Journalist and author Josiah Hesse was raised an evangelical Christian in Mason City, Iowa. But he eventually left the church and the state.
Hesse writes about that journey, and Mason’s City’s relationship with right-wing Christianity in his new memoir “On Fire for God: Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right-A Personal History.”
Book excerpt: ‘On Fire for God’
By Josiah Hesse
From “On Fire for God” by Josiah Hesse. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Josiah Hesse.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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