[lbo-talk] Religion of Fear

[Dennis Claxton]

Anybody read this?  Probably not or it would have come up.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=404940&sectioncode=26

Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism

8 January 2009

Written by an American scholar of religious 
studies at North Carolina State University, this 
book argues that conservative evangelical 
Christians are driven by the fear that America is 
being taken over by false believers, atheists, 
liberals, feminists and gays. Sometimes the enemy 
is more specific: Roman Catholics and, to a 
lesser degree, Jews, who must be treated gingerly 
because on their conversion rests the fate of the 
world. Oddly, immigrants and blacks get barely a mention.

What purportedly preoccupies US evangelicals is 
the fear that America's adolescents are being 
seduced by adults who espouse promiscuity, 
homosexuality, sadomasochism, and the 
accompanying vices of drugs and drink - the 
opposite of "family values". Paedophilia is not 
the fear. Who are the Pied Pipers leading the 
children astray? Rock stars, especially Marilyn 
Manson and heavy metal bands such as Black 
Sabbath. Almost all are white and native sons. 

 From them, American youth must be saved.

America's "culture wars", which began in the 
1980s, are by no means exclusively religious. But 
for evangelicals the wars are religious, for the 
opponents are Satanists, not secularists. 
Evangelicals see America the way the Book of 
Revelation, their master text, sees the world: as 
the setting for the mother of all battles - Jesus against Satan.

Jason Bivins describes in detail the propagation 
of the evangelical message. Rather than 
tabulating the number of conservative Christian 
TV and radio stations, publishing houses and 
other media outlets, he guides us through the 
merchandise. We encounter Jack Chick's comic-book 
tracts, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' Left 
Behind series of novels, and wacko 
Halloween-style "Hell Houses". Through them all, 
evangelicals luridly depict the pitfalls of straying from Christ.

[...]

Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism.
-

By Jason C. Bivins. Oxford University Press, 
336pp, £14.99. ISBN 9780195340815. Published 28 August 2008