What do you think?
Rate this book
On Fire for God: Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right - a Personal History
Hillbilly Elegy meets Educated in this powerful hybrid of memoir and sociopolitical observation that explores the ways evangelical Christianity has preyed upon its followers while galvanizing them into the political force known today as the Christian right.
Written in vivid prose, On Fire For God is a stirring and urgent examination of the far-reaching emotional, political, and sociological effects of the Christian Right. With unflinching honesty, exvaneglical journalist Josiah Hesse shares his personal journey from the stifling working class town of Mason City, Iowa, through the institutions of the Christian a toxic mixture of schools, ministries, and Christian camps that taught creationism, foretold horrific stories of the rapture, instilled sexual shame, and fearmongered followers into believing ceaseless agony was awaiting sinners in the afterlife. At the same time, greedy preachers siphoned his community’s wealth while preaching a doctrine of prosperity and humiliating the poor. Hesse reveals how this brand of Christian conservativism traps working-class believers into an isolated bubble of racism, xenophobia, martyrdom, and self-loathing—turning them into passive, low-wage workers who would never dare to ask for higher wages or utter the word “union.” Like many of his peers, Hesse eventually escaped his hometown a high-school dropout, ultimately finding himself squatting in Denver where, for the first time, he truly considered that perhaps God doesn’t exist, the world wasn’t going to end, and that he was woefully unprepared for a future he never thought would arrive.
While prevailing theories about the disappearing working class point to opioids, automation, or globalism as the culprits, Hesse’s story of awakening and escape exposes how conservative Christian conmen routinely strip communities, such as Hesse’s hometown of Mason City, Iowa, of their wealth, rationality, and self-esteem. His story goes far beyond that often-asked “Why did 81% of evangelical voters—the majority of them poor and working class—support Donald Trump?” Instead, Hesse brings deep feeling and piercing immediacy to what he describes as the socioeconomic tragedy of the American working class.
Written in vivid prose, On Fire For God is a stirring and urgent examination of the far-reaching emotional, political, and sociological effects of the Christian Right. With unflinching honesty, exvaneglical journalist Josiah Hesse shares his personal journey from the stifling working class town of Mason City, Iowa, through the institutions of the Christian a toxic mixture of schools, ministries, and Christian camps that taught creationism, foretold horrific stories of the rapture, instilled sexual shame, and fearmongered followers into believing ceaseless agony was awaiting sinners in the afterlife. At the same time, greedy preachers siphoned his community’s wealth while preaching a doctrine of prosperity and humiliating the poor. Hesse reveals how this brand of Christian conservativism traps working-class believers into an isolated bubble of racism, xenophobia, martyrdom, and self-loathing—turning them into passive, low-wage workers who would never dare to ask for higher wages or utter the word “union.” Like many of his peers, Hesse eventually escaped his hometown a high-school dropout, ultimately finding himself squatting in Denver where, for the first time, he truly considered that perhaps God doesn’t exist, the world wasn’t going to end, and that he was woefully unprepared for a future he never thought would arrive.
While prevailing theories about the disappearing working class point to opioids, automation, or globalism as the culprits, Hesse’s story of awakening and escape exposes how conservative Christian conmen routinely strip communities, such as Hesse’s hometown of Mason City, Iowa, of their wealth, rationality, and self-esteem. His story goes far beyond that often-asked “Why did 81% of evangelical voters—the majority of them poor and working class—support Donald Trump?” Instead, Hesse brings deep feeling and piercing immediacy to what he describes as the socioeconomic tragedy of the American working class.
353 pages, Hardcover
Published January 13, 2026
About the author
Josiah Hesse
6 books59 followersJosiah is a freelance journalist in Denver, Colorado. He writes about politics, marijuana and evangelical culture and theology, and is a regular contributor to the Guardian and Vice. He’s also had bylines in Esquire, Politico, High Times, and The Denver Post, and is the senior editor of the Denver arts and literature magazine Suspect Press.
An Iowa native and leading authority on 90s Christian rock, Josiah released his debut novel Carnality: Dancing On Red Lake in 2015. A psychological horror about growing up in an isolated farming community fueled by pentecostal Christianity and methamphetamine, the book was hailed as “one of the finest novels to come out of Denver’s burgeoning arts scene.”
Josiah just released his second book in the Carnality series, Carnality: Sebastian Phoenix and the Dark Star, which was written in part at Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colorado – the longtime home of Hunter S. Thompson.
An Iowa native and leading authority on 90s Christian rock, Josiah released his debut novel Carnality: Dancing On Red Lake in 2015. A psychological horror about growing up in an isolated farming community fueled by pentecostal Christianity and methamphetamine, the book was hailed as “one of the finest novels to come out of Denver’s burgeoning arts scene.”
Josiah just released his second book in the Carnality series, Carnality: Sebastian Phoenix and the Dark Star, which was written in part at Owl Farm in Woody Creek, Colorado – the longtime home of Hunter S. Thompson.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 84 reviews
January 17, 2026
Growing up without a lot of resources in an unassuming town in the Midwest, Hesse was on fire for God. His parents had fallen into conservative Christianity before he was born, and in it they saw promise—but for Hesse, his church's conservative, fire-and-brimstone beliefs were less a promise than a threat; his faith did not so much bring him peace or stability as it convinced him that he was worthless and never farther than half a step away from an eternity in hell. Home was chaotic. School was...not a refuge. And as an adult, Hesse gradually started to realize that the bill he'd been sold—among other things, the promise that the world would end before he had to worry about the future—was not grounded in reality.
This is a book about religion, to an extent, but it's just as much about childhood lost, and family dysfunction, and power, and the way religion so often isn't actually about religion. As he grew up and left school and started working, Hesse's world started to open up, but...I suppose that gaining good things often comes at the loss of something else. Not an easy course to take.
It makes for a complicated story and a complicated book. In On Fire for God, Hesse is both processing the trauma of his youth and digging into how all this came about—what competing forces were invested in children's souls, invested in keeping children scared, invested in profit and power. It's not a new story. I've read many exvangelical books at this point and expect to read many more. But it's a powerful and timely voice in the chorus of writers and speakers and survivors saying, Enough. No more.
Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.
This is a book about religion, to an extent, but it's just as much about childhood lost, and family dysfunction, and power, and the way religion so often isn't actually about religion. As he grew up and left school and started working, Hesse's world started to open up, but...I suppose that gaining good things often comes at the loss of something else. Not an easy course to take.
It makes for a complicated story and a complicated book. In On Fire for God, Hesse is both processing the trauma of his youth and digging into how all this came about—what competing forces were invested in children's souls, invested in keeping children scared, invested in profit and power. It's not a new story. I've read many exvangelical books at this point and expect to read many more. But it's a powerful and timely voice in the chorus of writers and speakers and survivors saying, Enough. No more.
Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.
December 10, 2025
As someone who grew up in an ambivalently religious household and found a progressive church as an adult, I find books detailing religious trauma shocking. This book is part memoir and part social commentary about the history and dangers of fundamentalism based in the author’s hometown in Iowa. I have now read several books on this theme and it seems so incredible that I had no idea, growing up in the Midwest, that some churches are like this. The Hell Houses, the revivals, speaking in tongues, extreme guilt…all of it. This book is well written with a good mix of personal narrative and journalistic investigation. As a portion of our country’s population moves more towards a more nationalistic and conservative worship, I hope that we see more books that turn an inward look at their own experiences. I receive a digital copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
November 16, 2025
Review of On Fire for God by Josiah Hesse
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group / Pantheon
Josiah Hesse structures On Fire for God as a combination of memoir and social analysis, moving chronologically through his childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood in Mason City, Iowa. The early chapters focus on the theology that shaped his upbringing: rapture prophecy, purity culture, unaccredited Christian schools, and the insular world of evangelical youth camps and church communities. In the middle of the book, Hesse shifts into the economic decline of Iowa after the farm crises of the 1980s, showing how the collapse of family farms reshaped entire towns and intensified the turn toward evangelical identity. The final chapters trace his exit from that world: dropping out of public school, self-educating through libraries, and slowly understanding the political and cultural forces that had shaped him. The book blends personal narrative with regional history, using Hesse’s experiences as a lens for examining the politics and psychology of rural evangelical life.
I found the book’s political angle particularly strong. Hesse shows how constant end-times messaging discouraged long-term thinking, including the idea that formal education mattered. Many of the religious schools he attended weren’t accredited, and when he transferred to public school, he discovered how unprepared he was. That gap — created not by lack of ability but by theology and isolation — is central to the book’s argument about Iowa’s “brain drain.” Young people who hoped for a different future often left, while those who stayed behind were left with fewer options and fewer supportive systems. Hesse’s account makes clear how prophecy culture, economic decline, and political manipulation reinforced one another in ways that shaped entire communities.
Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf / Pantheon for providing an advance copy.
