I was there. I knew a lot of the people Keri is writing about, worked with them, lived with some of them, and was part of the rise of the religious right. And I’ve been writing about and saying these things for the last 40 years since I left, especially about how the secular media totally ignored it and underestimated it. They were more comfortable talking about economic policy than religious motivation. And there seemed to be an absolute misunderstanding of the power of the movement. Everyone thought it was too fringe to warrant serious attention.
But it wasn’t.
And now we’re looking at something that was there all along and just wasn’t taken seriously.
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Keri Ladner, PhD, is an expert on fundamentalist politics in America and the radicalization of the conservative movement. She specializes in the religious beliefs of the American right wing, and her work illuminates how those beliefs have become part of American power structures. She is the author of End Time Politics: From the Moral Majority to Qanon (2024) and her publications have been featured in a number of media outlets, including Christian Century, Religion Dispatches, and Good Faith Media.