ON FIRE FOR GOD Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right - a Personal History

Independent journalist Josiah Hesse takes on the religious right in this harrowing memoir of growing up in 1980s-90s Mason City, Iowa. As corporate farming caused the collapse of family farms and evangelical churches were succumbing to what he describes as the destructive corruption of the prosperity gospel, his family disintegrated into a vicious cycle of poverty, shame, guilt, sex, and drugs. He tells this story with earnest intensity, mimicking the cadence of the famous preacher Billy Graham. His narrative is replete with unsavory sexual encounters, violence, and the advent of the Midwestern opioid crisis. Hesse even creates chilling voices for the demons that, to this day, continue to give him nightmares. [Published: JANUARY 2026]