mainstream like Christian grifter, Right,
they come from this. I'm speaking from my faith. These
are my religious principles. But like it is worth noting
again just to rewind in our conversation. But like the
full concept of religious liberty and religious freedom absolutely was
(27:21):
like an ad slogan coined in the seventies around segregation.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Right, religious freedom to do what? I mean, it's like
states rights, States rights.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
To do what?
Speaker 3 (27:31):
Right? Yeah, like you answer the question, Yeah, it's religious
freedom to have segregated schools, is the answer to that.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
And you still see echoes of that with either still
religious schools that can't accept federal grant money because they
don't let students be gay, right, Like it's not racial
segregation anymore, but they are refusing to admit gay students, and.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
That is a violation of federal civil rights law.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Yeah, but that's where I mean, that's where that slogan started.
And then it's blossomed to clue basically like a gay
person came into my shop.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Except they didn't, right, I know, there's no standing, right,
Like that whole case was built a lie.
Speaker 4 (28:09):
Whatever.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
That's yeah, it's like and the standing in the Supreme
Court is so ridiculous. This, I mean, in many ways,
this Supreme Court is the culmination and embodiment and a
botheosis of like Christian right theocracy, because you have these
like absolutely bat shit religious zealots, I mean, Amy Cony
Barrett is like from a cult, and in this unaccountable body,
(28:31):
they're passing unpopular theocratic principles that the majority of the
American public uh disagrees with. But like specifically, what they
are trying to enact and what they are what they
are enacting is this theocratic agenda where like the government
is in your bedroom, the government is in your doctor's office,
like the government is sniffing your panties, and it's it's
(28:54):
gross and it's upsetting and fundamentally, like theocracies are just
very famous all up in your junk, like they're obsessed
with like controlling and censoring sexuality of all kinds of
a particularly female sexuality and queer sexuality, like snuff those out.
And so that's part of the reason why so many
(29:16):
abortion arguments, Like first of all, you have the like
the you're murdering this cluster of cells which is a
full human baby, Like do you remember that article in
the Guardian a couple of years ago that like showed
the actual size of like fetuses at various stages of development,
and it was like you were just like so little,
like these little like little fingernails.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
Yeah, and it doesn't look like a tiny baby doll.
That's just very small.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
Yeah, exactly, it's not like a mini baby like it
like tides of gore. It's like literally like a tiny
cluster of cells. So the anti abortion propaganda, like, you
are not immune to propaganda. It has like wormed its
way into the popular consciousness just by virtue of its
ubiquity and constant repetition being the key to successful propaganda.
(30:03):
But so many of these arguments, in addition to this
abortion is murder stuff is also just like you should
have kept your legs closed.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Right, this is a this is a consequence God did
this to you. Yeah, Like sex for your sins immortal sin,
and sex should be punished and.
Speaker 4 (30:19):
They must be doing it wrong.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
Like I'm like, why do you want sex to have
consequences and be punished? The like intensity of the misogyny
around purity culture is so intense.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
I wanted to ask you, you know, about the experience
of writing the book. Right, So you know, your first book,
Culture Warlords, was traumatizing for you to craft, right, because
you had to spend so much time in these digital
spaces in some in some cases physical spaces with you know,
neo Nazis, four Chen guys, you know, aspiring terrorists, and
so that's traumatic to experience, you know, But largely that
(31:06):
experience was alone, like at your computer screen, sort of
consuming this content that was eroding your soul.
Speaker 4 (31:13):
But the second half.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Of this book is about child abuse, right, and like
you interviewed people who grew up in this movement about
their lives, about their husband's raping them and their parents
beating them as children, and like, how did those experiences compare?
And like what was that? How, I mean, how did
(31:35):
you prepare to do that? I don't know even know
how it would begin to do that with care.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
I mean, I think my goal going in is like
I'm not going to betray you, Like that was my
guiding ethos of just like I view like your trust
in me as a sacred thing, not like sacred in
any formal religious sense, but just like you know, I
view your trust in me as something that I hold
very dearly. It's very important. I'm going to treat your
(32:04):
pain with as much gentleness and respect as I can.
And like, I interviewed over one hundred people largely about
their experiences with experiencing child abuse and an evangelical milieu
as is laid out with pain steaking instructions and like
all of these parenting manuals. Actually, like I think reading
the parenting manuals was even more disturbing than talking to people,
(32:26):
because like people were like, this fucked me up and
it was wrong. And then these books are like, no,
you must beat your toddler because Jesus says so, and
like here's exactly how to beat your toddler, and here's
what you should use to beat your toddler, and here's
the like supremely fucked up, like weird ritual that we prescribe.
And then like reading those in tandem with like like
(32:49):
the accounts of people who were like this specific thing
like sucked me up for life and really messed up
my ability to have like intimacy or self confidence or
whatever all of that stuff. I mean, that was tough.
I definitely took more time, Like I wrote Culture Warlords
in nine months, so I was like totally immersed constantly
it just like didn't come up for air yeah at all.
(33:10):
And this one I was like, I need a little
more time, guys, Like I wrote it over, you know,
almost three years. I also pretentiously started calling this philosophy
guarding your Heart because I really got lost in the
sauce with culture warlords, Like I was in a dark
place while I was writing it, and afterwards I was
also the like it came out in mid COVID, so
(33:32):
that didn't help either. But uh, it was a real,
really rough experience with this. I was like, I'm going
to keep writing. I'm gonna write about sandwiches all the
way through. I'm going to like make sure I have
friendships and stuff that's grounding me. I think consciously having
that at the forefront of my mind really helped.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
That.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
Being said, like what was really encouraging was all of
these people who had experienced this sort of child abuse
industrial complex in the evangelical community, where like we really
value that someone wants to hear what we have to say,
and also that it's someone from outside the community is
like paying attention and thinks this is important, which is
(34:12):
not to denigrate like expangelical voices, but more to say that, Like,
I guess there's a certain validation when someone who's like
not didn't grow up in your corner of religiosity, dark corner.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
And I'm sort of bringing it to an outside audience too.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
I think a lot of expangelicals their audience is largely
their fellow expangelicals exactly.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
And I'm someone who, like I grew up as a Jew,
and I'm like, yeah, this sucked, this is terrible. I'm
like appalled reading like to Train Up a Child by
The Pearls or The Strong Willed Child by jam Stobson, which, like,
to be clear, the strong willed child is a bad thing.
It's a bad thing to have a child with us.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
You have to beat it out of them, sure, literally,
And I'm going into this in the wild recently. I
don't know if you have come across this guy online.
Do you know the nineties movie The Little Rascals.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
Oh my god, alf from The Little Rascals turns out
to be able Salfa.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
The guy who played Alfalfa's name is Bug Hall. He
like really like I don't, got into a sort of
main character situation over some posts about how he beats
his infants.
Speaker 4 (35:15):
He beats infants because that's I guess, a good way
to raise a baby.
Speaker 3 (35:20):
Yeah. Also I think he's homeless.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
No, he's a surf.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Oh he's in a voluntary serfdom arrangement.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
Oh my god. Okay, well he sounds like a big rascal. Yeah,
he's continued that trajectory of rascaledom. But don't be your kids.
I mean, I will also say the reason why this
book focuses so much on child abuse, which, like I
encountered some some haters and losers and doubters along the
(35:52):
way who were like, why are you focused so much
on child abuse? And I was like, there are a
lot of different theories about like how authoritarianism developed, but
one of the big ones is focusing on the pedagogy
in authoritarian societies. Societies that become authoritarian, you know, evolve
from democracy to authoritarianism, and beating the shit out of
(36:14):
people from when they're in infancy and particularly when they
display disobedience or ask why, or you know, just deviate
from expectations.
