The Authoritarian State in Miniature

But just as Lavin traces the hyper-local roots of the ​“spiritual war” that made Christian nationalists a decisive factor in Donald Trump’s reactionary counterrevolution, she also explores how that world may have sowed the seeds of its own undoing, as she talks with ​“ex-vangelicals” leaving the movement behind.

In These Times talked with Lavin about her journey into the Christian nationalist movement and what it tells us about our current political landscape amid the second Trump administration. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

SB: What drew you to cover Christian nationalism specifically and what did you encounter once you did?

TL: A big turning point for me was watching a documentary called The Way Down, about a Christian weight loss church. One episode dealt with child abuse. It was the first time I had really heard about child abuse in the evangelical context and it made a profound impression on me. When they were describing child rearing manuals and specific equipment for corporal punishment, suddenly I knew this can’t be just one congregation. And the question for me was: How does this kind of system develop? 

I reached out to folks online and asked if they were raised in a household with stuff like James Dobson and gurus of Christian child rearing and was horrified by what I encountered. I wrote a series about my initial findings because the response was so intense — people desperate to tell their stories, people who obviously felt their stories hadn’t been told. From there it became a question of how these cultures create totalitarian states in miniature and how that relates to authoritarian politics in general.

SB: You talk a lot in the book about the culture of abuse in many evangelical homes. What ramifications does this culture have across our social and political spheres?

TL: If we talk about what tenderizes society to accept authoritarianism, an authoritarian family structure is a huge part of it. This is especially true on the Christian Right, where obedience is considered a chief virtue and the core education on how to be a person. In a democracy, your voice and actions matter, at least nominally. If you grow up in an authoritarian environment, where you’re told your voice and actions don’t matter and that you should be obedient, then these two ideas, authority and democracy, are going to be in conflict. 

If you create an authoritarian state in the home that raises people to expect and empathize with violence, then what you receive is a generation of people who do just that. In many ways, that’s the heart of Trumpism: watching an authoritarian father figure mete out punishment against the wicked.

This leads to a lot of gleeful malevolence in the MAGA movement and on the Christian Right. Recently, there was a bestselling book called The Sin of Empathy, about how liberals perverted the church by talking about empathy. The idea that empathy is a Trojan horse corrupting Christianity is a major bestseller right now. Mel Gibson and Tucker Carlson separately, a couple of months apart, compared Trump becoming president again to daddy coming home to beat you with a belt, framing that in very positive terms: he’s going to beat some sense into the nation. 

SB: Do these dynamics affect how people are responding to some of the incredibly cruel governmental changes we’re seeing now, from mass layoffs to closing social service programs?

TL: I think for the perpetrators and those eagerly embracing this destruction, that’s where you’re seeing this authoritarian family influence — where you are forced from a very early age to empathize with your abuser, because if you don’t, you have to answer a lot of very painful questions about your life, your beliefs and the way you were raised.

But avoiding that questioning means that you go through the world with ​“might makes right” as a positive social value and where the person who is the most flagrantly cruel and authoritarian is the inherently appealing figure.

SB: You describe some of these communities as composing a ​“society within a society.” How so? 

TL: There is an insular material culture created by evangelicals for evangelicals. People who were not familiar with the Christian Right who read my book asked how they didn’t know these things. It’s because their books weren’t written for you. Their marriage manuals, parenting guides, movies and TV shows and homeschool curricula are by and for evangelical Christians. Their movement has created a parallel and parasitic material culture that puts mainstream culture through a fun house mirror and makes it its own. There are Christian thrillers patterned off secular thrillers. Bibleman is Superman, but with the Bible.

There is also a broad persecution complex that suggests that not being able to enforce their religion through law and impose it on the general public is a form of persecution. That being forced to experience religious pluralism is a form of persecution. No one embodies this more than Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk fired after refusing to issue a marriage license to a gay couple and who has been suing ever since. She positioned herself as a martyr and raised all this money for lawsuits and ultimately what she is advocating for is the absolute power, for Christians — and Christians alone — to discriminate, using civil power at will.

You also have very restrictive and fixed gender norms, with men at the top, women submissive to them and children little better than property. There are definitely female leaders and speakers, but much of the right-wing church has expunged female pastors over the last half-decade.

Another profound element is the absolute hostility to gay rights and trans rights in particular — the fixity and hierarchy of gender norms and the idea that people who defy the gender of their birth or opt out of the gender binary are an existential threat.

SB: You write about the private infrastructure evangelicals created, such as the explosion of Christian homeschooling as an alternative to public schools. Does this dynamic affect how they see the gutting of our public services? 

TL: It’s all of a piece. The Christian Right became politically active as a result of school desegregation. They were opening tax-exempt racially segregated Christian schools and the government said they can’t do that, so they said, ​“I guess we’ll start a 50-year plan that will eventually overturn American democracy.” The political origins of this movement are in devaluing and fleeing from public services.