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group / Pantheon
Josiah Hesse structures On Fire for God as a combination of memoir and social analysis, moving chronologically through his childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood in Mason City, Iowa. The early chapters focus on the theology that shaped his upbringing: rapture prophecy, purity culture, unaccredited Christian schools, and the insular world of evangelical youth camps and church communities. In the middle of the book, Hesse shifts into the economic decline of Iowa after the farm crises of the 1980s, showing how the collapse of family farms reshaped entire towns and intensified the turn toward evangelical identity. The final chapters trace his exit from that world: dropping out of public school, self-educating through libraries, and slowly understanding the political and cultural forces that had shaped him. The book blends personal narrative with regional history, using Hesse’s experiences as a lens for examining the politics and psychology of rural evangelical life.
I found the book’s political angle particularly strong. Hesse shows how constant end-times messaging discouraged long-term thinking, including the idea that formal education mattered. Many of the religious schools he attended weren’t accredited, and when he transferred to public school, he discovered how unprepared he was. That gap — created not by lack of ability but by theology and isolation — is central to the book’s argument about Iowa’s “brain drain.” Young people who hoped for a different future often left, while those who stayed behind were left with fewer options and fewer supportive systems. Hesse’s account makes clear how prophecy culture, economic decline, and political manipulation reinforced one another in ways that shaped entire communities.
Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf / Pantheon for providing an advance copy.
May 7, 2026
The first time “On Fire for God” wants to prove its thesis, it doesn’t do it with data. It does it with smell.
A basement door opens. The air turns musty, wet, alive with old thunderstorm rot. A childhood soundtrack rises – a Christian pop song looping through cracked speakers – and then, in the stairwell’s dark, two red eyes float like a cruel practical joke the nervous system plays on itself. The voice that follows doesn’t even bother to come from the room. It comes from inside the skull, where the book insists its true action has always been: the afterlife of fear.
Josiah Hesse’s subtitle is almost comically capacious – “Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right – a Personal History” – but the book’s real confidence is that these categories aren’t separate topics so much as a single ecosystem. Fear manufactures shame. Shame makes bodies governable. Governable bodies make for pliable workers. Pliable workers become a voting bloc. That is the book’s loop, its chain of custody, its story about how private terror can be converted into public power.
It’s also, as the jacket copy bluntly advertises, a hybrid of memoir and sociopolitical observation, pitched in the lineage of “Hillbilly Elegy” and “Educated.” The comps are shrewd: like J.D. Vance, Hesse writes from inside a working-class milieu that has been narrated to death by outsiders; like Tara Westover, he’s attentive to the way an ideology can feel less like an opinion than like the walls of a house. But “On Fire for God” is pricklier than those comparisons suggest – more essayistic, more pop-culture-literate, more willing to implicate its own narrator in the machinery it critiques.
The book opens not in the past but in an argument with the present: Hesse back in Iowa in 2023, spending days in a public library’s archives, wearing a jeweler’s magnifying headband as he reads yellowed clippings, chasing the genealogy of the Christian right through local history. This framing device matters. It means “On Fire for God” doesn’t ask the reader to treat his childhood as a sealed memoir capsule – trauma in amber – but as an investigation with a civic purpose. The town becomes an archive of American rehearsal: the same moral panics, the same appeals to “family values,” the same promise that someone, somewhere, is polluting the children.
One of the book’s most unsettling early moves is to route that story through Midwestern pageantry and then puncture it with a scene from the 1920s: a parade of robed Ku Klux Klan members marching with civic leaders, followed by community entertainments that turn extremism into something neighborly. Hesse’s point is not merely that racism existed “back then,” but that white Protestant power has always been skilled at packaging itself as wholesome entertainment, civic pride, and moral hygiene. Conservatism, in his Buckley-inflected formulation, is the instinct to stand athwart history, yelling “Stop.” The book’s grimmer refinement is that “Stop” rarely sounds like “Stop.” It sounds like a band, a carnival, a sermon, a concerned parent.
Hesse is at his best when he lets the historical material coexist with the body-level reality that made it persuasive. The character who embodies this is Caldonia, the voice in his head – not a cute inner-critic metaphor but a full-on demonic dramaturgy, an avatar of religious trauma that speaks in second-person damnation. At one moment, Hesse is an adult atheist riding his bike through town; in the next, he’s five years old again, listening to his father explain how the family may soon have to flee into the wilderness to avoid the armies of the Antichrist. Refuse the “Mark,” suffer torture; accept it, burn forever. Caldonia hisses: you’ll never escape; you don’t deserve to.
This is one of the book’s riskiest choices, stylistically. Personifying the psyche can turn solemn quickly; it can feel like a device announcing itself. Hesse largely pulls it off because Caldonia isn’t only a villain. She’s also – in a devastating late reveal – a kind of brutal protector. When he demands, “What do you want?” she answers: “To keep you safe.” That line lands with the sick recognition of anyone who has watched their own coping mechanisms become their prison. The book suggests that fundamentalism didn’t simply terrify children; it taught them to terrify themselves preemptively, to become their own security apparatus.
In the memoir sections, Hesse maps the institutions that trained him: churches that marketed rapture horror like a children’s franchise; schools that taught creationism; purity culture that turned desire into evidence; camps where shame was not an unfortunate byproduct but an explicit technology. The rhetoric can be blunt, but Hesse’s primary interest is not slogans. It is texture: the sound of worship music, the choreography of altar calls, the private rituals of self-punishment a child invents to try to outrun damnation.
The sociological sections widen that personal story into a system: why shame is politically useful; why an apocalyptic worldview makes organizing for better wages feel irrelevant or even sinful; why “union” becomes a dirty word not through economic argument but through spiritual conditioning. Hesse’s most compelling claim is that evangelicalism doesn’t just preach values – it produces an emotional economy. If you can make people feel perpetually unworthy, you can sell them endless remedies: salvation, certainty, purity, an enemy to blame.
Where the book becomes truly contemporary is in its depiction of the post-2016 landscape – not as a sudden rupture but as a culmination. Hesse writes about the emergence of exvangelical communities after Donald Trump’s election, a diaspora of former believers swapping stories about rapture fear, purity-class body hatred, and sleepless nights spent obsessing about “spiritual warfare.” He notes the now-famous evangelical support for Trump, not as a dunk but as a symptom – the kind of outcome you get when a movement has spent decades training people to read the world as siege and to interpret empathy as compromise with evil.
Hesse’s reporting background helps him here, and “On Fire for God” is unusually honest about the psychic cost of turning your own history into your beat. He describes journalism as access – an almost endless catalog of experts – and also as an occupation that requires wading through the swamps of childhood terror all for a day’s wages. It’s a small line with a big moral implication: the book knows that the market incentivizes personal trauma, that “telling your story” can become a kind of monetized self-exposure. Rather than pretending this doesn’t exist, Hesse folds it into his argument about American systems that extract value – from labor, from faith, from pain.
The reporting sections are at their sharpest when Hesse follows money. A standout chapter drops him into a Christian finance conference in Denver where celebrities and entrepreneurs deliver a long day of investment tips and culture-war revivalism. The scene is grotesque precisely because it is cheerful: an arena of smiling believers, weeping with joy, urged to treat wealth as proof of divine favor, urged to convert their anxiety into tithes, tickets, branded courses, maybe a stock God approves of. Hesse’s point isn’t that religious people are gullible. It’s that desperation is profitable – and that prosperity theology is a kind of payday lending for the soul, offering hope at a fee and blaming the customer when the miracle doesn’t arrive.
He is equally astute about “Think of the Children” rhetoric as a cross-generational engine. He moves from earlier American moral panics to contemporary conversations around religious trauma, noting that what many former believers describe resembles complex PTSD: hypervigilance, black-and-white thinking, cognitive restriction. Hesse places himself inside that diagnostic frame while also showing how these dynamics become politics: a populace trained to fear invisible threats is easily mobilized against visible scapegoats.
If the book has a recurring weakness, it’s the one that haunts most hybrid works: sometimes the transitions feel like a lecturer grabbing the mic. Hesse’s intelligence is restless; his reading is wide; his analogies are eager. Now and then, the sociopolitical argument arrives too cleanly, flattening the messier interpersonal realities that memoir can capture. The personal narrative is strongest when it resists simplification – when a father is not just a symbol of the Christian right but also a damaged man trying, late in life, to tell the truth. In those scenes, Hesse manages a rare thing: he writes with fury and still finds room for tenderness.
The late chapters deepen this tension. Hesse wants to indict a system; he also wants to know what, exactly, to do with love for people shaped by that system. His father can be humble, honest, even courageous, and still cling to partisan narratives that leave his son feeling unseen. The book refuses the easy ending where understanding equals reconciliation. Sometimes the cost of speaking honestly is a door closing.
Yet “On Fire for God” is not, finally, a book about winning an argument. It’s a book about learning how to live after your mind has been trained to anticipate apocalypse. The closing movement reaches for a quieter vocabulary than politics: therapy, embodiment, acceptance. Hesse turns to Buddhist-inflected ideas about staying present to suffering without trying to make it go away. This isn’t a conversion narrative; it’s almost the opposite – a recognition that the self cannot be bullied into health by threats of punishment, whether those threats are theological or internal.