Speaker 4 (36:27):
It's a great way to make an obedient brown shirt.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
Yeah, exactly, Like this is a recipe for future authoritarians.
Like the people I spoke to had sort of broken
away largely from this culture. But many of the sort
of most obedient soldiers in the Army's Army of God
like are that way. Because again, I can't overemphasize how
much these parenting manuals, which spanned from like nineteen seventy
(36:52):
to twenty fifteen, these texts, you know, the dates that
they were published, emphasize having an obedient child. What you
want is not like a child who's kind or curious
or thoughtful or smart. It's obedient, instantly obedient. Don't make
me count to three is the title of one of
the books, And like, what you're creating is a culture
(37:14):
of people who a like empathize with the aggressor at
all times. So hence this admiration for strength and even
admiration for cruelty, people who are trained to obey and
obey without question, and people who are very acclimated to
the use of violence.
Speaker 4 (37:30):
I mean, you're doing fascism in the home, right.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
So the the author, like Alice Miller, the the author
of the book For Your Own Good, lays out a
pretty she was also a Holocaust survivor. She lays out
a pretty strong case for like, you know, early twentieth
century Germany having this poisonous pedagogy that also involved beating
the shit out of your kids until I was illegal
to love your children, Yeah, to obey you, and how
(37:56):
basically this is how you make a torture and the
book is called or your Own Good And yeah, I
mean I really think it is like under valued in politics,
Like how much this culture of corporal punishment, which is yeah,
Americans have like moved away from universal approval of corporal punishment,
(38:19):
we're still like a lot higher than other Western democracies
in that regard, and like on a national level, we're
the only country in the world that hasn't ratified the
UN Conventions on the Rights of a Child, which include
like having a name and like not being beaten and
not being thrown into like ju the solitary.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
Oh well, that's why America can't touch that. We need
to incarcerate the children.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
Yeah, the children, you're in for the cells. But it's
also just like a lot of it actually was like
worries that like evangelicals like would sort of object to
the interference in their it's.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
An infringement on their religious freedom to bet the shit
out of baby.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Yeah, and they're parental rights which is another buzzword of
this this movement.
Speaker 4 (39:06):
Parental rights is a red flag for me.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
Oh yeah, no, I hear parental rights, and I think
you want to beat the shit out of your kids.
Speaker 4 (39:13):
You don't want your children to learn science.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
Yeah, you at a homeschool and under educate your kids
or miseducate.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
You want to cause a measle's outbreak exactly.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
But that's like for us because we're weirdos. We're like
obsessively clued into this stuff. If you're not, Like, parental
rights is like religious freedom is, like it sounds good, Yeah,
it's an effective marketing slogan, but like what it means
is like we're going to show up at the school
board and yell about how I mean. And Trump is
like bought into this obviously because he knows where his
(39:46):
bread is buttered. He has savvy Like he's like, you guys,
do the policy. But like his current parental rights based
his biggest like policy that he's advocating is like denying
federal funding to any school with any vaccine a mandate,
which is basically just like make measles great again, like
bring back diphtheria. I think, like, yes, the maga movement
(40:09):
ister of the the efflorescence, the apotheosis of this steadily
building power, but like there's also just like fifty years
of power building behind it. And like even if Trump
was defeated at the federal level, which like I profoundly
hope he is, sorry to come out as like a
you know, partisan, a voter, like a hashtag a voter,
(40:31):
but like, I think it would be just a nauseatingly
it's a horrifying thought that he I mean, first of all,
you would absolutely enact every item in this theocratic agenda,
starting with a national abortion band like that would happen
in the first hundred days, I think, which would just
functionally plunge American women into like a very very dark
(40:55):
septocemic nightmare.
Speaker 4 (40:57):
Yeah, the dark place that we're going as a coffin.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:01):
But even should he lose, which you know hope, there's
still twenty two states where abortion is outlawed or severely restricted,
and these places are becoming care deserts. Like medical residents.
My extremely sexy partner is a medical resident, so I
(41:22):
know more about the state of medicine than I otherwise would.
But like residents don't want to do their residencies in
states with abortion restrictions, they're like, right, given.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
A choice, gynecological providers just aren't practicing there anymore. Like
even if you know, even your primary focus is not abortions,
or even if your primary focus is not you know,
pregnancy care, they just don't want to They just don't
want to work there.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
Well, also, first of all that, but second of all,
it's like, if you're in the er, you're going to
experience pregnancy losss It happens in one in five pregnancy.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
Right, So they're choosing to work in states where they're
not going to go to jail for doing medicine.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
Yeah, Like they don't want to incur the moral injury
of not being able to apply the standard of care
to patients in extremely common situations such as incomplete miscarriage
and you know, pregnancy loss, whether you know self induced
or just like miscarriage is super common and nobody talks
about it.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
It's more common than we an Ectopic pregnancy is so
much more common than people realize. Like there are so
many things that your body can do to betray you
that you need a doctor help.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
With just ordinary pregnancy.
Speaker 4 (42:28):
And then after the baby is born, then your lustrous
hair all falls out.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
Yeah, Like ordinary pregnancy is so fraught with like weird
body horror. Like, but anyway, that's besides the point. Whatever.
The point is someone presents with abdominal pain in the
er and it turns out to be an ectopic pregnancy,
and like you can't do standard of care like dilation
and cure tash procedures without checking with the hospital lawyer.
(42:56):
Like that is a really bad position a care provider
to be in. So when you have these fundamentally unscientific laws,
right that are produced by people who don't know anything
about pregnancy and are like very intentionally ambiguous, so that
cautious institutions will sort of interpret them at maximally interpret them,
(43:19):
Like the life of the mother.
Speaker 4 (43:20):
How dead does she have to be? First?
Speaker 3 (43:22):
Yeah, she has to be almost dead, right, and then
sometimes she winds up dying because almost dead is tough
to judge, Like, it just winds up this grotesque sort
of farce of medicine, and very directly, like residents don't
want to train, doctors don't want to practice in these places,
and so you.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
Know, right, so this ends up killing more people than
just the ones hemorrhaging in the parking lot. There are
people who have completely unrelated problems who are now unable
to access unrelated kinds of care because the doctors just aren't.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
There, Yeah, Or people who have ordinary wanted pregnancies who
can't access neonatal care, who have to drive hours and
hours and hours to like get checkups, like you know,
I mean, human reproduction is like a pretty major part
of like life.
Speaker 4 (44:09):
And a lot of people are doing it.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
Yeah, like it's sort of how you know, It's just
people do it all the time, and like, not being
able to access medical care around like the entire spectrum
of like reproduction is pretty catastrophic. But yeah, it also
impacts all the people not engaging in reproduction at this
moment in time, like doctors who are just like fuck this,
(44:31):
I'm not wearing out an er in Tennessee, you know,
because I want to be able to treat patients.
Speaker 4 (44:36):
Without a lawyer in the room.
Speaker 3 (44:37):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, I mean, And then there are doctors
who are bigots and doctors who are happily on board
with abortion bands. But like, do you want that to
be the only doctor in your county? I don't think so,
you know, it's just it's a really grim situation. And
I just like, I'm such an absolutist about bodily autonomy.
It's like, if you don't own your body, you are
(44:58):
not a full citizen, period of story. Like if if
a major organ in your body is treated as a
controlled substance, like, you are not a full and equal
citizen with rights, which I would like to be.
Speaker 4 (45:11):
I aspire to it.
Speaker 2 (45:13):
Yeah, so I want to ask you one more question
about your book, and I will let you go.
Speaker 4 (45:17):
I told you that I wouldn't keep you very long,
and I lied.
Speaker 3 (45:21):
But it's like, it's just because I like talking to you.
So it's I think I've done the majority of the talkics.
You can't. You can't be like, oh, it's about your book,
which you should buy listeners.
