Abram C. Van Engen's "City on a Hill"

Abram C. Van Engen is associate professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is also a Faculty Affiliate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, and reported the following:

How did Ford Madox Ford know?

Page 99 of my book is just a section break. It reads, “Part III: Myths.” That’s it.

Whether this gets at the quality of my prose (concise!), I do not know. But it does open up the book as a whole. My book is a story about myths—a history of how national tales acquire an almost mythic quality in American culture. In particular, I explain how a lost and unknown text (John Winthrop’s 1630 “city on a hill” sermon) became the canonical origin of American literature, history, and politics in the twentieth century. That part of the story is centered on Perry Miller, Sacvan Bercovitch, and Ronald Reagan. But more broadly, I tell the tale of the Pilgrims themselves and how they journeyed through American cultural memory to shape conceptions of American exceptionalism from the seventeenth century to the present day.

Part III focuses on the early republic. With widespread divisions marking the early states, it was not clear how a new nation could bring such varied people together. Multiple efforts began to construct a national culture. Political leaders launched Fourth of July rites and rituals from state to state. Maps tried to visually ingrain the idea of one nation for all people. Then, in the 1820s, historical narratives suddenly tried to tie the nation together through a shared sense of the past. Bicentennial celebrations of Pilgrim Landing in 1820 marked this turn toward history, and as more and more schools started required the teaching of history, more and more textbooks flowed from writers and printers in New England. In the process, the Pilgrims became the new origin point of the nation, the beginning that could give the United States a clear identity and purpose.

In many ways, the Pilgrims were always an odd beginning. They were not the first people in America. They were not the first colonists. They were not the first English. They were not the first permanent settlement of any kind. In a hundred different ways, they were never the “first.” But in self-consciously presenting them as an origin point, early historians crafted a national tale of liberty that ignored whole swaths of the American population—a tale of freedom that still bolsters American exceptionalism today. “Myths” gets at this central idea throughout my book. In a story running from 1630 to the present day, I uncover and examine the different meanings of America that emerge from rediscoveries, reinventions, and reinterpretations of its past.

Learn more about City on a Hill at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael L. Peterson's "C. S. Lewis and the Christian Worldview"

Michael L. Peterson is Professor of Philosophy at Asbury Theological Seminary. His books include Science, Evolution, and Religion, God and Evil, and With All Your Mind. He is managing editor of the scholarly journal Faith and Philosophy.

Peterson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, C. S. Lewis and the Christian Worldview, and reported the following:

If you open C. S. Lewis and the Christian Worldview to page 99, you will find yourself squarely in a discussion of the heart of the Christian view of reality. Most centrally, historical orthodox Christianity asserts that God, who is intrinsically personal and relational, willed that there would be finite human persons to be in relationship with him. In light of this, page 99 addresses the problem of the rational free creature’s essential choice—indeed its central struggle—regarding whether or not to enter relationship with God. Beginning the page is a quote from Lewis’s The Problem of Pain assessing the primeval human reaction to the choice:

They wanted, as we say, to “call their souls their own.” But that means to live a lie, for our souls are not, in fact, our own. They wanted some corner in the universe of which they could say to God, “This is our business, not yours.” But there is no such corner.... This act of self-will on the part of the creature, which constitutes an utter falseness to its true creaturely position, is the only sin that can be conceived as the Fall.

The human “fall” caused relational damage, such that we are no longer in right relation to God, others, or ourselves.

All of this means that human persons living apart from relation to God are not their “true selves,” not in proper contact with God, their Ultimate Source. Yet the human purpose or telos is life in God—and living into our true purpose is authentic human happiness and flourishing. The Christian drama, then, which plays out Christian doctrine in the actual world, regards the gracious activity of God to repair the relational damage, the relational breach, caused by wayward human choice.

Page 99 is important as a kind of hinge of the book. It presents what Lewis calls the essential problem of human life, a major theme in his fantasy, fiction, and philosophical writings. As hinge, it follows prior chapters discussing Lewis’s twenty-year long intellectual and existential journey to God—from atheistic materialist to philosophical idealist to basic theist to Christian. The page is prelude to chapters interacting with Lewis’s explanations of central Christian doctrines and their implications for important philosophical problems.

