Wild Faith: An Interview with Talia Lavin

Welcome to STRONGWILLED, the multimedia project aimed at helping survivors of religious authoritarian parenting methods develop autonomy and find solidarity. Today’s post is the audio/transcript of my interview with Talia Lavin, author of the phenomenal book Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America. I highly recommend you check out her work — not only is it incredibly well-researched and well-documented, she also highlights the stories of exvangelicals with tenderness and care. You can follow Talia on bluesky or buy her book here. I know this can be a triggering time to hear about Christian authoritarianism, but I truly feel like our conversation was one of the most validating I have had in a long time. You can listen here or find STRONGWILLED wherever you normally get your podcasts.

As always, this is a survivor-led and survivor-supported publication. If you appreciate our work (and our ad-free podcast!) please consider supporting us financially or sharing about the podcast on your social media channels.

---

“It was really shocking to me on a very core level how so much of all this parenting doctrine was about creating and enforcing this obedience. And that obedience was a more laudable quality in a child than curiosity, or kindness, or generosity, or intelligence. That obedience, absolute, unquestioning, first snap of the finger, obedience, was really what you want from your kid more than anything.”

— Talia Lavin on evangelical parenting manuals

Wild Faith: An Interview with Talia Lavin

(transcript has been lightly edited for clarity)

DL: Welcome to the STRONGWILLED podcast. I'm DL Mayfield, and I am very excited to talk to someone today that I've been aware of her work for quite some time now and it's an absolute dream and privilege and honor to talk to our guest today. I'm going to have her introduce herself, but first I just want to say that we have the person who basically predicted what the United States is experiencing here on the podcast today, because I'm talking to Talia Lavin, who is the author of Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America.

Talia, how does it feel to be right about everything? So right.

Talia: It sucks so bad. Have you ever gone back and looked at the myth of Cassandra? The actual story?

DL: I know bits and pieces, unfortunately now, but yes tell the people.

Talia: No, it's a tragedy. She's literally cursed by a god to be right and yet nobody pays attention. She's dragged through the streets of Troy…you know, it doesn't feel great. And I feel like ex-evangelicals have the hardest-won knowledge of what's happening now and have been so consistently disregarded and ignored. And it feels all of a piece with the myth of Cassandra who was discarded because she was a woman and pissed off Apollo at some point.

I don't know if I've pissed off Apollo, but maybe.

DL: I mean…

Talia: I certainly haven't gotten enough sun.

DL: I mean, Cassandra, [it’s like] the canary in the coal mine. What an interesting place to be. And people who have read Project 2025 and understand what it means, it’s just a special kind of hell to be living through it. But I'm sorry, I'm getting a little ahead of myself. I just want to say, Talia, your book is amazing. If people are listening to the STRONGWILLED podcast, there's like a few different kinds of people who listen. Some people are survivors of religious authoritarian parenting methods.

There's a lot of therapists and people in helping professions that want to learn about it. There's lots of partners and loved ones, who want to understand what it was like to grow up like this. I'm just going to say, everyone should buy and read this book, Wild Faith.

I think it's even more important now, post-election and post-inauguration than – it came out close to all of that – but I'm just saying it's a tiny bit triggering if you're a survivor of evangelicalism, but it's also so cathartic the way you wrote it and one of the reasons I think it was so cathartic for me to read it is because I, being raised white evangelical, I read so many books by white Christian men and just the way you write is different from that.

You bring your full self into the writing. It's so funny. It's so smart. It is just jam-packed with information, like a firehose of information. I was like, Whoa, this is – It was hard to read, but it was also really nice to read it. I just loved everything about your writing. So I don't know if we could just go right into what led you to write this book.

And if you want to tell people a little bit about yourself before you launch into that would probably be good too.

Talia: Yeah. So my name is Talia Lavin. This is the second book I've written. The first one was about online neo-Nazis, so I'm having the pleasure of finding the confluence of both awful types of people I write about now controlling the federal government, which is just truly lovely. So that's just cool, it's both and they've worked together, and the confluence is interesting, for sure, the many ways they overlap and work together.

But the first book was called Culture Warlords and Wild Faith, How the Christian Right is Taking Over America took me about three years to write and it came out in October. So I guess I'm doomed to write books about horrible people that then go on to destroy the fabric of America.

