Want to sell your book? Vilify the Christians who raised you.

Last year, here in Portland, I went to an author event at my local bookstore. The book was called “On Fire for God: Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right.” It was a memoir by Josiah Hesse.

The event description said the memoir was about Hesse’s “bleak and difficult childhood in a small, rural Evangelical community in Iowa.”

My guess is that his literary agent or his editor understood how hungry mainstream publishers are for books that attack and slander the Christian faith.

Apparently, Hesse suffered mental anguish as a child when he was told by church elders that he was going to be tortured in hell for his sins.

Breaking with his church and family while still in his teens, he struck out on his