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Hi, I’m Lauren Sandler. My new book is called AMERICAN PROPHECY: One Family, Two Nations, and a World on Fire. It's a story about *an* American family -- and a story about *the* American family.
What made me want to write about pastor Rick Joyner, a man of renown in the end times-minded Evangelical world, was his less-known family. Five children, all raised in his right-wing church, now all leftists. The eldest daughter, Anna Jane, a climate-change crusader, a prophet of a different so-called end times than the ones her father preached about. Their mother, lodged uncomfortably between her children and the husband God had chosen for her. A family holding fast to one another across an ideological chasm, fighting one another in public, breaking bread in private, defined by the deep narrative of a shared tribe.
The Joyner family is hardly a neat microcosm of the country—that doesn't exist—nor is it a simple metaphor. But in their story, I thought there might be a way of understanding how Americans had tipped into extreme division and what it meant to live there. Perhaps you live there, too, in some measure, debating whether you can still speak to family members because of their political views, wondering if you're targeted in your neighborhood, trying to figure out how things got so fractured so quickly.
In the 1990s, as a young journalist, I reported on the emerging world of the Christian Right. In a historical flash, a movement had gone from cultish fringe to suburban mainstream. Its advance team held power radically disproportionate from its numbers: movement conservatives whispering into the ears of presidents and senators, influencing legislation, drenching the soil with victimization and rage. But it was the young Americans they hooked, at skate parks and on military bases alike -- the young Americans I wrote about in my first book, RIGHTEOUS -- who would grow up to worship a corrupt demagogue from Queens who inherited a real estate fortune and a taste for unchecked power.
Then, in the post–9/11 era of bloodthirsty evangelicalism, after the rise of Fox News but before smartphones and social-media algorithms, this population significantly expanded—and, even more significantly, organized. Pastors didn’t worry about preaching politics from the pulpit like their forefathers had; the church was the ultimate vehicle to get out the vote for Christian dominionism. Truthiness was a new concept, and reality television was somewhat nascent. Climate change remained solvable, even as the end of days loomed. That time was running out on Election Day, 2016, when this book begins. And it certainly would be after Election Day, 2024, when AMERICAN PROPHECY ends. The country has held together nominally. Will the Joyners? What might it cost them? What might it cost all of us?
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