The Community Book Study: Notes from The Power Worshippers
Tonight we move into Chapter 7
Chapter 6 asks how Christian nationalists use the past to justify the present. Ask a room full of people that question and you don't get a tidy answer … you get everyone's family. That's how Sunday nights tend to go, and this one was no exception: we moved from theology into food scarcity, into a mother's memory of picking cotton, into fairy tales, into how modern debate works, and back out again. It felt scattered while we were in it. In hindsight, every thread was answering the same question from a different angle: how does personal experience harden into a story people will defend past the point of evidence?
Scarcity as inheritance
We opened with food, almost by accident. Several members grew up in households shaped by the Depression or by rural poverty — gardens the length of a field, a rented locker at the local dairy for frozen meat, a bakery you paid to use rather than owned an oven yourself. One member described her mother going without dinner so her children could eat, then being caught later eating crackers alone in the kitchen. Another remembered her brothers eating cornflakes before bed because there wasn't enough.
What struck the group wasn't the hardship itself but how long it outlives the hardship. Decades later, some of these same families still can't throw away a paper plate. One member's brother refused to buy his daughters a dollhouse because he'd grown up sharing everything and didn't want his own kids to have that luxury — even though not sharing was, by then, entirely affordable. Scarcity becomes a worldview long after scarcity stops being a fact. That turned out to be the hinge the whole night swung on: memory doesn't just record what happened. It builds a lens, and the lens outlasts the event.
Whose cotton field is this, exactly
That lens is exactly what the chapter is describing. One member told a story about her mother, who often says: *I picked cotton too. My fingers bled on that cotton. Don't tell me only Black workers built the South.* And she did pick cotton — that part is true. What she leaves out, her daughter said, is that she was gleaning leftover cotton after the main harvest, for money, on land her own father owned. She wasn't picking to survive. She was picking for pocket money, and she got to choose whether to do it at all.
The group sat with this for a while. It's not that her memory is false. It's that one true, painful, personal detail — bleeding fingers — is being asked to stand in for the entire history of forced labor in the South, and to cancel out any account that doesn't match it. When someone else's history is offered as a fuller picture, it doesn't just feel like new information. It feels like an attack on something that actually happened to her. That's a hard thing to argue someone out of, because you're not really arguing about history at that point. You're arguing about whether her pain counts.
Reification and idea laundering
Two vocabulary words did a lot of work this session, and both describe how a personal or invented story gets upgraded to fact.
Reification: treating a belief or an invented narrative as though it were established fact. The example on the table: a fabricated anecdote circulating about a public figure's supposed work ethic. When challenged that it wasn't a true story, the response was that it didn't need to be true, because it reflected who he "really is." That's reification in miniature — the story stops needing to be factual once it's doing the job you want it to do.
Idea laundering: a term one member had researched after a conversation about how repackaging works. A controversial claim gets dressed in gentler language while keeping its original shape intact. Segregation reframed as "cultural differences" was the example that came up, pulled from one of my own past newsletters.
Tracing ‘settled fact’ back to its source
From there we turned to the chapter's discussion question directly: name a historical claim you once accepted as settled and later had to unlearn. A few examples are worth sitting with — and worth verifying properly before any of us repeats them as fact (see the note below):
- The Columbus narrative most of us were taught in school versus the account left by Bartolomé de las Casas — worth a correction here: Las Casas didn't sail with Columbus himself. His father and uncles did, on the second voyage, and Las Casas grew up hearing the stories before arriving in Hispaniola himself around 1502. What he left behind is still an eyewitness account of the Spanish colonial system in its first decades, just not of Columbus's own initial voyage.
- A widely circulated story about George Washington praying alone at Valley Forge, witnessed by a Quaker miller named Isaac Potts. This one is worth retelling accurately: it traces to Parson Weems, the same biographer who invented the cherry-tree myth, published in the 1804–1816 editions of his Washington biography — five to seventeen years after Washington's death. The story wasn't disputed by Washington's own daughters (he had none biologically); it was Potts's daughter, Ruth-Anna, whose handwritten account is the closest thing to corroboration, and even that differs in details from Weems's version. Historians also note Potts likely wasn't married yet at the time the story claims he told his wife about it. It's a legend with a documented paper trail, not a fabrication out of nowhere — but it's legend, not eyewitness history.