Before page 99, we find treatments of Lewis’s reasons why he came to believe in the Christian God—his arguments from joy, reason, and morality as well as his deep personal longing for meaning and fulfillment. Yet, despite rational and personal elements that were drawing Lewis to God, he felt the same understandable human hesitation, and almost fear, of surrendering to God. Lewis had “wanted to call his soul his own” and had “wanted not to be interfered with.” After his conversion, he began to flourish and became the most influential Christian author in the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century.

Following page 99 are chapters discussing Lewis’s elucidation of central Christian doctrines whose implications are explored through the remaining chapters. Lewis is eloquent on the doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity—explaining that Christ the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, became bonded forever with a historical human being, Jesus of first-century Nazareth, in order to show how close relationally he wants to be with us. The book evaluates Lewis’s defense of Jesus’s claims to divinity. Subsequent chapters then trace out implications of Christian ideas for major issues—like the problem of evil and suffering, the impact of science on Christian belief, the problem of salvation for people outside the faith, and the puzzles involving prayer and providence.

Learn more about C. S. Lewis and the Christian Worldview at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Whitehead & Samuel L. Perry's "Taking America Back for God"

Andrew L. Whitehead is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Clemson University and Assistant Director of the Association of Religion Data Archives. He is the author of numerous articles on Christian nationalism and religion in the modern world.

Samuel L. Perry is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles and two books, Addicted to Lust and Growing God's Family.

They applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, and reported the following:

Our book Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States seeks to understand, as comprehensively as possible, a particular cultural framework that conflates Christian identity (along with other implied identities) with American civic belonging and participation. More specifically, we want to understand the ideological and demographic sources of this cultural framework, and, perhaps even more importantly, its powerful consequences. We find over and over again that once we know where you stand on various Christian nationalist views―whether you reject them, resist them, accommodate them, or serve as an enthusiastic ambassador of them―we can predict a lot about your views toward a host of issues: Trump, racism, immigration, abortion, gender roles, gay marriage, Muslims, and gun control.

Page 99 gives us a taste of what you’ll see throughout our book. At the top of the page we find most of the last paragraph of a section devoted to Americans’ attitudes toward immigration. We report that Americans who believe being Christian is an essential marker of national belonging are much more likely to resist the idea that immigrants can ever be “truly American.” Rather, anyone who comes to the United States is “indelibly ‘them,’ not ‘us.’” This is a central theme throughout: Christian nationalism―particularly when it is endorsed by white Americans―provides ideological support for xenophobic and racist views. It strengthens the symbolic border walls that ultimately lead to the physical border walls separating “us” from “them.”

The rest of page 99 begins the next section focusing on how Christian nationalism has historically and continues to undergird strong symbolic racial boundaries around national identity. While the payoff of our findings comes on a later page, this section begins with us introducing the historical relationship between Christianity, racism, and national identity. This is something we do throughout Taking America Back for God. Our survey research and interviews are situated in the historical record, helping readers make sense of not only where we are today, but what led us here.

So, on Page 99 readers get a taste of how we examined Christian nationalism in the United States and its relationship with racial boundaries and hierarchies. With an eye on our history, we provide the first sustained examination of Christian nationalism’s causes and consequences within American society. We’re able to show how much of the polarization in the media, around our kitchen tables, and even in our congregations is due to the power of Christian nationalism.

Learn more about Taking America Back for God at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Melissa R. Klapper's "Ballet Class: An American History"

Melissa R. Klapper is Professor of History and Director of Women's and Gender Studies at Rowan University. She is the author of Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920, Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in the United States, 1880-1925, and Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women's Activism,1890-1940, winner of the National Jewish Book Award in Women's Studies.

Klapper applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Ballet Class: An American History, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Ballet Class: An American History is in a chapter about ballet teachers, studios, and the business of ballet. Most of Page 99 is about the role parents historically played in finding ballet teachers and studios for their children and the difficulties faced by those who did not know much about ballet and had trouble recognizing good—or poor—teaching when they saw it.

The Page 99 Test does not work especially well for Ballet Class: An American History. While the discussion of finding quality ballet classes for children remains relevant, it is not really clear from this particular page that the book as a whole is interested in the way ballet class became part of American childhood over the course of the twentieth century. This page also does not draw directly on gender, class, race, and sexuality as analytical themes as the book as a whole does.