Earlier than that, some of the pre-rumbling that this was going to be a major political force came when church leaders came out against FDR and the New Deal. Their argument has always been that charity should be administered through churches, which means if you are an unwed mother or queer or non-white applying for charity through a white evangelical church, you will face roadblocks. 

It’s a limitation on a publicly-funded safety net that enables people to rebound, grow and contribute in their own way. The trouble with that, if you’re a member of the Christian Right, is you lose this vector of control. 

SB: It seems like the turn towards homeschooling is also about creating more control at home. Now that we’re seeing a major push to destroy the Department of Education, to erase homeschool regulations and to win ​“school choice” — aka, school privatization — do you think this will result in fewer safeguards to protect kids?

TL: Yes. Homeschooling can enable abuse by removing children from seeing mandated reporters on a regular basis, like a school nurse who might see bruises and ask where they’re coming from, or an English teacher a student could confide in. Isolation is a really important factor in abuse. 

Currently in Utah, there’s a bill that would remove the requirement for homeschooling parents to attest to any criminal background, including child abuse, explicitly enabling people convicted of child abuse to homeschool their kids. That is, of course, a heavily Republican legislature and it’s being boosted by a ton of people within the homeschool community.

Even for public schools, you’re seeing so much movement on the Right to assert more control, to dominate schools and make them more submissive to parents. Parents demanding control over curricula. Parents controlling how children are referred to in terms of their gender. Kids being disallowed from using nicknames at school. Not to mention book bans.

SB: For the people you interviewed who left evangelicalism, what challenges did they face as they were entering adulthood or abandoning this isolating environment?

TL: It’s well documented that people who come out of abusive homes are more likely to either be abused or to abuse. Many of the people I spoke to have been involved in abusive relationships even after leaving this community. They talked about not knowing what a healthy, nurturing love is supposed to look like or feeling like they deserved poor treatment and pain. Some talked about a crippling lack of self-confidence or an inability to make decisions after having spent so long being forced into obedience. 

There isn’t one personality type that breaks away. Some folks were very thoughtful and introspective. Some folks were never going to fit in the model, who were gay, queer or women who couldn’t spend their lives in this very small box. There are many pathways to leaving, but everyone came out with scars and had to spend a lot of time rethinking how to interact with other people and how to think about themselves.

It’s the path of least resistance to stay. And I say that as someone who did leave a restrictive, high-control faith. I think a lot of people may ask why a Jew wrote this book. But I didn’t just grow up Jewish — I grew up Orthodox. The way I grew up was such that when I talked to former evangelicals, I was not at all weirded out because I had also lived a life dominated by religion. Religion was the school I went to. Religion was what I could eat, what I could wear, who I could date and that was natural to me. And even under the gentle circumstances by which I left that religious community, where I’m not cut off from my family, it was still quite painful and challenging. 

SB: What do you think motivated the former evangelicals you spoke with to share their stories? 

TL: I heard from multiple people that the fact that someone outside their community cared was validating. As a journalist, it’s always significant to be entrusted with someone’s vulnerabilities and traumas. 

But, more broadly, ex-evangelicals have been sounding this warning for a long time. Ex-evangelicals have been some of the clearest voices saying: this is what the Christian Right’s political project is. So many people I spoke to had this very clear understanding: that this is an authoritarian movement that has been gathering power my whole life and I don’t want to live in a country that suddenly has the same home I escaped. 

SB: Do you think the Christian nationalist movement was the decisive factor in moving the country Right?

TL: Absolutely. I think their chief project has been an aggressive, reactionary, counterrevolutionary movement against the various civil rights movements of the 20^th century — women’s rights, gay rights and, above all, civil rights. 

This movement is still a minority, but a loud minority with a lot of power, built quietly, in insular ways. They created these pipelines to power. The so-called ​“Joshua Generation” of former homeschool kids are bulking up Senate staff right now. Some are reactionary senators themselves. It’s a multi-generational project.

They sensed Trump’s momentum, so tacking with the winds of power, if you’re a movement primarily concerned with power, makes all the sense in the world. 

SB: What role do ex-evangelicals have in the fight against the Christian Right? Is resistance to Christian nationalism coming in part from people who left this movement? 

TL: To some extent. Tim Alberta, who came out of an evangelical background, had an influential book asking what happened to his community. Sarah McCammon’s book The Exvangelicals is about the movement more broadly and her experience in particular. Other ex-vangelicals like Blake Chastain and Chrissy Stroop are out there writing about Christian nationalism and I think these voices are really important to highlight. 

At the same time, the unearned respectability that white evangelicalism has makes it very hard for these critical voices to gain prominence. The people who know Christian nationalism from the inside out are arguably the best equipped to refute it. But there has to be more mainstream education about Christian nationalism for their voices to be taken seriously.