Speaker 4 (45:36):
Pre order it now wherever you buy your books.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
And if you like the delcent tones of my voice,
which are I shouldn't have you to narrate in my
audio books, you brush that passage.
Speaker 4 (45:46):
I'm a professional talker now, yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
Yeah, Well I narrated the audio book and then was like,
why did I write such complicated sentences? Afterwards?
Speaker 2 (45:54):
So now that I read my own writing, like on
a regular basis out loud, which.
Speaker 4 (45:59):
Is new for me.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Right, So you know, I have my podcast and I'm
writing my little scripts and then I'm reading into a
little microphone. Now that I struggle with that. I noticed
while I was reading your book that oh I wouldn't
be able to read this out loud. I know, where
would I breathe? I know it was because I write
like that too, and it's something I'm like really grappling
with right now.
Speaker 3 (46:17):
She's like call me ten clubs, Talia. I'm like, ah, fuck,
this sentence is this paragraph? This sentence is a paragraph.
Stop it.
Speaker 4 (46:25):
Like I really really lost, really lost momentum on that one.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
Yeah, I know, but like I managed to get through it.
And if you if you enjoy the dulcae sounds of
my voice, you can hear it for like I don't know,
eight hours or whatever. I assume we're being like, listen
to my voice.
Speaker 4 (46:40):
But you know, invite me into your mind.
Speaker 3 (46:43):
Yeah, but I do think it's nice as an author
to read your audiobook because I can like get mad
and like, you know, emphasize stuff that I think is important.
And also I'm a theater kid, like, like I don't
have many opportunities to perform, and it is a performance
and it's it's fun.
Speaker 4 (47:02):
But yeah, and that comes out at the same time
as the physical book.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Yes, it comes out audio ebook, physical book with a
cool snake on it.
Speaker 4 (47:12):
Oh yeah, Oh, I guess this is an audio medium.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
The listener can't see that I'm showing the cool cover.
Speaker 3 (47:18):
Yeah, it's got a cool snake, a red and black
snake on the cover. I've named him Rocco, but he
has a cross for a tongue. If you're looking for
a book to give to the metal head in your life,
oh yeah, it's pretty metal, metal heads, atheists, degenerates. Everyone
is going to love this book.
Speaker 4 (47:37):
It's perfect for everyone.
Speaker 3 (47:39):
And if you're light on cash flow, want it for
supporting India authors is ask your library to stock it
or your local bookstore because library orders are really important
and you can just like put in a request in
your library system and that is super helpful.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
Hell yeah, everybody go to your library's website right now
and request that they purchase a copy of Wild Faith
by Talia Lavin. Yeah, talywhere else can people find you online?
Speaker 3 (48:07):
So I have a newsletter. It's on button down. I
left substack because they were like, We're never gonna sensor Nazis,
but we will sensor porn. And I was like, I
don't like your priorities, so I left for button Down.
So it's buttondown dot com slash the sword in the sandwich,
or if you just google the sword and the sandwich
comes up. Most Tuesdays I write about like the horrific
(48:27):
state of politics, et cetera, and then Fridays I write
an essay about a different sandwich on Wikipedia's list of
notable sandwiches, and so far I've written one hundred and
eleven sandwiches.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
The sandwich content alone is worth the price of admission.
You need to find out about these sandwiches.
Speaker 3 (48:48):
I mean it just and I get really deep into
the history and the provenance and like like ah, the
shifting of peoples led to this sandwich, so I get
really deep into it. And then you can also find
me on Blue Sky, where I most of the time
now because Twitter is just like robots and Nazis and
Nazi robots, where I'm at swords Jew. I'm still on
(49:12):
Vishy Twitter as Mobi Dick Energy. And you know, if
you want to say hi or invite me to speak
at your synagogue or bookstore I'm at Talia l even
writes at gmail dot com. Or church if you're like cool. Yeah,
if it's like a cool church, yeah, you show up
and they pass you with snake yeah exactly. Oh God,
(49:36):
I didn't do enough speaking you times for this book.
Speaker 2 (49:38):
Well, Tally, thank you so much for coming on today again.
The book is Wild Faith by Talia Lavin, and you
can pre order it now wherever books are sold, and
you should request it from your library.
Speaker 3 (49:50):
Yeah, we stand civic services, and I'm a huge fan
of public libraries and also of Molly Conger. So thanks
for having me on and take care, Bye bye.
Speaker 1 (50:07):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 3 (50:18):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (50:20):
We can now find sources for It Could Happen here
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome back to it could happen here in
your daily dose of the horrors that are, in fact,
already happening all around us. I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger,
and I am delighted to be joined today by the
critically acclaimed author of Culture Warlords, journalist researcher, sword enthusiast,
Sandwich expert, and my friend Talia Lavin. Hello.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Yeah. I once introduced myself at an event as a
Sandwich historian, which I think was the pinnacle of my
public speaking career. But this is a second pinnacle. Hey, Molly,
what's up?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Thank you so much for coming on today to talk
with me about your new book, Wild Faith is coming
out in just a few weeks October fifteenth, right.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Yeah, Wild Faith, How the Christian Right is taking over America.
Not the terrible B movie entitled Wild Faith.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yeah, the SEO is scrambled on that one. But the book, however,
is very good. I mean, first of all, I just
want to say, like I've been reading the gally copy
that you sent me, which I honestly made me feel
very fancy. I've never received a galley copy of a
book that's not out yet before. So I felt, you know,
kind of a kind of a broadcasting professional with my
special book.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
It's an exclusive club. You're one of like five people
thus read it.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Oh my god, that is that's very exclusive.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Yeah. Well it's aboud to become a lot less exclusive,
so feel special while you can, right.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
But I realized while I was reading it, you know,
I have my little sticky tabs because I'm reading a
lot more books lately, regrettably not not not a big
time book guy. It's always reading. I read a lot
of court documents, but I'm reading a lot of books
right now for research for my show, and it's like
my little sticky tabs. And as in reading it, I
realize I'm not marking passages that I think would be
(01:47):
useful for us to talk about in this interview. I'm
just putting my little tabs on passages that just like
punched me in the gut.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
You know, Ah, sorry for punching you.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
No, but I mean, I mean with the way the
power of your words, because like a lot.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
Of what I'm reading sucks.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
It's just right, Like I spent all day yesterday reading
like twenty five year old Issues of Resistance, which was
the quarterly magazine for a white power music label. So this,
I mean it's a real departure, So you know, really
just reveling in the richness of the pros and the
fact that it, you know, didn't want to kill me.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Yeah. No, I also have experienced neo Nazi research fatigue,
and also just like the sort of relentless grimness of
flowing through these like fundamentally hostile texts, and also like
academic texts, which are difficult in their own way. I
try to write accessively or just like excitingly. I find
(02:50):
that a lot of especially nonfiction sort of journalism me books,
tend to be a little dry, and I'm like, let's
not be dry. Let's be like spicy, and you know,
like form and function, Like you're more likely to be
moved by a message if you find the writing compelling.