The pages right around Page 99 do discuss issues like the preponderance of female ballet teachers in most recreational ballet classes throughout American history, an important point to note given that so many of the most famous ballet choreographers and artistic directors have been men. Since most American children who take ballet class had neither the talent nor the aspiration to become professional dancers, this means that the women who taught recreational classes were the point of contact between most children and ballet. They were role models not only as ballet teachers but also as professionals and entrepreneurs with their own businesses.

Moving further away from Page 99, there are entire chapters in Ballet Class: An American History on race and ballet, boys and ballet, ballet and girl culture, and critiques of ballet class from artistic, medical, and feminist perspectives, among other chapters. There are also more than two dozen illustrations. So while Page 99 is informative—and contains a fun story about an ignorant mother who told a teacher not to bother with any more barre exercises because her daughter already knew how to do them—it is perhaps not the best page to illustrate the full richness of the book.

Learn more about Ballet Class: An American History at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carl Rollyson's "The Last Days of Sylvia Plath"

Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of many biographies, including American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath; Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated. He is also coauthor (with Lisa Paddock) of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated.

Rollyson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new biography, The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, and reported the following:

Page 99 in The Last Days of Sylvia Plath occurs near the middle of my biography and begins by describing a letter that the poet’s therapist wrote to her, asking what kind of help her patient needed: “Am I being consulted as a woman (mother) (witch) (earth goddess) or as a mere psychiatrist?” The very question suggests that Barnhouse was all of these and more to Sylvia Plath, struggling with the demise of her marriage, a shaken confidence in herself, and coping with the burden of single motherhood. Barnhouse had been the only doctor at McLean Hospital who had effectively been able to help Plath recover from a suicide attempt in 1953. Now, ten years later, Barnhouse attempted to minister to Plath’s psychic anguish from afar, since the poet remained in England and unable to return to Barnhouse’s U. S. practice.

I used the word “minister” advisedly, since Barnhouse brought a spiritual dimension to psychiatry that her friend and fellow psychiatrist Robert Coles thought was missing from contemporary therapy. What ailed people, Coles and Barnhouse believed, went beyond some technical definition of a psychological disorder. In fact, after Plath’s death, Barnhouse became an ordained Episcopal priest, and one reason why she had been successful with Plath is that Barnhouse knew that “mere” psychiatry could not heal people. Plath, who had worked in a mental hospital and had read a textbook on abnormal psychology, expressed her own skepticism of psychiatry in her story, “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams.” She needed a therapist who understood the limitations of therapy, and was prepared, because of her own wide ranging experience, to treat a poet. Indeed, Barnhouse wrote poetry which Robert Coles praised as “touching”: “I’m amazed at your control over words and the intricacy of your phrasing,” he wrote Barnhouse.

All this you will learn on page 99, as you realize how limited previous versions of Plath’s life have been, treating her and Barnhouse in isolation, so to speak, and not realizing that both were involved in investigating the way the world itself confined and categorized individuals. Both Plath and Barnhouse wanted to break out of an imprisonment that often led to the institutionalization of brilliant women.

Visit Carl Rollyson's website, blog, and Facebook page.

--Marshal Zeringue

Cassia Roth's "A Miscarriage of Justice"

Cassia Roth is an Assistant Professor of History & Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Georgia. Previously, she was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, and a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar at the Fundação Oswaldo Cruz in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Roth applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil, and reported the following:

Page 99 includes the stories of two women – Maria Campos de Azevedo and Maria Luisa Bessa – both of whom died due to abdominal infections (peritonitis). Azevedo had delivered her infant at home under the care of an unlicensed midwife. Bessa had sought out an illegal abortion, and the unlicensed provider perforated her uterus. The page both highlights the precarious nature of reproductive healthcare in early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro and how the illegality of abortion made it deadly to women.

On the one hand, page 99 centers the embodied experiences of Brazilian women – a central methodological and theoretical tenet of the book. In the introduction, I state that the book is a feminist history of reproduction that centers the lives and deaths of Brazilian women in its historical narrative. To write a feminist history of reproduction, we must emphasize women’s experiences, and this page is a good example of how to do that. On the other hand, page 99 is more focused on medical history than legal history. Overall, the book combines both to make its central argument: that political changes after the end of slavery (1888) and the onset of a republican government (1889) forced all women’s reproductive lives, but particularly those of poor women, into regimes of legal and medical institutional regulation.