Caldonia, the demon-guardian, doesn’t vanish. That, too, feels honest. The book’s most mature claim may be that healing isn’t exorcism. It’s relationship. You learn what the voice is protecting you from, and you decide – with effort, with community, with time – when you can thank it and when you can refuse it.
As an account of the Christian right’s emotional infrastructure, “On Fire for God” is vivid, angry, funny in its darker moments, and unexpectedly compassionate. As literature, it sometimes over-explains, occasionally tightening a screw that would have held better with a lighter touch. But the book’s force is undeniable: it shows how a child’s fear becomes a man’s politics, and how a nation’s politics can still sound, at midnight, like two red eyes at the bottom of the stairs.
My rating: 89 out of 100.
A basement door opens. The air turns musty, wet, alive with old thunderstorm rot. A childhood soundtrack rises – a Christian pop song looping through cracked speakers – and then, in the stairwell’s dark, two red eyes float like a cruel practical joke the nervous system plays on itself. The voice that follows doesn’t even bother to come from the room. It comes from inside the skull, where the book insists its true action has always been: the afterlife of fear.
Josiah Hesse’s subtitle is almost comically capacious – “Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right – a Personal History” – but the book’s real confidence is that these categories aren’t separate topics so much as a single ecosystem. Fear manufactures shame. Shame makes bodies governable. Governable bodies make for pliable workers. Pliable workers become a voting bloc. That is the book’s loop, its chain of custody, its story about how private terror can be converted into public power.
It’s also, as the jacket copy bluntly advertises, a hybrid of memoir and sociopolitical observation, pitched in the lineage of “Hillbilly Elegy” and “Educated.” The comps are shrewd: like J.D. Vance, Hesse writes from inside a working-class milieu that has been narrated to death by outsiders; like Tara Westover, he’s attentive to the way an ideology can feel less like an opinion than like the walls of a house. But “On Fire for God” is pricklier than those comparisons suggest – more essayistic, more pop-culture-literate, more willing to implicate its own narrator in the machinery it critiques.
The book opens not in the past but in an argument with the present: Hesse back in Iowa in 2023, spending days in a public library’s archives, wearing a jeweler’s magnifying headband as he reads yellowed clippings, chasing the genealogy of the Christian right through local history. This framing device matters. It means “On Fire for God” doesn’t ask the reader to treat his childhood as a sealed memoir capsule – trauma in amber – but as an investigation with a civic purpose. The town becomes an archive of American rehearsal: the same moral panics, the same appeals to “family values,” the same promise that someone, somewhere, is polluting the children.
One of the book’s most unsettling early moves is to route that story through Midwestern pageantry and then puncture it with a scene from the 1920s: a parade of robed Ku Klux Klan members marching with civic leaders, followed by community entertainments that turn extremism into something neighborly. Hesse’s point is not merely that racism existed “back then,” but that white Protestant power has always been skilled at packaging itself as wholesome entertainment, civic pride, and moral hygiene. Conservatism, in his Buckley-inflected formulation, is the instinct to stand athwart history, yelling “Stop.” The book’s grimmer refinement is that “Stop” rarely sounds like “Stop.” It sounds like a band, a carnival, a sermon, a concerned parent.
Hesse is at his best when he lets the historical material coexist with the body-level reality that made it persuasive. The character who embodies this is Caldonia, the voice in his head – not a cute inner-critic metaphor but a full-on demonic dramaturgy, an avatar of religious trauma that speaks in second-person damnation. At one moment, Hesse is an adult atheist riding his bike through town; in the next, he’s five years old again, listening to his father explain how the family may soon have to flee into the wilderness to avoid the armies of the Antichrist. Refuse the “Mark,” suffer torture; accept it, burn forever. Caldonia hisses: you’ll never escape; you don’t deserve to.
This is one of the book’s riskiest choices, stylistically. Personifying the psyche can turn solemn quickly; it can feel like a device announcing itself. Hesse largely pulls it off because Caldonia isn’t only a villain. She’s also – in a devastating late reveal – a kind of brutal protector. When he demands, “What do you want?” she answers: “To keep you safe.” That line lands with the sick recognition of anyone who has watched their own coping mechanisms become their prison. The book suggests that fundamentalism didn’t simply terrify children; it taught them to terrify themselves preemptively, to become their own security apparatus.
In the memoir sections, Hesse maps the institutions that trained him: churches that marketed rapture horror like a children’s franchise; schools that taught creationism; purity culture that turned desire into evidence; camps where shame was not an unfortunate byproduct but an explicit technology. The rhetoric can be blunt, but Hesse’s primary interest is not slogans. It is texture: the sound of worship music, the choreography of altar calls, the private rituals of self-punishment a child invents to try to outrun damnation.
The sociological sections widen that personal story into a system: why shame is politically useful; why an apocalyptic worldview makes organizing for better wages feel irrelevant or even sinful; why “union” becomes a dirty word not through economic argument but through spiritual conditioning. Hesse’s most compelling claim is that evangelicalism doesn’t just preach values – it produces an emotional economy. If you can make people feel perpetually unworthy, you can sell them endless remedies: salvation, certainty, purity, an enemy to blame.
Where the book becomes truly contemporary is in its depiction of the post-2016 landscape – not as a sudden rupture but as a culmination. Hesse writes about the emergence of exvangelical communities after Donald Trump’s election, a diaspora of former believers swapping stories about rapture fear, purity-class body hatred, and sleepless nights spent obsessing about “spiritual warfare.” He notes the now-famous evangelical support for Trump, not as a dunk but as a symptom – the kind of outcome you get when a movement has spent decades training people to read the world as siege and to interpret empathy as compromise with evil.
Hesse’s reporting background helps him here, and “On Fire for God” is unusually honest about the psychic cost of turning your own history into your beat. He describes journalism as access – an almost endless catalog of experts – and also as an occupation that requires wading through the swamps of childhood terror all for a day’s wages. It’s a small line with a big moral implication: the book knows that the market incentivizes personal trauma, that “telling your story” can become a kind of monetized self-exposure. Rather than pretending this doesn’t exist, Hesse folds it into his argument about American systems that extract value – from labor, from faith, from pain.
The reporting sections are at their sharpest when Hesse follows money. A standout chapter drops him into a Christian finance conference in Denver where celebrities and entrepreneurs deliver a long day of investment tips and culture-war revivalism. The scene is grotesque precisely because it is cheerful: an arena of smiling believers, weeping with joy, urged to treat wealth as proof of divine favor, urged to convert their anxiety into tithes, tickets, branded courses, maybe a stock God approves of. Hesse’s point isn’t that religious people are gullible. It’s that desperation is profitable – and that prosperity theology is a kind of payday lending for the soul, offering hope at a fee and blaming the customer when the miracle doesn’t arrive.
He is equally astute about “Think of the Children” rhetoric as a cross-generational engine. He moves from earlier American moral panics to contemporary conversations around religious trauma, noting that what many former believers describe resembles complex PTSD: hypervigilance, black-and-white thinking, cognitive restriction. Hesse places himself inside that diagnostic frame while also showing how these dynamics become politics: a populace trained to fear invisible threats is easily mobilized against visible scapegoats.
If the book has a recurring weakness, it’s the one that haunts most hybrid works: sometimes the transitions feel like a lecturer grabbing the mic. Hesse’s intelligence is restless; his reading is wide; his analogies are eager. Now and then, the sociopolitical argument arrives too cleanly, flattening the messier interpersonal realities that memoir can capture. The personal narrative is strongest when it resists simplification – when a father is not just a symbol of the Christian right but also a damaged man trying, late in life, to tell the truth. In those scenes, Hesse manages a rare thing: he writes with fury and still finds room for tenderness.
The late chapters deepen this tension. Hesse wants to indict a system; he also wants to know what, exactly, to do with love for people shaped by that system. His father can be humble, honest, even courageous, and still cling to partisan narratives that leave his son feeling unseen. The book refuses the easy ending where understanding equals reconciliation. Sometimes the cost of speaking honestly is a door closing.
Yet “On Fire for God” is not, finally, a book about winning an argument. It’s a book about learning how to live after your mind has been trained to anticipate apocalypse. The closing movement reaches for a quieter vocabulary than politics: therapy, embodiment, acceptance. Hesse turns to Buddhist-inflected ideas about staying present to suffering without trying to make it go away. This isn’t a conversion narrative; it’s almost the opposite – a recognition that the self cannot be bullied into health by threats of punishment, whether those threats are theological or internal.
Caldonia, the demon-guardian, doesn’t vanish. That, too, feels honest. The book’s most mature claim may be that healing isn’t exorcism. It’s relationship. You learn what the voice is protecting you from, and you decide – with effort, with community, with time – when you can thank it and when you can refuse it.
As an account of the Christian right’s emotional infrastructure, “On Fire for God” is vivid, angry, funny in its darker moments, and unexpectedly compassionate. As literature, it sometimes over-explains, occasionally tightening a screw that would have held better with a lighter touch. But the book’s force is undeniable: it shows how a child’s fear becomes a man’s politics, and how a nation’s politics can still sound, at midnight, like two red eyes at the bottom of the stairs.
