The Resentful World of the Religious Right

Review of The Politics of Hate: How the Christian Right Darkened America’s Political Soul by Angelia R. Wilson (Temple University Press, 2025)

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed contains one of the sharper satires of the Left ever put to paper. About halfway through, there’s a meeting of proto-socialists, anarchists, liberals, and other self-styled intellectuals and reformers. Their chief theorist, Shigalyev, pontificates to the crowd, lamenting that his program for an ideal social system began with a commitment to unlimited freedom and ended in a commitment to unlimited despotism. Nevertheless he dryly concludes that the only solution to the social problem is his.

This kind of dialectical inversion, by which hallowed ideals somehow become their opposite, was very much on my mind reading Angelia Wilson’s engaging new book, The Politics of Hate: How the Christian Right Darkened America’s Political Soul. Wilson is well positioned to write a critical book on the religious right. Now a professor of politics at the University of Manchester, she is also a self-described lesbian who grew up in the Bible Belt and demonstrates an encyclopedic familiarity with the Right’s institutional ecosystems.

For much of the book, Wilson acts as an impartial and careful chronicler of this scene, relaying her time attending an endless array of megachurches, anti-LGBTQ rallies, and fire-and-brimstone sermons. Yet she opens and concludes the book on a polemical note warning against the rising tide of religious fundamentalism.

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