On Fire for God: Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right - a Personal History

by Josiah Hesse

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Politics, Religion, History, Biography, Christian

368 pages, Hardcover

Published January 13, 2026

About the author

Josiah 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.

Reviews

[Liralen · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Adam‘’s book reviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Lissa00 · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[BansheeBibliophile · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

****4.5 Stars****
This book blew me away...I learned so much about Reagan & Reaganomics (more than I did in any class of my education) and I have to say that I have so many questions. Religion is such a wild concept and after reading this I stand by that statement. Hesse does such a wonderful job exploring how a stronghold of the Christian Right shaped not only his experience, but his family's and the community he grew up in. Seeing him be able to break free from this cycle of emotional abuse showed true strength and I was so impressed with how much time, effort and work Hesse put in to making sure he healed (not 100% and still healing) himself from this giant predator.
I rarely read nonfiction but this book read like fiction and I could NOT put it down.
Thanks to Penguin Random for the ARC!

[Jen Juenke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the parts of history that told what was happening during the Farm Crisis in the 1980s.
I liked the history of the preachers/KKK/rise of the christian right.

I was very involved in the authors story and how the family fell apart.

What I did not like, was the constant references to his imaginary demon. It brought nothing to the story.

I also felt that too much time was spent on his own sexuality and what was going on in his own head, instead of relating that to his own faith/the communities faith.

Overall this is a deeply personal story that touches upon christian values and what was going on when he was growing up in Iowa.

Thanks to the publisher who sent me a copy of the book for this honest review.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly I really enjoyed reading this book.
I am an evangelical Christian who grew up in the 70's and 80s, so although I didn''t grow up in a church culture like the author, I am familiar with most of what he wrote about. And I also find much of this very bothersome.
Although I do not agree with his final conclusions rejecting God altogther, I did find his story very interesting and it made sense to me, how his life went. It is valuable to hear the dialouge and thoughts of someone on the opposite side politically of much of what I believe. We probably should be able to have more conversations like this, but as the author says in the book, this is difficult in this time of our nation.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to the publisher, via Netgalley, for an advance e-galley for honest review.

This is a fascinating look at one person's deconstruction that does a great job setting his story in a time and place. Readers will get a clear sense of what it was like to grow up with an unstable family life and financial instability in 80s/90s small town Iowa, and the influence of evangelical Christianity on the community and his life.

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hesse shares his experience growing up in and extracting himself from the evangelical church. Using the familiar story of "The Music Man" as a reference point, Hesse describes how some church leaders influence followers into harmful beliefs and actions.

Thank you, Pantheon and Netgalley, for an advance ebook in exchange for a fair review.

[Robyn Latchford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Binged this in a week

Really enjoyed this memoir. I agree with the review that says it’s a blend of “Educated” and “Hillbilly Elegy.” Makes me want to read more “exvangelical” memoirs.

[Karen Ashley · Rating 2 out of 5]

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

[Ron Frampton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about the happenings where of growing up in a small town where a few members of a church rule by shame and fear.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this and I'm so sad I missed the author's talk in Denver. Wild story told with care.

[Second Account · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice read

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Independent journalist Josiah Hesse relates the ongoing struggles of growing up in Mason City, Iowa, in a time when the area’s small farms were folding to corporate farming and the local economy was collapsing. Add in the destructive corruption of the prosperity gospel that took over the evangelical church and the Republican Party, and Hesse and his family become part of a failing community, consumed by guilt, shame, alcohol, drugs, and sex. It’s hard to listen to this brutally honest story.