July 20, 2026: ‘On Fire for God’ with author Josiah Hesse

Summary

Colorado Matters – July 20, 2026: "On Fire for God" with author Josiah Hesse

Main Theme & Purpose

This Colorado Matters episode, hosted by Ryan Warner and recorded live at the Denver Press Club, features Denver-based journalist and author Josiah Hesse discussing his new memoir: On Fire for God: Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right. The episode explores Hesse’s experiences with religious trauma growing up in an evangelical family in rural Iowa, the psychological and economic impacts of that upbringing, and the broader social forces shaping American Christianity and the Midwest. The conversation weaves together personal memoir, journalistic investigation, and critical analysis of culture, poverty, politics, and faith.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Religious Trauma and the Inner World of an Evangelical Childhood

• Caldonia: Personification of Shame

  • Hesse introduces "Caldonia," a figment of his imagination that embodied the shame, fear, and contradictions of his evangelical upbringing ([02:07], [03:35]).
  • Quote: "I felt just an overwhelming pressure cooker of shame. Shame building on shame. Because I was ashamed of the things. Things I was ashamed of. So it was just something that was compounded and you had meta shame. Exactly. Shame squared." – Josiah Hesse ([03:35])
  • Hesse describes a state of chronic nervous-system hypervigilance, leading to dissociation and memory gaps ([04:13]).
  • Quote: "There are, you know, swaths of my childhood that I have a difficult time remembering, or I remember it as just staring at people's shoes or patterns in the carpet when things just became too difficult to handle." – Josiah Hesse ([04:13])

• Religious Ritual and Self-Harm

  • Hesse recounts emotionally charged church camps, coercive rituals, and developing patterns of self-inflicted harm ([05:18]-[08:09]).
  • Quote: "The children are weeping and handing over all their money. Used tissues litter the church floor, making me think of dead bodies spread across a battlefield…a voice speaks within my head. That’s the voice of Caldonia." – Josiah Hesse ([05:50])

• What is Religious Trauma?

  • Hesse explains the legitimacy of religious trauma as a subset of complex PTSD, detailing symptoms and impacts ([08:33]).
  • Quote: “It’s a subset of complex PTSD... Cognitive impairment, difficulty socializing, you’re often behind in school, a feeling of shame, dissociation from your body.” – Josiah Hesse ([08:33])

2. Family, Compassion, and Complexity

• Empathy for Evangelicals

  • Hesse insists the book is not intended to shame his family or community, but rather to explore how good people end up entangled in harmful ideologies ([10:52]).
  • Quote: “I don’t judge people, I judge ideas. And there are some really good people with really bad ideas.” – Josiah Hesse, citing Antonin Scalia ([11:39])

• Variation of Trauma Experience

  • He details an epiphany that while he internalized biblical threats as literal and pressing, his brother and others in his community were far less impacted on a daily basis ([12:36]-[13:50]).
  • Quote: "I thought you didn’t think about it that much. I thought about it all the time. I didn’t think about anything else." – Josiah Hesse ([13:28])

• Neurodivergence and Belief

  • Hesse posits that people who research theology deeply, due to neurodivergence, may come to reject faith after intense study ([13:52]).

3. Cultural & Economic Context: The Music Man Parallel

• The “Music Man” Analogy
  • Hesse’s hometown, Mason City, the inspiration for River City in The Music Man, serves as metaphor for how communities are manipulated by fear-mongering about outsiders or change ([17:22]).
  • Quote: "The Music man, this guy is going from town to town looking for whatever is new that he can freak people out about and then offer his marching band as the solution." – Josiah Hesse ([17:22])
  • The cycle of finding a “foil” or enemy—whether Communists, feminists, people of color, LGBTQ people, etc.—repeats through American history ([17:22]-[19:42]).

4. Economic Hardship and the Rise of the Christian Right

• The 1980s Farm Crisis

  • Hesse details the devastation of Iowa’s farming crisis—foreclosures, suicides, and the collapse of a way of life ([21:19]-[23:08]).
  • Quote: “A whole way of life...was lost in the 1980s. There was a great deal of despair that was spread across the land and isolation.” – Josiah Hesse ([22:50])

• Stigma, Poverty & Prosperity Gospel

  • As the safety net declined and stigma about welfare rose, preachers promoted “prosperity gospel,” promising return on donations to the church ([23:41]-[25:17]).
  • Quote: "The more you give to God—that is, the church—financially, the more you will be blessed... but for the rest of us...Everyone’s still buying thrift store clothes and living on food stamps and burnt tater tots. No one’s climbing the ladder of success in the congregation." – Josiah Hesse ([24:14])
  • The cycle mirrors The Music Man’s “Think System,” selling easy answers while profiting from people’s desperation ([25:17]-[25:44]).

