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Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán addresses cheering supporters during an election night rally in Budapest, Hungary, on April 3.

This makes the echoes between DeSantis’s agenda and Orbán’s especially notable — with the “Don’t Say Gay” law, and the ensuing fight with Disney, being the most glaring examples.

Orbán’s political model has frequently employed a demagogic two-step: stand up a feared or marginalized group as an enemy, then use the supposed need to combat this group’s influence to justify punitive policies that also happen to expand his regime’s power. Targets have included Muslim immigrants, Jewish financier George Soros, and most recently LGBTQ Hungarians. Hungary’s version of the “Don’t Say Gay” law — which the government labeled an anti-pedophilia bill — expanded both government control over curricula and its powers to regulate programming on Hungary’s airwaves.

You see a similar logic in DeSantis’s Florida. Alleging that classroom education on LGBTQ topics somehow threatens children, the governor and his allies pushed through a vague and broadly worded bill that empowers both the state and private citizens to go after schools that teach about LGBTQ identity. A moral panic about alleged LGBTQ “grooming” serves to justify the imposition of ideological controls on public education — and the speech rights of progressive and LGBTQ teachers. (Relatedly, both Orbán and DeSantis have taken aim at curricula and textbooks used in K-12 schools on expressly political-cultural grounds.)

Predictably, the Florida bill provoked a backlash from corporate America — which DeSantis used as a justification to engage in even more Orbán-like behavior.

After Disney put out a statement criticizing the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, DeSantis moved to strip the corporation of its special tax status in a 40-square- mile area around Disney World. In this area, called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, Florida allows the mega- corporation to essentially function as a local government, giving it the power to, for example, collect taxes (from itself) and build roads. These privileges, first granted by the state in 1967, are hugely beneficial for the company — and, on Friday, DeSantis signed a bill revoking them.

In doing so, he was very explicit about his reasoning: This move was direct punishment for Disney’s stance on the “Don’t Say Gay” law. In a fundraising email, DeSantis wrote that “Disney and other woke corporations won’t get away with peddling their unchecked pressure campaigns any longer.” In an appearance on Newsmax, Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nunez noted that Disney had “changed what they really espouse,” lambasting the company’s “very public agenda to indoctrinate our children.”

This use of regulatory power to punish political opponents is right out of Orbán’s playbook. In 2015, Lajos Simicska — an extremely wealthy Hungarian businessman and longtime Orbán ally — turned on his patron, using a vulgar term to describe the prime minister.

In retaliation, the government cut its advertising in Simicska’s media outlets and shifted contracts away from his construction companies. After Fidesz’s 2018 election, Simicska sold his corporate holdings (mostly to pro- government figures). He moved to an isolated village in western Hungary; his last remaining business interest was an agricultural firm owned by his wife.

DeSantis isn’t the first Republican to follow Orbán here. Trump tried this kind of move a few times, most notably attempting to block AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner because he hated CNN’s coverage of his campaign and administration, according to Jane Mayer’s reporting in the New Yorker. But he failed to follow through, whereas DeSantis actually made good on his threats (at least for now).

Higher education is another area where DeSantis, like Orban, has taken special aim. On April 22, DeSantis signed the “Stop WOKE Act,” a bill that, among other things, expressly regulates what professors are allowed to teach about race and gender in college courses. In a letter to Florida State University, the free speech advocacy group FIRE argued that the bill (also known as HB 7) was so obviously an unconstitutional abridgment of speech that administrators might simply “refuse to enforce” the bill. 

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis poses for a photo after signing HB 7, the “Stop WOKE Act,” at a school in Hialeah Gardens, Florida, on April 22.

“By barring any ‘instruction’ that ‘espouses,’ ‘promotes,’ or ‘advances’ a prohibited concept, HB7 chills vast swaths of academic discussion and inquiry protected by the First Amendment,” FIRE writes. “Florida’s new prohibition will silence discussions on (among other topics) systemic racism, the gender pay gap, affirmative action, [and] reparations for slavery or indigenous peoples.”

Orbán’s assault on higher ed has been even more striking. In 2018, his government issued a decree removing accreditation for Hungarian gender studies degrees, a move that effectively banned Hungarian universities from teaching the subject. Later that year, his government forced Budapest’s Central European University — a widely respected liberal arts college founded by Orbán’s foil, George Soros — to leave the country altogether.

For both men, the focus on academia is unsurprising: Universities are places where cultural liberal views flourish, and a forceful conservative agenda should take the fight to them. Conservatives believe state power can and should be wielded to prevent professors from “indoctrinating” students into a left-wing worldview (which doesn’t actually happen).

