If you intended to read the last BookNotes but didn’t, here’s a quick link. I described (mostly) recent books that I found compelling, even transformative; perhaps life-changing. There were creative books on the Christian life but before I listed those I briefly listed 10 very different kinds of books on sharing faith with others. I know using the “e” word (evangelism) doesn’t sell books, but at least I tried, right? Check it out and note how I explained the tone of each.

This week I’m in a bit of funk — it’s been going on a while, I know — in part because of my research into the history of the Republican Party and how the far, extremist right wing (many who are armed and dangerous) has infiltrated the party that was once known for traditional family values and the free market. For a variety of reasons that vex political scientists, social analysts, and contemporary historians the MAGA movement has become the ideological home for militias, border vigilantes, skinheads, the KKK and newer Trumpians like the Boogaloo Boys and the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters. How did that happen? What are we to do?

(For those that wonder, by the way, I find no comparable infiltration of violent far left extremists into the Democratic Party. This is not to say that there is nothing to criticize about the Left or the Dems, but I am not, here, describing books about either Party. I’ve been reading for more than a year about the violent extremists found in unholy organizations such as the KKK and Aryan Nation and Oathkeepers. Black-masked (anarco-leftist) Antifa has been disruptive in some cities, usually countering the far right, but they have not been involved in party politics, as such. As far as I can tell Homeland Security are not documenting much of a threat from domestic terrorists on the left; in this era, at least, the threat is from the fringes of conservative moments.)

In this BookNotes I want to highly recommend several important books, including two riveting reads each about brave undercover cops who infiltrated these dangerous (and sometime murderous) extremist groups. These are fingernail-biting, page-turning books that will keep you up at night. I can’t say which is better so get ‘em both. They are both remarkable. Let’s start with those. And then we’ll explore another very different book called We Become What We Normalize by David Dark. As always, here, they are all on sale – 20% off.

The Hate Next Door: Why White Supremacists Are All Around Us — and How to Spot Them by Mason Browning, with his wife Tawny Browning (Sourcebooks) $17.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $14.32

This came out a year ago and I’ve just discovered it and I burned through it, staying up late on work nights, as I was so drawn in to his wild expose of the cult-like “changing face of hate.” A good-hearted Mormon cop becomes (with only minimal support from his PD) an undercover detective hanging out with various sorts of skinheads and neo-Nazis which lead him to ever more dangerous militias — some which were not necessarily driven by racism but were seriously anti-government and some who were explicitly racist, even organizing “hunting trips” to murder immigrants sneaking across the Arizona border. These seemingly fringe groups (well, not the skinheads) were often involved in Republican politics and had covers as community minded legitimate civic groups. These militas and their training camps (some affiliated with churches) were often overlapping with other White Power groups and Matt Browning, under a pseudonym, got to know most of the major players in the Western US. After eventually being outed, and having jailed many of the violent offenders, he and his wife became international experts, serving law enforcement all over the world about the growing scourge of hate groups.

Part way through his career, when bumping into violent border militias or skinheads at the local Walmart, say, his wife got involved and became, curiously enough, an unofficial gatherer of intel. Tawny was serving as a producer of a TV series on fundamentalist Mormon cults that engaged in polygamy and was helping women and girls escape that scene when she realized the overlap — one of the reason a particularly fearsome cult of polygamists practice their incestuous worldview was to keep their “seed” racially pure. She was as passionate as her husband to study and learn and connect the dots of these groups. Together they had a front-row seat to the rise of White supremacy. From learning about the sorts of Doc Martens favored by real skinheads to the various symbols, tattoos, numbers, patches and slogans of the various iterations of the Klan or the militias, The Hate Next Door is eye opening, well told, and — at times — inspirational.

Inspirational? Browning works hard to be a good dad and husband and speaks about the stress of undercover work and the PTSD that set in as he lived with so much evil. He worries, still, about guys that got away, about murders he maybe could have prevented, about losing ground in the work to expose these dangers. He’s a good guy and there is a light touch as he chats about all this. There is even some humor. I’d like to meet this guy; after reporting about all the groups he infiltrated and all the tension, you feel like you know him. His writing style is super approachable. And I’d love to meet Tawni, too. If they made a movie of this I wondered who would play her?