• Personal Financial Literacy Deficit

  • Hesse shares how this culture left him financially illiterate well into adulthood ([26:46]).
  • Quote: "I didn’t have a credit card until I was 38. I think I was 40 before I got my first loan." – Josiah Hesse ([26:48])

5. Drugs, Labor, and the Welfare Myth

• Methamphetamine Epidemic

  • Economic deterioration and access to anhydrous ammonia led to high meth use in Mason City ([28:23]).
  • Quote: “It's a drug that is cheaper than cocaine and lasts longer... very appealing to people who are in this precarious position of needing to take on a much longer workload.” – Josiah Hesse ([28:23])

• The Welfare Queen and Stigma of Poverty

  • Hesse debunks the “nobody wants to work anymore” myth and critiques the aggressive social shaming of welfare recipients, contrasting it with how passive income and corporate subsidies are celebrated ([29:41]-[31:36]).
  • Quote: “A little bit of food assistance...is not enough... but we love, you know, getting to a place of passive income... we don’t have any kind of judgment on this term." – Josiah Hesse ([31:36])

6. Evangelical Music, Hypocrisy, and Double Lives

• DC Talk & Michael Tait Investigation

  • Hesse discusses how Christian artists like DC Talk shaped evangelical youth culture while hiding deep hypocrisy. He reveals his own investigative reporting on sexual abuse allegations against DC Talk’s Michael Tait ([35:42]-[39:42]).
  • Quote: "This was the guy who told me not to use drugs, not to drink, not to have premarital sex... meanwhile, he was addicted to alcohol and cocaine and feeding drugs to underage boys and assaulting them." – Josiah Hesse ([39:25])

• Reconciling Music and Pain

  • Hesse expresses ambivalence: even knowing the harm, the music still evokes nostalgia and joy ([39:44]).
  • Quote: "When I listen to those albums, I go right back to being 10, 12, 15 years old and what they meant to me. It’s something that doesn’t change... but yeah, I couldn’t help but think about 10, 12 year old Josiah just hating himself for his perfectly natural and understandable desires." – Josiah Hesse ([40:04])

• On Good and Evil in Religion

  • Hesse reflects on maintaining a sense of beauty and value in some biblical teachings, while refusing to ignore the trauma organized religion can inflict ([41:49]-[43:51]).
  • Quote: "There is still so much that resonates with me about what I was taught from the teachings of Jesus. Turning the other cheek, praying for those who persecute you... just something that resonates within my spirit as truth." – Josiah Hesse ([42:19])

7. Confrontation, Healing, and Identity

• Hard Questions with Family
  • The memoir ends with Hesse interviewing his mother about why she didn’t abort him—facilitating a reckoning with his worth and the long journey toward embracing life ([43:51]-[48:58]).
  • Quote: "I think I’m finally ready to say I’m glad to be alive." – Josiah Hesse ([44:37])
  • He explains the question came from reflecting on the pain and emotional suffering of childhood, and the ways faith’s view on abortion had colored his worldview ([44:45]-[48:58]).

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Memorable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• "Shame-squared":
  "Shame building on shame… so you had meta shame. Exactly. Shame squared." – Josiah Hesse ([03:35])

• On religious trauma:
  "Cognitive impairment, difficulty socializing… you're living in a very isolated world." – Josiah Hesse ([08:33])

• On economic manipulation:
  "Everyone’s still buying thrift store clothes and living on food stamps and burnt tater tots. No one’s climbing the ladder of success in the congregation, but it’s working out quite well for the people on the stage." – Josiah Hesse ([24:14])

• About the Music Man parallel:
  "The Music man, this guy is going from town to town looking for whatever is new that he can freak people out about… it was a beat of history that repeated again and again." – Josiah Hesse ([17:22])

• On DC Talk and Michael Tait:
  “Hundreds of thousands of young people signed purity pledges… meanwhile, he was addicted to alcohol and cocaine and feeding drugs to underage boys and assaulting them.” – Josiah Hesse ([39:25])

