This past year, as I watched my deepest fears actualize, I was thrilled to discover Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks, a darkly comic novel that explores an America overtaken by Christian extremists.
I’ve spent much of my adulthood terrified that Christian extremists would take over America, and, at the same time, irritated that many of my peers seemed oblivious to my concerns - or they did until 2016, when 81% of white evangelicals voted the Religious Right into power with the election of Donald Trump. When I was fifteen, my father sent me to a Christian re-education camp affiliated with Mike Pence. Reagan promised, as the current inhabitant of the White House has promised, to support conservative judges who respected the sanctity of human life, “traditional family values”, and prayer in public schools. With the election of Ronald Reagan, the Moral Majority sought to seize control of the federal government. The organization was crusading against the “signs of cultural decline”: abortion had been legalized, divorce and access to birth control were contributing to the deterioration of the traditional family unit, and women, homosexuals, and people of color were petitioning for equal rights. My father became a born-again Christian in 1979, the year Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority swept through the country. Sydnee Monday and Petra Mayer adapted it for the Web.I grew up in the America which, until recently, was not often discussed, the one ruled by fundamentalists. Peter Breslow produced and edited this interview for broadcast. And I think our books are very different, in the sense that, in The Handmaid's Tale, she's created such a spectacular and drastic world that does draw on elements of historical fact, but which is really so separate from our own world, whereas I think that the world of Red Clocks could frankly happen next week. I've admired Margaret Atwood for a really long time, and I love her work. But that doesn't mean that a 15-and-a-half-year-old doesn't get to use that word for herself. And certainly I wasn't using the word clump to myself. I remember when I got the call that I was pregnant after many, many tries. I think that's where the complexity lies in this conversation. I think that she does want to distance herself but she's - she doesn't know what she's doing, you know, she hasn't quite turned 16 and she herself is adopted, which makes her decision to seek an abortion more complicated. The Week's Best Stories From NPR Books In 'The Power,' Women Develop A Weapon That Changes Everything
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