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The Conversation
The Conversation
Russell Blackford, Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Newcastle

The Christian Right is taking over America, according to Talia Lavin – but what is the best response?

Victor Moussa/Shutterstock

Talia Lavin’s Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America is an angry response to the rise of American Christianity’s far-right fringe, which she depicts as a theocratic menace to secular government and liberal freedoms.

As Lavin shows in abundant detail, the US Christian Right adheres to a worldview based around supernatural struggle between good and evil, where “demons make war every day with the better angels of the human spirit”. This is the same mentality as motivated the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, with its hysterical tales of ritual child abuse in service of the Devil. It continues to influence America’s “politics, punditry, and policy”.

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