Nevertheless, my discussion on page 99 of how the police responded to the unlicensed midwives who provided care to Azevedo and Bessa demonstrate the interconnected nature of legal and medical control over women’s reproductive lives. Readers will get a good feel for how the rest of the book reads; that is, the way I use women’s stories to make larger analytical points, but the page gives the impression that this is simply a medical history, which it is not.

Visit Cassia Roth's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel Markey's "China's Western Horizon"

Daniel Markey is a senior research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He also serves as the academic director of the SAIS Global Policy Program. He teaches courses in international politics and policy.

Markey applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, China's Western Horizon: Beijing and the New Geopolitics of Eurasia, and reported the following:

Page 99 of China’s Western Horizon catches the reader at the beginning of a discussion about the nature of politics in Kazakhstan, the world’s ninth-largest country by landmass, whose vast steppes run from China’s western border to the Caspian Sea.

The “Page 99 Test” is not a complete flop, as one core argument of the book is that if we want to think carefully about how China’s growing wealth and power are likely to influence its western neighborhood, we really have to understand the internal politics of those neighbors.

As page 99 explains, Kazakhstan’s politics are defined by patronage networks with deep historical roots. In countries like Kazakhstan, leaders “distribute state resources to their associates and receive political loyalty in return.” Although Soviet rule brought considerable change to Kazakhstan, Moscow ultimately chose to reinforce existing patronage patterns, entrusting the region to local strongmen. And after Kazakhstan’s independence in 1991, its leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, successfully placed himself at the center of these networks rather than building “modern, impersonal institutions of state.”

This point is critical to understanding how Kazakhstan works today, not least because Nazarbayev was born in 1940 and will not live forever. His death could lead to “a messy period of jockeying for political power.” One question the book goes on to consider is whether a post-Nazarbayev period would open the door to greater Chinese political influence. Whereas Nazarbayev has been adept at striking a balance between Russia and China, his successor will almost certainly have a tougher time.

So Page 99 offers a window into one aspect of the book, but it misses a lot as well. In addition to dissecting the domestic politics of Kazakhstan, China’s Western Horizon delves into the wider geopolitics of Central Asia, and especially the shifting balance of influence between traditionally dominant Russia and increasingly powerful China. Beyond that, the book offers a similar assessment in South Asia, with a focus on China’s influence inside Pakistan and its evolving consequences for Pakistan’s hostile relationship with India. Moving westward, it describes China’s deepening ties with both Iran and Saudi Arabia and contemplates how those entanglements are likely to play into the oil-soaked and bloody politics of the Middle East. Finally, page 99 offers not a hint that the book will pull all of these developments together and evaluate their consequences for the United States and its global competition with China, the topic of the book’s final chapter.

That said, a reader would get the general gist of China’s Western Horizon from reading its blurb. Page 99 would complement that with a sense of how the book unpacks the politics of the region, makes sense of considerable complexity and history for readers who may come to the story with little or no prior background, and tells a detailed story that never loses sight of the bigger picture.

Visit Daniel Markey's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Abigail C. Saguy's "Come Out, Come Out, Whoever You Are"

Abigail Saguy is Professor of Sociology and of Gender Studies at UCLA. She has been a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Yale University (2000-2002) and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2008-2009). She is the author of What is Sexual Harassment? From Capitol Hill to the Sorbonne (2003) and What's Wrong with Fat (2013), which received Honorable Mention for the Association for Humanist Sociology's Best Book Award. She has also written scores of scientific journal articles and several op-eds published in leading news outlets.