The book offers some good advice near the end, offering wisdom on coping if you know somebody in one of these hateful cults. He ends with a balanced (if brief) treatment of attending Trump rallies and noticing “so many guns” — guns among the leftist protestors and, even more, among those with racist slogans and anti-Jewish sentiments in plain view. He recognized the tattoos and symbols and patches on many of the January 6 insurrectionists, proof that many who attacked the Capitol had extremist connections; he and his wife were on a first name basis with the head-dressed QAnon Shaman. (Browning is quick to remind us, by the way, that many fellow-citizens who think the 2019 election was rigged are not therefore racist nor necessarily violent.) He loves his country, he loves seeing the good in things, and yet he has this passionate calling to inform us about this crazy, alarming stuff happening, often under our noses.

At the Trump rally in Harrisburg a few weeks ago the local news team covered the large lines waiting to get in to the rally on an exceptionally hot day and had footage of those at the event before they entered the building. As often happens, happy folks mugged for the camera, knowing they’d appear in the background of the newscaster. One guy walked by and flashed an odd hand symbol. It was weird. Having read this book, I now know what it was; I have gone back and watched it over and over. Right at our central PA Republican Party event, there it was. I wasn’t shocked. Hate next door, indeed.

White Robes and Broken Badges: Infiltrating the KKK and Exposing the Evil Among Us Joe Moore (Harper) $32.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $25.60

Holy smokes, what a book. (It’s brand new – maybe you heard him on Fresh Air earlier this week.) Joe Moore is a fine, clear, writer. He clearly tells a story that I just couldn’t put down. Like the above-mentioned The Hate Next Door, it is a page-turner and one that I think is vitally important for us to read and talk about. I’ve mentioned before our own run-in with the Klan here at our shop in Dallastown, and although racist hate groups have changed much over the years, they remain the granddaddy of all the variations of hate groups. Like most of the far right groups, they hate blacks, Latinos, Asians, gays, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, and nearly anyone who does’t fit their view of conservative, American rightness.

Their story has been well told. You know about their rise after the Civil War and then their revival in numbers and hatefulness in the early 20th century. (One of the great, award-winning books we highlighted a year or so ago is A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over American, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by the great nonfiction scholar and bestselling author, Timothy Egan (Penguin; $18.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $14.40.) I suppose you know some Klan chapters — often called klaverns — view themselves as explicitly Christian. (Ahh, remember that book I highlighted last month called Another Gospel: Christian Nationalism and the Crisis of Evangelical Identity by Joel Looper – duh.) Some groups seem more taken by their anti-Semitism than being anti-Black and most use the Heil Hitler salute as much as their other secret codes, like KIGY. Many are willing to commit heinous acts of intimidation and perhaps murder.

Joe Moore was an Army Special ops guy. He was a sniper and notes that he served in locations that are sealed and he may not tell us. Throughout the book he draws on his military training — skills of observation, ways to drive, ways to enter a room, and obvious hand-to-hand combat strategies. When he was working as a welder — coping with PTSD from what he suggests included the sorts of shootouts and killings you see on TV shows about spies that he encountered in special operations — he was recruited, almost out of the blue, by a Florida FBI guy. They asked him how he liked rednecks.

So begins his complex plan to become a Klansman which, in Central Florida, in this secret organization, it isn’t simple. The initiation ceremony (held out on a side road in the middle of no-where, near Lochloosa Lake, which made him think he had been found out and they were going to kill him) was described in detail as he became a Knight. This outfit was different than the Klansman we got to know in the amazing Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America by Vegas Tenfold, who, as a left-wing journalist somehow got embedded in a whole gang of alt-right groups, including the guys who planned the infamous Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville VA. In that story some of the KKK guys were nearly bumpkins, as I recall, and their cross burning ceremony was almost laughable. Not so the armed men Moore was getting to know, who met under the Saltire Cross, the older mystic insignia of the KKK, also known as the Blood Drop Cross. Some guys were friendly enough, but Joe had seen Mississippi Burning that is based on the investigation of the 1964 murders of civil rights workers. He knew what these guys could do. And they had the firepower to back up the horrendous stories they told him.

