At Religion Dispatches, Jason C. Bivins answers ten questions about his book, Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism. He says:
My hope is that with Religion of Fear, I have continued to document the subcultural shapes of political religion, beyond standard orientations like church/state studies and so forth, by looking at cultural politics and pop culture as ways of shaping religious orientations to politics.
The book tries to answer the question “How did these visions of religious horror erupting in public life move from the margins in the 1960s steadily to the center by the early 2000s?” The case studies I examine help tell answer this question, showing that a powerful anti-pluralism, resistance to liberalism, antipathy to governmental reform, and a zeal for disciplines of the flesh are powerfully nurtured in entertainments that partake equally of religious instruction and horror story.
There is something about the recrudescence of religious fear regimes in American life, and specifically about contemporary expressions of the old stories of alterity, that demands reconsideration of: 1) the specifically religious textures of, and contributions to, a broader crisis of confidence in American politics; 2) the complex, demonologically-driven identities generated in conservative evangelical engagements with pop culture; and 3) the responsibility that scholars of religion have to remake and maintain a critical engagement with public life.
Read the full interview here.
[via: Religion in American History]