So that's a fun, just, recreational abyss gazing. It's great. Super awesome for mental health. But, as to what drove me to write this, something that I mention quite a bit in the book is that I grew up as a Jew in America. I grew up actually, and I'm not trying to like, toot my own horn over much here, it's more that I grew up in a fundamentalist religious environment, too.

I grew up an Orthodox Jew, so not like a Hasidic Jew with the earlocks and big hats and stuff, but a modern orthodox Jew, which is, its own quarter of fundamentalism, I guess. It grew up, you know, keeping fast days keeping feast days – my whole life was arranged around God.

And I think I came to this book with an understanding of that aspect of evangelical life. I didn't start from this sort of secular, rationalist perspective, nor did I start from any kind of Christian perspective.

I didn't come to it with a competing Jesus that I was like, obviously my version of Jesus is correct and yours isn't. And I didn't come to it with a, but I don't understand how could God and faith be driving forces in a person's life? And I think both of these perspectives, which are unfortunately relatively uncommon in American journalism, served me pretty well in trying to understand this particular iteration of radical Christianity.

And then also a very big focus of the book, and a part that I fought very hard for was to highlight the voices of survivors and really understand what is done to children and women under the aegis of this faith. And that was very important to me and really encompasses most of the second half of the book.

DL: Yeah. The way you wrote your book – one of the reasons why it was just so validating for me to read it was, yeah, because you spent so many of the beginning chapters laying out the case for this extremist religious group and, kind of taking them seriously.

You really took the apocalypticism seriously, which was very validating to read about. And then the second half, you're so tender with people who grew up in this, even though you just spent so much time talking about how batshit crazy and fucked up it is. It was a really beautiful way of being a human as you wrote.

I just could sense it through the book. And to have the stories of survivors in there was obviously very meaningful to me. And I'm just curious, as you wrote this, what were some of the stories that you continue to think about? Maybe it's research you did, or maybe it's people you talked to.

I don't know if anything comes to mind for you.

Talia: So much of it just lingers in my head. And I think every journalist or author has their own pet theory about how things came to be the way they are and very often it just so happens to coincide with the focus of their personal work. So I don't I'm hardly alone in being like, ah, the thing that really explains it is the thing that I, worked on in my book.

But I do think something that's been really underexplored, in terms of, how did America go so fascist so quickly and so readily, is the role of these cycles of child abuse and how is the Christian right so authoritarian and this is just not something that is explored, taken seriously, understood by people outside the community. And looking at what we're seeing now, this destruction of institutions, this willful, gleeful surrender to violent authority is really, to me – and genuinely, I'm not just trying to do guerrilla book marketing –

I think a lot of it is really explained by this cycle of abuse, and specifically the type of abuse that is engaged in evangelical households from Focus on the Family onward. So we're talking about generations of people inculcated in this sort of brutal child rearing at this point.

And what really struck me – and like I said, I come from a fundamentalist background myself, but it's a different one – was the complete focus on obedience. Domination leading to absolute obedience. And there's a lot of reasons for it. It's that these perfectly behaved, obedient children will be a witness to the broader public for how this is a better way to raise a kid. But mostly what it comes from is this desire that Dobson and his cohort had to basically repeal the social changes of the ‘60s.

And I've heard that the modern shambles that we're in right now was a desire to repeal the 20th century. And I think, yes, that's rooted in, that was the core of Dobson's project was seeing that these movements, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, were led by youth and being like, okay, we have to create this counter-type of youth that is utterly broken into total obedience.

And it was such a foreign concept for me at first because, yes, my community of origin is pretty brutally conformist, but this idea of your children are these like unquestioning soldiers of the Lord and constantly kept in both physical distress and then also this emotional distress of fearing the apocalypse, fearing hell.

This was very foreign to me. And I really was like, okay, let me, let me talk to survivors, let me understand, and then, make the sort of, I don't think it's that far a leap, but let's think about how this mindset, writ large and writ over generations, in a movement that has, been steadily gaining in political power, what that does to the body politic at large when it becomes the dominant ethos of the ruling class. And, nothing good, is the answer.

DL: Right! It's just, it's really nice to talk to people who have studied this and who call it child abuse, because when you're raised in this – you know, I'm an evangelical pastor’s kid, me and my two sisters, we were on display and had to be very obedient, right? Or else the whole thing was a sham. And when you're raised in it you're just like this is how everybody raises their kids. And it's only after I had my own kids I was like, oh my god, oh no! What happened to me was super bad.

