Christian Nationalism's War on Democracy: A Conversation with Talia Lavin
Not all coups change a country in an instant. Some are a slow-boil process of subversion that nonetheless leaves the institutions they affect unrecognizable. Journalist Talia Lavin has spent her career looking at the violent and bigoted politics of the United States’ rightward turn, and, as she chronicles in her recent book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America, the Christian nationalist movement currently remaking U.S. society was one such long revolution.
From the Christian Right’s early mobilization in the 1970s, as they fought desegregation by embracing private schools and homeschooling, to the culture wars seeking to undo myriad progressive reforms, Lavin finds that most of the movement’s political projects emerged from an authoritarian evangelical culture centered in the home. Through increasingly strict — and sometimes violent — forms of parenting to increasing rigidity around gender and sexuality, Lavin reveals how the localized fiefdoms of evangelical homes serve as a microcosm for what Christian nationalists want to see nationwide, and how the stark cruelty of today’s right-wing politics grew out of abusive family dynamics framed as biblically-mandated “tough love.”
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.
I 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.