My rating: 89 out of 100.
March 14, 2026
I think, like some other readers, I expected this to be more of a socio-political perspective than it ended up being. This book is not really about the making of the Christian right per se so much as it is about Hesse's personal religious trauma, with some broad strokes history as well as a lot of anecdotal and possibly region-specific evidence. There's a bit of a disconnect here between the marketing and the content of the book and I think I would have enjoyed it more if I'd realized the personal would be emphasized more than the history.
January 9, 2026
A pretty traumatic read. I initially read this book because 1) I have an interest in the interaction of US Christianity and the Right and 2) I have really good friends from Clear Lake, Iowa. I've been to Clear Lake, Iowa. I think this book was something different than I wanted. I wanted less of the memoir and more of the "Making of the Christian Right." I think those seeking a exvangelical memoir would probably like this more than someone looking for a microhistory of the Christian Right in Clear Lake, Iowa.
January 20, 2026
I am extremely grateful to the publisher and NetGalley for giving me the privilege of reviewing an e-ARC of this book in exchange for my honest opinions.
I have struggled to write a review for this one because it is a deeply personal and painful memoir that involves a deep dive into religious trauma and abuse.
It is important to note that the author, Josiah Hesse, is a journalist and his writing often takes that approach. The story telling felt a little oddly paced at times but the writing was at it's best when Hesse stuck to the journalistic style. I learned so much while reading and the book is very well-researched. I appreciated the footnotes and attention to detail in supplying necessary evidence to bolster the narrative.
This book is a much an exploration of the birth of the religious right as a memoir and that alone would have made it a fascinating book. There is no question where the author stands politically and he is clear in his (entirely understandable) disdain for the Christian right. Given the abuses he suffered, it is remarkable that he lived to tell the tale at all. I did appreciate that he had a very human approach to the people from his past - many still believers - and refused to make them caricatures or tropes. He spends a lot of time examining how people find their way into religions through a deep need to find meaning or heal trauma but often end up worse off than they were to start.
A solid read for anyone interested in memoirs that focus on religious deconstruction, the history of how Christian nationalism became the backbone of the Republican party and stories of overcoming an abusive childhood. It is a trigger heavy read that must have taken great courage to write. 4 stars.
I have struggled to write a review for this one because it is a deeply personal and painful memoir that involves a deep dive into religious trauma and abuse.
It is important to note that the author, Josiah Hesse, is a journalist and his writing often takes that approach. The story telling felt a little oddly paced at times but the writing was at it's best when Hesse stuck to the journalistic style. I learned so much while reading and the book is very well-researched. I appreciated the footnotes and attention to detail in supplying necessary evidence to bolster the narrative.
This book is a much an exploration of the birth of the religious right as a memoir and that alone would have made it a fascinating book. There is no question where the author stands politically and he is clear in his (entirely understandable) disdain for the Christian right. Given the abuses he suffered, it is remarkable that he lived to tell the tale at all. I did appreciate that he had a very human approach to the people from his past - many still believers - and refused to make them caricatures or tropes. He spends a lot of time examining how people find their way into religions through a deep need to find meaning or heal trauma but often end up worse off than they were to start.
A solid read for anyone interested in memoirs that focus on religious deconstruction, the history of how Christian nationalism became the backbone of the Republican party and stories of overcoming an abusive childhood. It is a trigger heavy read that must have taken great courage to write. 4 stars.
April 4, 2026
Never having read Hillbilly Elegy, I feel like I can confidently say skip that one and read this instead. Josiah Hesse fleshes out how shame and the farming crisis of the 80s pitted rural families against urban (read: “liberal”) city-dwellers, a cliche that still exists today, through the lens of personal experience. We witness a whole culture of people being told that poverty is a moral failing and then watch as they vote away welfare and social safety nets, resources they themselves need, and give all their money to the church to receive God’s blessing instead.
If you’re at all unsure of what went wrong in this country, pick up this book. Turns out it was all Reagan’s fault.
And I’ll give you this chilling quote for free: “In the early days of Nazi recruitment, Hitler never bothered soliciting the decadent intellectuals in Berlin… he went to the countryside where poor, young farmers and laborers felt left behind.”
If you’re at all unsure of what went wrong in this country, pick up this book. Turns out it was all Reagan’s fault.
And I’ll give you this chilling quote for free: “In the early days of Nazi recruitment, Hitler never bothered soliciting the decadent intellectuals in Berlin… he went to the countryside where poor, young farmers and laborers felt left behind.”
March 20, 2026
This is a harrowing tale of a man raised in a cult (I have to call it what it is) that so thoroughly shaped his thoughts he could not sleep - from childhood into adulthood - without having terrifying dreams of banishment to eternal hell. I was especially fascinated by the author's description of the history of evangelical Christianity, his family's absorption into this parallel and closed society, and the genesis of "contemporary Christian music" and other Christian media. I thought his analogy to The Music Man was apt. My only complaint is that the book could have been shortened by editing out some of the repetition.
April 13, 2026
I don't give many books 5 stars, but this is that rare gem that fully deserves them. I was initially intrigued by the idea of a memoir by a queer Midwestern journalist--but the book delivers a lot more.
I confess I like my history, theology and economics in small bites and Hesse is a terrific teacher who educates through story and experience. I learned so much about the Farm Crisis, the Jimmy Carter years, and especially evangelicalism. Not to mention 1970s Christian rock.
Hesse has a very hard life for any number of reasons including family, time, place, and poverty. And being queer doesn't help. But ultimately this is an enormously uplifting personal story and highly informative history.
I confess I like my history, theology and economics in small bites and Hesse is a terrific teacher who educates through story and experience. I learned so much about the Farm Crisis, the Jimmy Carter years, and especially evangelicalism. Not to mention 1970s Christian rock.
Hesse has a very hard life for any number of reasons including family, time, place, and poverty. And being queer doesn't help. But ultimately this is an enormously uplifting personal story and highly informative history.
May 6, 2026
Certainly an interesting book, about a topic in which I have relatively little experience. It was quite engaging, though I found some of the commentary towards the end a little scurrilous.
March 24, 2026
My wife said there'd be triggers for me on every page. While it wasn't a Christian life that I grew up under, I grew up under a military household where my life was consistently being molded toward my becoming the first officer in my family. That didn't happen. I had a parent with alcohol use issues, who went into rehab twice that didn't take. While a third time later did, it was only after I'd left home for good. So...she was right. Again. And I'm grateful for it, and for this book; I'm sure it took a significant amount of pain to face writing it, and to face after writing it.
April 9, 2026
Definitely a fascinating memoir. Hesse, however, admits at the beginning that there are embellishments for story telling purposes and while I appreciate the transparency it blurs the lines between what's real and what isn't.
March 23, 2026
3.5 stars, I picked this up because I love his fiction novels. The mix of memoir and political writing was… interesting. There’s a lot of “facts” and “history” stated but it’s all missing sources. And the intertwining of his personal experiences made it seem very biased. Not saying that I disagreed with the content but I would have stuck to one route or the other. He seemed to keep hitting the same talking points over and over again, I found the memoir portions much more engaging. Now please I’m begging you, release the next carnality novel !!
May 6, 2026
A blend of history and memoir divulging a compact history of evangelicalism and the tumultuous inner life of a true believer. Evangelical-explainer books abounded following the apparently bewildering statistic of 81% of white evangelicals voting for Trump in 2016 (and again in 2020, and once again in 2024), some very good ones of which are Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, and Against: What Does the White Evangelical Want?.
Ex-evangelical memoirs of exiting the church in no small part because of this voting trend like Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church and Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science are also proliferating. Similar to Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free, Hesse marks important milestones of this movement's development over the last 100 years, especially in proximity to his native area of northern Iowa, while illustrating its modern effects in the lives of his family, friends & himself.
A running metaphor throughout this work is the Broadway show "The Music Man," a charming tale about a fraudulent salesman who attempts to swindle rural Iowan townspeople through fearmongering. It's worth reading a summary and watching some clips from this because of how frequently the book alludes to lines and details from the show. Thankfully I had happened to see this in a theatre in the past couple months as I had not ever even heard of it before.
Reading Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 helped prepare me to understand the post-Reconstruction revanchist racial politics undergirding the population of early white fundamentalists. The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic also illuminated the post-WWI humiliation and spite towards modern Weimar urbanites in the rural German Protestant population which was then targeted by Nazi party recruitment. Both of these supported my mental framework of the embattlement and underlying racial politics of evangelicals chronicled in this book.
Hesse notes the nation's "discovery" of evangelicals through the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial as worldly journalists flipped over the rock of the courtroom roof exposing dumb squirming creationist bugs to the laughter of the world. He maps out the "sawdust trail" tent revival circuit in the 1930s-40s showcasing the dubious faith healing and Christian living standards of its travelling preachers. One evangelist in this circuit, Billy Graham, takes center stage in the post-war era as arguably the most pivotal figure in evangelicalism and its ascendant white Christian nationalism.
