I wasn’t sure what to make of the ping-pong rhythm between “religious freedom” and economic deregulation, God and mammon, that marked the second night of the GOP convention until Cissie Graham Lynch, rock-jawed granddaughter of Billy, took the pulpit to put the fear of God in us. “In America,” she warned, “we have not yet experienced physical persecution.” Not yet.
Even as liberals fear the prospect of a real-life Handmaid’s Tale, a future first lady Mother Pence, the Christian right has long relied on dystopian fiction to scare the faithful into line. There’s the influential 1972 evangelical movie A Thief in the Night, in which the “United Nations Imperium of Total Emergency” (UNITE) tries to code citizens with the mark of the beast prophesied in the Book of Revelation; there’s the 16-volume mega-selling rapture franchise Left Behind; and now there’s the Republican National Convention.
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