Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism. By Jason C. Bivins

Extract

In an adroit and theoretically sophisticated monograph entitled Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism, Jason Bivins takes his readers on a guided tour of an important religious formation within U.S. conservative evangelicalism—the religion of fear, a cultural formation that is part social critique and part political agenda, a formation that has its roots in the early history of the republic and has flourished in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. Tacking back and forth between brief and sweeping histories of the rise of evangelicalism in the United States, on the one hand, and close readings of strategically chosen exemplars on the other, Bivins offers both a portrait of a not-to-be-ignored religio-political force and a nuanced analysis of how the diverse manifestations of this force perform pedagogical work, impose disciplines based on religiously inflected social critique, and dangerously narrow the terrain of the political. His book concludes with a critique of the academic field of religious studies, which has in his view failed to rise to the analytical occasion in the face of this religio-political project. Moreover, he issues an urgent plea for resistance against the evacuation of the sphere of the political by narratives of moral panic and moral promise.