About Jeff Sharlet

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

Since then, I've published eight books, one of which, The Family, became a Netflix documentary series of the same name, another of which, 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, the beginning of 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 rightwing 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.

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.