(03:10):
You know, it's just you.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Have such a way with words. I mean, you know this,
You're a professional writer. I don't want to embarrass you
on the show.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
So I'm twirling my air like, yes, but I do
write for a living.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
If you'll indulge me, if it's legal, if the publisher
will allow this, I just want to read this passage
from the introduction that I think is a good jumping
off point, and it was one of the first things
I marked because I was just like, oh, hell yeah,
we're getting into this.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
There's good words in here, okay.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
The Christian Right is a force in American politics and
has been for decades, half a century to be precise,
during which it has steadily gained power. It started in
school rooms, continued in courtrooms, and perseveres with the aid
of people who are perfectly willing to call in bomb
threats to hospitals and attempt to overturn elections. It features
self proclaimed profits with a distinct interest in policy, newly
(04:01):
minted apostles with very definite ideas about spiritual battle and
its earthly components, and pastors eager to usher in the
end of the world. Its adherents have hymns and devotionals
and speaking tongues on occasion, and the showiest among them
are known to march their cities, blowing rams horns in
an effort to topple, as Joshua once did, the wicked
cities of the world. They have their own insular world,
(04:22):
their own media apparatus. They have legislators who could fire
in brimstone speeches from the badly carpeted rooms where laws
are made. They have lawyers too, and in case the
lawyers fail, there's always the promise of congregations that might
coalesce into mobs or arsonists. Who's burning holy zeal coalesces
into the tiny pinpoint of a Molotov cocktail. And I
(04:47):
knew from the intro that we were in for a ride.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Yeah, it's like cast of characters, the worst people ever,
but like, let's write about it in an exciting way.
I think that one of the themes of the book
is really how these extra legal extremist movements like the
anti abortion terror movement, and the legal framework of a
(05:13):
movement work together. I actually initially heard about this from
a friend who was talking about how like during the
gay rights movement you had sort of the act up
builth demonstrations, the diants, and then you have the sort
of like more respectively coded like gay people who you know,
we're talking to the government and trying to get elected
and you know, really trying to influence research, and that
(05:35):
every movement needs sort of a radical outside and then
a respectable inside. And I'm like, oh, this works in
like the acratic movements too, where you have like this
you know, fringe that's burning down clinics, and then people
steadily working for fifty years to like ban abortion, and
(05:56):
they have the same DNA and they have the same goals.
They just go about it differently but complement each other.
And I think that's like a running theme in the book,
is that like you have lawyers and you have legislators,
and then you have mobs and they're sort of all
working towards the same goals. And that's really what we're seeing,
(06:17):
I think, on the Christian Right after decades of building power.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yeah, one of the notes that I wrote down in
that vein while I was reading was that, you know,
the Christian Right drives its power across a spectrum, right
from the clinic bomber to the senator. But it's not
you know, you might say two sides of the same coin.
But to me it looks like this isn't two different
spheres of power too sort of separate but coexisting or
comorbid ideologies. They're just different numbers on the same dial, right,
(06:46):
it's turning up and turning down.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Yeah, it's like the hand that lights the torch and
the hand that puts it to the you know, pyre.
They perform different functions, but they have really the same goals.
And if like me, you view stripping half the populace
of its bodily autonomy, imposing a theocracy, hounding queer people
(07:12):
out of public life, slash into death as fundamentally violent goals. Yeah,
I don't think there's like a respectable iteration necessarily, there's
just cosplaying respectability and right.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
You can say it with a tie on on the
Senate floor, but it's it's the same message.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
Yeah, And I think so much of our media apparatus
and governmental apparatus is really sort of views like again
this like form and function, right, Like if you are
if you say something politely, it doesn't really matter what
you're saying, like if you say something with a suit
(07:53):
on in the register of like, you know, in a
calm sort of Mike Pencian, rush Limbaugh and decap As
he called himself a boy. She says, did he say that, Yeah,
that's what he called himself when he read it, did
a like evangelical radio show. Yeah, No, no matter what
you say, as long as you are like white and
you say it politely, like this is fundamentally sort of fine,
(08:14):
And then if you look at it from you know,
a step or two back, and you're like, no, actually,
no matter how politely say it, this is like a violent,
deeply unpopular theocratic agenda that like fundamentally is incompatible with
multiracial democracy. I also think, and I keep running into this,
(08:37):
like well meaning liberals being like, but isn't there a
separation of church and state? And I'm like, I don't know.
Do you fucking think there is? In Alabama? Do you
think there is an Arkansas? And all of these you
know in Texas, Like all of these figures are like
we're Christians. We're making laws for Jesus, and.
Speaker 4 (08:55):
We have covenant marriages and we want you to too.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Yeah, like we're gonna outlawe because of God. And like,
you know, women dying of sepsis in hospital parking lots
is what Jesus wants. And like, and I experienced this,
I think you probably have to when you like report
on you know, zealots and extremists, and people inevitably wind
(09:18):
up like measuring other people's weep by their own bushel.
In other words, they're like they can't really believe this stuff,
and it's like, no, they really do, they can't really
have these goals.
Speaker 4 (09:30):
First of all, they do, but also doesn't.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Matter, right, I mean the question of like impact versus intent.
First of all, it's I think it's perfectly possible to
be both a grifter and a true believer at the
same time.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
That's just synergy, baby.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
Yeah. And also fundamentally, this is a world premise done grievance,
where it's this idea that like, the world has got
one over on you. And so in a sense, grift
is just like, well, you know, the world's corrupt and
I'm fighting a righteous cause, so what does it matter
the ethics that I sort of skip on along the way.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
I mean, once you've amped the stakes up to you're
fighting the literal devil and everyone who's getting in my
way is animated by actual demons from Hell. I mean,
the stakes couldn't be higher. So you do what you
have to do.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Exactly, and it's this theory of power. And so then
people sort of standing outside of that paradigm who are
not keyed into this idea of like we're in an
ethical spiritual battle and we must create like a Kingdom
of Christ on earth. In America to win against the devil,
and then people outside being like, you're hypocrites, and it's
(10:40):
like it's not a valid criticism to them because they're like,
first of all, you're not like a Christian if you're
a liberal, but also like you're not on our level,
Like we're fighting Lucifer and you're probably a stand like
on his team if you oppose us. So, you know,
a multitude of apparent hypocrisies can be excused by the
(11:02):
idea that like this is a holy war and in
war there's like all kinds of avert behavior.
Speaker 4 (11:09):
That's together doing holy war crimes.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Yeah, exactly. I mean this is why, for example, you
see a lot of like prominent female figures from Philish Lafley,
you know, in the seventies and eighties, to like the
trad wives now, and it's like, how does this fit
in with your overall sort of idea that women should
be chaste and submissive and meek and silent. I mean,
first of all, tradwife stuff is often fetish Spanish content.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
But yeah, I mean Pilish Laughfly made a living professionally
saying that women shouldn't make a living professionally, but that
contradiction doesn't matter.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Yeah, I mean I think I call them valkyries for
feminine submission in the book. Yeah, I mean, at the
end of the day, like if you believe that this
is your your calling, your mission, you know, your mission
field in the service of the Lord to undo the
demonic sort of influence of feminism, Like of course you're
going to.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
Speak, You've been moved by God to do so.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Yeah. And of course, like female leaders with the evangelical community,
like sort of minority Republicans can be like knocked off
their pedestal quicker and easier, but like they still can
come out and exist and testify. And Schlaughley throughout her
very long prolific and lucrative career, you know, was like
(12:28):
I'm a housewife with six kids, and that was her.
That was how she defined herself, even while being this
incredibly prominent figure and one of the sort of key
architects of the current Christian right coalition of like right
wing Catholics. She and Paul Weyrick and Leonard Leo and
some other right wing Catholics brought these Catholic values of
(12:52):
being all about abortion to the evangelical right, which prior
to the seventies is like, that's a weird Catholic thing.
You don't really I.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
Wanted to talk about that.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
So I'm not sure how sort of common knowledge this is,
but the Protestant Christian community in the United States did
not care about abortion until the seventies. It was not
an issue in their communities. They were generally pro abortion.
They were you know, the Baptists were in favor of
Roe v. Wade.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
Yeah, the fucking Southern Baptist Convention came out in like
seventy four, I think it was, and was like, yeah,
we approve of Rob Wade.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
So it's not like, you know, opposition to abortion is
baked into Christianity. It is baked into the American Evangelical
Christianity of post nineteen seventy five or so because of
this sort of conscious cynical political decision. And that I
think is so interesting because you know, you get into
this conversation of well, what are their deeply held beliefs
(13:49):
and do they really believe it and does that matter?