Joe’s awareness of makes and models of weapons certainly helped him earn cred within this new circle of brothers. He was often “carrying”, himself — he had no back up in this undercover work — but his appreciation for rare weapons (including old German pistols and handguns) made it clear that he could be an asset to the Klan. I won’t spoil all the details but he is assigned a major assassination attempt on a candidate running for US President that they especially hated: one Barack Obama. As the day approached they gave Moore a high-end Barrett M107A1 sniper rifle and he had to somehow figure out how to botch the job without his cover being blown. He had done all the necessary recon and various associates were going to be in place, including a getaway car with false plates gathered from a Klansman in the Department of Transportation. It was, as they say, down to the wire.

As it ends up, they did not kill Obama that day during the Kissimmee Florida campaign stop, he was soon enough elected, and the network of various sorts of Klansmen were elated. The election of our nation’s first Black President caused an immediate, almost overnight, increase in interest in the Klan. As the KKK learned the art of the deal (by using the internet and changing their image a bit) they recruited, in nearly every state of the union, hundreds and hundreds of angry, white men.

I do not want to blow the story for you as it unfolds like a novel and you’ll be on the edge of your seat as he attempt to balance this real-world life of being undercover among serious haters — some redneck rural guys, some who went to church, maybe, and others who were fairly sophisticated workers in law enforcement, themselves!  There is a reason Moore hates bullies and why he took this job so seriously. The book explores the interior life of such a detective and the psychic wear it does being around foul-mouthed and despicably hateful people much of his working days. That he had a wife and kids and was trying to keep them safe is part of the story. It doesn’t always go well, and, as you will see, there are issues with the feds, local cops, the FBI, and more. If only he had a pal like Matt Browning.

Joe Moore gets out of the undercover biz for a while and, when an opportunity presents itself, he is sucked back in. There is family drama, concern about his kids, obviously questions about his safety and his mental health. The extended connection with border militias and white supremacy groups and KKK klaverns, who are not unlike the New York mafia families, is dreadfully stressful. His spy work put him in danger. (Did you know that when the government puts you into a witness protection program you can only take a limited amount of your stuff; family heirlooms, pictures, his children’s beloved toys were all lost as they were rushed to another state.) Moore’s passion to help expose these thugs.

As he puts it, “I watched a group that had long proclaimed itself he “Invisible Empire” gradually emerge from the shadows to unite the disparate forces that continue to roil this country today.”

Best-selling author Brad Meltzer says “White Robes and Broken Badges is a gut-punch of a book… this is one you shouldn’t miss.”

The forward is by Congressman Jamie Raskin who was a member of the House Select Committee on the January 6th attack. He obviously knows much about these radical groups that have become part of a political assault on America. He compliments Joe Moore’s bravery, and notes that Joe shows how there are sheriff offices and police departments that allow the Klan to work and sometimes commit crimes with impunity. (Hence the “Broken Badges” of the title. That is a theme in The Hate Next Door as well.) Some of these groups have toned down their hate-speech a bit and have found welcome in the Republican Party which should be concerning to all Americans, but especially morally-serious conservatives. Moore, like Browning, is a military guy, a law-and-order type, and not particularly interested in liberal activists, let alone anti-police rhetoric or Marxist stuff.

They want the facts and they have risked their lives to bring us these dramatic stories. Moore, like Browning, is convinced we must know about the danger. There is much to learn.

We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered in a New Era of American Extremism Andy Campbell (Hatchette) $29.00  / OUR SALE PRICE = $23.20

I won’t say much about this because I’ve highlighted it before at BookNotes. It is a brave book, a book that tells exactly who this right-wing fight club is and what they are about. It starts with an exceptionally vulgar overview of the early cable show Gavin McInnes (founder of The Proud Boys) ran and how show after show he spewed anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-women, sexual politics, mocking men who did not live into his views about exceedingly toxic masculinity.

