On Fire for God

One part Educated, one part rebuttal to Hillbilly Elegy, On Fire for God explores the ways evangelical Christianity has preyed upon its followers while galvanizing them into the political force known today as the Christian right.

Exvangelical journalist Josiah Hesse grew up in the stifling working-class town of Mason City, Iowa, raised in the institutions of fundamentalist Christianity: a toxic mixture of schools, ministries, and religious camps that taught creationism, instilled sexual shame, and foretold horrific tales of the rapture and the ceaseless agony awaiting sinners in the afterlife. In the churches where he worshipped, pastors siphoned their flocks’ wealth while preaching a doctrine of prosperity and humiliating the poor. Meanwhile, as economic struggles grew in the community around him, his fellow believers lambasted organized labor and shunned the social safety net, becoming an army for God against the evils of progressivism. Like many of his peers, Hesse would find himself a high-school dropout, in and out of a series of dead-end jobs. Only upon escaping Iowa in search of something more would he consider the possibility that the world wasn’t going to end and that he was woefully unprepared for a future he’d never believed would arrive.

Written in vivid prose, On Fire for God is both an unflinching memoir of religious trauma and survival and a stirring examination of the emotional, political, and sociological effects of the Christian right. Returning to his hometown in search of answers about his upbringing, his family history, and the political forces at work in the region, Hesse calls into question prevailing theories about the disappearing working class that point to opioids, automation, or globalism as the culprits. His story of awakening and escape exposes how conservative Christian conmen have, over generations, trapped working-class believers in an isolated bubble of racism, xenophobia, and self-imposed martyrdom and stripped communities like his of their wealth and self-esteem, leaving behind a passive, low-wage workforce unable—and unwilling—to demand better. In On Fire for God, Hesse plumbs the depths of his own experience to illuminate, with deep feeling and piercing immediacy, what he describes as the socioeconomic tragedy of the American working class.