About Jeff Sharlet

I've been reporting on the intersection of religion and politics since the craters of the Twin Towers were still smoking. That was when an acquaintance who called himself “a follower of Jesus” visited me in NYC and explained he was there to—as if in strange sympathy with Al Qaeda—”survey the ruins of secularism."

Since then, I've published eight books. That “follower of Jesus” led me into what became The Family, which became a Netflix documentary series of the same name. Another, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, gives this Substack its name. Most of my work is in the U.S., but I’ve also reported on the so-called “Kill-the-Gays” law in Uganda, Russia’s anti-LGBTQ+ crackdown—inspired by the U.S. right, which in turn has adopted ideas put into practice by Putin—and the ways American Christian fundamentalisms shape what I think of as “gender nationalism” around the globe.

I never meant to spend decades reporting on the varieties of far right belief. I confess fascination; I admit fear. I love and write about many other matters, music and books and photography and Vermont, where I live, and everyday people in all their glory. The book I’m proudest of is This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers, which is not about rightwing beliefs at all, and second-most is Sweet Heaven When I Die, in which they make only a few appearances. (One of those is a partial basis for season two of the Amazon documentary series, Shiny Happy People: A Teenage Holy War.)

Most of my work is intimate: I spend time with people. Some of these people are scary, but none of them are “monsters.” If only it were that easy. We could push them back under the bed. But they’re human, like us. I don’t “humanize” my subjects. They are, for better and worse, already human. My work is to see them as fully as possible. Our work, those troubled by what we see, is to imagine how this world we share now could be otherwise.