A masterful labor of research and synthesis, this book is a comprehensive history of Evangelical Protestantism's influence in the United States government in the twentieth century. Those seeking to understand the persistent theocratic impulse in a government founded solidly on Enlightenment principles--and Mr. Sharlet does a particularly able job of sorting out the various strands of intellectual history in this area--will do well to start with this book.

An example of just one of the many established norms of American politics and government is that its citizens have been lied to for nefarious ends. ( )

Extensive research embedded, dedicated journalist = scary product. I used to read Robert Ludlum because he spun a good yarn, but this work of non-fiction is no yarn, because The Family is real, pervasive and infecting the U.S. like a malevolent virus. And not just the U.S. - they back some of the worst dictatorships. Think of the most backward public figures in recent years - John Ashcroft, Tom Coburn, James Inhofe, John Ensign, Sam Brownback - all Family. These people scare me - they have money and they have a jihadist mindset with their own interpretation of Christianity. ( )

This was a very difficult book for me. I don't doubt the facts it presents.

One thing I have seen in my life - people who actually believe that rich people are somehow better, rich people know what is right. I have seen this in people who have little money, who have a comfortable amount of money, and in people who are quite wealthy. When somebody confesses this belief to me, I am always amazed. My own theory is that rich people are about as tuned into truth as anybody else is, i.e. sometimes they're pretty tuned in but an awful lot of the time they are very far off the mark.

I guess for me what would help more would be a perspective that steps back a bit. Sharlet does occasionally hold up his fundamentalists next to other groups, sometimes liberal secularists, sometimes Islamic jihadists. But never for very long. His book is already plenty long so I can hardly blame him for not triply or quadrupling it! He has a particular story to tell. But to make sense of this story is really hard. It's probably just my style, to understand a thing by seeing it as an instance of a more general category.

I like his proposed solution, deliverance versus salvation.

I do wonder though... here is an analogy: climate change is a problem, but maybe we will run out of fossil fuels soon enough that actually climate change won't be such a big problem. Living without fossil fuels is going to be plenty hard, though! The cure may well be every bit as difficult as the disease would have been!

Similarly, the American Empire may not reach the kind of totalitarian finality that would make clear what horrible nightmares its dreams actually are. Between debt deflation, various global crises from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea etc., we may end up splintered into gangs and clans, ruled by war lords like Ted Bundy and who can say what militias... the USA could look like Afghanistan or Somalia, transformed with horrible suddenness.

What kind of stories can we then live by to give our lives meaning? ( )

At its best a detailed description of the history of American fundamentalism and the Family, including alarming and possibly damnable evidence of its ties (post- fall) to Nazism and fascism. No one has yet provided a reliable course for navigating American fundamentalism; instead we now have a number of paths through it that only provide views of some of its features, ignoring others. I had hoped that Sharlet would provide more of a definitive history, but even if it's not that this is a strong book. ( )