- The original Grimm fairy tales featured biological mothers as the villains in stories like Snow White and Hansel and Gretel. Folklorist Jack Zipes and others have traced the change through the editions: the first 1812 collection was criticized as unsuitable for children, and the Grimms, led primarily by Wilhelm, revised later editions to swap in stepmothers, reportedly out of a wish to preserve motherhood as sacred.
- The 325 AD Council of Nicaea was a gathering of Christian bishops with no Jewish participants, and Constantine's own follow-up letter announcing the Easter-dating decision explicitly frames it as separating the church from Jewish practice. The Trinity as formalized doctrine was very much argued into existence there, not inherited whole from the earliest church.
That last thread turned personal fast. One of our members, a stepmother of over forty years who legally adopted her husband's children within months of marrying him, talked about never fully shedding the "wicked stepmother" framing in her own family, regardless of what she actually did or didn't do. It landed as a small, uncomfortable proof of the chapter's larger point: the stories we inherit shape how we're allowed to be seen, whether or not they're accurate.
Reading the document itself
Naming a claim is one thing. Knowing how to check it is another, and that's really where the night's threads converge. When you sit down with a primary source, three questions do most of the work:
1. Who wrote it, and why? A land charter written by a king claiming authority he didn't actually hold (several English monarchs styled themselves "King of France" long after that stopped being true) is not a neutral record — it's a claim to power, dressed as description.
2. Who was it written for? A private diary meant for no other eyes — like William Bradford's journal — tends to be more trustworthy than something written for an audience. Edward Winslow's writings, by contrast, were meant to recruit more colonists, so they read differently.
3. What's the author's bias, and can you find it?Everyone has one. The job isn't to find a bias-free source — there isn't one — it's to know what you're correcting for.
Debate is not the same as truth
The last thread of the night was rhetoric itself — specifically Schopenhauer's The Art of Being Right, which one member is currently reading. His point, badly needed in 2026: in a debate, people aren't trying to reach truth. They're trying to win. One member described a Tibetan Buddhist debate tradition where the person defending an idea sits in the center of a circle while others fire questions at them — not to find truth, but to practice staying calm under pressure. That distinction — performance versus inquiry — came up again around the modern tactic of overwhelming an opponent with more claims than they can address in real time. Nobody in the room thought this was a new trick. Several of us just hadn't had a name for it before.
It's the same move as reification and idea laundering, really, just live instead of written down: make the story feel true faster than anyone can check it.
Where curiosity fits into all of this
We ended, as we often do, somewhere quieter. A few members talked about growing up in households or school systems where curiosity itself wasn't encouraged — where questions were treated as a kind of insubordination. One member, a longtime educator, talked about deliberately filling her classroom with hornets' nests, fossils, and "weird rocks" specifically to invite the kind of open-ended wondering nobody modeled for her growing up. It felt like the right closing note for a chapter about how easily belief calcifies into fact: the antidote isn't more information. It's staying curious enough to keep checking your own.
How the book study works
We meet on Zoom TONIGHT at 7 p.m. EST to talk through the Chapter 7. Come as you are — you don’t need to have every line annotated, just read the introduction and bring one thing that struck you.
To get the Zoom link: comment below or send me a message, and I’ll make sure it gets to you before Sunday. The link goes out to every paid subscriber who wants in. If you have been attending, continue using the same link and passcode.
Questions to consider for Chapter 7
1. Stewart borrows the “laboratories of democracy” framing (originally about states testing policy for the public good) and shows it repurposed to test theocratic policy instead. Where else have you seen a phrase or institution built for one purpose get quietly redirected toward another?
2. The chapter argues that state legislatures are an easier target than Congress — less scrutiny, less media coverage, faster turnover. Has anyone in the group followed state-level politics more closely than national, and what did that teach you that national coverage doesn’t?
3. Model legislation lets the same bill appear in a dozen statehouses with local sponsors’ names on it. Have you ever discovered that something you thought was a local, homegrown decision was actually part of a much bigger coordinated push?
4. This is a strategy chapter, not a theology chapter — it’s about mechanics, not belief. Does understanding the “how” change how you feel about the “why,” or are those two separate problems for you?
5. Bring it back to the personal, like we did with Chapter 6: has your own state or town ever felt the effects of one of these coordinated pushes, even if nobody around you named it that way at the time?