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Religious Book Store > Religious books beginning with R
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Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism |
Author: Jason C Bivins
Published: 2008-08-29 |
List price: $27.95
Our price: $22.36
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Customer comments on this selection.
 A gallery of modern American religious horror
Bivins explores a dramatic side of modern American religion, where the emphasis is on winning souls through fear. Rather than just preaching hellfire and Armageddon in church, these Christians engage all the arts of mass media to drive their warnings home across the nation. As Bivins quotes Christian tract cartoonist Jack Chick, "I want to shock people. I want to make them physically sick when they see this".
Bivins points out that the vast majority of conservative Christians in the USA were non-aggressive during the decades of America's world supremacy. But as American dominance waned, many conservatives blamed the forces of sin, and devoted themselves to a victory for God. Bivins details many of their major media efforts such as Christian cartoons, attacks on popular music, "hell house" dramas, and apocalyptic novels. He finds the level of vindictive violence, blood, and horror in these productions almost stupifying. Instead of offending the religious authorities of his day by daring to forgive sinners, Jesus as portrayed in these productions is bound to execute vengeance for sin. As Jesus says in the Left Behind novel Glorious Appearing, "I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that is justice, and that is your sentence".
The book is good in covering the story plots, knock-out lines, and theatrical methods of fear-mongering Christianity over the past four decades. But the intro. chapter is dense social science talk, and Bivins invites readers to skip this part if inclined. At the end he raises some good questions about how a popular religion of fear is affecting American society.
--author of "Different Visions of Love"
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