On another hot-button culture-war issue, social media, DeSantis has actually outstripped Orbán.

In February 2021, Hungarian Justice Minister Judit Varga proposed a bill to regulate “the Hungarian operations of large tech companies” to counteract what she earlier called their alleged restrictions on “Christian, conservative, right-wing opinions.” While Varga’s bill never passed, a version of it became law in Florida just three months after her proposal. Florida Senate Bill 7072 gave state regulators the power to fine social media companies if state authorities determined they improperly “deplatformed” a political candidate for office. (Shortly after its enactment, a court ruled that the bill violated the First Amendment; oral arguments for Florida’s appeal are set for mid-May.)

Finally, the Hungarian and Florida governments share a penchant for extreme gerrymandering (as, to be fair, do quite a few other Democratic and Republican state governments).

Shortly after its initial victory in 2010, Fidesz created a new set of single- member districts that gave its supporters outsize representation in the country’s parliament. In the 2022 election, Fidesz won 53 percent of the vote nationally and 83 percent of the seats in single-member districts — including a whopping 98 percent of seats in districts outside of Budapest.

During the current redistricting cycle, DeSantis rejected a congressional map drawn by Florida’s Republican legislature, instead insisting on new maps that would give the party a substantially larger leg up in House elections. The statehouse complied, producing new maps that are so biased that, by one estimate, they could swing the national House bias a full point in the GOP’s direction.

Why DeSantis and Orbán have converged

These similarities reflect a certain ideological convergence between the post-Trump Republican Party and Fidesz: a belief in the central importance of cultural war and the need to wage it using state power.

Broadly speaking, both Orbán and DeSantis characterize themselves as standing for ordinary citizens against a corrupt and immoral left-wing cosmopolitan elite. These factions are so powerful, in their telling, that aggressive steps must be taken to defeat their influence and defend traditional values. University professors, the LGBTQ community, “woke” corporations, undocumented immigrants, opposition political parties — these are not merely rivals or constituents in a democratic political system, but threats to a traditional way of life.

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A poster of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declares “America needs a new generation of leaders,” alongside a poster of former President Donald Trump, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, on February 24.

In such an existential struggle, the old norms of tolerance and limited government need to be adjusted, tailored to a world where the left controls the commanding heights of culture. Since the left can’t be beaten in that realm, government must be seized and wielded in service of a right-wing cultural agenda.

These ideas are not exclusive to these two political figures: They are widely shared among far-right thinkers and parties across the Western world. You can find versions of them in factions ranging from Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.

In the United States, Trump was supposed to be the avatar of this far-right thinking — which, in this country, is broadly associated with a loose group of intellectuals and writers called “the New Right.” But it turned out he was too self-absorbed and haphazard to successfully implement a New Right agenda. Trump’s most notable legislative achievement? A tax cut written by old-school, pro-business conservatives.

DeSantis is actually walking the New Right walk. His policy agenda has been described as “competent Trumpism,” but that’s a bit misleading. Trumpism was never a coherent intellectual doctrine, because the person whose name it bore did not have a coherent ideology. What DeSantis is doing is taking far-right ideas and making them into policy reality.

“There are important parallels [between Orbán and DeSantis], although I think they’re less exclusive to Orbán than they are indicative of a broader shift in right-wing parties across the West,” Nate Hochman, a writer at National Review affiliated with the New Right, tells me. “DeSantis and Orbán do share a much starker view of politics than the traditional, laissez-faire, business-friendly Republican approach to politics, which is much more willing to draw sharp lines between political friends and enemies.”

That starker view of politics, and the foregrounding of the culture wars it entails, threatens to further undermine the status and security of marginalized groups. It also serves as a vehicle for maintaining and expanding Orbán’s and DeSantis’s own power and influence — at democracy’s expense.

Democracy in Hungary — and in Florida

Any politics that puts emphasis on punishing political and cultural enemies tends toward illiberal and anti-democratic practices.

In the Hungarian case, this was a feature rather than a bug: Orbán designed his ideological message around his desire to create a “central political forcefield” that would dominate the country. The culture war was more of a means than an end, a legitimating tactic for policies explicitly designed to undermine Hungarian democracy, weaken political rivals, and strengthen Fidesz’s grip on power.