Hesse demonstrates how the FDR-era social gospel connotation of Jimmy Carter's and Hesse's grandmother's evangelicalism gets swapped for an anti-civil rights & anti-welfare ethic. Graham undermined evangelicals' material analysis by teaching that social issues were due to sin and not capitalism. In Hesse's Iowan locale, this Protestant work ethic combined with disastrous Cold War economic decisions lead to the 1980s farm crisis. Indebted farmers had no one to blame but themselves for bankruptcies resulting in skyrocketing suicides. In the late 1970s, New Right political strategist Paul Weyrich politically mobilized evangelicals by framing their integration-evading private schools as under attack by the state. He further advised evangelical influencers like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell to peddle abortion as a sinful hot button issue. Reagan's infamous anti-worker economic policies kept rural midwestern laborers immiserated & addicted to deal with strenuous working conditions.
The second half or so of the book contains less history and more personal recounting of Hesse's graphic struggles with interiorizing evangelical beliefs. Existential dread terrorized young Josiah over the prospect of being tortured forever in hell or left behind at the rapture to the point of self-mutilation. "I felt envious of aborted babies," he admits, and longed for the bliss of a lobotomized subject in a movie: "He'll probably never be tempted by sin again." Escapades with his childhood friend Thad, even depressing ones such as helping run for a puppy mill operation, come as welcome comic relief compared to Hesse's psychological horror trapped within the distorted funhouse mirror maze of evangelicalism's functional doctrines.
At the very end Hesse steps back and vulnerably reports on the process of interviewing his family and friends which made up the preceding material of the book. While it's painful to listen to, I appreciate his reflections in that they touch on a recurring problem I notice in post-evangelical memoirs and content. Often exvangelicals end up in establishment liberal circles with just enough critical distance to look smugly back at their unenlightened former co-believers, but not so much as to extend the same ire towards their newfound political camp whose politics are as destructive abroad as the previous now-demonized one. Within these reflections he recognizes how his body was trying to keep him safe all along within the torturous matrix of evangelical beliefs, and despite all he's suffered his connection to the people within his former world remains.
Ex-evangelical memoirs of exiting the church in no small part because of this voting trend like Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church and Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science are also proliferating. Similar to Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free, Hesse marks important milestones of this movement's development over the last 100 years, especially in proximity to his native area of northern Iowa, while illustrating its modern effects in the lives of his family, friends & himself.
A running metaphor throughout this work is the Broadway show "The Music Man," a charming tale about a fraudulent salesman who attempts to swindle rural Iowan townspeople through fearmongering. It's worth reading a summary and watching some clips from this because of how frequently the book alludes to lines and details from the show. Thankfully I had happened to see this in a theatre in the past couple months as I had not ever even heard of it before.
Reading Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 helped prepare me to understand the post-Reconstruction revanchist racial politics undergirding the population of early white fundamentalists. The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic also illuminated the post-WWI humiliation and spite towards modern Weimar urbanites in the rural German Protestant population which was then targeted by Nazi party recruitment. Both of these supported my mental framework of the embattlement and underlying racial politics of evangelicals chronicled in this book.
Hesse notes the nation's "discovery" of evangelicals through the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial as worldly journalists flipped over the rock of the courtroom roof exposing dumb squirming creationist bugs to the laughter of the world. He maps out the "sawdust trail" tent revival circuit in the 1930s-40s showcasing the dubious faith healing and Christian living standards of its travelling preachers. One evangelist in this circuit, Billy Graham, takes center stage in the post-war era as arguably the most pivotal figure in evangelicalism and its ascendant white Christian nationalism.
Hesse demonstrates how the FDR-era social gospel connotation of Jimmy Carter's and Hesse's grandmother's evangelicalism gets swapped for an anti-civil rights & anti-welfare ethic. Graham undermined evangelicals' material analysis by teaching that social issues were due to sin and not capitalism. In Hesse's Iowan locale, this Protestant work ethic combined with disastrous Cold War economic decisions lead to the 1980s farm crisis. Indebted farmers had no one to blame but themselves for bankruptcies resulting in skyrocketing suicides. In the late 1970s, New Right political strategist Paul Weyrich politically mobilized evangelicals by framing their integration-evading private schools as under attack by the state. He further advised evangelical influencers like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell to peddle abortion as a sinful hot button issue. Reagan's infamous anti-worker economic policies kept rural midwestern laborers immiserated & addicted to deal with strenuous working conditions.
The second half or so of the book contains less history and more personal recounting of Hesse's graphic struggles with interiorizing evangelical beliefs. Existential dread terrorized young Josiah over the prospect of being tortured forever in hell or left behind at the rapture to the point of self-mutilation. "I felt envious of aborted babies," he admits, and longed for the bliss of a lobotomized subject in a movie: "He'll probably never be tempted by sin again." Escapades with his childhood friend Thad, even depressing ones such as helping run for a puppy mill operation, come as welcome comic relief compared to Hesse's psychological horror trapped within the distorted funhouse mirror maze of evangelicalism's functional doctrines.
At the very end Hesse steps back and vulnerably reports on the process of interviewing his family and friends which made up the preceding material of the book. While it's painful to listen to, I appreciate his reflections in that they touch on a recurring problem I notice in post-evangelical memoirs and content. Often exvangelicals end up in establishment liberal circles with just enough critical distance to look smugly back at their unenlightened former co-believers, but not so much as to extend the same ire towards their newfound political camp whose politics are as destructive abroad as the previous now-demonized one. Within these reflections he recognizes how his body was trying to keep him safe all along within the torturous matrix of evangelical beliefs, and despite all he's suffered his connection to the people within his former world remains.
January 13, 2026
Thanks to NetGalley and Pantheon for the ARC of this title.
I'm absolutely the target audience for this book, but I found myself underwhelmed at the end of it. I think part might be the marketing copy/comparisons here - aiming for the audience of Educated is a very specific type of audience, and while I see where in the Venn diagram this book overlaps with that (and with Hillbilly Elegy, which I have no desire to read), it's a comparison that does disservice to both books.
This feels one final round of editing/restructuring from being at the level it wants to be - there's a lot of disparate "books" happening that could be better braided together, and motifs that repeat a few times too often - it's clear the Caledonia stuff is important to the author and his journey to where he is today, but it just did. not. work. for me as a reader.
There's definitely some nuggets here, particularly what Assemblies of God looks like in the midwest, but I definitely wanted to tap out.
I'm absolutely the target audience for this book, but I found myself underwhelmed at the end of it. I think part might be the marketing copy/comparisons here - aiming for the audience of Educated is a very specific type of audience, and while I see where in the Venn diagram this book overlaps with that (and with Hillbilly Elegy, which I have no desire to read), it's a comparison that does disservice to both books.
This feels one final round of editing/restructuring from being at the level it wants to be - there's a lot of disparate "books" happening that could be better braided together, and motifs that repeat a few times too often - it's clear the Caledonia stuff is important to the author and his journey to where he is today, but it just did. not. work. for me as a reader.
There's definitely some nuggets here, particularly what Assemblies of God looks like in the midwest, but I definitely wanted to tap out.
February 7, 2026
This was extremely readable in that I didn't want to put it down, but I worry a bit about the authenticity of parts of the narrative, both in that some of it may have been exaggerated or made up a la James Frey's A Million Little Pieces and in that way that childhood experiences often loom larger and more sinister in our youthful experience of them than they truly are objectively.
I was raised in a rural Midwestern town which was heavy on churches per capita. I attended a progressive one, but I saw so many of these evangelical components that Hesse experienced from my interactions with friends who did attend the evangelical churches - from the "true love waits" to the WWJD bracelets to the Christian rock.
Reading his own experience alongside a historical reckoning of the decline of rural America and the hypocrises of some of the church's movements and the rise of our Christian nationalist right did make for some compelling reading.
I was raised in a rural Midwestern town which was heavy on churches per capita. I attended a progressive one, but I saw so many of these evangelical components that Hesse experienced from my interactions with friends who did attend the evangelical churches - from the "true love waits" to the WWJD bracelets to the Christian rock.
Reading his own experience alongside a historical reckoning of the decline of rural America and the hypocrises of some of the church's movements and the rise of our Christian nationalist right did make for some compelling reading.
January 24, 2026
This book is as messy as his life. There’s a story there, but the book feels long winded and falls flat. I definitely could have done without the strange voices (listened to audiobook version) of the demon in his head. 2.5 stars
February 13, 2026
Giving up. I think I just needed a more cohesive synopsis of the Christian right.
April 3, 2026
Summary: A memoir of growing up in a troubled family amidst a toxic mix of conservative Christianity, and escaping it.
Josiah Hesse is an accomplished freelance journalist with several books to his credit as well as regular contributions to The Guardian, Esquire, Newsweek, and other publications. He is also part of the growing body of “exvangelicals.” This book combines memoir with a sociological study of the impact of both religion and economic forces on a working class town in Iowa.