It is, as a former FBI special agent Ali Soufan puts it, “an investigative feat” and “essential reading for those wrestling to understand how homegrown extremist movements take hold and wreak havoc in America.”

This study of creeping fascism and violent extremism is so unbelievable it is almost funny at times — indeed, Vegas Tenfold, who knows extremist groups as well as nearly any reporter in America, says it is hilarious. I don’t know about that, it does explain how this movement with their cute little uniforms became popular among nationalists and more conventional white supremacists, and how they came to become enforcers for many in the MAGA movement and even the Trump campaigns. Beyond just normalizing street violence and crude attacks, they are endangering much of what we value as Americans. This book will be hard to forget.

Consumed by Hate, Redeemed by Love: How a Violent Klansman Became a Champion of Racial Reconciliation Thomas A. Tarrants (Nelson Books) $18.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

For those who wonder how one can get out of the depths of the far-right worldview, I should remind you of an older book we have highlighted before, but that we still happily stock. It is written by a friend who I’ve admired for his kindness and grace and gentleness and his gospel-centered missional vision. Thomas Tarrants (formerly of the C.S. Lewis Institute in DC) writes in Consumed by Hate, Redeemed by Love of his own deep, dark involvement in anti-semitic and racist actions affiliated with one of the most violent of KKK chapters in the Mississippi Klan. You’ll have to read the almost unbelievable story yourself, but in 1968 Tom was arrested — after a bloody shoot-out — for attempting to bomb a Jewish leaders home. The short version is that Tom went to jail and while in prison started thinking and reading and he became a Christian. After many years his sentence was commuted and he ended up co-pastoring a bi-racial church with a black pastor. This book tells, as the subtitle puts it, “how a violent Klansman Became a Champion of Racial Reconciliation.”

Another book he wrote that is now out of print was done with his friend and mentor John Perkins, each pondering how they hated the other race and how God changed their attitudes. In this one, he more fully and candidly tells his terrible story and gives glory to the God who is able to change the heart and life of an extremist turned terrorist. What a story! Tom is quick to say that God’s work in his life is “undeserved mercy.” What a testimony!

Consumed by Hate Redeemed by Love come with rave reviews and heartfelt endorsements. John Perkins, of course, has said much about it, including that it is “amazing.” Mark Batterson calls it “simply astonishing.” Os Guinness writes that, “…in showing how grace and forgiveness broke into his own life to give him a second chance, Tom Tarrants points the way for all who strive to rid America of this terrible scourge and the hatred that breeds it.” Exactly.

Listen to this from novelist John Grisham writes:

As a kid in Mississippi in the late 1960’s, I remember the men of our church discussing the Klan’s bombing campaign against the Jews. The men did not disapprove. Later, I would use this fascinating chapter of civil rights history as the backdrop for my novel The Chamber. Now, one of the bombers, Thomas Tarrants, tells the real story in this remarkable memoir. It is riveting, inspiring, at times hard to believe but utterly true, and it gives some measure of hope in these rancorous times.

Cherie Harder of the Trinity Forum beautifully notes:

Tom Tarrant’s extraordinary, often horrifying, and miraculous story offers both insight and instruction. He shows the ways in which hate warps the mind and corrupts the heart, as well as the allure of scapegoating and rigid ideology and the human carnage left in their wake. But this is ultimately a story of amazing grace — how one blinded by hate learned to see, to love, to reconcile. And it offers hope, showing the possibilities for the flowering of such grace, even on the cultural battlefields of our own riven land.