And at STRONGWILLED, we tried to come up with a term because, you could call them child abuse manuals. You can call them all these things. But we tried to focus in on what were the specific ideologies behind it. So we call it, religious authoritarian parenting methods. And that's where it becomes incredibly powerful. You can get a kid to comply both by using corporal punishment, but also this internal shame and terror and fear, right?

Using these religious stories about hell, about the end times, about your sinfulness, and you caused Jesus to die – all these things. It's like, wow, taken all together it's just such a mess. I'm curious, I'm so sorry to ask you this, but what are your thoughts on what we should call these parenting methods?

Beause we just came up with the term religious authoritarian because these authors always just call it authoritative parenting, but these authors lied about everything. And so I don't want to call it that. There's something much more sort of sinister at work here than just being authoritative.

Talia: Yeah, I mean, listen, there's lots of ways to abuse kids that don't involve God at all. And I think you're right in your inclination to say that child abuse as a religious doctrine deserves its own unique form of address. The most common thread I found – one of the methodologies I used was, I'm going to read as many primary source texts as I can, not only just Dobson's oeuvre, but also the subsequent 50 years of child rearing-manuals that have followed him.

And sometimes even exceeded him in brutality. And yeah, most often they call themselves biblical parenting, which, okay… It's interesting to me that they use Proverbs so often because in Jewish culture, like at least the culture I was raised in, Proverbs is like such a minor book. It's such a minor text.

And then, of course, there's so much contempt and disregard of the Old Testament in Christianity, and when Christians want to insult each other they're like, oh, your god is this vengeful Old Testament god, and you're a Pharisee, and, it's like a lot of this embedded antisemitism that comes out as like scorn of the Old Testament. But when it comes to raising your kids, there's this collection of verses about beating kids, and so you found this convenient and you're leaping on with both hands. Fine.

I wouldn't call it biblical parenting just because there's a lot of different kinds of Biblical parenting. None of them are especially good. There's, murder a whole town because they raped your daughter. There’s, begrudgingly accept a ram as a sacrifice instead of your son.

The Bible's full of lots of different kinds of parenting, none of which are particularly relevant or inspiring. But I've wandered a bit afield from your question. I think religious authoritarian parenting is as good a term as any. The more clunky phrasing I often used was, child abuse in the name of God.

And one of the saddest pieces of the puzzle that I saw, first of all you're far from the only person I've talked to who broke the cycle when they had their own kids and were like, I don't want to hit my kid. I don't want to hit my kid. And then slowly, painfully from that come to the realization that what was done to them was wrong.

This sort of visceral recoiling from hurting their own. And then conversely, I've talked to some people who did parent that way. And in essence, what they told me was that this was what everyone in the community was doing, was that they were given multiple copies of James Dobson books, or analogous books, Ted Tripp and maybe the Pearls if you went to a particularly psycho church.

The other part of the religious authoritarian parenting schema is that it also tells the parent, if you do not physically harm your child, you are condemning your child to hell. So that even parents who would not otherwise be inclined to corporal punishment on a personal level are entrapped both socially and then doctrinally into this cycle.

And that is so cruel. But also I think serves a broader point – and this is something that, that came from book I think it's called The Roots of Religious Child Maltreatment, that I read for research – basically, a parent-child bond can be an incredibly powerful one. And one of the things that any authoritarian institution seeks to do is tear down and weaken these interpersonal bonds that can override the broader mandates of the church.

And so the parent-child bond is, of course, weakened and attenuated by continuing physical abuse and other forms of spiritual abuse. So as if like child beating wasn't nefarious enough, the other sort of more like hidden agenda is that if you weaken the bonds between parent and child you force both to cleave more tightly to the church and the community.

DL: Yeah, the way I think of it now is this is what makes evangelicals closer to a totalitarian worldview just because everything about it was used to entrap you into this being your entire identity.

And so with the parenting stuff, yeah, of course there is this pressure. And every parent was like, people could tell in a church if your kids didn't obey you immediately, right? They could just tell if you're a two year old felt free to express themselves. And so you were under this microscope, and I absolutely understand that, but then like, when you do spank your kids, especially if it goes against something within you –

I think some people enjoy hurting children and that's a whole other thing, but there's a lot of people who don't. And so you have to override your natural instinct to do this, to get the community's approval. And once you do that, you're going to work really hard not to have to unpack that decision, right?

