October 21, 2024

Sword & the Sandwich x Know Your Enemy

Welcome back to Culture Club, the weekly feature where Talia and I discuss our preoccupations—what we’ve been thinking about, reading, watching or playing—for premium subscribers.

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With Talia off this weekend celebrating Sukkot with her family (and taking a breather from book promotion), for this Sunday’s column we’re running an interview that she recently gave to ex-evangelical religious scholar Matthew Sitman of the “Know Your Enemy” podcast. Normally this episode would only be available to the podcast’s Patreon subscribers, but now our own premium subscribers can listen.

It’s fascinating conversation about how empathy and curiosity are vital political tools. Here’s a sneak preview:

MATT: I started reading [Wild Faith], and what I realized was, you're not just mocking religious leaders, the people who say things in public on the record that are ridiculous, whether about politics or religion. What I found was you're mad on behalf of the people they hurt. And that twist of the aperture—using that lens—was the thing that really made your book stand out. For me, it wasn't just, “look at these religious bigots.” It was, “look at what it does to the people these beliefs touch. Look at the wreckage of the lives ruined. Look at the people that have suffered because of this.” And I think that was just a different angle into this than you get in a lot of books in a similar space as yours. 

TALIA: First of all, I think the kind of Idiocracy genre of let's just really condescend to people. Let's start from this viewpoint of overt condescension and misunderstanding—I think it's really unhelpful. For me, the best way of accessing a topic is always to assume that the people that are embodying the worldview you want to explore are utterly sincere in what they say. Explore where that sincerity comes from, and then who it impacts. And you're right. So much of this book centers on women and children, because ultimately, when you look at a patriarchal, theocratic viewpoint—and a church that views women as subordinate and children as objects to enforce obedience upon—what you are looking at is a very particular view of society, and one that really does harm people so irrevocably. And we see that in miniature, I guess, in the ten of millions of evangelical families that deal with this kind of absolutist patriarchal faith. And this is also their vision for what the whole country should be. So I think exploring the harms and consequences in real lives of this ideology winds up being the most effective way of being like, no, they're serious, and this is an internally consistent theology.