Saguy applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Come Out, Come Out, Whoever You Are, and reported the following:

If readers were to open my book to page 99, they would fall upon a discussion of the “shitty media men” list, a collection of rumors and allegations of sexual misconduct allegedly perpetrated by men working in magazines and publishing. On page 99, the book discusses how the list’s founder envisioned the spreadsheet as circumventing the challenges of traditional avenues of recourse. It explains that many of the women who used the it were especially vulnerable—young and new to the industry—and for them “the risks of using any of the established means of reporting were especially high and the chance for justice especially slim.” It quotes the founder saying:

“Anonymous, it would protect its users from retaliation: No one could be fired, harassed, or publicly smeared for telling her story when that story was not attached to her name. Open-sourced, it would theoretically be accessible to women who didn’t have the professional or social cachet required for admittance into whisper networks. The spreadsheet did not ask how women responded to men’s inappropriate behavior; it did not ask what you were wearing or whether you’d had anything to drink. Instead, the spreadsheet made a presumption that is still seen as radical: That it is men, not women, who are responsible for men’s sexual misconduct.”

The rest of the page discusses some of the criticisms leveled at the list, including that it was vulnerable to false accusations, and how shocked the creator was to realize how badly the list was needed.

A person opening my book to page 99 would get a sense of some of the controversies related to the politics of outing and how these have played out specifically within the context of the MeToo movement. This would provide a revealing but partial idea of the whole book, which examines the politics of coming out in a variety of contexts including the LGBTQ movement, the fat acceptance movement, the undocumented immigrant youth movement, the plural-marriage movement among Mormon fundamentalist polygamists, and the MeToo movement. In those cases, people reveal their own identities as members of stigmatized groups in order to challenge others’ negative stereotypes, organize for social change, and be more authentically themselves. In contrast, the shitty media men’s list did not reveal the identities of the victims, only those of the alleged assaulters. As such, it is a form of outing, not coming out—a theme also explored in Chapter 2 on the LGBTQ movement.

While the test does not work perfectly for this book, page 99—and Chapter 6, “Airing Dirty Laundry and Outing Pigs,” in general—is interesting in its own right. I write this on Monday February 24, the day Harvey Weinstein was convicted of rape and sexual assault in New York. Weinstein’s conviction would never have happened without the #MeToo movement. It represents a huge step forward for victims of sexual violence and is testament to the power of coming out and of outing.

Visit Abigail C. Saguy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseba Zulaika's "Hellfire from Paradise Ranch"

Joseba Zulaika received his licentiate in philosophy from the University of Deusto, Spain, in 1975, his M.A. in social anthropology from Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, in 1977 and his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Princeton in 1982. He has taught at the University of the Basque Country, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at the University of Nevada, Reno, since 1990, where he is currently affiliated as a researcher with the Basque Studies program.

Zulaika applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hellfire from Paradise Ranch: On the Front Lines of Drone Warfare, and reported the following:

Page 99 references Robert Friedman's 1995 conclusion that the CIA's involvement in the first attack on the World Trade Center was "far greater" than the general public knew and that by 1985 "the CIA had inadvertently managed to do something that America's enemies have been unable to: give terrorism a foothold in the United States." This was not a cheap conspiracy theory but a well documented piece published by The New Yorker. The page is within a section entitled "The Terror Factory"--the title of Trevor Aaronson's book devoted to the alleged terrorist plots that took place in the U.S. during the 2001-11 decade. Having examined all the high-profile terrorism plots, his conclusion is chilling: in 2011 there were 508 "terrorists" in U.S. prisons, but "of the 508 defendants, 243 had been targeted through an FBI informant, 158 had been caught on an FBI terrorism sting, and 49 had encountered an agent provocateur. With the exception of three cases, most of them were smalltime criminals." Except for three cases, 505 out of 508 "terrorists" had been created by the FBI. As one defense lawyer put it, "They're creating crimes to solve crimes so they can claim a victory in the war on terror." Aaronson's book is not another cheap conspiracy theory but a well documented case by case report. Page 99 completes and extends these findings to the case of the pivotal figure known as the Blind Sheik, the alleged mentor behind the first attack on the WTC, who was condemned to life in prison on the basis of the FBI informer Emad Salem's testimony. The New York Times reported that Salem "began his testimony by admitting that he had lied to just about everybody he ever met" and that his testimony sounded "like sheer fantasy." But this was the "fantasy" that counterterrorism counted on to indict the Blind Sheik and begin a chain of events that, according to experts such as Peter Bergen, led to 9/11. This is again not a cheap conspiracy theory but a proof of the extent to which terrorism has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Page 99 is representative of the book in that it emphasizes the roles played by "fantasy," "playing terrorist," "narrative and discourse," and "self-fulfilling prophecy" in drone warfare. Drone pilots at Creech Air Base near Las Vegas define themselves literally as "hunters" and look at their victims through the phantasy lens of hunting animals. The killings on the ground are "bugsplat." But the problem with the pilot is that he or she watches the victim for hours and days. The pilot becomes a voyeur of his or her own killings. And there is a limit to how much you can watch. One of the former pilots I met in Las Vegas was Brandon Bryant. His problem was that "I got to know them"--the victims he killed--"I saw them having sex with their wives. They were good daddies." One day, Bryant collapsed at work, spitting blood. He was diagnosed with trauma and released. His scoreboard award stated he had killed 1,626 combatants. Bryant had joined the army at 19 out of high school; "I thought I couldn't kill anyone at all." Another former drone operative I met in Las Vegas was Cian Westmoreland. In a talk he gave in Las Vegas he said he had helped kill 359 innocent civilians in 2009--the same year his commander in chief Obama got a Nobel Prize. Westmoreland is also traumatized by his own killings. Both Bryant and Westmoreland had "seen" too much, to the point of losing their sanity. It is when the pilot realizes that the terrorist enemy he/she has vaporized with a Hellfire missile was also a "good daddy," and that the fantasy one is supposed to believe that the victim is a beastly subhuman monster no longer can hold, that the pilot succumbs to trauma. With the collapse of fantasy, the pilot sees himself/herself as a serial killer and the devastation of trauma sets in. The book begins by describing "the real" of the drone pilots life which is nothing but hunting (chapter 1), to then go to "fantasy and the art of drone assassination" (chapter 2), and the self-fulfilling quality of "drone wars returning from the future" (chapter 3). The last two chapters are on "trauma: the killer as voyeur" (chapter 4) and "resistance: a harsh and dreadful love" (chapter 5). The book ends with an Epilogue on "Obama's Troy: kill me a son."

Learn more about Hellfire from Paradise Ranch at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Katherine Stewart's "The Power Worshippers"

Katherine Stewart's most recent publications have appeared in the New York Times opinion pages, New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and the Guardian. She is the author of The Good News Club (2012), an investigative look at public education and religious fundamentalism in America, as well as two comic novels about 21st century parenting.

Stewart applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, and reported the following:

Stylistically, page 99 is perhaps not the peak of The Power Worshippers. My vanity is slightly wounded! After all, I can’t call in page 254, where the prose is so fiery hot that that it burns through the next several pages, or page 108, where the metaphors sing so loudly that you wonder if the neighbors can hear. But that said, page 99 may be more representative of the book overall.

A key point I make throughout The Power Worshippers is that the religious right is not just a “culture war”; it is a political movement. Leaders of the movement know that pastors drive votes. And so they organize pastors into networks that get them all on the same page, politically, and give them the “correct” talking points, along with sophisticated messaging and data tools, to help them turn out votes for the hyperconservative candidates the movement favors. From the perspective of movement leadership, vast numbers of America’s conservative churches have been converted into the loyal cells of a shadow political party. The movement also relies on a mythological history of America’s allegedly conservative Christian founding to promote its aims.

Sure enough, on page 99 of The Power Worshippers, we are thrown into a particular church in California where a pastor who has been recruited into a conservative network of clergy is misquoting Thomas Jefferson to rationalize the union of church and state. It’s kind of an unexpected scene, but it speaks to an aspect of the larger strategy of the movement.

Then, on page 99, we travel from California to Texas where another pastor, who established “church-school partnerships” in dozens of public schools, tells us that the idea of church-state separation is “unbiblical”: “God never intended for there to be such a separation in His world,” he says. Christian nationalists are fundamentally hostile to public education, which they see as a great adversary in the fight for control of people’s minds. They see nonsectarian education, intended to serve a diverse student body, as somehow hostile to their form of religion. And so they seek to insert their initiatives in public schools, which some activists refer to as "mission fields." And sure enough, on page 99, we see a hyperconservative pastor indicating as much.

The Power Worshippers offers a mix of storytelling, political and historical analysis, and investigative reporting, all of which show up on page 99. If you like that, just wait until you get to page 254!

Visit Katherine Stewart's website.

--Marshal Zeringue