World War Z, by Max Brooks, the son of Mel Brooks, is “An Oral History of the Zombie War,” recorded after a worldwide zombie uprising is (barely) quashed. It’s a blast—a Studs Terkel—inspired zombie-killing Kamasutra. But the book that really had me losing sleep this month is about a different kind of brainless, life-killing monster: the Evangelical Christian.
Righteous, Lauren Sandler’s investigative report on the Christian Youth Movement, travels from Virginia’s Patrick Henry College, the hard-line Christian school that sends more interns to the White House than any other in the nation, to Seattle’s own antifeminist Mars Hill Church, with its grand and frightening plan to “redirect local politics, public education, and (our) city’s culture.” Ms. Sandler determines that, using some of the 1960s counterculture playbook, Christian groups are building a base of believers—and hyperenthusiastic voters—that could soon transform America into something superstitious and unrecognizable. Joan Didion has nothing to fear from Ms. Sandler’s unimaginative, magazine-writer-y prose, but it gets the job done. To a rational mind, it reads like bad Pod People sci-fi, but Righteous is a warning call, alerting America to an apocalyptic army that has already declared war against us. The horror is palpable.