The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War Jeff Sharlet (Norton) $18.99  / OUR SALE PRICE = $15.19

Again, just a reminder of this eloquent, elegant, and expansive bit of reportorial courage that we have highlighted before. Highly acclaimed, it is not mostly about the KKK or skinheads; it doesn’t focus on high-profile Proud Boys or anti-semitic stars such as President Trump’s, on-again/off-again friend Nick Fuentes, but rather, ordinary people in small towns and seemingly inconsequential places. A master of the art of compelling, creative non-fiction expose, this is “attempting to capture the mood of the nation at this fraught moment, that others in the future may know how it felt to live through the present…”

The Undertow explores the religious dimensions of many who are unhappy with the culture as it is and are deeply troubled and troubling people. This is beyond what he explored in his books on “The Family.” As the back cover notes, Sharlet “journeys into corners of our national psyche where others fear to tread.” And yet this book isn’t only an expose of dark stuff. They say this book explores “a geography of grief and uncertainty amid rising fascism, and reckons with a decade of American failures — all while celebrating the courage of those who sing a different song of community, of an American long drama of and yet to be born.”

Across the country men “of God” glorify guns while citing Scripture and preparing for civil war. Political rallies are aflame with giddy expectations as religious revivals. On the Far Right every thing is heightened — love into adulteration, fear into vengeance, anger into white-hot rage. Here, in the undertow, our forty-fifth president, a vessel of conspiratorial fears and fantasies, continues to rise to sainthood, and the insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt, killed January 6 at the Capitol, is beatified as a martyr of white womanhood.

Jeff Sharlet has written for many major publications, teaches writing at Dartmouth, and had his book The Family turned into a popular Netflix documentary. What a glimpse this is of the “slow civil war” brewing, about which we should all be concerned.

Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis James Davison Hunter (Yale University Press) $40.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $32.00

Okay, we’ve highlighted this one before as well and we are pleased to have sold a few. But I wanted it on this list, even if it is different in style and tone than these other gripping page-turners described above. If those keep you up late waiting to see what the hell happens next, this might put you to sleep. But, no matter: keep trying to wade through this. It has been a struggle for me, I’ll admit, but I know enough to know that Hunter is always on to something. He does a major, academic, book about once a decade or so — his last was Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality (Yale University Press in 2018) but before that the much-discussed To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World on Oxford University Press released in 2010, I think.)

Democracy and Solidarity is not a boots-on-the-ground look at white supremacy or a memoir about investigating goons racists. It isn’t even a spicy survey of the vile stuff coming from the extremes these days, but, rather, it is a scholar’s deep search into the underlying currents that give shape to civic life within our Republic. Can our democratic ways be sustained, and if so, what is needed? For those who are alarmed by the far right, as we all should be, this will put it into a deeper, and perhaps, finally, even more alarming context.

From various quarters, from the far right and the moderate right, to the moderate liberal view to the progressive left, there is a breakdown in shared assumptions about what makes our pluralistic culture tick. Can we renew the cultural assumptions of classical liberal democracy? Call it, as some have, a “sweeping history of American culture wars” or “a fresh and challenging interpretation of American in crisis”, this book is insightful and wise, a cry against the nihilism that seems to be an undercurrent of much of the breakdown of our discourse and shared values.

If you are the sort that likes to read one or two major, challenging books a year, this should be on your list. If you are a scholar, political scientist, professional theologian, or cultural critic, this obviously is a must. If you read the likes of Aaron Renn, Carl Trueman, Os Guinness, the late Jean Bethke Elshtain, Yuval Levin, Patrick Deenen or even Hannah Arendt, you should read Hunter. By the way, he thanks Tim Keller in the acknowledgments.

I especially liked this paragraph from Democracy and Solidarity:

As it was at time of the Founding, so it is now: liberal democracy in the late modern world will not find renewal without the moral imagination to envision a public life that transcends the present warring binaries, and with it, a fresh vocabulary with which to talk about and pragmatically address the genuine problems the nation and the world face. It would be a renewed ethical vision for the re-formation of public life, for the institutions that sustain it, and for the citizens who put it into place. This vision would be embedded in a mythos that doesn’t deny the story of America, but reframes it toward what it could yet be. Democratic politics would not be that vision, as I say, but it would serve it all the same. To imagine it and to give it voice would require poets more than power brokers

