Loving it. Some of it is interesting, but it’s mostly a very detailed history of American Christianity, with some lip service paid to other types of magical thinking (I’d say 75% or more is devoted to Christianity). I get the reasons Christianity is so much more entrenched here than in the rest of the developed world. Not quite buying its suggestion that it has always dominated all of America - the enlightened, Greek philosophy influenced, more deist than Christian founders somehow were chosen by all these magical thinkers in the founding period. And Great Britain was all dreamy and susceptible to longing for an idyllic past when it stumbled into Brexit, in part because of credulity to disinformation. And the greatest example of descent into magical thinking in the last 100 years might be shared by Nazi aryan fantasies and Japanese man-god emperors on earth. Americans got nuthin’ on them.

But I do buy this “death by a thousand cuts” descent into magical thinking. Like the book says, speaking in tongues was a wackjob end of Christianity when I was a kid, and now it’s Joel Osteen. Thoroughly unchristian people like Trump claiming Christianity is under imaginary assault, and that he himself is the vanguard, would have been laughed off the podium a few years back. Now it’s just another rally. Cultish thinking in one party is an everyday, routine affair.

The too-old guy seems the clear lesser evil to me.