About the Author
Michelle Goldberg is a freelance writer who has reported from all over the United States, as well as from Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Israel and the West Bank. One constant in her peripatetic career is a fascination with the role of ideology in politics, leading her to report extensively on both sides of America’s ever-seething culture war.

A native of Buffalo, New York, Goldberg saw that war up close during the Spring of Life, the 1992 campaign by Operation Rescue to close the city's abortion clinics. As a high-school student, she would drive to the clinics before homeroom to link arms with the hundreds of pro-choice activists who converged to keep the facilities open. Her interest in the conservative movement was reawakened in her early 20s, when, after finishing her Masters Degree in journalism at UC Berkeley and moving to San Francisco, she wrote a series of articles about the ex-gay movement. She went to a huge ex-gay convention in Los Angeles and later profiled a group of men living in a Northern California “rehab” center that promised to cure them of their homosexuality. It was her initiation into the mainstream, non-violent side of the evangelical movement, a movement that, while almost invisible on the coasts, dominates the culture in much of the country.

In 2002, after a year of traveling and reporting in India and East Asia, Goldberg moved to New York City and took a job as a news and politics reporter with Salon.com. There she covered all aspects of the ascendant political right, from the neocons to the theocrats. She was one of the first to expose how a tiny far-right Catholic sect convinced Bush to cut off support for the United Nations Population Fund, which promotes reproductive health care and safe childbirth in the third world. She wrote about faith-based abstinence-only education and crisis pregnancy centers and about the right-wing attempts to take over the federal judiciary.

In addition to Salon, Goldberg's work has appeared in publications including Rolling Stone, The New York Observer, New York, In These Times, The New Republic online, The UK Guardian, The Utne Reader, Newsday and other newspapers nationwide. She was a columnist for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and for Shift Magazine, and has taught at New York University's Graduate School of Journalism. She is a fellow at the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. Kingdom Coming is her first book.

AUTHOR INTERVIEWS

Artvoice:
http://artvoice.com/issues/v5n31/salvation_nation

Alternet:
http://www.alternet.org/story/38830/

Gothamist:
http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2006/06/16/
michelle_goldbe_1.php

Order the Book

Kingdom Coming:
The Rise of Christian Nationalism
By Michelle Goldberg
Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton

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PRAISe for kingdom coming

“Michelle Goldberg has done the impossible. She's written a serious, scathing, eye-opening expose of the ongoing takeover of our country by rightwing Christians– and somehow managed to make it witty, funny, and humane. If it were satire, Kingdom Coming would be hilarious. Unfortunately, it's all true – things are even worse than you thought. Read it while you can!”

–Katha Pollitt, columnist, The Nation ; author, Virginity or Death! : And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time

 
“America’s theocrats have to be seen, heard, and read to be believed. Not all of us have the acute senses, stamina, guts and intelligence to uncover these forces of unreason and tyranny directly, so we rely on scouts. Michelle Goldberg is one of our indispensable scouts, and Kingdom Coming is a brave and important book. If you cherish plurality and reason, read it to get the bad news—and to restore your faith in journalism.”

–Todd Gitlin, Professor of Journalism, Columbia University, and author of The Intellectuals and the Flag

 
“Michelle Goldberg ventured into the heartland of American fundamentalist extremism -- and returned to warn us of the authoritarian ambitions that lie behind the moralistic posturing of the religious right.  Every patriot who still cherishes the freedoms we inherited from the nation’s founders should read her book.”

– Joe Conason, author of The Hunting of the President, Big Lies, and The Raw Deal

“Michelle Goldberg takes us on an eye-opening journey through the Christian right grass- roots, from the evolution battles in Dover, Pennsylvania to Roy’s Rock in Alabama and beyond. Along the way, she makes a devastating case that underlying this movement’s campaigns against abortion or gay marriage is a tremendous will to power, an ambition to achieve Christian domination of our public life and laws. Kingdom Coming offers a stark warning that our democracy is under attack from within.”

–Esther Kaplan, author of With God on Their Side: George W. Bush and the Christian Right

 “Kingdom Coming reveals just how thoroughly our national discourse has been corrupted by the mad work of religious literalists.  Goldberg demonstrates — elegantly and persuasively— that tens of millions of our neighbors are working each day to obliterate the separation between church and state, to supplant scientific rationality with Iron Age fantasies, and to achieve a Christian theocracy in the 21st century. This is a terrifying and necessary book.”

–Sam Harris, author, The End of Faith

“A chilling and lucid investigation into the rise of Christian extremism in America, as well as a how-to guide for thinking Americans who wish to preserve their civil liberties against the coming onslaught. An important book.”

–Julia Scheeres, author of Jesusland

“Tocqueville said in 1840, 'Various forms of religious madness are quite common in the United States.'  Michelle Goldberg demonstrates that various forms of religious madness are still quite common. Tocqueville thought that American democracy could contain the danger. Can it still? Only with an effort. That is Michelle Goldberg's well-illustrated and eloquently expressed point, and she is right to make that point, and we had better pay attention.”

– Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism and Power and the Idealists

“Michelle Goldberg provides a critical wake up call for all Americans about a coalition of right wing Christian conservative groups determined to remake the United States into a Christian nation ruled by their conception of Jesus' will. Every American who cherishes religious freedom, civil liberties and the separation of church and state must read Kingdom Coming.”

–Abraham H. Foxman, National Director, Anti-Defamation League; author, Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism

“Michelle Goldberg takes us on a superbly reported inside tour of the far-out Christian Right, distinguished by its contempt for democracy in this world in the hope of total victory over nonbelievers in the world to come. This book should scare every American who cherishes our secular Constitution and its separation of church and state. ”

–Susan Jacoby, author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism