One of the stock characters in American public life is the political/religious convert who becomes the expert on the evil he once was. Pick your era or locality of evil, and you’ll find ’em. And while there are certainly authentic converts from totalist or criminal societies who have truths to tell, for others it becomes a confidence game of ever newly found or escalating evil.
Frederick Clarkson is a Senior Research Analyst at PRA and has written about politics and religion for more than four decades. His work has appeared in a wide range of publications from Mother Jones, Church & State, and Ms. Magazine to The Christian Science Monitor, Salon.com, and Religion Dispatches. He is the author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between In the classical definition, a system in which governmental leaders are clergy. Learn more and Democracy, and editor of Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America. He has worked as an investigative editor at Planned Parenthood Federation of America; as Communications Director at the Institute for Democracy Studies; and co-founded the group blog, Talk to Action.