But we can pin down the moment they started believing
this and we know why, and it's segregation.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Yeah. I mean, first of all, I would say, like
people can still like this is like several generations later
of like constant barrages of extremely violent propaganda against abortions.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
So right, so the belief is sincere today, but you
could look at it where it was born.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
Yeah, exactly, you should have been aborted, right, Yeah, no,
it definitely should not have been carried to term. But
like it's it's crazy. And in addition to Mooi's book,
Randall Baumer does some really good coverage of this. So
the sort of general arc is like three sort of
nineteen seventies, you had this like generally conservative population of
(14:41):
Southern Baptists who were like on board with McCarthyism, hated
the godless Reds, but kind of viewed politics as like
worldly and not really their sphere, and we're not particularly
politically engaged. And then brown versus a board of education
passes immediately, the white Christian populist just disinvests these from
(15:05):
the public schools, leaving multiple counties in the South without
functionally any public education at all. And this mushroom after rain,
kind of like patch of patches of parochial schools with
church or Christian in the name start popping up, and
they're all white schools. Their segregation academies is the sort
(15:28):
of term of art for these and they're explicitly under
a Christian agis they're religious schools. They're tax exempt as
a result. And then in like the late sixties and seventies,
the government was like, you can't be tax exempt and
like considered a charitable organization if you are segregated and
(15:51):
don't have any black students or minority students. And that
is what woke the sleeping dragon of the Christian right
really like, you know, get your filthy government hands off
our tax exemptions. Like they just went, you know nuts.
They were really mobilized, you know, like these are the
people who are like throwing tomatoes at Ruby Bridges, Like
(16:13):
you know, they're really politically motivated for the first time
because they're experiencing like a consequence for segregation. And so
this is when like Jerry Fowell and Ralph Reid and
you know, James Dobson start sort of coming forward and
being more prominent. And then by the sort of mid
(16:36):
seventies to eighties, you had these like savvy or political
operators coming out and saying, hey, guys, segregation now, segregation tomorrow,
segregation forever is like it's great that it really fired
y'all up, but it has sort of a limited appeal.
Speaker 4 (16:54):
And they shot George Wallace. It's over.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Yeah, Like there's going to be a ceiling on that,
and a lot of people think you suck. So why
are you getting on the ground on this new civil
rights struggle abortion where you can fight for the unborn
who conveniently will never disagree with you.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
Right, their voices don't have to be centered here. We
can speak for them.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
I mean, they're the most convenient political constituency in history.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Right because they're so innocent and you can't milkshake duck
a fetus.
Speaker 4 (17:23):
He's not even here.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Yeah, he can't talk, but he's not gonna say shit.
So I mean that's like the very capsule history. And
then of course it becomes this idea of like the
(17:44):
moral majority and where the guardians of America's soul and
we're gonna get really weird about sex. Also, it's just.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Like if you strip it all the way down to
the studs, Like the core of this is women are
bleeding to death in hospital parking lots because Gary Fowell
didn't want to pay his taxes or stop being racist.
Speaker 4 (18:04):
Yeah, I mean that's not fair.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
No, people sometimes like are a little skeptical when I'm like,
all of the hatreds are interconnected. But then you look
at like concrete historical examples of like this world historical
wave of misogyny. I mean, it's not that this population
wasn't like weird about sex or weird about women like
to start with.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
I mean maybe they would have gotten here a different way,
but that's how we got here.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
Yeah, we got here by just like no, we will
pay taxes on our segregation academies. Bob Jones University's inter
racial dating ban is perfectly great, and we're gonna mobilize
about it. And so what you have then now is
just like fifty years of political lock step because and
(18:52):
you see this in like other religious communities. I mean,
like I know, like it's sort of notorious how much
corruption slides by in New York because like the that
a communities vote as a block, like it is very
useful to have a congregation that all votes the same way.
It's politically useful.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
I mean, what other populations can you get together once
a week as a captive audience and speak to with
authority if you can mobilize those people. And that's what
Jerry Folwell saw, right, is like this is a great
way to get a lot of people to vote the
way I want them to vote.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
Yeah, And you know, the church has always been like
a really prominent institution in American civil society, especially as
the rest of sort of civil society has fallen away
and degraded. Like churches are some of the only social
outlets that Americans have. And what's interesting when you talk
to evangelicals and next evangelicals is just like being a
(19:47):
Republican is like part of their religious identity in a
major way. It's like this is how you vote, and
this is you know, how you dress, and this is
how you go to church and so on. But like
the idea of being a Democrat is like not only
you know, a little bit out of step with your community,
it's heretical.
Speaker 4 (20:06):
I mean, that's how the demons give in.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Yeah, yeah, demoncrats, I mean, and like, yeah, it's stupid,
But it's also like half of the people saying demoncrats
like literally mean democrats are aligned with Lucifer.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
And I think that's a point that I don't want
to get lost on the listener this you know, this
idea that people literally have demons in them, that demons
are active in the world, that demons are motivating the actions.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
Of their enemies. It is real for them.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
And I'm not saying that to be derisive or you know,
it's real.
Speaker 4 (20:36):
It's real.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
It is an animating factor for a lot of these people.
And that's hard to wrap your mind around. I mean,
I struggle with the idea that that is real for them.
But like that's how you get things like satanic panic,
and we see echoes of satanic panic in this idea
of you know, groomers in kids' schools. They really have
this fundamental, like foundational belief in this, you know, whether
(20:59):
or not they're calling it demons, that the existence of
some sort of ontological evil that is coming for their children.
And like once you arrive at the place where, like
where you understand that that's real for them, their actions
make more sense. Like they're not behaving irrationally if you
if you truly believe that these things were happening, you'd
act crazy too.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
Yeah, I mean it's really hard to get people to
step outside their own worldviews and in both directions, right, Like,
I don't believe that demons are, you know, abroad in
the world and motivating like every element of political action
to someone who.
Speaker 4 (21:33):
You're starting to see them some places, but generally, I.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Know, to someone who does my viewpoint is incomprehensible and
vice versa. So I think part of I mean not
that I'm like one of those people that's like polarization
is the big problem, like you know, as opposed to
anything with like concrete policy, like you know where it's
like the big problem is we all don't like each
other enough, and I'm like, no, the big problem is
(21:57):
like people are espousing policies that will cause deaths, and
like also that people like believe their political enemies are
like literally agents of Satan. I would say, is like
a bigger problem than polarization in the abstract. But yeah,
I mean this this doctrine of sort of spiritual warfare,
which if you like google it, it's just like, oh,
this is the mindset and it's like you, the listener
(22:18):
to it could happen here, like you've been drafted into
the spirit war from like birth.
Speaker 4 (22:23):
Congratulations private, and.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
You're probably in the side of the devil, so good job.
I mean, I don't know, like a lot of Americans
believe in angels and demons, and that's fine, but it's
like when that starts impinging on the political sphere in
a very serious way. It's like, how far would you
go if you believed your opponent was under the thrall
(22:46):
of like Satan, you would go pretty damn far's.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
I mean, that's why you know clinic bombings were and
I guess are on the rise again, right, Like these
arsens of clinics. It's not like other kinds of crime
in my mind, right, It's not a crime of passion
or an interpersonal dispute. It is people who have been
motivated by this belief that this is a place where
a genocide is happening, that there's a holocaust going on
(23:10):
in there, that people are ripping you know, actual living babies,
limb from limb, And if you really did believe that,
their actions make sense. And that's why it happens so often, right,
because these people are motivated by this belief that God
commands them to take this action.
