Any American who’s attended mainstream church services knows all about hymnal singing, water dunking and wafer eating. But what goes down when Satanists and Scientologists meet? J.C. Hallman’s new non-fiction book THE DEVIL IS A GENTLEMAN: EXPLORING AMERICA’S RELIGIOUS FRINGE – read our review here – explores this very topic, as Hallman researched firsthand.

The author of the acclaimed – yet criminally underread – THE CHESS ARTIST: GENIUS, OBSESSION, AND THE WORLD’S OLDEST GAME, journalist Hallman sheds a little more light on his subjects in this quick Q&A with BOOKGASM.

BOOKGASM: How did you select which religious fringes to cover, and were there any that had to be cut for whatever reason?

HALLMAN: First off, let me say thanks to BOOKGASM and its readers. Literary weblogs are performing a very important function right now in the whole business of books, and I’m flattered to have been granted this forum. It’s nice to know there’s an audience out there that isn’t concerned, first and foremost, with bottom lines.

The thing with writing about religion, I think, is that it’s impossible to be comprehensive. You can read and write your whole life and barely scratch the surface of the subject. When I began to compile a list of groups to investigate, I followed a couple of rules: They had to speak to something inherently American, and they had to have emerged in the 20th century. Now, I broke these rules to some extent, but what was more important than the basic facts of any particular group was coming up with a collection that was, at least on some level, representative of something. You can’t be comprehensive, but you can at least aspire to representation. I went with a couple Christian groups, a couple Pagan groups, a few that seemed to have sprung out of nothing at all, and Atheism to round things out. Together, they made a portrait that felt accurate to me.

No group was cut, but I did abandon the investigation of a couple – snake handlers and the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship – because I felt I already had a fair handle on the Christian side of things. If you’re in the ring with the Christian Wrestling Federation, do you have to take up a serpent, too, to understand the Christian fringe?

BOOKGASM: You remark several times about being spooked, but at any point, did your “fight or flight” instinct kick in and tell you, “I should not be here. I should not be doing this”?

HALLMAN: There were definitely a few moments when things felt sketchy – such as sneaking onto the razed foundation of the house where the Heaven’s Gate members killed themselves, or finding myself in a Satanic dungeon in remote Canada – but the only time I really felt like I was doing something I didn’t want to do was in Scientology. I was attending L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday celebration in Los Angeles. It wasn’t that it scared me; it was just kind of gross. It was religion as the Oscars, and that ceremony had just taken place not that far away. About halfway through the celebration, I wanted to leave – I wasn’t interested, it wasn’t moving in any way – so I did. That’s how I ended the Scientology section of the book.

BOOKGASM: What do you think it is that people find attractive about these groups that you and I and the majority of our nation sees as utterly strange?

HALLMAN: It’s pretty easy to take pot shots at groups like this. They’re routinely mocked. And they are pretty strange, there’s no doubt about it. But one of the jobs I sort of set for myself in this book, one of the ideas I had, was that I would spend at least a little time in each chapter trying to portray ceremonies or observances in such a way that you, as the reader, would get a sense of just this question. What’s attractive about them? How do these people understand themselves? Sometimes it’s the very otherness of a religion that draws people.

THE DEVIL IS A GENTLEMAN spends a good amount of time on the life and work of William James, whose THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE answered this question for a different century. One of the things that James said is that people are drawn to the religions that are in keeping with their “personal susceptibilities.” If you feel left out of culture, you’ll find a religion that speaks to that. The utter strangeness of a belief is precisely the thing that folks like this respond to – they don’t join in spite of it, but because of it. People come in varieties – that’s why there are a variety of religions. I kept that idea in mind throughout the work on this book.

BOOKGASM: Have you been harassed by any of the more suspect groups since the book came out?

HALLMAN: Not yet, but the book’s just coming out. Check back with me in a couple months – if I don’t respond, call my editor. He knows what to do.

BOOKGASM: What’s next from you?

HALLMAN: I’m working on an article about Pleistocene rewilding for Harper’s Magazine. It’s possible that a book may spin off from that.

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