Today, the Hungarian political system is best described as a form of “competitive authoritarianism”: a system where leaders do not ban elections or nakedly stuff ballot boxes, but instead hold contests under profoundly unfair background conditions — pervasive state control of the media, for example. By combining repressive tools with a culture-war message that genuinely resonates in Hungary’s conservative countryside, the government can maintain a near-absolute hammerlock on power without needing to resort to the most obvious forms of electoral cheating.

This model has been proven effective. Orbán has been in power since 2010, and has won three separate reelection bids — in 2014, 2018, and April 2022 — on an increasingly uneven playing field.

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Gov. Ron DeSantis arrives to speak at CPAC in Orlando, Florida, on February 24.

DeSantis is operating in a very different context. His goal is not establishing a permanent DeSantis regime in Florida, but rather improving his status in the national Republican Party in order to launch an eventual presidential bid. Bare-knuckles culture warring in Florida is also constrained by national politics and a legal system his party doesn’t (entirely) control. It is very plausible that some of his signature legislation, like the revocation of Disney’s tax status, will be struck down on constitutional grounds.

But that is cold comfort. The American federal system delegates huge amounts of power to state governments, enough to severely undermine democracy within a state’s boundaries. The United States has a long history of state-level authoritarianism: Jim Crow laws, in addition to being a form of racial apartheid, were also designed to guarantee indefinite Democratic control over Southern states.

In this political context, any diffusion of Hungarian-style culture-war authoritarianism to the state governments is extremely disturbing — potentially accelerating a decade- plus process of democratic decline in Republican-governed states. If DeSantis is in fact creating a blueprint for American Orbánism that Republicans across the country choose to follow, the implications for American democracy could well be disastrous.

Peretti wasn’t creating the concept of spiritual warfare. The concept of angels and demons battling among us has been around for centuries; the Christian idea of humans helping them comes to us from Ephesians. In the 1980s, such rhetoric percolated on talk radio, in contemporary Christian music, and in churches, all at odds with modern mainstream culture. But his novels, with their thorough version of an embattled but entirely righteous Christian culture, are an early articulation of what has become the reigning modern evangelical conspiracy theory. A recent survey revealed that a large number of right-wing Republicans — and 27 percent of white evangelicals — believe the central conceit of QAnon, the false conspiracy theory that Donald Trump is fighting high- powered Democrats and other powerful liberals who are engaged in sexually abusing, kidnapping, and sex trafficking children. The “liberal child-napping sex cult” theme of QAnon, and its recent “groomer” variant, seems to be the only thing literally different from the Peretti novels; everything else positing a high-powered government scheme to control the world and eradicate Christian culture is more or less identical.

As far-right conspiracy theories swerve into the mainstream, more cultural critics have been revisiting Peretti, perhaps hunting for insight into the modern paranoiac evangelical far-right mind. Here at Vox’s culture team, we’ve discussed Peretti’s influence many times over the years. Three of us, like millions of other ’90s evangelical kids, have our own formative experiences of reading Peretti as preteens. Even rereading as adults, Alissa, Emily, and Aja agree that these books are still fun, engaging standouts among the pantheon of pulpy conspiracy theory thrillers. We sit down to discuss our own personal histories with Peretti and how it feels to revisit the series that helped shape the modern ideological divide.

Emily: I read a fair amount of potboiler Christian fiction growing up in the evangelical church, and even as I left fundamentalist Christianity behind, I maintained a vague memory of Peretti’s books being “the good ones.” When I was a tween, I inhaled This Present Darkness and Piercing the Darkness in similar fashion to my friends who were just discovering Stephen King.

And rereading these books in 2022, I am struck by how much tween me’s opinion holds up. Where, say, the Left Behind series is a dull slog, Peretti trained as a screenwriter, and you can really tell. His books move in a way that suggests a big-screen blockbuster. The second Darkness book is quite a bit better than the first, which has some clunky “this is my first novel aimed at adults” stuff in it. There’s a lot of unnecessary detail, as when Peretti spends several paragraphs on how a reporter makes sure she has the right apartment by … finding the door with the right number. But both books are enjoyably trashy in a way Christian fiction rarely allows itself to get.

They are, strictly speaking, not very good as literature, but I would say the same of Michael Crichton (the mainstream writer whose prose Peretti’s most resembles), and I still love Jurassic Park. Both books work as serviceable horror fiction pastiche, with Peretti having a ball writing the slinky, slimy demons, who are constantly backbiting each other. They work even better as paranoid conspiracy thrillers, but it’s in that arena where everything in reality is a plot to take down evangelical Christians and, as such, Peretti’s books end up looking an awful lot like the conspiracy theorizing that dominates religious conservative spaces right now.