+++

I am sure most of us have heard of neo-Nazis and other cult-like extremist groups and maybe have had first hand encounters. Certainly we know those who have fallen under the sway of conspiracies and far-out propaganda. (Just a day or two ago online I saw a comment on a friend’s Facebook page alleging the Democratic Party of sexual trafficking. Really??) It is hard to know what to do; certainly, despite Sharlet’s language of an approaching “slow civil war” we should pray for no government shoot-outs like at Ruby Ridge or the terrible horror of the government bombing of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas or the infamous police fire-bombing of the black MOVE headquarters in a Philadelphia neighborhood in1985. There has to be a better way (and one such way, centering the gospel of Jesus Christ to so-called Christian nationalists, is explained in Disarming Leviathan, which I have mentioned several times last month.)

Of course, most of us just have to cope with ordinary relational conflicts, awkward conversations, daily questions of when to speak up and when to stay silent, how to care well for others and steward our own agency and use our moral compass in helpful ways. Maybe we are called to resist the Nazis and protest candidates who give them cover, but, for many of us, our fidelity will be less dramatic. Reading up about the dangers of the alt-right is an urgent matter for us all, I think, but pondering how to respond — beyond the obvious of being kind to all, trying to “speak the truth in love” and speaking graciously — is tricky. I think one way to consider that big question, one of the puzzle pieces, comes from the pen and big heart of a good friend, David Dark. The title of his book (which we’ve highlighted previously but would invite you to consider once again) is We Become What We Normalize. That is a phrase worth pondering.

We Become What We Normalize: What We Owe Each Other in Worlds That Demand Our Silence David Dark (Broadleaf Books) $26.99 / OUR SALE PRICE = $21.59

This is another book that we’ve highlighted before and yet I want to revisit again, here, now, too quickly. It is a book to read more than once and it is a book to ponder, maybe discuss with others. If the brave Joe Moore and Matt & Tawni Browning (above) are right that we must be vigilante and speak out against racism and anti-semitism and violent militias, and if the scholar Hunter is right that we need poets more than power-brokering pols in this fraying culture, then this book may be the life-line we need. It will poke and prod and — as a poet often does — make us scratch our heads. I can’t say that enough, and it is mostly a good thing; this book is a bit weird. In a good way.

And there are so many great lines to underline, commit to heart. “Courage is contagious”, he says. Yup. Our “presumed consent functions as a free pass for abuse.”  “In the land of the free, what do I owe people whose lives are endangered by my silence?

I’ve alluded to this before and I trust it doesn’t scare anybody off. He uses some funny words and he writes creatively. He’s deeply rooted in popular culture and can cite Bono and Kendrick and his friend Jessica Hopper (we carry her amazingly thoughtful work, The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic) and he goes on about Octavia Butler, who, among other things, was a highly-awarded a black sci fi writer. Ya dig? No, he doesn’t say that, but he does invite us to “slow your roll” and offers, in a beautiful section about Fred Rogers, what he calls a “psychic blast of care.” He recommends what he calls “observational candor.” He thinks basic self-respect demands of us that we, at least, “not disgrace oneself” by being aware of our “embodied particularity.”

Is this thing on? Yes, he says that often, and explains exactly what he means.

Ya dig?

Here is one of the provocative and vital chapter titles: “What Does Apocalypse Want From Me?” In other words, as he also puts it, we are called to “the prophetic task of naming what’s happening.” And ponder what it calls forth from us.

You see, what we allow to pass as speakable and acceptable will become normalized. Think of it simply: when we don’t protest a racist quip, racism becomes, or at least joking about racism becomes, acceptable. Normal. Our decision to not resist this has normalized it, for the room, and, perhaps — is this thing on? — for ourselves. Who is watching and listening as we make decisions? Certainly at least our own souls. David knows that as Biblical people we are called to conversions, to be transformed. We are called to be prophetic, to be open to the Spirit as the Spirit moves us to care for the common good, to create beloved community.