Josiah was born in 1982 in Mason City, Iowa, the town that served as inspiration for The Music Man. His father had converted through a Jesus Movement era ministry that combined lots of bible study and a Late Great Planet Earth expectation of Christ’s imminent return. Henry wanted to be ready, but also to enjoy the pleasures of marriage before that. He met Janet, a quiet and studious woman at a Bible study in her home. They married young. When Josiah came along, the marriage was already in trouble. Henry was abusing alcohol and drugs. Janet was probably suffering clinical depression. But ministers encouraged them to “claim victory in Jesus” by making generous donations and serving actively in the church. They hid the troubles behind fake smiles. But Henry’s business was struggling. The home was a mess. Meanwhile, ministry leaders lived in lavish homes.
Josiah was in the middle of it all. That included imbibing toxic teaching, frequent altar calls that only called into question his salvation, and as he grew older, struggles with doubts that couldn’t be voiced and his sexuality. He was taught to be ashamed of his body and its urges. There was also a shadow life of substance abuse and the exploits most teens engage in at some time or another. By then, his parents are divorced. He struggled in school, finally dropping out.
Finally, he escapes to Denver, discovering a talent for writing that he turns into a career. Through counseling, running, and in his case, cannabis, he comes to a healthy acceptance of himself. While not an atheist, he left Christianity and the troubling ideas of the God he grew up with.
To write the memoir, he returns home to interview family and friends. He also studies the history and current economic conditions of a town in which big agriculture and Walmart replaced family farms and local stores. He learns that religious shysters long preceded his generation. And he understands both the religious and economic sources of adherence to the ideas of the Right.
It was hard to read this book. The Jesus Movement played an important role in my spiritual journey. While experiencing some of the emotionalism described in the book, occasionally manipulative, I was blessed with wise mentors of integrity, including within my family. Raised in a home with a love of learning, I discovered that I could love God as well. And I spent a career helping college students connect those two loves in their own lives.
So it was hard to read this book, though good. I knew how different and good the walk of faith could be and grieved that this was not Josiah’s experience. It was also hard because I know of too many other instances of predatory ministry figures who love sex, money, and power more than Jesus. I know of those who played on the latent fears of congregants, rather than inviting them into the “perfect love which casts out fear” and flows out in love to neighbor and stranger alike.
I grieve for a generation that lost its way. The generation of Josiah’s parents. My generation. So many of us really experienced how Jesus changes everything. We envisioned working this out in loving and serving communities, living out the just love of Jesus in society. But Josiah describes ministry leaders who did not feed the sheep but fleeced them. And sadly, what many of the sheep learned was to pursue, not the kingdom of God, but personal prosperity.
Given all this, and all that Hesse experienced, it is striking that he writes, “Though I cannot, at this time embrace Christianity as part of my identity, I can place humble curiosity about it at the center of my being. And hope that one day I can view spirituality beyond the lens of fear and shame, and perhaps connect with something divine.” He also can acknowledge the great treasures Christianity has given the world. It says something about him that he can forgive and realize his connection to his people and their land. As much as I grieve what he experienced (and many others), I’m encouraged with how far he’s come, and long that in his “humble curiosity” he will one day discover a better story.
_______________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.
Josiah Hesse is an accomplished freelance journalist with several books to his credit as well as regular contributions to The Guardian, Esquire, Newsweek, and other publications. He is also part of the growing body of “exvangelicals.” This book combines memoir with a sociological study of the impact of both religion and economic forces on a working class town in Iowa.
Josiah was born in 1982 in Mason City, Iowa, the town that served as inspiration for The Music Man. His father had converted through a Jesus Movement era ministry that combined lots of bible study and a Late Great Planet Earth expectation of Christ’s imminent return. Henry wanted to be ready, but also to enjoy the pleasures of marriage before that. He met Janet, a quiet and studious woman at a Bible study in her home. They married young. When Josiah came along, the marriage was already in trouble. Henry was abusing alcohol and drugs. Janet was probably suffering clinical depression. But ministers encouraged them to “claim victory in Jesus” by making generous donations and serving actively in the church. They hid the troubles behind fake smiles. But Henry’s business was struggling. The home was a mess. Meanwhile, ministry leaders lived in lavish homes.
Josiah was in the middle of it all. That included imbibing toxic teaching, frequent altar calls that only called into question his salvation, and as he grew older, struggles with doubts that couldn’t be voiced and his sexuality. He was taught to be ashamed of his body and its urges. There was also a shadow life of substance abuse and the exploits most teens engage in at some time or another. By then, his parents are divorced. He struggled in school, finally dropping out.
Finally, he escapes to Denver, discovering a talent for writing that he turns into a career. Through counseling, running, and in his case, cannabis, he comes to a healthy acceptance of himself. While not an atheist, he left Christianity and the troubling ideas of the God he grew up with.
To write the memoir, he returns home to interview family and friends. He also studies the history and current economic conditions of a town in which big agriculture and Walmart replaced family farms and local stores. He learns that religious shysters long preceded his generation. And he understands both the religious and economic sources of adherence to the ideas of the Right.
It was hard to read this book. The Jesus Movement played an important role in my spiritual journey. While experiencing some of the emotionalism described in the book, occasionally manipulative, I was blessed with wise mentors of integrity, including within my family. Raised in a home with a love of learning, I discovered that I could love God as well. And I spent a career helping college students connect those two loves in their own lives.
So it was hard to read this book, though good. I knew how different and good the walk of faith could be and grieved that this was not Josiah’s experience. It was also hard because I know of too many other instances of predatory ministry figures who love sex, money, and power more than Jesus. I know of those who played on the latent fears of congregants, rather than inviting them into the “perfect love which casts out fear” and flows out in love to neighbor and stranger alike.
I grieve for a generation that lost its way. The generation of Josiah’s parents. My generation. So many of us really experienced how Jesus changes everything. We envisioned working this out in loving and serving communities, living out the just love of Jesus in society. But Josiah describes ministry leaders who did not feed the sheep but fleeced them. And sadly, what many of the sheep learned was to pursue, not the kingdom of God, but personal prosperity.
Given all this, and all that Hesse experienced, it is striking that he writes, “Though I cannot, at this time embrace Christianity as part of my identity, I can place humble curiosity about it at the center of my being. And hope that one day I can view spirituality beyond the lens of fear and shame, and perhaps connect with something divine.” He also can acknowledge the great treasures Christianity has given the world. It says something about him that he can forgive and realize his connection to his people and their land. As much as I grieve what he experienced (and many others), I’m encouraged with how far he’s come, and long that in his “humble curiosity” he will one day discover a better story.
_______________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.
January 31, 2026
“I mourn the loss of my youth, spent as a political solider awaiting the coming wars of the apocalypse, manipulated by those who taught me to fear science, art, my own body, and anyone who didn’t fit the mold of the white Protestant American.” -Josiah Hesse, On Fire For God
On Fire for God: Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right - a Personal History by Josiah Hesse felt—maybe surprisingly, considering its content—like a breath of fresh air.
On Fire For God is a deep dive into “Midwest Christianity,” the history of the Evangelical right (and its distaste for education), the prosperity gospel, and what conservative Christianity comprised of in the 90s and early 2000s. It is also a thorough examination of Hesse’s own life—the history of his family, his childhood, and how it influenced who he is today.
Hesse emphasizes how exploitative Christianity can be through the phrase “the grift of the Christian Right.” Take, for example, traveling preachers, constantly shelling out false promises and taking from the poor for their own gain. He likens these manipulators to con artist Harold Hill in The Music Man.
Hesse describes in vivid detail the experience of “rapture trauma.” To those who have also experienced it, his examination feels cathartic.
Hesse uncovers how being raised in an environment that centers around nothing but rules and fear of the coming apocalypse can break a child’s spirit. Obsessed with being martyrs, Christians teacher their children that suffering is good, that it makes you good. It is necessary, even noble, to suffer. Self-flagellation becomes ritual, leaving the mind in constant terror.
Hesse has decided that he can’t find solace in Christianity like many progressive Christians can. It’s because the God of the Bible, the God he was raised with, is associated with nothing but fear, terror, and pervasive self-hatred.
So many other exvangelical memoirs or books try to reconcile the religion they were raised with the faith they now hold. They explain to the reader how their new version of Christianity can be different from the kind we were raised with.
But Hesse doesn’t try to convince us.
Hesse acknowledges that the religion of his childhood and any faith he might now hold, any belief in a different kind of God, progressive Christianity, the social gospel, etc., cannot, in fact, be reconciled. It simply doesn’t make sense.
“At the moment, my only associations with Christianity are fear, shame, and poverty. Nothing I’d want to make part of my identity.” he writes.
On Fire for God: Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right - a Personal History by Josiah Hesse felt—maybe surprisingly, considering its content—like a breath of fresh air.
On Fire For God is a deep dive into “Midwest Christianity,” the history of the Evangelical right (and its distaste for education), the prosperity gospel, and what conservative Christianity comprised of in the 90s and early 2000s. It is also a thorough examination of Hesse’s own life—the history of his family, his childhood, and how it influenced who he is today.