Aja: I tend to think of such conspiracies as akin to Christian live-action roleplaying, because that’s what these books turned me into for about a year when I was a kid. It was the peak of Satanic Panic; my church youth director was teaching us how to spot demonic activity and making all us kids watch documentaries like Hell’s Bells, which taught that heavy metal music was satanic. Kids in my school were reading memoirs about satanic ritual abuse and lectures on the seven circles of Hell. This stuff was just in the water; and in the middle of it all, my church was among the thousands passing around a copy of This Present Darkness.

And boy, was I too young to read those books! Because of Frank Peretti, I went around for months envisioning angels and demons fighting in the air all around me. Even after that initial wave of vivid fantasy wore off, the impression the books left me with for years was of an entire adjacent cosmic realm directed by the whims of God and the devil, if I would only believe enough to fall into it.

Rereading them, one thing that stands out most to me is how flimsy the initial logic is that kicks off the whole conspiracy investigation. One villainous pastor is supposed to be suspicious because he’s into things like “saving the whales,” and has the audacity to tell one of our heroes, Marshall, that “every human has the natural capacity for good, for love, for expecting and striving for the best interest of himself and his neighbor.” This gentle humanism is the deceptive liberalism behind which Satan lurks?

The devil’s primary weapon is New Age spirituality — which is also overtly racist, since Peretti frames most of the world’s demonic New Age practices as stemming from Asian mysticism — but the New Age spirituality in the books is utterly banal. This Present Darkness is vividly cinematic, but if it were an actual movie, the sight of villains dramatically doing yoga or sitting around smoking weed while they surf the astral plane hardly seems like it would invoke earth-shaking metaphysical terror.

Clearly, though, decades of evangelical moral panic has shown us that people are leery of all these alternative practices. Peretti gives us a detailed road map for what that moral panic looks like on a granular level: It’s not the cloven-footed devil or the child-abducting clown in a storm drain, but the beautiful (demonic) liberal arts major who speaks to you of ecology, or the mild-mannered preschool teacher who lets your child draw their imaginary (demon) friends. In other words, it’s pretty much everything and anything. No wonder I saw angels and demons everywhere; no wonder that fascination never quite wore off.

Alissa: I was such a voracious reader as a kid (we didn’t really watch TV or movies) that I basically read my way through the church library. And yes, they were exciting! While they had some kind of spiritual application and a highly, strangely moralistic worldview, I could also just tell that they were meant to be fun. They read like movies or comic books.

Plus, they tapped into everything that I already thought was basically true, because it was what people were talking about on Christian radio, from preachers to drive-time hosts kicking it with various evangelical celebrities to future Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow and his mega-popular call-in show. At the time, among a wide swath of evangelicals, it was very much in vogue to have teenagers go through “worldview” study groups; the curriculum we used was primarily driven by video lectures that had been recorded in the 1980s and early 1990s, which meant a lot of them were about the various ways that the “new age” — or “cosmic humanism,” as they liked to call it — was infiltrating our minds in movies, books, college courses, public school curricula, and various toys.

So the plots you both mention in the Darkness books seemed natural and correct to me, and the images they painted were so vivid. I believed every bit of it. I thought for sure that if I listened to rock music, I would discover one day that my mind had been colonized by a demon (in Peretti parlance, probably named “Rock Music” or maybe just “Rebellion”) and would have to be exorcised.

I think what was so appealing is the same thing that’s appealing about any conspiracy thinking: It ascribes meaning and purpose and logic to things that aren’t honestly all that meaningful or purposeful or logical, like random accidents or senseless struggles that ordinary people encounter every day. It made me feel meaningful, like a warrior who could join with other warriors to protect what was good. To be honest, the same sort of thing made the Left Behind books appealing — the main characters even formed a force to fight the Antichrist that they called the “Tribulation Force.” Which is so cool! Especially when you feel kind of helpless and ordinary in your real life.

When I started reading about QAnon’s rise as a belief system, I instantly saw the same sort of thinking at play — that its believers could save the world from a shadowy and hidden cabal of evil. Even if you didn’t ascribe to something quite as fantastical as that, though, there’s a strain of this thinking in all “us versus them” belief systems: that the real truth of what’s going on in the world has only been revealed to the faithful, and their purpose is to fight the other side.

Aja: I completely agree with you, Alissa — there’s something really powerful and individualistic about the feeling you’re part of a spiritual ecosystem. Something that struck me too as I was rereading is how Peretti creates an inherent tension around every new meeting with another human: Are they one of the “initiated” Christians? Do they get it? Can they be trusted? As a way to generate suspense, that’s a classic conspiracy plot trope, but as a way of viewing humans IRL, it feels exhausting.