Because if you do then you have to say the whole thing's a sham. And that's one of the things you write about in your book. You talk about the grift, right? You talk about how evangelicals are, really susceptible to grifters. And I don't know why I just found that so refreshingly honest and very true in my experience, but again, I'm 40 years old right now and it’s hard to be like, wow, my parents are really susceptible to grifters, and that's just been true their whole life. That really stood out to me.

Talia: I mean, look at Creflo Dollar, and the prosperity gospel, and fucking Amway is an evangelical business.

DL: So many MLMs.

Talia: So many MLMs, and that's a Mormon thing, too big time. Utah is like the MLM capital of the US for various reasons. Part of the reason why MLMs are not particularly regulated – or pyramid schemes – is because the senator of Utah, Orrin Hatch, was like let's carve out some exemptions, and then Amway got a lot of power, but whatever.

That's a whole other thing. Sorry, there's just so much, I could just talk for fucking ever, so you've gotta help me rein in my babble. But I think, how do I put it? What really struck me, among other – lots of things struck me. It was like a worldview that was, again, both familiar and then totally alien in these very wild ways to me.

But first of all, one thing that I wanted to do from the very first was to take these ideologies seriously. Which is not to say that I'm like, first of all, I'm not a theologian, I didn't approach this book as a theologian.

DL: Thank goodness.

Talia: So many of the arguments that you see, and sometimes the sort of defensiveness from liberal Christians is like, they [The Christian Right] are not real Christians.

And this is a very common argument, or defense, or whatever it is, that they obviously ignore Jesus real teachings, and they're not Christians. I'm like first of all, you're talking to a non-Christian. That's not relevant to me at all.

And second of all, I'm like okay, but looking at what they write, and looking at what they say, including in internal communications, non-public-facing books and newsletters designed by and for evangelicals – no, the desire to please God is absolutely at the core of this.

There are just many different kinds of Christianity. And when you look at the past couple millennia of Christian history, and then you try to tell me, a member of a group that's consistently been targeted by some of the excesses of Christian cruelty, that Christian equals good at all times, and no true Christian could behave badly, I'm like, okay, I don't think this is a useful argument and maybe you should gather in some of the people who you feel are perverting your faith instead of defending Christianity to people who are being harmed by it.

But anyway, that's a separate—

DL: No. We gotta camp out this for just one second, just in case there are people listening that this is like their knee jerk like defense is to say those people aren't real Christians. I just thank you, Talia, for saying that super sucks to be told that, as a Jewish person. I was in progressive Christianity for a while as a way out and they have a huge problem with Christian supremacy in progressive Christianity, and the second you threaten this idea that Christianity is a place where you learn morals and values about how to be a good ethical person – and usually that's couched in, we just follow Jesus – as soon as you're like, actually, a lot of people are pretty cool that don't follow Jesus at all, and think he was an apocalyptic preacher and that's it.

They get so upset! And it's because Christian supremacy is still so deeply embedded because that's one of the things we were indoctrinated with so intensely as children. So even that to me is related to this abuse of children, this Christian supremacy that just pops up and it is keeping people from – get your head in the game, people! Why are you trying to save the brand when we have many bigger things to worry about? I'm sorry. I just wanted to make sure we got that message out there. because I think it's important.

Talia: Yeah. And maybe at this point I'm attacking easier targets than the sort of ultimate hard target of people who are like, yeah, okay, my faith is hurting people, I don't give a crap ‘cause they're the wrong type of people anyway.

But I do think it is very, it's remarkably durable and, even maybe especially in people who are very like attached to their vision of themselves as deeply moral people.

DL: Yes. Absolutely.

Talia: That like their morality comes from Christianity and that there's this sort of sense that as truly applied, Christianity can only ever be a source of moral good, and the unwritten converse is that the only true source of morality is Christian belief. And I think a lot of people haven't examined that, a lot of people haven't really looked at it and what it really means. Look, this is a moment that requires very broad coalition building and one of the things that I do really profoundly respect is faith as a mover and driver of people's motivations and lives, something that I think a lot of my cohorts in the journalistic profession have very long overlooked to their cost.

So if people want to bring their progressive faith to this moment, absolutely. And in many respects, this no true Christian stuff is a bit of a losing battle. But I'm kind of like, bring back calling people heretics, or apostates. Go back to having feuds over interpretations, you guys are good at that.

DL: We’ve done it so much.