Hesse emphasizes how exploitative Christianity can be through the phrase “the grift of the Christian Right.” Take, for example, traveling preachers, constantly shelling out false promises and taking from the poor for their own gain. He likens these manipulators to con artist Harold Hill in The Music Man.
Hesse describes in vivid detail the experience of “rapture trauma.” To those who have also experienced it, his examination feels cathartic.
Hesse uncovers how being raised in an environment that centers around nothing but rules and fear of the coming apocalypse can break a child’s spirit. Obsessed with being martyrs, Christians teacher their children that suffering is good, that it makes you good. It is necessary, even noble, to suffer. Self-flagellation becomes ritual, leaving the mind in constant terror.
Hesse has decided that he can’t find solace in Christianity like many progressive Christians can. It’s because the God of the Bible, the God he was raised with, is associated with nothing but fear, terror, and pervasive self-hatred.
So many other exvangelical memoirs or books try to reconcile the religion they were raised with the faith they now hold. They explain to the reader how their new version of Christianity can be different from the kind we were raised with.
But Hesse doesn’t try to convince us.
Hesse acknowledges that the religion of his childhood and any faith he might now hold, any belief in a different kind of God, progressive Christianity, the social gospel, etc., cannot, in fact, be reconciled. It simply doesn’t make sense.
“At the moment, my only associations with Christianity are fear, shame, and poverty. Nothing I’d want to make part of my identity.” he writes.
April 17, 2026
3.5 stars, but Goodreads won't let me do that.
It appears that I had a similar experience to a lot of readers of this book: I went in expecting more socio-political history and analysis, and instead got a memoir and personal exploration of faith and small-town Midwest culture.
Notable, though, that I am still giving it 3.5. Because even though it isn't what I initially checked the book out for, it was still captivating and harrowing in all the ways a memoir like this should be. There was a lot of great reflection in here, and Hesse did a good job of acknowledging when his own biases, emotions, and experiences were cloudy his ability to report on this sensitive issue.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of actual analysis was left on the cutting room floor. According to Hesse, he spent 2 weeks in his hometown to collect interviews of family and friends about their experiences over the last several decades. Pretty much none of that material made it into this. To me, that was definitely the smarter call, given what this book shaped out to be, but I am still so deeply curious about what perspectives his community provided.
There was some reporting on historical context throughout, which I did like, but I think the memoir could have stood up on it's own merits without them. Though I am still eagerly looking for more scholarly works on the intersection of Christian fundamentalism and politics!
I respect Hesse for his ability to really put it all out there, even if some of his beliefs or thoughts weren't fully baked all the way through. Its raw. Its honest. I think this memoir is well worth the read based on that alone.
A note about the audiobook: Hesse reads this himself, and he brings some big theater kid energy. Not a bad thing in and of itself, but some of the voices he puts on for various actors definitely grated on me. I am think particularly of Caldonia (spelling? Again. Audiobook listener here.), who, every she spoke, I wanted to turn off the book entirely. Its a forgivable blip, and didn't completely deter me from finishing it up, but its really quite annoying. At least to me, anyway. Your milage may vary.
It appears that I had a similar experience to a lot of readers of this book: I went in expecting more socio-political history and analysis, and instead got a memoir and personal exploration of faith and small-town Midwest culture.
Notable, though, that I am still giving it 3.5. Because even though it isn't what I initially checked the book out for, it was still captivating and harrowing in all the ways a memoir like this should be. There was a lot of great reflection in here, and Hesse did a good job of acknowledging when his own biases, emotions, and experiences were cloudy his ability to report on this sensitive issue.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of actual analysis was left on the cutting room floor. According to Hesse, he spent 2 weeks in his hometown to collect interviews of family and friends about their experiences over the last several decades. Pretty much none of that material made it into this. To me, that was definitely the smarter call, given what this book shaped out to be, but I am still so deeply curious about what perspectives his community provided.
There was some reporting on historical context throughout, which I did like, but I think the memoir could have stood up on it's own merits without them. Though I am still eagerly looking for more scholarly works on the intersection of Christian fundamentalism and politics!
I respect Hesse for his ability to really put it all out there, even if some of his beliefs or thoughts weren't fully baked all the way through. Its raw. Its honest. I think this memoir is well worth the read based on that alone.
A note about the audiobook: Hesse reads this himself, and he brings some big theater kid energy. Not a bad thing in and of itself, but some of the voices he puts on for various actors definitely grated on me. I am think particularly of Caldonia (spelling? Again. Audiobook listener here.), who, every she spoke, I wanted to turn off the book entirely. Its a forgivable blip, and didn't completely deter me from finishing it up, but its really quite annoying. At least to me, anyway. Your milage may vary.
April 27, 2026
How to review this.....it is one person's perspective of growing up in a evangelical church - in a town full of Christian Nationalists.
I picked up the book to further understand White Christian Nationalism. The author does provide good insight into this; particularly how these people vote against their interests, how they continue to fund charlatans who claim to be messiahs and the cognitive dissonance of rallying against the "other" when they do the exact same thing.
It doesn't really illuminate to me how to fight these, beyond simply trying to introduce these people to different people/cultures - to show them maybe not to be afraid and to know the "other" before judging.
The book is very much this author's life story up to this point and to be honest, I could not relate. Reading it makes it sound like this kid is raising himself and he desperately needed a therapist from childhood! What shocks me is that NOT ONE person in his early childhood provided some refuge and guidance. From the way he writes it, he grew up wild as a weed (which I get from the parents who are both seriously flawed human beings) but not even the siblings cared for him? A church leader? A teacher? No one cared?? I feel like I'm getting only half the story.
The author had/has severe mental issues and the evangelical church he grew up in was the WORST possible thing for him - feeding his anxieties and irrationalities - that continue to this day.
I consider myself a liberal but at some point in his telling of his life story, with the constant job hopping and the drug use and the self abuse drives me to want to scream at him "grow up!" Like I get it, you got dealt a really crappy hand in life, your parents were absent, you're gay growing up in small town Iowa, you get bullied - but at some point you have to stop being the victim and seize the day. I just couldn't relate to him.
This book is fine, a little long in the tooth at the end, with him riffing on his life and stance on religion and God. I'd recommend perhaps for a book club, think it would be fascinating to hear how others read it.
I picked up the book to further understand White Christian Nationalism. The author does provide good insight into this; particularly how these people vote against their interests, how they continue to fund charlatans who claim to be messiahs and the cognitive dissonance of rallying against the "other" when they do the exact same thing.
It doesn't really illuminate to me how to fight these, beyond simply trying to introduce these people to different people/cultures - to show them maybe not to be afraid and to know the "other" before judging.
The book is very much this author's life story up to this point and to be honest, I could not relate. Reading it makes it sound like this kid is raising himself and he desperately needed a therapist from childhood! What shocks me is that NOT ONE person in his early childhood provided some refuge and guidance. From the way he writes it, he grew up wild as a weed (which I get from the parents who are both seriously flawed human beings) but not even the siblings cared for him? A church leader? A teacher? No one cared?? I feel like I'm getting only half the story.
The author had/has severe mental issues and the evangelical church he grew up in was the WORST possible thing for him - feeding his anxieties and irrationalities - that continue to this day.
I consider myself a liberal but at some point in his telling of his life story, with the constant job hopping and the drug use and the self abuse drives me to want to scream at him "grow up!" Like I get it, you got dealt a really crappy hand in life, your parents were absent, you're gay growing up in small town Iowa, you get bullied - but at some point you have to stop being the victim and seize the day. I just couldn't relate to him.
This book is fine, a little long in the tooth at the end, with him riffing on his life and stance on religion and God. I'd recommend perhaps for a book club, think it would be fascinating to hear how others read it.
March 8, 2026
After reading "Runner's High" by Hesse, I decided to learn more about this writer's story, and it is one of perseverance and resilience. I share his fundamentalist religious upbringing and the constant worry about being left behind. I understand how the song "I wish we'd all been ready" plays in your head for decades, despite the deconversion to atheism. This book is extremely well written. I could not put it down. Hesse' demonstrates an intellectual curiosity that may have aided his escape from the religious bubble he was raised in. I think all of those of us who have been raised in a controlling, apocalyptic-permeated existence can benefit from reading his story, his struggles with accepting himself, and his persistence to understand himself and the world in general. When you grow up in a fundamentalist, evangelical world, you struggle to trust your feelings and always feel like you are worthless and going to hell. That is, after all, the teaching of this worldview from all of those around you. For those not growing up in this world, it is good to offer grace to those of us who did. Fundamentalist do not value education and detest science. I think the most important point the book makes is to analyze how this religious ideology results in poverty and magical thinking about prosperity, resulting in people self-medicating with drugs and alcohol to reduce the pain of their inevitable failure to be what God wants them to be. Please, Josiah, keep writing and telling your story. You can help many people who are struggling with religious trauma.