I feel like the ’90s especially gave rise to this new era of performative self-identification among evangelicals, to the point where anticipating your societal persecution because of your faith was almost faddish; “what will people think when they hear that I’m a Jesus freak?” etc. And now that mentality has resurged and joined with the broadly fundamentalist idea that the world is inherently opposed to Christianity.

If you’re taught to believe the world is a spiritual land mine and everyone who’s not in the church is inherently standing against you, even if they don’t know it, then it surely makes you more likely to expect bad faith, stratagems, and manipulation coming from people you’ve identified as uninitiated. That makes it even harder to break down an “us versus them” divide. On a human-to-human level, how are evangelicals supposed to talk to people they think might be unwitting tools for Satan? For that matter, how is anyone else supposed to talk to them about things like basic human rights, much less anything else?

Emily: There’s a bit of a double bind here, because compared to its height in the 1980s, the white evangelical church has seen a precipitous drop in membership. And if you are already trapped in a cycle of conspiratorial thinking, then learning that more and more people — maybe even people you think of as friends! — are “in on it” can be extremely discombobulating.

The idea that the world is uniquely out to get evangelicals is incorrect; the idea that they are a small and shrinking remnant of believers, whose numbers grow smaller by the day, is more or less right. And since the two ideas feed each other, the latter props up the former too easily.

If you poke at the logic of the book for even a second, it completely falls apart. When the angels are sufficiently prayer-powered, why do they still need to let the forces of darkness come so close to winning the day? If both the angels and demons engage in a little light rule-bending to, say, influence a vote to oust a particularly prayerful minister from his church, why is it fine when the angels do it but unscrupulous when the demons do so? The storytelling answer, of course, is that “the angels won, let’s go home” would be a very short novel. But the books also neatly capture the in-group projection inherent to a lot of evangelical art.

Evangelical theology would argue that it’s okay for angels to cheat and not demons because a thing becomes good if it’s done by the right team, more or less. The answer within evangelicalism to the age-old theological question of “Is a thing good if God does it?” is always, always “yes,” and that answer gets applied to whatever in-groups evangelicals deem worthy. In this worldview, whatever the Republican Party does is always right, for instance, because the Republican Party is on the right side.

The core assumption of Peretti’s work, and most evangelical art, is that this sort of “my side did it, so it’s okay” thinking is the way everybody approaches how they think about the world. In a polarized society, that’s occasionally true, but human beings are a lot more complicated and messy than all of us simply having the same thought patterns about society being a zero-sum game where only one group can win. (Of course, most potboiler fiction exists in a world where people are paper-thin caricatures who exist to advance the plot, and Peretti is working within that tradition.)

Aja: This, again, is another thing that absolutely falls apart if you think about it for even a moment, because Peretti’s worldbuilding only works if all non- Christians and progressive Christians are, by default, incapable of building authentic loving communities and performing real authentic goodness. But of course, humans are quite capable of inherent goodness and love without invoking religion, and the longer the books progress through tours of characters who get divided up by religion without acknowledging their inherent capacity for humanity and goodness, the more these dividing lines stretch thin.

Even less plausible is Peretti’s interpretation of gender relative to faith. In Peretti’s universe, unmarried men and women interact solely through a weird Puritan binary in which they are either always in danger of having sex (bad!), or else yoked together in a student/mentor or BDSM-y servant/master dynamic, with one always leading the other one (usually to Satan!). The only way Christian couples seem to function is by enthusiastically being in the God fandom together. The only way everyone else seems to function is by seeing the opposite sex as either a temptation or a tool. It’s such a strange way of framing relationships.

He also presents masculinity as a sign of godliness. The effeteness of the villain’s church is one of its tells. Marshall thinks God should be bigger and tougher than the God he gets at the bad church. Peretti’s angels are big, brawny warriors. Peretti’s concern is with spiritual warfare, but even in the spiritual realm, war is a distinctly masculine subject.

Emily: In that elevation of masculinity above all else, Peretti’s books accidentally capture the real scandal that was going on inside American evangelicalism at the time and that is now being steadily revealed: a terrible willingness to forgive child abuse and sexual assault if the accused was a powerful man and the accuser was a woman or child.