Speaker 3 (23:24):
Yeah, I mean there's your dual element to that. I mean,
first of all, absolutely, yes, Like I've read some anti
abortion terror manuals speaking of extremely unpleasant research and it's
just really like these people are murderers. It's mass murderers,
Like you're like killing Hitler, right.
Speaker 4 (23:41):
And wouldn't you wouldn't you kill baby Hitler exactly?
Speaker 3 (23:44):
But poltical about baby Hitler in like a countrywide scale.
And when specific abortion doctors have been mentioned in right
wing media, those guys end up dead and that's not
a coincidence. So there's that element of it, which is
the majority of it. It's huge. But there's also this
idea of demonic geography, where like demons can possess sort
(24:07):
of places like abortion clinics or institutions like planned parenthood
or even the Democratic Party, which you know, I read
a lot of demonology books like Taxonomies of Demons. Pigs
in the Parlor was this really big hit in like
the seventies, and it's been like reissued and reissued and
millions of copies, and it's just like, on one level,
(24:29):
it's really compelling because it's like are you tired, are
you sad? Are you feeling clumsy? Do you have like
persistent stomach aches? It's demons and here's how you deal
with that. And like, in a country with shitty healthcare,
I can totally see why someone who's like really depressed
might go to like an exorcist or a deliverance minister,
(24:52):
which is the Protestant.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
If you'll try anything, and this guy's going to do
it for free.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
I watched so many videos of deliverance ministers doing their thing,
and it's like crazy. It's like people, you know, are
just like sitting there and they're like people praying over
them and screaming in their face, like and they wind
up vomiting and crying and it's all very like intense.
And you know, if you think about it from a
placebo effect perspective for like one second, you're like, obviously
(25:18):
this person would feel a weightlifted from them they've had
this ecstatic experience. And this isn't the majority of it.
This is about fourteen percent of America identifies this as
white evangelics, so many Protestants and still so many people
because people keep asking me, like how many people really
believe shit like this? And I'm like, well, about eighty
(25:40):
to ninety percent of like people who identify as white
Evangelical Protestants espows most of these beliefs.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
So that's like third, that's like thirty million people yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:49):
Yeah, and then you add in the Catholic right.
Speaker 4 (25:51):
Which is getting weirder every day.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
Yeah JD Evans, I hate women exist to reproduce breed
you filthy now. But like even beyond the adult Catholic
convert style weirdness, like right wing Catholics are an integral
part of the Christian right, like Amy Cony Barrett, you know,
antonin Scalia, that kind of thing. That's another bunch of millions.
(26:17):
So this reactionary force has like numerically significant constituency. On
the other hand, it definitely punches way above its weight
in terms of right.
Speaker 2 (26:27):
They have an outsized influence of both you know, on
the legislative floor and when it comes to you know,
who's racking up the most bodies.
Speaker 3 (26:36):
Yeah, And also even like the culture wars right, like
the sort of loudest culture warriors tend to at least
come from like a background of I'm speaking for God
or Christ is King or whatever it is, Like how
many times have you and I encountered that an extremist
contacts But also like the sort of more mainstream me,
(26:59):
what the fuck the mainstream is? I don't know, it's
full of piss, But like the more mainstream like Christian grifter, Right,
they come from this. I'm speaking from my faith. These
are my religious principles. But like it is worth noting
again just to rewind in our conversation. But like the
full concept of religious liberty and religious freedom absolutely was
(27:21):
like an ad slogan coined in the seventies around segregation.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Right, religious freedom to do what? I mean, it's like
states rights, States rights.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
To do what?
Speaker 3 (27:31):
Right? Yeah, like you answer the question, Yeah, it's religious
freedom to have segregated schools, is the answer to that.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
And you still see echoes of that with either still
religious schools that can't accept federal grant money because they
don't let students be gay, right, Like it's not racial
segregation anymore, but they are refusing to admit gay students, and.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
That is a violation of federal civil rights law.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Yeah, but that's where I mean, that's where that slogan started.
And then it's blossomed to clue basically like a gay
person came into my shop.
Speaker 2 (28:03):
Except they didn't, right, I know, there's no standing, right,
Like that whole case was built a lie.
Speaker 4 (28:09):
Whatever.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
That's yeah, it's like and the standing in the Supreme
Court is so ridiculous. This, I mean, in many ways,
this Supreme Court is the culmination and embodiment and a
botheosis of like Christian right theocracy, because you have these
like absolutely bat shit religious zealots, I mean, Amy Cony
Barrett is like from a cult, and in this unaccountable body,
(28:31):
they're passing unpopular theocratic principles that the majority of the
American public uh disagrees with. But like specifically, what they
are trying to enact and what they are what they
are enacting is this theocratic agenda where like the government
is in your bedroom, the government is in your doctor's office,
like the government is sniffing your panties, and it's it's
(28:54):
gross and it's upsetting and fundamentally, like theocracies are just
very famous all up in your junk, like they're obsessed
with like controlling and censoring sexuality of all kinds of
a particularly female sexuality and queer sexuality, like snuff those out.
And so that's part of the reason why so many
(29:16):
abortion arguments, Like first of all, you have the like
the you're murdering this cluster of cells which is a
full human baby, Like do you remember that article in
the Guardian a couple of years ago that like showed
the actual size of like fetuses at various stages of development,
and it was like you were just like so little,
like these little like little fingernails.
Speaker 2 (29:37):
Yeah, and it doesn't look like a tiny baby doll.
That's just very small.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
Yeah, exactly, it's not like a mini baby like it
like tides of gore. It's like literally like a tiny
cluster of cells. So the anti abortion propaganda, like, you
are not immune to propaganda. It has like wormed its
way into the popular consciousness just by virtue of its
ubiquity and constant repetition being the key to successful propaganda.
(30:03):
But so many of these arguments, in addition to this
abortion is murder stuff is also just like you should
have kept your legs closed.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Right, this is a this is a consequence God did
this to you. Yeah, Like sex for your sins immortal sin,
and sex should be punished and.
Speaker 4 (30:19):
They must be doing it wrong.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
Like I'm like, why do you want sex to have
consequences and be punished? The like intensity of the misogyny
around purity culture is so intense.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
I wanted to ask you, you know, about the experience
of writing the book. Right, So you know, your first book,
Culture Warlords, was traumatizing for you to craft, right, because
you had to spend so much time in these digital
spaces in some in some cases physical spaces with you know,
neo Nazis, four Chen guys, you know, aspiring terrorists, and
so that's traumatic to experience, you know, But largely that
(31:06):
experience was alone, like at your computer screen, sort of
consuming this content that was eroding your soul.
Speaker 4 (31:13):
But the second half.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Of this book is about child abuse, right, and like
you interviewed people who grew up in this movement about
their lives, about their husband's raping them and their parents
beating them as children, and like, how did those experiences compare?
And like what was that? How, I mean, how did
(31:35):
you prepare to do that? I don't know even know
how it would begin to do that with care.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
I mean, I think my goal going in is like
I'm not going to betray you, Like that was my
guiding ethos of just like I view like your trust
in me as a sacred thing, not like sacred in
any formal religious sense, but just like you know, I
view your trust in me as something that I hold
very dearly. It's very important. I'm going to treat your
(32:04):
pain with as much gentleness and respect as I can.
And like, I interviewed over one hundred people largely about
their experiences with experiencing child abuse and an evangelical milieu
as is laid out with pain steaking instructions and like
all of these parenting manuals. Actually, like I think reading
the parenting manuals was even more disturbing than talking to people,
(32:26):
because like people were like, this fucked me up and
it was wrong. And then these books are like, no,
you must beat your toddler because Jesus says so, and
like here's exactly how to beat your toddler, and here's
what you should use to beat your toddler, and here's
the like supremely fucked up, like weird ritual that we prescribe.