Talia: Schisming. There's so much schisming and stuff. You're good at that, do it. But don't tell me that no one who isn't Christian can be truly moral, and that no one who is truly Christian can be immoral, because that's not flying.

And you do see it even in people who are like, I'm an atheist now, and oh, I'm not religious anymore, and I'm like, but you were raised in a Christian household, and you were raised to revere Jesus, that is a part of who you are, and you can't just disclaim it, because…hegemony is like being a fish in water, when you're a part of it and so it becomes invisible to you. But the water's all around you.

But yeah, basically, my feeling is stop saying no real Christian can be as cruel and evil as these people are, and Jesus is all nice, and it's about the Sermon on the Mount and instead be like, you guys are apostates and defilers of the faith, and you're misusing Christianity, you're corrupting it, you're perverting it, do all that, but don't put it on me to defend Christianity for you.

DL: Do not put it on Talia, okay? I'm sending out an edict right now.

Talia: Because I’m not going to do it.

DL: Go yell at your parents, okay? That's what we need more of. Maybe this is just my personal thing. I'm just in a phase where I just keep texting my mom, so cool that 81 percent of your church is really into this. That's so very cool. She does not appreciate those texts. But you know, what else do we have to lose at this moment?

Okay. I have a few questions I really want to get to, to ask you if that's okay. If I just keep trucking along? When I was reading your book—

Talia: No, but I do want to say just one last thing. And I think it moves us back to more productive things while also being a good segue.

I think that is also part of the reason why people cling to and perpetuate these beliefs that actively harmed them as kids. Why people are eager to embrace and perpetuate this abusive theology, and I'm not talking about liberal Christians anymore. Because to move away from theology that harmed you deeply physically, spiritually, emotionally, when you were small and helpless makes you have to encounter…makes you have to shift your identity in ways that are deeply painful and uncomfortable. Makes you have to acknowledge yourself as a victim, which really runs counter to certainly like a lot of visions of toxic masculinity.

It makes you confront your parents as people who harmed you. And it can alienate you from a religious community that offers an anchor in identity. And so it is almost always the harder path to step away and to say, I was hurt and this is wrong. It takes a tremendous amount of mental energy to continue to uphold and prize a theology that deeply scarred you.

But I think it is much harder and braver to say, no, the things I was taught were wrong. The people who taught me were cruel to me. And I was harmed when I was helpless. And that was wrong. Like that takes breathtaking amounts of courage and so much pain at that severance. And so what you're left with is people who are justifying industrial scale child abuse, and even defending a fascist politic as a sort of form of national discipline, which you see over and over in conservative rhetoric, because to do otherwise would be fundamentally destabilizing to their identity.

If you were cruel to one beaten child, you have to acknowledge the beaten child that's inside of you. And to do that would be emasculating and destabilizing. And so I think that's part of the reason people are so viciously defensive of this new politic, because they are also defending their own identities in the process.

DL: And that's why, to me, this is the most underreported story in America. Now this is my shit, right? This is what I talk about. And that's about how Dr. Dobson was a child psychologist who knew how to get your hooks into people, both when they're vulnerable parents, just stressed out, wondering what to do, and, kids as early as what one year old, he says, you should start spanking them to, to entrap people in these, totally vulnerable states of life.

And then Dobson goes on to become what I would say is the most prolific right wing political lobbyists that the United States has ever seen. I know that you read some of his parenting books, but the sheer amount of legislation that he has helped enact, and the sheer amount of organizations that he's either started or helped start. It's so overwhelming to me and they're intimately connected, the parenting and the political.

And I'm just so happy that you talked about that in your book. Cause I hadn't seen anyone do that beyond just a few of us here on the fringes, chatting about it. And you even talk about things like Alice Miller's book, For Your Own Good, the similarities between how parenting experts and religion, Christian religion, helped create this atmosphere where people are just like, totally enthralled by this punishing father figure.

And I don't know if you want to chat about that, but I loved reading Alice Miller's book, but it was also just so devastating to read.

Talia: Yeah it's also just so dark right now to see all this stuff that I was like okay, I think this is true, so I'm gonna write it, and I think it's important, so I'm gonna write it, and then it becomes more important than you ever wanted it to be.

