Theme
Theology & Faith
Belief as a personal question and as a political one, and the places those two stop being separable.
15 books
newest read first
Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation
Brenda Wineapple · 2024 · read May 2025Brenda Wineapple's narrative history of the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" — Dayton, Tennessee; Bryan vs.
Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy
Katherine Stewart · 2025 · read Mar 2025Stewart's 2025 follow-up to The Power Worshippers — updated for the Trump-2.0 environment, Project 2025, and the explicit…
The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism
Katherine Stewart · 2020 · read Mar 2025Katherine Stewart's investigative mapping of the institutional infrastructure of American Christian nationalism — the legal…
A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology
Mike Rinder · 2022 · read Feb 2025Former Scientology Office of Special Affairs head Mike Rinder's memoir of his decades inside Scientology's senior leadership, his…
Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church
Hahrie Han · 2024 · read Oct 2024Johns Hopkins political scientist Hahrie Han's case study of "Undivided" — a years-long racial-solidarity program inside a…
The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism
Tim Alberta · 2023 · read Dec 2023Tim Alberta's follow-up to American Carnage — a son-of-an-evangelical-pastor's reckoning with what the movement his father served…
Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation
Jon Ward · 2023 · read Nov 2023Yahoo News political reporter Jon Ward's memoir-journalism hybrid on his own evangelical upbringing in DC-area megachurch…
Counting the Cost
Jill Duggar · 2023 · read Sep 2023Jill Duggar's memoir of growing up in the family of 19 Kids and Counting, her separation from her parents and the IBLP (Bill…
White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity
Robert P. Jones · 2020 · read Sep 2023PRRI founder Robert P.
Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot
Seth Andrews · 2022 · read May 2023Former Christian radio personality Seth Andrews (now host of "The Thinking Atheist") on the specific verbal and conceptual habits…
Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free
Linda Kay Klein · 2018 · read Feb 2023Klein's hybrid memoir-and-journalism on evangelical "purity culture" of the 1990s and 2000s — True Love Waits, purity rings,…
The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth
Beth Allison Barr · 2021 · read Feb 2023A Baylor historian (and Southern Baptist pastor's wife) argues that "biblical womanhood" — the complementarian package of…
The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy
Philip S. Gorski · 2022 · read Feb 2023Sociologist Philip Gorski (with Samuel Perry) on white Christian nationalism as a distinct ideological tradition — measurable,…
Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation
Kristin Kobes Du Mez · 2020 · read Nov 2022A historian's argument that the Trump-evangelical alignment wasn't a sellout but the predictable endpoint of a 75-year project to…
Not in It to Win It: Why Choosing Sides Sidelines The Church
Andy Stanley · 2022 · read Oct 2022Atlanta megachurch pastor Andy Stanley's argument from within evangelicalism that the church's alignment with partisan politics —…