Countdown to Wild Faith
With Talia celebrating Rosh Hashanah this week, and a busy stretch ahead for both of us, team S&S is taking today off, before we return for our next adventure through Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches next Friday. To tide you all over until then, today New York magazine has published an excerpt from Talia’s new book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America.
The chapter explores “the Evangelical family’s twisted obsession with corporal punishment”—a theme Talia first explored here. As she says in the excerpt:
Within many Evangelical homes, violent abuse of children is cast as a direct act of service to God, and eschewing it a grave, even mortal sin that puts children in peril of losing their eternal souls. In tens of millions of American homes, there presides a structure in which the father dominates over his wife and children with unquestioned brutality, and the wife’s limited sphere of authority over the children is used to inflict further violence.
While Evangelicals might protest that the intended effect of corporal punishment is virtuous instruction, in the moral universe of Evangelical parenting, the ideal child is not necessarily smart, ambitious, or even kind or loving. Above all, he or she is obedient.
Wild Faith is out October 15, and if you haven’t ordered your copy yet, now would be a good time to do so (Talia reads the audiobook herself.) You can also hear her discuss this and other topics in recent interview with Molly Conger, and Luke O’Neal has another except from the book on his “Welcome to Hell World” newsletter.
There will, no doubt, be more news over the next couple of weeks, so be sure to stay up-to-date by following Talia on Bluesky.
— David Swanson
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How exciting! Very best wishes with the launch of your latest book, Ms. Lavin!