Religion of Fear

Abstract This book investigates American political religions by studying how conservative evangelical political orientations are shaped and spread by pop cultural narratives of fear and horror. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to what it calls the “religion of fear”, a form of religious social criticism produced and sustained in evangelical engagements with pop culture. The book's cases include Jack Chick's cartoon tracts, anti‐metal and anti‐rap preaching, the Halloween dramas known as Hell Houses, and Left Behind novels. By situating them in their sociopolitical contexts and drawing out their creators' motivations, the book locates in these entertainments a highly politicized worldview comprising evangelical piety, the aesthetics of genre horror, a narrative of American decline, and a combative approach to public politics. The book also proposes its own theoretical categories for explaining the cases: the Erotics of Fear and the Demonology Within. What does it say about American public life that such ideas of fearful religion and violent politics have become normalized? The book engages this question critically, establishing links and resonances between the cultural politics of evangelical pop, the activism of the New Christian Right, and the political exhaustion facing American democracy.