He is from the South, a former fundamentalist (and Limbaugh ditto-head, which he owns beautifully) and having discovered Southern folks like MLK and John Lewis, Clarence Jordan and Will Campbell, Fannie Lou Hamer and Wendell Berry, R. E. M. and Anthony Ray Hinton, plus a host of others who were religiously motivated agents of justice and goodness, he took into his worldview writers and activists from outside his culture of birth — Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan and James Baldwin and Larycia Hawkins, all agents of shalom.

You know me and my book-evaluating habits: I love seeing who informs the authors we commend and their footnotes are usually a good sign of how interesting the book is. David is a goldmine. He contains multitudes (a line he swipes from Whitman.) He’s a literature prof, too, so he knows his Jane Austin and his Thoreau and his Shakespeare. Just saying. Right next to LaBron James and rocker poet Pattie Smith. What a fun, fun book.

There is a method in the madness and it is this: we must learn to see the brokenness and the sin in ourselves and in our culture, and make wise decisions when and how to speak up against it. We become what we “sit still for” he says. What we “let slide.”  We become what we abide and the culture reflects the very ideologies and bad spirits we allow free reign. To use the language of Berrigan, we must resist.

As Dark puts it, “Honoring and remaining fully alive to your own conscience is the human assignment.”

Call it a postmodern riff on the old Edmund Burke quote about how all that really evil needs is for decent folks to remain quiet.

Again, what do we owe people whose lives are endangered by our silence?

We are, many of us, deeply aware of that, knowing we are implicated; wanting to be faithful, we may even be used to saying out loud what we think, of bearing witness, of letting our lights shine, but, David suggests, only up to a point.

And then he notes,

“Moving past that point is the risk of drama and the privilege of comedy. Both serve as a form of catharsis and both, at their most intense, can be difficult to categorize. …”

That is interesting, I think, but just an illustration of how he invites us to consider the arts — classic and contemporary, written or live — to help us see what we may not want to see. His own appreciation for artists and poets has helped him, and it could help us. (For a more conventionally written study of this, just for instance, see Mary McCampbell’s Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy Fortress Press; $28.00 / OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40. She too is a Southern Christian thinker who writes about the poppiest of pop culture and seriously classic European lit.)

Can we grow? Can we learn about the violence poured out on the least of these, the way public figures have become complicit with abuse and injustice, how we have become complicit? Want to do something about the rising dangers explored in the above books? David notes, “We don’t want to know what we don’t want to know until we do.”

That’s why we do what we do here at the bookshop: we believe God’s Spirit is alive and well, inviting people, wooing people, to be so full of the awareness of the grace God gives and so full of regenerate wonder at the goodness all around — I don’t like Blake as much as David does, but I get it, a little at least —that we can’t help but sing along with “How Can I Keep From Singing?” We break out in awe and become something new, the new humanity of peacemakers (described so beautifully at the end of Ephesians 2, for instance.) Which means, maybe slowly, maybe suddenly, we now want to know more. We are ready to take new steps. We just can’t normalize the bad stuff any more.

Bad stuff within our own lives (perhaps our apathy) or that the complex sorrows and damages of the world.

David gives us in this book a lot of stories, some wild speculations, his own vivid ruminations, some candid confessions about his mistakes and confusions. It is beautiful to see an outspoken voice for justice, a witty teacher who nicely embodies that old saying that good religion should “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” On Twitter and in this book Dark boldly calls us to confront the powers, even as he admits his own complicity and failures. That sort of honesty isn’t in every book you pick up, ya know. We Become What We Normalize is a very rare book, indeed. I am happy to recommend it.

David uses two words that I wish he’d define a bit better — I’m slow, I guess, or not fluent in his spiel. I stuck with it and it all made good sense (so I guess he might say, what’s the problem, then? Fair enough.) But, still, a heads up. He talks a lot about being a reactive person or a responsive one. There’s a difference. One is not so good, the other is more richly human and humane and righteous. The goal of this book is to resist the shame and ego and fear and whatever else is causing us to be reactive and to “slow our roll” and consider our own lives, our own hearts, our own motives and concerns, and to be responsible humans, using our God-given agency, even on and in God’s good internet and what more formal guys call the public square. Can we do that? I suspect we all need some help.

