One of the most moving and positive of the stories that you tell involves Tammy Faye Bakker.
“Well, they often say it starts in California, moves to the east coast and then moves to Europe.” We live in the world that Trump created, we live in the world that the tech utopians created, the libertarians, the culture warriors.”Īnd there’s a sense that their present is our future. But also, of course, we do live in their world. I went to Broadmoor for The Psychopath Test, to what used to be called the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane – this is in England, of course – and I turned to a nurse and I said, ‘God, I feel so lucky to be in Broadmoor.’ The nurse looked at me like I was nuts and said, ‘Well, we’ve got some spare beds if you like.’ That’s how I feel when I go to America. “The way America inhabits our consciousness now is of a different order from what it was 30 or 40 years ago. Jon Ronson: ‘Is there something inherent about the way that we live on the internet that is doing something to our brains that’s very new and destructive?’ The ripples were what then happened in Europe and everywhere else, but the pebbles did seem to be American stories.” Those were the pebbles thrown into the pond and that’s what I was looking for. But it struck me that, when Christian evangelists were prodded into becoming warriors in the early 1970s in America, and from that came the rise of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, the escalation of conflict on both sides that followed on from that all took place in America. “There were a few British stories I could have done. Are the culture wars essentially American? But the stories you describe are all American. You can draw a direct political line from the original Roe v Wade decision to what happened with our own Eighth Amendment. Podcast: Jon Ronson on the origins of the culture wars Your browser does not support the audio element.Ī rguments over abortion are something we’re familiar with in Ireland. It’s such a fascinating and unexpected story.” And this weird father and son, through a very odd set of circumstances, manipulated Christian evangelists into being anti-abortion. The Christian right were ambivalent, pro-choice even. After Roe v Wade, it was only the Roman Catholics who were protesting – quite quietly and peacefully – outside clinics. What’s so interesting about the latter is how the Christian right were manipulated into being anti-abortion. The first two great culture wars of the modern era were about diversity of thought in school textbooks and about abortion. It tends to stay away from economic matters. “The best definition I read was ‘the battle for dominance over conflicting values’.
We spoke ahead of his trip to Dublin to present a live version of the podcast. His latest podcast series, Things Fell Apart, goes back three or four decades to find the origin stories for our current vicious culture wars in the words of some of the key protagonists: a film-maker who kick-started the modern anti-abortion movement the radio host who ignited a moral panic about satanic child abuse a transgender women thrown out of a feminist music festival. For more than 20 years, writer and broadcaster Jon Ronson has been exploring the darker and odder corners of contemporary society.