In both books, male protagonists are accused of either child abuse or rape, and in both books, those accusations are lies concocted by demons to bring down powerful Christian men who are needed in the war against Satan. Within the fiction of the book, the accusations are obviously lies, because we see, for instance, every interaction pastor Hank Busche has with Carmen, the woman accusing him of raping her, and we also see that she’s possessed by many demons.

In reality, however, the patriarchal hierarchy of evangelical churches creates a situation that is rife with opportunities for abuse. When God has ultimate authority and when he has given the people who lead his churches a simulacrum of that ultimate authority, then what they do is, by definition, acceptable. Thus, when these men are accused of heinous crimes, they are either being assailed by Satan’s lies or their victims deserved what happened to them on some level. Peretti plays into that idea in both books, paying lip service to the idea that some pastors might be horrible people (or, in the book’s cosmology, demon-infested people) but never actually depicting that reality.

In talking about the books’ portrayal of power dynamics, we also need to talk about their racism, which is sometimes quite direct. Peretti frames all of his villains as being vaguely Hindu, a choice so forthrightly awful that it becomes kind of darkly comedic. But I’m more interested in the books’ other depictions of race, which are within evangelical Christian spaces. For the most part, Peretti uses the “colorblind casting” approach of lots of popcorn fiction where a character’s race is incidental to their plot function — for instance, in Piercing the Darkness, one of the main characters, Ben Cole, is a Black cop — and at least when it comes to the angels, he’s occasionally egalitarian. Yet all the human characters are assumed to be white unless otherwise noted, and it’s here where the books’ depiction of evangelical racism is most pernicious.

Modern evangelical Christianity often likes to pay lip service to diversity. An evangelical megachurch, especially in an urban area, will crow about the diversity of its membership, but that diversity only exists insofar as it props up the existing hierarchy, which elevates white, straight, cis men.

The Darkness novels use a similar approach to race. Once you’re on the right side, you’re one of the good guys, regardless of your race, but Peretti’s diverse band of angels is still preserving the status quo of white, patriarchal American Christianity. And once you’re on the wrong side, well, then the book will just be forthrightly racist when talking about you.

Alissa: When I reread the books a couple of years ago, the racism was the thing that stuck out most clearly to me, and I’m kind of curious how Peretti would handle it today. (I suspect a little differently, if only because of his publishers?)

In the end, here is the thing — and the reason we even started talking about this in the first place, I think. Other than serving as a manual for spiritual warfare for some Christians — something Peretti actively discouraged, to his credit — his books are more of an encapsulation or embodiment of the culture wars of the time than a driver of them. When you read them, you were hearing echoes of what people were saying on Christian radio, from pulpits, and in Christian bookstores.

And so it’s important to note that there was a lot of evangelical pop culture pushing and reflecting the same ideas at the time and soon afterward. Take, for instance, Audio Adrenaline’s mega-bestselling 1993 album Don’t Censor Me (the one with that huge hit song “Big House” on it). The whole album is about how you can’t make Christians shut up or stop praying in schools — basically, an anti “cancel culture” album, and it came out when I was 10. Or, as you mentioned, Aja, there’s DC Talk’s song “Jesus Freak,” with the chorus “People say I’m strange, does it make me a stranger / That my best friend was born in a manger?”

Or, as a friend recently pointed out on Twitter, there’s a whole Christian nationalist mini-sermon tacked onto the end of the band Sonicflood’s track “I Want to Know You,” a song that has nothing at all to do with America but was played at every single evangelical youth conference and event around the turn of the century. Sonicflood basically invented the “worship” genre (which has more or less taken over Christian music, but that’s another story), and American Christian nationalism now pervades the genre, which translates into what gets played in churches.

Or, as I’ve written previously, an entire cottage industry instantly sprang up in the late 1990s around what turned out to be somewhat apocryphal tales of Christian teens being killed for their faith at Columbine. That spawned a martyrdom fantasy that continues to this day.

You can draw a straight line from these to the uberpopular and, frankly, downright un-Christian God’s Not Dead movies, which are the most political of all evangelical films and posit increasingly hysterical battles between evil ACLU atheists and devout Christians. Peretti’s books are kind of quaint and friendly by contrast.

I could go on and on and on. But the point is this: very little has changed. That fact is why we started talking about this at all. I remember, maybe a dozen years ago, during Obama’s first term, hearing evangelical “thought leaders” of various stripes proposing that the culture wars were over, that we were past all of that now. I was skeptical, and it turns out, rightly. Everything old is new again. I think some of us, having been exposed to the hysterics in the past, instantly recognize it when it resurfaces and know there’s nothing new here. But if we don’t learn from history, we’re doomed to repeat it.

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