When Josiah Hesse set about writing  his memoir, about growing up in a rural household steeped in the doctrines of the Christian right, he had an unlikely model in mind.

“Stephen King was a big influence on me with writing this book,” he tells Kirkus Reviews, speaking by phone from his home in Colorado about On Fire for God: Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right—A Personal Story (Pantheon, Jan. 13). “I adhere to all the rules of journalism when it comes to things being factually airtight. But I really wanted that horror element in the book. We’re talking about stuff like agriculture and economics and theology and history. But there’s this narrative component of a child being psychologically tortured by a very insidious institution, and all of that materializing into a kind of demonic figure that lives inside his head and tortures him throughout the day. I really wanted people to feel in their bones what it is to grow up in this world.”

If you’re thinking Pennywise at the pulpit, you’re not far off the mark. Hesse’s upbringing included plenty of assurances that he was bound for the inferno if he doubted a single word his minister uttered in sermons that always ended in a browbeating request for money beyond the usual baseline tithing. The preacher lived well, with “new cars, designer suits, and tropical vacations,” while his Iowa parishioners worried about how to buy groceries and pay the bills.

It’s called the “prosperity gospel,” of which Hesse writes, “I often come across evangelical hucksters telling an audience of poor people that the solution to their problems is simple and easy. It’s easy to become rich. It’s easy to raise children (especially a ridiculously large number of them) and maintain a healthy, loving marriage. It’s easy to find a lucrative, satisfying job. It’s easy to understand the will of God, the meaning of the Bible, and your purpose on this Earth. All you have to do is believe, surrender to His will, and it’ll all work out just fine. You’ll be rich in no time. And if you’re not, it’s your own damn fault, because just look how easy this game is!”

Except, of course, it’s not such an easy game after all. Hesse reckons that his parents gave the modern equivalent of $360,000 to their prosperity-gospel church over a 10-year span, “while we ate burnt tater tots bought with food stamps.”

As Hesse explains, he wasn’t immune to the doctrine himself, especially as a child obsessed with images of hell and Armageddon, growing up in the 1980s and the age of the so-called Satanic Panic, when preschools and day care centers were supposedly ritually abusing and even killing innocent children. (There’s nothing new under the sun: today it’s pizza parlors.) “I wasn’t, you know, one of these kids who sat at the back of the church with my arms folded and thought it was all bullshit,” he says. “I was more of a zealot than anyone I knew.”

But then came adolescence, when the doubts began to surface. After he dropped out of high school, a difficult path as a freelance journalist followed, mixed with stints at restaurants, factories, and construction sites. As the years rolled by, Hesse, who had written two thinly disguised novels about his upbringing, began to think about writing a nonfiction book that linked his experiences to the rise of conservative, fundamentalist Christianity as a cultural and political force. In a conversation with his agent, he says, “I started talking about what a mess I was at the age of 18, when I was thrust into adulthood with no conception of what I was supposed to do or what the world would look like, because I’d been told my entire life that the world would end before I reached that age. We started talking about class and the Midwest and religion and mental health and all these different topics that are related when you really dig into it. The book I envisioned was an opportunity to [talk] about my personal experiences, with some very intimate, vulnerable stories, but then also talk about larger social issues and look at how the Christian right has manipulated working-class families like mine going back several generations.”

His parents’ generation saw a precipitous decline in the family farms on which they’d grown up, part of a process of corporate industrialization. It was the equivalent of the Great Depression for rural Iowans save that, Hesse writes, it was confined to the agricultural working class. And, in the eyes of prosperity-doctrine conservatives, it was a sign that God was punishing those farmers for not giving their churches enough money. So the money poured in, feeding a massive right-wing movement, even as adherents were cowed by “depression, social anxiety, poverty marked by thrift-store deals on brand-name clothes, [and] massive credit-card debt propping up a lifestyle that was used to market evangelical success,” Hesse writes.  Church doctrine was further fueled by “anti-woke frenzy,” fear of the “feminization of Christianity,” and the certainty that the poor are poor because God has deemed them unworthy of wealth.

Indeed, Hesse tells Kirkus Reviews, “one of the most damaging elements of the prosperity gospel is that you blame yourself for everything. I’m all about personal responsibility when it comes to your decisions and your circumstances, but when it comes to American economics and politics and religion, there are other factors at play than just your own grit and determination. When you’re in the mindset of the prosperity gospel, you attribute anything good happening [in] your life to God and your obedience to God.… And then if anything doesn’t work out, it’s your fault. So you don’t get any of the credit for anything, but you get all of the blame.”

Although he’s no longer a believer, Hesse admits to harboring some “hard-wired religious trauma” and even some residual worry that “eternal torture awaited me if I didn’t follow the rules.” It brings Stephen King to mind. “I just read Tim Curry's autobiography, Vagabond, which is fantastic. And then I went and rewatched It, the series from 1990, which was very prominent in my mind while writing this book.” [Curry played the iconic role of Pennywise, the terrifying clown.]” Horror story it is, but it’s also a rebuke to the inauthenticity of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, which Hesse holds in deep scorn: “He grew up in suburban Ohio with a mother who worked in health care. He had a middle-class life. And so it’s frustrating to hear him frame himself as some kind of working-class hero.”

“I want to show why poor people support Trump, but also why they would believe in QAnon conspiracy theories, why they would show up to the Jan. 6 riots. I’m not looking to excuse any behavior, but I am looking to explain it. I think I’m in a unique position to do that, because not a lot of journalists come from impoverished rural backgrounds. I have nothing but compassion for those kinds of zealots who might view me as some kind of agent of Satan, because I used to be one of those zealots. I understand where they’re coming from.”

Gregory McNamee is a contributing writer.