And then like reading those in tandem with like like
(32:49):
the accounts of people who were like this specific thing
like sucked me up for life and really messed up
my ability to have like intimacy or self confidence or
whatever all of that stuff. I mean, that was tough.
I definitely took more time, Like I wrote Culture Warlords
in nine months, so I was like totally immersed constantly
it just like didn't come up for air yeah at all.
(33:10):
And this one I was like, I need a little
more time, guys, Like I wrote it over, you know,
almost three years. I also pretentiously started calling this philosophy
guarding your Heart because I really got lost in the
sauce with culture warlords, Like I was in a dark
place while I was writing it, and afterwards I was
also the like it came out in mid COVID, so
(33:32):
that didn't help either. But uh, it was a real,
really rough experience with this. I was like, I'm going
to keep writing. I'm gonna write about sandwiches all the
way through. I'm going to like make sure I have
friendships and stuff that's grounding me. I think consciously having
that at the forefront of my mind really helped.
Speaker 1 (33:49):
That.
Speaker 3 (33:50):
Being said, like what was really encouraging was all of
these people who had experienced this sort of child abuse
industrial complex in the evangelical community, where like we really
value that someone wants to hear what we have to say,
and also that it's someone from outside the community is
like paying attention and thinks this is important, which is
(34:12):
not to denigrate like expangelical voices, but more to say that, Like,
I guess there's a certain validation when someone who's like
not didn't grow up in your corner of religiosity, dark corner.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
And I'm sort of bringing it to an outside audience too.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
I think a lot of expangelicals their audience is largely
their fellow expangelicals exactly.
Speaker 3 (34:32):
And I'm someone who, like I grew up as a Jew,
and I'm like, yeah, this sucked, this is terrible. I'm
like appalled reading like to Train Up a Child by
The Pearls or The Strong Willed Child by jam Stobson, which, like,
to be clear, the strong willed child is a bad thing.
It's a bad thing to have a child with us.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
You have to beat it out of them, sure, literally,
And I'm going into this in the wild recently. I
don't know if you have come across this guy online.
Do you know the nineties movie The Little Rascals.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
Oh my god, alf from The Little Rascals turns out
to be able Salfa.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
The guy who played Alfalfa's name is Bug Hall. He
like really like I don't, got into a sort of
main character situation over some posts about how he beats
his infants.
Speaker 4 (35:15):
He beats infants because that's I guess, a good way
to raise a baby.
Speaker 3 (35:20):
Yeah. Also I think he's homeless.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
No, he's a surf.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Oh he's in a voluntary serfdom arrangement.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
Oh my god. Okay, well he sounds like a big rascal. Yeah,
he's continued that trajectory of rascaledom. But don't be your kids.
I mean, I will also say the reason why this
book focuses so much on child abuse, which, like I
encountered some some haters and losers and doubters along the
(35:52):
way who were like, why are you focused so much
on child abuse? And I was like, there are a
lot of different theories about like how authoritarianism developed, but
one of the big ones is focusing on the pedagogy
in authoritarian societies. Societies that become authoritarian, you know, evolve
from democracy to authoritarianism, and beating the shit out of
(36:14):
people from when they're in infancy and particularly when they
display disobedience or ask why, or you know, just deviate
from expectations.
Speaker 4 (36:27):
It's a great way to make an obedient brown shirt.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
Yeah, exactly, Like this is a recipe for future authoritarians.
Like the people I spoke to had sort of broken
away largely from this culture. But many of the sort
of most obedient soldiers in the Army's Army of God
like are that way. Because again, I can't overemphasize how
much these parenting manuals, which spanned from like nineteen seventy
(36:52):
to twenty fifteen, these texts, you know, the dates that
they were published, emphasize having an obedient child. What you
want is not like a child who's kind or curious
or thoughtful or smart. It's obedient, instantly obedient. Don't make
me count to three is the title of one of
the books, And like, what you're creating is a culture
(37:14):
of people who a like empathize with the aggressor at
all times. So hence this admiration for strength and even
admiration for cruelty, people who are trained to obey and
obey without question, and people who are very acclimated to
the use of violence.
Speaker 4 (37:30):
I mean, you're doing fascism in the home, right.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
So the the author, like Alice Miller, the the author
of the book For Your Own Good, lays out a
pretty she was also a Holocaust survivor. She lays out
a pretty strong case for like, you know, early twentieth
century Germany having this poisonous pedagogy that also involved beating
the shit out of your kids until I was illegal
to love your children, Yeah, to obey you, and how
(37:56):
basically this is how you make a torture and the
book is called or your Own Good And yeah, I
mean I really think it is like under valued in politics,
Like how much this culture of corporal punishment, which is yeah,
Americans have like moved away from universal approval of corporal punishment,
(38:19):
we're still like a lot higher than other Western democracies
in that regard, and like on a national level, we're
the only country in the world that hasn't ratified the
UN Conventions on the Rights of a Child, which include
like having a name and like not being beaten and
not being thrown into like ju the solitary.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
Oh well, that's why America can't touch that. We need
to incarcerate the children.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
Yeah, the children, you're in for the cells. But it's
also just like a lot of it actually was like
worries that like evangelicals like would sort of object to
the interference in their it's.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
An infringement on their religious freedom to bet the shit
out of baby.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Yeah, and they're parental rights which is another buzzword of
this this movement.
Speaker 4 (39:06):
Parental rights is a red flag for me.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
Oh yeah, no, I hear parental rights, and I think
you want to beat the shit out of your kids.
Speaker 4 (39:13):
You don't want your children to learn science.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
Yeah, you at a homeschool and under educate your kids
or miseducate.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
You want to cause a measle's outbreak exactly.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
But that's like for us because we're weirdos. We're like
obsessively clued into this stuff. If you're not, Like, parental
rights is like religious freedom is, like it sounds good, Yeah,
it's an effective marketing slogan, but like what it means
is like we're going to show up at the school
board and yell about how I mean. And Trump is
like bought into this obviously because he knows where his
(39:46):
bread is buttered. He has savvy Like he's like, you guys,
do the policy. But like his current parental rights based
his biggest like policy that he's advocating is like denying
federal funding to any school with any vaccine a mandate,
which is basically just like make measles great again, like
bring back diphtheria. I think, like, yes, the maga movement
(40:09):
ister of the the efflorescence, the apotheosis of this steadily
building power, but like there's also just like fifty years
of power building behind it. And like even if Trump
was defeated at the federal level, which like I profoundly
hope he is, sorry to come out as like a
you know, partisan, a voter, like a hashtag a voter,
(40:31):
but like, I think it would be just a nauseatingly
it's a horrifying thought that he I mean, first of all,
you would absolutely enact every item in this theocratic agenda,
starting with a national abortion band like that would happen
in the first hundred days, I think, which would just
functionally plunge American women into like a very very dark
(40:55):
septocemic nightmare.
Speaker 4 (40:57):
Yeah, the dark place that we're going as a coffin.
Speaker 3 (41:00):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (41:01):
But even should he lose, which you know hope, there's
still twenty two states where abortion is outlawed or severely restricted,
and these places are becoming care deserts. Like medical residents.
My extremely sexy partner is a medical resident, so I
(41:22):
know more about the state of medicine than I otherwise would.
But like residents don't want to do their residencies in
states with abortion restrictions, they're like, right, given.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
A choice, gynecological providers just aren't practicing there anymore. Like
even if you know, even your primary focus is not abortions,
or even if your primary focus is not you know,
pregnancy care, they just don't want to They just don't
want to work there.
