BACK IN PRINT!

Conway and Siegelman’s acclaimed Holy Terror returns in a new “Classic Edition” from Stillpoint Press
with a timely new preface by the authors

The trailblazing book that explains what has happened to the minds of millions of Americans and millions more worldwide.

NEW YORK/NOVEMBER 1, 2024 — In the 1980s, religion and politics, two forces that affect all our lives every day, locked arms in a concerted effort to seize power in government and overturn America’s most basic constitutional guarantees: freedom of choice, the right of privacy, and the separation of church and state. Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman were the first investigative journalists to expose this ruthless new crusade of “intimidation, manipulation and control in the name of religion” that has grown into a national and global conflagration.

The authors’ acclaimed 1982 book, Holy Terror: The Fundamentalist War on America’s Freedoms in Religion, Politics, and Our Private Lives, laid bare how a newborn coalition of zealous fundamentalist Christians, right-wing ideologues and tech-savvy political strategists came to power and set out to impose their extreme beliefs on all Americans and cultures worldwide.

Hailed as “lively, hard-hitting, controversial,” and “a stunning and factual documentation” written “with style and sophistication,” Holy Terror was one of Doubleday and Company’s best-selling nonfiction books during the roiling political summer of ‘82. The authors and their book were assailed with heated cries and false claims by the power-hungry fundamentalist preachers and political strategists they brought to the public’s attention, and the chilling effect of those attacks soon became palpable. In one troubling incident that occurred soon after the authors’ opening round of national media appearances, a series of suspicious fires burned up a new printing of their book three times on Doubleday’s presses in rural Virginia. The incident stopped Holy Terror in its tracks in the runup to the hotly contested 1982 congressional elections and sales of the book never fully recovered.

The book has been out of print for 35 years. Now Holy Terror is back in a new “classic edition” from Stillpoint Press. Holy Terror chronicles the rise of the fundamentalist right in real time, as the authors crisscross the country and interview people on all sides of the issues: from targeted senators and congressmen to disillusioned “born-again” Christians appalled by the new political thrusts of their faith, and others who suffered years of mental and emotional trauma from the intense ritual practices of repressive fundamentalist churches and aggressive “parachurch” organizations.

Armed with a bold new perspective grounded in the communication sciences, Conway and Siegelman crack the potent “codes of control” movement leaders were deploying in their personal appeals and rebirth rituals, in small groups, megachurches, and before mass audiences on a national and global scale. For four decades, those indirect and often covert manipulative methods have drawn millions into what the authors call a “mindset of ideological fundamentalism,” a literal, absolutist worldview they define, “not as a particular set of religious beliefs, but as a mindset in opposition to the modern world, to our human nature and, in its extremes, to reality itself.”

The authors pointpoint the emergence of that mindset in the 1980 elections that brought President Ronald Reagan and a new breed of Republicans to power and changed the terms of American politics from that time forward. They followed the movement’s leaders into the halls of power in Washington and across the American heartland. They “followed the money,” as Washington Post investigative journalists Woodward and Bernstein did a few years earlier in their epic investigation of the Watergate scandal of the 1970s. More important, from their vantage point in communication, Conway and Siegelman followed the messages: the flow of words, signs, symbols, images, myths, meanings, and other coded communications so many fundamentalist right preachers, proselytizers, political strategists, propagandists, and other religious-political message makers were pouring on their flocks, the American electorate and global audiences. Their book explains for the first time how so many innocent and trusting Americans have been manipulated and controlled by powerful communication strategies that have been systematically designed to win their souls, take their money, dictate their votes, and draft them into the right’s activist throngs.

In Holy Terror’s most explosive revelations, the authors go beyond the battlefields of domestic politics and reveal to readers in the U.S. and other cultures how American-based Christian fundamentalist groups have deployed on a global scale in their overarching mission to “make disciples of all nations.” As they learned, many of those ardent missionary efforts have enlisted wealthy American businessmen, public officials, and other “leadership figures” in domestic and foreign enterprises, governments and their armed forces in clandestine intrusions into the social and political affairs of developed and developing countries.

In their new preface, the authors cite important developments that have occurred in the years since their book first appeared. And they point out: “the fires of Holy Terror have not abated.” During these years the right’s “long war on freedom” has grown into a sprawling, richly funded, many-headed movement of allied churches and quasi-religious organizations, PACs, think tanks, “Christian” law centers, and grassroots groups active in every voting district across the country, as the movement “has trained its fire on the nation’s public schools and libraries, laws governing gay marriage and LGBTQ rights, stepped-up campaigns against abortion, birth control, and other crusades on any battlefront where the movement could plant its flag and stamp its footprint.” At the same time, the mindset of ideological fundamentalism has spread beyond the domain of religion into rigid new strains of literal, absolutist thinking, among them: “free-market fundamentalism,” Second Amendment “gun fundamentalism,” “anti-tax,” “anti-vax,” and other extreme ideologies born of magical thinking and supernatural beliefs.

Capping it all, say Conway and Siegelman, “the unlikely figure of Donald Trump has been placed on a biblical throne” by America’s millions of hard-core Christian fundamentalists, while his fervent MAGA movement—”a textbook cult of personality propelled by rage, race hatred, delusion, disinformation and outright lies”—has joined with kindred gangs rooted in racist ideologies, crazy conspiracy theories, and fanatical groups bent on the violent overthrow of the government. And standing with Trump in watershed cases, the authors note, are “the strangest of bedfellows,” the supermajority of justices Trump himself consolidated on the U.S. Supreme Court, where “America’s last arbiters of freedom … have joined in the fundamentalist right crusade to repeal the nation’s bedrock constitutional principles, revoke the rights of women and minorities, and tear down America’s foundation wall of church-state separation brick by brick.”

The authors acknowledge that other factors also have shaped events on this crucial forefront: the rise of hyperpartisan right-wing news outlets, rabid extremist influencers on social media and the dark web, and segments of the population contending with legitimate grievances, class conflicts and historical injustices. But, through it all, they say:

And now this loyal “base” of political activists and voters who put their extreme beliefs above every other purpose and duty as citizens, has brazenly rebranded their mission in the 21st century as a full-throttle drive for “Christian Nationalism.”

So much that Conway and Siegelman feared and foresaw four decades ago has come to pass. And they believe Holy Terror is only one of many new social, political and spiritual crises bearing down on people in today’s runamok information age. That’s why the authors have brought a new communication perspective to the complex issues in Holy Terror and all their work. As they say: “The kind and quality of the messages we exchange with one another will have ever greater power to change our lives, our cultures, and our world for better and for worse.” And, they believe:

More timely today than it was four decades ago, in the shadow of the fateful 2024 election and its ominous forebodings for America under a second Trump regime, Holy Terror will be read and remembered for its farsighted early warning signs by those who lived through that first turbulent era of fundamentalist right machinations, and by younger generations who know only vaguely of the connections between that history and today’s headlines. Whatever the future may hold, Conway and Siegelman’s astute and provocative findings are sure to inform and enlighten readers of every age, faith and political persuasion.

Holy Terror is available now at Amazon in paperback, ebook and audiobook formats and in bookstores everywhere.

For more, go to Holy Terror or contact info@stillpointpress.net.

For more about the authors, see: More about Conway & Siegelman.