Like, I wasn't like rooting for a fascist takeover. But yeah, I think what, yeah, what we're seeing, like what Miller, I think one of her most compelling statements among many, it's a very remarkable book, and she's writing from a Holocaust survivor's perspective about German pedagogy, but what was remarkable to me is that the examples of German pedagogy that she cited basically could have come from any of these Christian parenting manuals that I was reading. The ethos of, beat him till he cries out, and obedience, authority, and what she says is that people raised this way make the best torturers.

DL: Oh, yeah.

Talia: Yeah, because you have to identify with the aggressor. You have to hate the helpless person who is being harmed. Otherwise, what was done to you is unjustifiable and who you are has been shaped by something deeply perverse.

And for most people that's not something that can be countenanced. Most people want to stay close to hearth and home. And I left a fundamentalist community, right? I left a religious community that shaped my family. It still shapes the lives of my nuclear family members. It is an ideology they have continued to adhere to.

I left because I could not abide being told over and over again and in so many different ways that as a woman I was inherently worth less, that I was a second class citizen in my own faith. But I am acutely aware, and more so now even, as I've moved beyond the initial stages of rebellion and separation or whatever into a more coherent identity – I gave up a lot in that process.

I gave up identity. I gave up community that in a very atomized American culture, religious community can be so anchoring. They're the people that bring you food when you're sick. They're the people that help with a birth or a death. I gave up all of this community, all of this fellowship, all of this sense of who I was as part of something bigger.

I don't regret that decision, because I think the fundamental injustice on which it was all premised remains intolerable to me. But there are many losses sustained in a severing of both your identity as you construed it for all of your early life.

And also in terms of loss of both a stable identity and a community that would continually reinforce it. So I think it is not morally acceptable, but it is understandable, deeply understandable why people would stay in these cruel and unjust communities. Because it is much easier to do that than to leave. I think you can extend empathy and recognize the human motivations behind people's actions without condoning them.

DL: I totally agree, and it's honestly heartbreaking for me as someone who was like this and has moved out, right? People just cannot face the reality of what happened to them because that would make their entire identity crumble. Because their identity from birth has been tied to religion, politics, family care, community care, and it's just so sad.

Our project is called STRONGWILLED, based off of Dr. Dobson's second book, The Strong-Willed Child. And it's so fascinating that he had to build into his authoritarian religious framework the reality that some kids don't comply, no matter how many times you hit them, they are like, no.

And there's kids who leave the community, there's a lot of kids who stay but there's kids who leave. And so that's why we really latched onto this strong-willed term and reclaiming it. Because we all have a strong-willed child inside of us that we can get in touch with. And I think that's going to be helpful moving forward with this administration, is getting in touch with the strong-willed child that – our will was supposed to be broken, but it never fully got broken.

And I think that's the people who find their way out. They're able to access that strong-willed part of them. Yeah, it's hard work, and you validate it so beautifully in your work, so it, thank you. It makes sense if you have some personal connection to that. Oh, this is why you're so good at it.

Talia: Yeah, and, not necessarily for public consumption, but let's say there are other reasons why the physical abuse of children is something that is a cause that is dear to my heart, and that's what I'll say, in a politic fashion. But I think, also, how to put it….I'm trying to phrase this well, because I really respect your audience…

One of the more heartbreaking things that was said to me in one of the many heartbreaking conversations I had with survivors of child abuse was, one woman who'd had a wending path away, she said, I don't know what about me was so strong-willed, but I fucking want it back.

And I think, yeah, that process of reclamation of the strong willed, but also how perverse, how fucking perverse it is. To see a child who is strong-willed in that they are particularly curious, or particularly thoughtful, or particularly questioning, and curious, and, or even has a tantrum, or whatever, and be like, we've gotta obliterate that.

And it's all about the obliteration of the child's will. And I keep having to clarify to people who are not familiar with this style of parenting that the strong-willed child is a bad thing.

DL: It's the scapegoat of this system.

Talia: But if you are not inculcated in this sort of parenting, the strong-willed child — just the phrase it doesn't come off as derogatory. It doesn't come off as derogatory unless you're trained to see it as bad that a child has a will. And so you have to explain that the strong-willed child is a bad thing. And people are surprised, as they should be, because what the fuck? A child that has a will in the world that's a beautiful thing, and why is our goal to destroy it, to knock it down, to render their obedience perfect?

It was really shocking to me, on a very core level that so much of it, how so much of all this parenting doctrine was about creating and enforcing this obedience, that obedience was a more laudable quality in a child than curiosity, or kindness, or generosity, or intelligence. That obedience, absolute, unquestioning, first snap of the finger, obedience, was really what you want from your kid more than anything.