Review of advance copy received from Goodreads Giveaways
I received a copy of this through Goodreads Giveaways. I was looking forward to reading it and had hoped I would enjoy it more than it turns out I did. At times I found the narrative to be overly repetitive. I agree with Hesse's thesis that there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to some churches using fear, shame, and outrage to enrich themselves. Even so, I found his use of The Music Man to underscore this point (and his references to the demon Caldonia) distracting at times. For others that particular imagery might have made the story come alive.
Most of all I came away with a sense of sadness for Hesse in that he never really seems to find safe harbor even as he recognizes his good fortune in escaping the worse fates of prison or early death that could have befallen him. I grieve for him that his faith in and relationship with God was so negatively impacted by the church. Ideally the church would have offered the safe harbor that he needed when his family of origin couldn't do so.
The wider tragedy is that the story Hesse is sharing here seems one many people could have written. Maybe the one positive offshoot of that truth is that Hesse does seem to have found comfort and companionship among other former evangelicals who experienced a similar trajectory. I genuinely wish him well and admire his tenacity in overcoming a challenging childhood to achieve his dream of supporting himself as a writer.
Most of all I came away with a sense of sadness for Hesse in that he never really seems to find safe harbor even as he recognizes his good fortune in escaping the worse fates of prison or early death that could have befallen him. I grieve for him that his faith in and relationship with God was so negatively impacted by the church. Ideally the church would have offered the safe harbor that he needed when his family of origin couldn't do so.
The wider tragedy is that the story Hesse is sharing here seems one many people could have written. Maybe the one positive offshoot of that truth is that Hesse does seem to have found comfort and companionship among other former evangelicals who experienced a similar trajectory. I genuinely wish him well and admire his tenacity in overcoming a challenging childhood to achieve his dream of supporting himself as a writer.
February 9, 2026
Hesse was raised as an evangelical Christian in Iowa. He interweaves the story of his family and of his upbringing with the ways in which evangelicalism has altered the sociological and political landscape of Iowa. He offers a compelling portrait of how the political right used faith to con the working class and the poor into believing that social programs and immigrants were the real problem, thereby keeping them voting against their own interests. But the most effective and affecting parts of the book are those showing how he was traumatized by a childhood saturated in beliefs in sin, hellfire, and the tribulations and the rapture. It is a moving and terrifying portrait of the cruel worldview of evangelicalism and of the ways in which it cramps the minds of those immersed in it. Hesse shows remarkable compassion for those caught up in the world of his childhood and youth while still being clear eyed about the damage they have caused and continue to cause. As a retired University of Iowa philosophy professor, I was constantly struck by the social and intellectual distance between the liberal world of Iowa City and the not-at-all liberal world of small town Iowa depicted by Hesse from which some of my students came.
Very highly recommended.
Very highly recommended.
February 13, 2026
Thank you @pantheonbooks #partner for the gifted copy of this book!
I saw this compared to Hillbilly Elegy and Educated and that was honestly all I needed to know. Trainwreck + trainwreck = I’m in. 😂
I listened to this on a flight this week and I was completely enthralled, mesmerized, flabbergasted…and honestly quite heartbroken.
As a Christian myself, I’ll just say I am deeply thankful for my upbringing. What Josiah experienced was so heavy and so hard to listen to at times. There were entire sections of this book where I just wanted to reach back into his childhood and pull him out. The stress. The pressure. The fear. The constant internal battles this poor kid had to fight was just...a lot. And that’s not even touching how difficult his home life was.
It feels strange to call a memoir like this “entertaining,” because it’s someone’s real pain, but I truly could not stop listening. Once I started, I didn’t want to pause it. It’s one of those stories that makes your jaw drop at the dysfunction and simultaneously makes you count your blessings. Josiah didn’t get to be a carefree kid. Woof.
This feels like the kind of book that had to be written and maybe even something that has been healing for him and his family. I genuinely hope he’s found peace.
If books like The Glass Castle, Educated or Hillbilly Elegy are your jammy jam then this one absolutely deserves a spot on your shelf.
I saw this compared to Hillbilly Elegy and Educated and that was honestly all I needed to know. Trainwreck + trainwreck = I’m in. 😂
I listened to this on a flight this week and I was completely enthralled, mesmerized, flabbergasted…and honestly quite heartbroken.
As a Christian myself, I’ll just say I am deeply thankful for my upbringing. What Josiah experienced was so heavy and so hard to listen to at times. There were entire sections of this book where I just wanted to reach back into his childhood and pull him out. The stress. The pressure. The fear. The constant internal battles this poor kid had to fight was just...a lot. And that’s not even touching how difficult his home life was.
It feels strange to call a memoir like this “entertaining,” because it’s someone’s real pain, but I truly could not stop listening. Once I started, I didn’t want to pause it. It’s one of those stories that makes your jaw drop at the dysfunction and simultaneously makes you count your blessings. Josiah didn’t get to be a carefree kid. Woof.
This feels like the kind of book that had to be written and maybe even something that has been healing for him and his family. I genuinely hope he’s found peace.
If books like The Glass Castle, Educated or Hillbilly Elegy are your jammy jam then this one absolutely deserves a spot on your shelf.
March 30, 2026
I could talk for hours about this book! Anyone growing up in America (or in this case Iowa in the 80's and 90's) will be able to relate to the "Maga" church movement and how the far right Evangelical churches poisoned the vulnerable with their righteousness of "good and evil" blaming the farmers during the farm crisis for not having work ethic like their ancestors and how they were being punished for not being good Christians. Not mentioning the economics of the Reagan administration that was bought and sold by these churches long ago.
The author, who experienced relentless torture (both physically and emotionally) from the teachings of this churches but from his peers, his parent's and community. He told his story with so much raw emotion it was almost too painful to read.
So many topics in this book from poverty, mental illness, addiction, isolation and how rural Iowans were directly impacted by these criminals through emotional and financial manipulation. Only to find out two decades later that these very "Godly" leaders were addicts and criminals themselves. Not to mention gay, trans or mentally ill.
Read this book. Especially if this was a period in your life living in Iowa. The author tells such a gripping story that you wish was fiction.
The author, who experienced relentless torture (both physically and emotionally) from the teachings of this churches but from his peers, his parent's and community. He told his story with so much raw emotion it was almost too painful to read.
So many topics in this book from poverty, mental illness, addiction, isolation and how rural Iowans were directly impacted by these criminals through emotional and financial manipulation. Only to find out two decades later that these very "Godly" leaders were addicts and criminals themselves. Not to mention gay, trans or mentally ill.
Read this book. Especially if this was a period in your life living in Iowa. The author tells such a gripping story that you wish was fiction.
April 1, 2026
This was an incredibly engaging and thoughtfully written book that I genuinely enjoyed from start to finish. From the very first chapter, the story pulled me in with its strong sense of direction and well-crafted narrative.
One of the standout aspects for me was the character development. The characters felt real, with clear motivations and emotional depth that made it easy to connect with their journey. I found myself invested in their decisions and curious to see how everything would unfold.
The writing style was smooth and immersive, making it easy to stay engaged without feeling overwhelmed. I also appreciated how the author handled the themes throughout the book they were presented in a way that felt natural and thought-provoking without being forced.
There were several moments that stood out and stayed with me even after I finished reading, which is always a sign of a memorable book. The pacing was consistent, and the story maintained my interest all the way to a satisfying conclusion.
Overall, this was a rewarding reading experience, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys a well-told and meaningful story. I’m looking forward to reading more from this author.
One of the standout aspects for me was the character development. The characters felt real, with clear motivations and emotional depth that made it easy to connect with their journey. I found myself invested in their decisions and curious to see how everything would unfold.
The writing style was smooth and immersive, making it easy to stay engaged without feeling overwhelmed. I also appreciated how the author handled the themes throughout the book they were presented in a way that felt natural and thought-provoking without being forced.
There were several moments that stood out and stayed with me even after I finished reading, which is always a sign of a memorable book. The pacing was consistent, and the story maintained my interest all the way to a satisfying conclusion.
Overall, this was a rewarding reading experience, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys a well-told and meaningful story. I’m looking forward to reading more from this author.
February 1, 2026
The first section of this book was difficult to get through. The descriptions of the bullying, family dysfunction and fear related to religious trauma during the author’s childhood were truly painful. His fears, self-harm and obsessions were described in unflinching detail including his intrusive thoughts about being left to fend for himself once the rest of his family was raptured. While raised in the church, thankfully it was not an apocalyptic evangelical branch. I first read the “Left Behind” series when I was in my 30’s and found the concepts in them unsettling and disturbing. I cannot imagine had I been exposed constantly to this message as a child how I would have felt, let alone had my father talked incessantly about the need to be able to survive on my own during years of the tribulation and its associated horrors.
I found the second part of the book quite fascinating as the author went back to his hometown to interview family and friends about how their perceptions of that time period. Many interesting facts are presented in this section of the book including impacts of Walmart on small town economics.
I found the second part of the book quite fascinating as the author went back to his hometown to interview family and friends about how their perceptions of that time period. Many interesting facts are presented in this section of the book including impacts of Walmart on small town economics.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 84 reviews