You know that I’ve commended thoughtful tools for helping us be faithful in how we speak (a key component of a peacemaking lifestyle) that respects others well. Titles like Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict by the poet and writer Marilyn McEntyre, Love is the Resistance by Ashley Abercrombie, Six Conversations by Heather Holleman, Learning to Disagree by John Inazu, and the fabulous, one-of-kind Loving Disagreement: Fighting for Community Through the Fruit of the Spirit by Kathy Khang & Matt Mikalatos, are some of our favs that we suggest. These days we all need some extra skills in this area.

But We Become What We Normalize by David Dark is on another level — playful and creative, yes, deadly serious, indeed, full of humble stories and holding up heros who might inspire our own creative resistance. For instance, he tells about Bree Newsome, that brave woman who shimmed up that South Carolina Capitol flagpole and removed the pro-slavery rebel flag, “in the name of Jesus.” Yes, she was arrested, but so? She also made history.

David also lifts up the testimony of Greta Thunberg, his own Sunday school teacher dad, Tami Sawyer (of Shelby County, Memphis, TN who campaigned to make more public a public park by removing statues of terrorist Nathan Bedford Forrest), the whistleblower Reality Winner, alongside the aforementioned Fred Rogers, and others who are, in his memorable phrase, “artisans of moral seriousness.”

There is one thing that I think I highlighted in the BookNotes review I did previously. I wrote about what may be his two most remarkable chapters. First, he describes how to be more discerning about what he playfully calls “White Supremacist AntiChrist Poltergeist.” That’s a mouthful and a headful and you’ve got to read it. What a chapter! (Later, he also names these as “reigning deceptions.”) Then he writes about what he playfully calls “Robot Soft Exorcism.” It is a bit odd but exceedingly curious in how it explains and explores what the Bible calls principalities and powers. (See Michael Bird and N.T. Wright’s recent Jesus and the Powers for a sensible, book-length treatment.) I like how in this chapter about exercising robots, David largely explores how to delineate the humans within the robots.

To be, as some put it, both pastoral and prophetic.

He writes,

I wrestle not against flesh and blood. But I do get a little punchy with our reigning robots. I owe it to the flesh and blood within the robots to get punchy. I owe it to myself. This calls for discernment.

With enough care (breathing and speaking slowly) I can choose contemplation over projection, responsiveness over reactivity. I can gather my wits and remember, The robots aren’t people, but they do contain them. They, in fact, are powered by them…

He wants our engagement “to bend towards love.” He wants us to “address our fellow human beings as something other than their robots.” I don’t know any other book that struggles to make clear our complex contexts and milieu, laden as they are with idols and ideologies, in zeitgeists and social imaginaries, our decisions shaping institutions and bureaucracies, that then in turn shape (captivate?) us. Ha — you’ll be glad he doesn’t write like that!  He does say “reactivity can’t drive out reactivity.” He doesn’t want “power-over” another, but shared humanness, “power-with.”  It is not “us vs them.” “There is no them, as the healing mantra has it,” he says.

A line to share from his chapter 6, a bit more than half-way through: “beauty prepares the heart for justice.” He writes movingly about the famous story of contralto Marian Anderson not being allowed to sing at a DAR event in 1939 when Eleanor Roosevelt gave up her spot among the DAR and invited Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for an integrated audience.

Near the end of the book Dark quotes one of my favorite Wendell Berry books, Berry’s study of poet (and doctor) William Carlos Williams of Rutherford, New Jersey. Berry expands on William’s adage “No ideas but in things.”  Again, this is granular.

Did I mention that this book uses a lot of poetry and visionary stuff to make some very profound points? Or at least to raise up stuff that might become profound points for us?  Bringing our most responsible selves into the world (“especially when we feel belittled, shut down, or silenced” ) is, again, as David suggests, “our most essential task.”

He closes the book with this great and hopeful and generous line: “Let’s have at it together.”

What do you say? Order one today, please, and maybe spread the word.

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