And then also at the expense of – it doesn't matter what it's at the expense of. That was shocking to me. It was foreign and shocking. And then the more I delved into it, the more profound the injustice and the cruelty I saw in it.

And I think we are a country that does not pay attention to cruelties done to children.

DL: No, we don't.

Talia: We are a country that more or less views children as the property of their parents, either in a libertarian way or in a religious way. And no one was talking about it, that I saw. People directly affected by it, but no one in the sort of mainstream that wasn't an ex-evangelical was making as much of it as should be made of it, because it's at the absolute heart of this canker.

DL: Yeah, and I think that's because they tied it to Christianity, right? Tied it to a religious faith, therefore, it's somewhat untouchable, right? Especially if that religion is privileged and prioritized, which Christianity is in America, so it's just such a toxic stew and we have such regressive laws, I'm sure you know this, protecting children. And I just think it's so sad, but we're reclaiming the term strong-willed. Many of the kids that Dobson writes about in his book, The Strong-Willed Child read to me as neurodivergent children, which is also interesting and heartbreaking and really sad.

Just the kids that can't immediately comply for a variety of reasons. And, again, I keep being reminded of this current administration and how they're trying to make examples of certain people who are not complying. And it's just the whole, it's just the playbook playing out, on the main stage, which is so fun.

We got to wrap up here cause I want to be respectful of your time, but I have two questions I'll kind of cram into the last one. I often like to ask authors and maybe is an annoying question to you, but if there's an extra chapter or something you would add to your book? Because again, your book came out in October. Trump was elected the next month and then the inauguration happened a few months after.

I'm just curious. Is there anything that's like burning in you that you wish you could add, that you wish you could say? And to go with that same question, I just wondered if there's any person in your book you're just dying to shit talk for a moment, because there's a pretty good likelihood I will know who you're talking about and I can match your energy, if that's what you're wanting right now, to just talk some shit.

Talia: Oh my god, so many people. My book had a legal review and everything and It's legally, I could call Steve Bannon a human yeast infection because he was in jail at the time, or something.

DL: But he's out now!

Talia: But I was like, Ron DeSantis, a man who never met a suit that liked him, and an evangelical who didn't.

There's some snark in there. But I would have had a lot more snark. I would like to officially apologize to my readers that I came up with the term ramen-haired for Sean Feucht after the book came out.

DL: Oh, that's what you would add.

Talia: That's one…that's the shit talk.

I hate him, he's such a piece of shit. But also I grew up with curly hair, it can be hard, it's a challenge, but whatever you are using on your hair, sir, is making it look crispy. By 8th grade, I had learned you do not use that much gel. Gotta use a more natural cream, and also please stop spreading Christofacism as effectively as you did COVID in 2020.

So Sean Feucht big middle finger to that guy. Also his last name means moist in German, which is not what his hair is. It's dry.

DL: It’s crispy. I love this so much. I protested one of his worship concerts in Portland, Oregon. Cause he came here to just shit on Black Lives Matter, during his COVID spreading.

Talia: Oh, he's “Oh, the city is down because it's got people who care about racial justice. And I'm going to march.”

DL: The shit he pulled at that show. He's just a fucking grifter. The funny thing is I posted on my Instagram stories, who wants to come counter protest with me? I was still Christian at the time so I had all these like Bible verses calling out how stupid all these people were. That was the most terrifying experience of my life. The proud boys were surrounding us. People were spitting on us, trying to give us COVID. And my mom, meanwhile, was texting me like, Oh, that's so cool, you want to go worship at the waterfront?

And I was like, Mom, I am here protesting it. And she was so offended and couldn't believe that her child had the gall. Again, this going back to these parenting methods, like she has such a hard time conceptualizing of me as an autonomous individual. It never crossed her mind why I would be there if I wasn't there singing loudly to Jesus at the top of my lungs, I was like, Oh my God, Mom, you love fascism.

Talia: Yes, I can absolutely imagine an analogous situation if I came out and protested certain Jewish leaders at this point in time.

So let's just say I get where you're coming from. That is not what I would add to the book. That was just who would you shit talk more. I do not like that man. I do not like his hair. But what's been interesting to me, because you always hope you've put out something that will help explain the moment, and I do think the book does, to a degree.

