“It was what I found in the archives that inspired me to write the book—Craddock’s unpublished book manuscripts on everything from ancient sex worship to contemporary marriage reform. And then there was her journal of mystical experiences—a diary so baffling and intense in its combination of spiritualism and sexuality as to demand attention.”
Has there ever been a major pop group more concerned with exploring personal anxieties, aspirations, and narratives through music defined so fundamentally by religious themes? The turmoil and paranoia of the last decade—wars, attacks, economic crashes, myriad color-coded fears—run through Arcade Fire’s three full-length records. The newest effort induces a look back to previous decades, when suburbia seemed to offer placidity and refuge from the wilderness downtown.
With the swing to the Right of the 1950s, conservatives began to deploy “Judeo-Christian” in the fight against “Godless Communism,” contrasting it with “the communist projection of man as a producing, consuming animal to be used and discarded.”
Kevin M. Lowe is an independent scholar of American religious history. He received his doctorate from the Pennsylvania State University in 2013, and is the author of Baptized with the Soil: Christian…