Speaker 3 (41:47):
Well, also, first of all that, but second of all,
it's like, if you're in the er, you're going to
experience pregnancy losss It happens in one in five pregnancy.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
Right, So they're choosing to work in states where they're
not going to go to jail for doing medicine.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
Yeah, Like they don't want to incur the moral injury
of not being able to apply the standard of care
to patients in extremely common situations such as incomplete miscarriage
and you know, pregnancy loss, whether you know self induced
or just like miscarriage is super common and nobody talks
about it.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
It's more common than we an Ectopic pregnancy is so
much more common than people realize. Like there are so
many things that your body can do to betray you
that you need a doctor help.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
With just ordinary pregnancy.
Speaker 4 (42:28):
And then after the baby is born, then your lustrous
hair all falls out.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
Yeah, Like ordinary pregnancy is so fraught with like weird
body horror. Like, but anyway, that's besides the point. Whatever.
The point is someone presents with abdominal pain in the
er and it turns out to be an ectopic pregnancy,
and like you can't do standard of care like dilation
and cure tash procedures without checking with the hospital lawyer.
(42:56):
Like that is a really bad position a care provider
to be in. So when you have these fundamentally unscientific laws,
right that are produced by people who don't know anything
about pregnancy and are like very intentionally ambiguous, so that
cautious institutions will sort of interpret them at maximally interpret them,
(43:19):
Like the life of the mother.
Speaker 4 (43:20):
How dead does she have to be? First?
Speaker 3 (43:22):
Yeah, she has to be almost dead, right, and then
sometimes she winds up dying because almost dead is tough
to judge, Like, it just winds up this grotesque sort
of farce of medicine, and very directly, like residents don't
want to train, doctors don't want to practice in these places,
and so you.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
Know, right, so this ends up killing more people than
just the ones hemorrhaging in the parking lot. There are
people who have completely unrelated problems who are now unable
to access unrelated kinds of care because the doctors just aren't.
Speaker 3 (43:54):
There, Yeah, Or people who have ordinary wanted pregnancies who
can't access neonatal care, who have to drive hours and
hours and hours to like get checkups, like you know,
I mean, human reproduction is like a pretty major part
of like life.
Speaker 4 (44:09):
And a lot of people are doing it.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
Yeah, like it's sort of how you know, It's just
people do it all the time, and like, not being
able to access medical care around like the entire spectrum
of like reproduction is pretty catastrophic. But yeah, it also
impacts all the people not engaging in reproduction at this
moment in time, like doctors who are just like fuck this,
(44:31):
I'm not wearing out an er in Tennessee, you know,
because I want to be able to treat patients.
Speaker 4 (44:36):
Without a lawyer in the room.
Speaker 3 (44:37):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, I mean, And then there are doctors
who are bigots and doctors who are happily on board
with abortion bands. But like, do you want that to
be the only doctor in your county? I don't think so,
you know, it's just it's a really grim situation. And
I just like, I'm such an absolutist about bodily autonomy.
It's like, if you don't own your body, you are
(44:58):
not a full citizen, period of story. Like if if
a major organ in your body is treated as a
controlled substance, like, you are not a full and equal
citizen with rights, which I would like to be.
Speaker 4 (45:11):
I aspire to it.
Speaker 2 (45:13):
Yeah, so I want to ask you one more question
about your book, and I will let you go.
Speaker 4 (45:17):
I told you that I wouldn't keep you very long,
and I lied.
Speaker 3 (45:21):
But it's like, it's just because I like talking to you.
So it's I think I've done the majority of the talkics.
You can't. You can't be like, oh, it's about your book,
which you should buy listeners.
Speaker 4 (45:36):
Pre order it now wherever you buy your books.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
And if you like the delcent tones of my voice,
which are I shouldn't have you to narrate in my
audio books, you brush that passage.
Speaker 4 (45:46):
I'm a professional talker now, yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
Yeah, Well I narrated the audio book and then was like,
why did I write such complicated sentences? Afterwards?
Speaker 2 (45:54):
So now that I read my own writing, like on
a regular basis out loud, which.
Speaker 4 (45:59):
Is new for me.
Speaker 2 (45:59):
Right, So you know, I have my podcast and I'm
writing my little scripts and then I'm reading into a
little microphone. Now that I struggle with that. I noticed
while I was reading your book that oh I wouldn't
be able to read this out loud. I know, where
would I breathe? I know it was because I write
like that too, and it's something I'm like really grappling
with right now.
Speaker 3 (46:17):
She's like call me ten clubs, Talia. I'm like, ah, fuck,
this sentence is this paragraph? This sentence is a paragraph.
Stop it.
Speaker 4 (46:25):
Like I really really lost, really lost momentum on that one.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
Yeah, I know, but like I managed to get through it.
And if you if you enjoy the dulcae sounds of
my voice, you can hear it for like I don't know,
eight hours or whatever. I assume we're being like, listen
to my voice.
Speaker 4 (46:40):
But you know, invite me into your mind.
Speaker 3 (46:43):
Yeah, but I do think it's nice as an author
to read your audiobook because I can like get mad
and like, you know, emphasize stuff that I think is important.
And also I'm a theater kid, like, like I don't
have many opportunities to perform, and it is a performance
and it's it's fun.
Speaker 4 (47:02):
But yeah, and that comes out at the same time
as the physical book.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Yes, it comes out audio ebook, physical book with a
cool snake on it.
Speaker 4 (47:12):
Oh yeah, Oh, I guess this is an audio medium.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
The listener can't see that I'm showing the cool cover.
Speaker 3 (47:18):
Yeah, it's got a cool snake, a red and black
snake on the cover. I've named him Rocco, but he
has a cross for a tongue. If you're looking for
a book to give to the metal head in your life,
oh yeah, it's pretty metal, metal heads, atheists, degenerates. Everyone
is going to love this book.
Speaker 4 (47:37):
It's perfect for everyone.
Speaker 3 (47:39):
And if you're light on cash flow, want it for
supporting India authors is ask your library to stock it
or your local bookstore because library orders are really important
and you can just like put in a request in
your library system and that is super helpful.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
Hell yeah, everybody go to your library's website right now
and request that they purchase a copy of Wild Faith
by Talia Lavin. Yeah, talywhere else can people find you online?
Speaker 3 (48:07):
So I have a newsletter. It's on button down. I
left substack because they were like, We're never gonna sensor Nazis,
but we will sensor porn. And I was like, I
don't like your priorities, so I left for button Down.
So it's buttondown dot com slash the sword in the sandwich,
or if you just google the sword and the sandwich
comes up. Most Tuesdays I write about like the horrific
(48:27):
state of politics, et cetera, and then Fridays I write
an essay about a different sandwich on Wikipedia's list of
notable sandwiches, and so far I've written one hundred and
eleven sandwiches.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
The sandwich content alone is worth the price of admission.
You need to find out about these sandwiches.
Speaker 3 (48:48):
I mean it just and I get really deep into
the history and the provenance and like like ah, the
shifting of peoples led to this sandwich, so I get
really deep into it. And then you can also find
me on Blue Sky, where I most of the time
now because Twitter is just like robots and Nazis and
Nazi robots, where I'm at swords Jew. I'm still on
(49:12):
Vishy Twitter as Mobi Dick Energy. And you know, if
you want to say hi or invite me to speak
at your synagogue or bookstore I'm at Talia l even
writes at gmail dot com. Or church if you're like cool. Yeah,
if it's like a cool church, yeah, you show up
and they pass you with snake yeah exactly. Oh God,
(49:36):
I didn't do enough speaking you times for this book.
Speaker 2 (49:38):
Well, Tally, thank you so much for coming on today again.
The book is Wild Faith by Talia Lavin, and you
can pre order it now wherever books are sold, and
you should request it from your library.
Speaker 3 (49:50):
Yeah, we stand civic services, and I'm a huge fan
of public libraries and also of Molly Conger. So thanks
for having me on and take care, Bye bye.
Speaker 1 (50:07):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 3 (50:18):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (50:20):
We can now find sources for It Could Happen here
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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