DL: I do too. I do too.

Talia: But one thing that has I think, to be fair, taken a lot of political commentators by surprise is the Elon Musk centrality of it, and his DOGE power grab, and I think one thing that I would have liked to have explored, and would make a good sort of analysis of the moment, or future book for someone who is still committed to abyss gazing, which is not me.

DL: Oh, we’re done with the abyss, okay.

Talia: At least for the present, I need a fucking break. It's been a decade of just being like, here's what the worst people in the world are thinking and doing all the time.

But the tech bro, Christian right, the solidity, durability of that alliance and the ways their goals are like marching in tandem. And then in retrospect, like thinking about it of course these are people who believe – Musk himself is a product of apartheid and he firmly believes in a hierarchy with white men on top, just as white evangelicals do.

There's also the obsession with natalism, with having as many children as possible to pass on the right genes, and I think that also is very consonant with the quiverful kind of mentality. But it is interesting and revealing, I think of just how regressive and self-justifying these ideas are that you can arrive at them via secular means or religious but, essentially have the same governing set of obsessions which is to acquire as much children as property as you can, and absolutely destroy queer people and women who defy very rigid forms of the gender binary.

And that is what we're seeing very disparate elements of the Trump coalition come together to create, and it's not good. It's not good. Yeah, so understanding familial authoritarianism in a religious context, I think, is a pretty good place to start when you look around and wonder, How could my countrymen be so cruel? How could they embrace things that are so repugnant and alien to me? And if you understand that this has roots in the deepest parts of childhood, the deepest parts of who they are, I think it becomes, if not justifiable than more explicable.

DL: Yes. I love that. It's not justifiable. Because Alice Miller obviously had a personal obsession with what led Hitler to do what he did and what led his followers to do what they did.

And the answer she came to was the cycles of cruelty against children perpetuate themselves into perpetuity until we stop it. Until we end – we can interrupt cycles of child abuse. And I know that is true because I did not abuse my kids. I fucked up in other ways. And guess what? I'm learning how to feel my feelings, take accountability, self-reflect, repair.

Like, this can be done in one generation!

And that takes the will of all!

In one generation, we could do this shit if we stop hurting kids. Sorry. That's my passion project.

Talia: Oh, no, God please. I'm like, people are like, you don't have kids. Why are you so obsessed with not hurting kids? I'm like well, first of all, I think everyone should be exactly hurting kids. I think that's a pretty reasonable thing to be obsessed with. But also we do not survive if we don't break out of this cycle of cruelty and justification of cruelty. And I think it's wonderful what you're doing and I think that it takes the strongest will of all to say, to look at what you were raised with and to say, no.

DL: Wow. I hope people listening can let that sink into your bones as we're all just busy surviving these patterns and cycles of abuse playing themselves out. Some of us are experiencing this conflict in our families right now, as it's happening on the stage.

Talia, just thanks so much for doing the work you did, for writing your book. You're an outsider to evangelicalism, which I found so incredibly validating, and I think that gives your book just a really necessary tone to it. I'm not sure someone even like myself could write the book you wrote, so I'm just so happy you did that, that you were in the trenches. You read the Dobson shit, you read the Pearls, my hat's off to you. I really hope you are taking care of yourself as best as you can these days, but why don't you just let people know where they can find you and access your work on the internet right now?

Talia: Thank you so much and thanks for having me on and, ex-evangelicals have been so welcoming and really profoundly, like you said, the sense of someone from the outside looking in and being like, that's fucked up, can be validating in ways that other people that went through the same shit saying it somehow isn't, and so I'm grateful to be able to supply that.

The book is Wild Faith the other book is Cultural Warlords, and then I also write a newsletter called The Sword and the Sandwich that's half political writing and half food writing. It's on a medical hiatus right now because my editor is experiencing some health issues, but we'll be back shortly.

And then in the interim I'm working on some longer-term projects, but I'm almost entirely on Blue ky now because I left Twitter and so that's where I'm at. My handle is swordsjew cause I am a Jew who owns a bunch of swords.

DL: Wow. I'm so happy to know you and follow you on BlueSky. This is a big plug for people. Get on BlueSky, follow Talia for sure.

Talia: Okay. Thank you so much and be gentle with yourself, too. Lots of like hot baths and nourishing food. Take care of yourself. Yeah. And all right take care and thank you.

DL: Thank you so much.