The acclaimed author of The Power Worshippers exposes the inner workings of the “engine of unreason” roiling American culture and politics.

Why have so many Americans turned against democracy? In this deeply reported book, Katherine Stewart takes us to conferences of conspiracy-mongers, backroom strategy gatherings, and services at extremist churches, and profiles the people who want to tear it all down. She introduces us to reactionary Catholic activists, atheist billionaires, pseudo-Platonist intellectuals, self-appointed apostles of Jesus, disciples of Ayn Rand, women-hating opponents of “the gynocracy,” pronatalists preoccupied with the dearth of white babies, Covid truthers, militia members masquerading as “concerned moms” and battalions of spirit warriors who appear to be inventing a new style of religion even as they set about attacking democracy at its foundations.

Along the way, she provides a compelling analysis of the authoritarian reaction in the United States. She demonstrates that the movement relies on several distinct constituencies, with very different and often conflicting agendas. Stewart's reporting and comprehensive political analysis helps reframe the conversation about the moral collapse of conservatism in America and points the way forward toward a democratic future.

In 2009, the Good News Club came to the public elementary school where journalist Katherine Stewart sent her children. The Club, which is sponsored by the Child Evangelism Fellowship, bills itself as an after-school program of Bible study. But Stewart soon discovered that the Club's real mission is to convert children to fundamentalist Christianity and encourage them to proselytize to their unchurched peers, all the while promoting the natural but false impression among the children that its activities are endorsed by the school. Astonished to discover that the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed this--and other forms of religious activity in public schools--legal, Stewart set off on an investigative journey to dozens of cities and towns across the nation to document the impact. In this book she demonstrates that there is more religion in America's public schools today than there has been for the past 100 years. The movement driving this agenda is stealthy. It is aggressive. It has our children in its sights. And its ultimate aim is to destroy the system of public education as we know it.