• Reconciling faith and hurt:
  "There is still so much that resonates with me about what I was taught from the teachings of Jesus. …these are things that are still in my heart as part of my values, not because it harkens back to my childhood…but just something that resonates within my spirit as truth." – Josiah Hesse ([42:19])

• On survival and acceptance:
  "For all I’ve been through, I’m glad I’m alive, I’m glad I’m here, and I’m ready to embrace life with that kind of joy and optimism." – Josiah Hesse ([48:40])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00-02:07: Hesse’s childhood, internalization of religious fear, introduction to “Caldonia”
• 03:35: The concept of “shame squared”
• 05:18-08:09: Church camps, emotional pressure, and trauma
• 08:33: Religious trauma and its legitimacy
• 10:52-12:17: Compassion toward family, separating people from ideas
• 13:50-15:16: Differing impacts of trauma among siblings
• 17:22-19:42: “Music Man” as a device for understanding fear-mongering and manipulation
• 21:19-23:08: The 1980s farm crisis and its aftermath
• 23:41-25:44: Prosperity gospel, poverty, and its manipulation
• 28:23: Meth epidemic and labor exploitation
• 31:36: Contradictions of economic shame vs. celebration of passive/corporate income
• 35:42-39:42: DC Talk, investigative reporting, and hypocrisy in evangelical music
• 42:19: Retaining positive values and empathy despite trauma
• 44:45-48:58: End of book: facing existential questions, finding gladness in survival

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Tone & Language

The conversation balances direct honesty, measured empathy, personal vulnerability, and critical analysis. Hesse’s recounting is both raw and reflective; the hosts ask thoughtful, sometimes challenging questions that invite introspection and nuance instead of condemnation.

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Conclusion

This episode is a compelling exploration of how religion, economics, and culture intersect in a specific American context, told through the lens of personal trauma and journalistic inquiry. Hesse’s story is both singular and deeply connected to broader patterns in American society, making his insights about shame, poverty, manipulation, and healing resonant far beyond the evangelical Midwest.

Transcript

[Ryan Warner]

His parents and pastors told him the end was near, and unless he repented, he'd spend eternity in hell. Josiah Hesse had to Be On Fire for God, which is also the title of his new book, sparked by his religious trauma.

[Josiah Hesse]

It has been in academic papers and studied by a variety of mental health professionals, and there's a lot of symptoms of it. Cognitive impairment, difficulty socializing, you're often behind in school, a feeling of shame, dissociation from your body. I often interpreted my sexual development as a demonic presence.

[Ryan Warner]

Hesse, a journalist, applies a reporter's lens to the economic hardships and social forces that shaped the Iowa town he left for Denver, a town that inspired the Music Man.

[Musical Performer / Narrator]

Well, you got trouble, my friend. Right here, I say.

[Ryan Warner]

This is Colorado Matters from CPR News and krcc. I'm Ryan Warner. When a kid thinks there are monsters under the bed, they're usually told monsters aren't real. Josiah Hesse got the opposite message. He grew up in an evangelical Christian family with the idea that the Antichrist was coming, the mark of the beast was nigh. The religious trauma he endured made it hard for him to embrace his sexuality, he says, and to hold down a job. Hesse left rural Iowa and moved to Denver, becoming a freelance reporter. Now he applies a journalistic lens to his childhood and to the social and economic realities of his hometown. Hesse's new book is On Fire for Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right. We spoke at the Denver Press Club for the book's release.

[Interviewer / Host]

Welcome to the show.

[Josiah Hesse]

Thanks for having me.

[Interviewer / Host]

Ryan, besides your family, one of the most persistent figures in your life is Caldonia. Who is Caldonia?

[Josiah Hesse]

Yeah, I mean, it's a kind of demon figment of my imagination as a child, kind of manifestation of all of the rhetoric that I had absorbed as a young person from the Christian rite, which was a great deal of shame about my sexuality, but also being lazy, being a bit dim, I had a great deal of trouble understanding the rhetoric that I was absorbing as a child. So what I interpreted as being a bit dim, but as an adult, I see it was just a very confusing mess of contradicting ideologies. But this was a kind of entity that lived within my mind. I didn't quite have, you know, schizophrenia, where you have audio hallucinations or visual hallucinations, but it was a presence with me every hour of the day and really absorbed my attention throughout my waking hours.

[Interviewer / Host]

Now, the name Caldonia, you'll forgive my ignorance of biblical texts. Is that a biblical name or is that a Name you bestowed upon this, the specter.

[Josiah Hesse]

It's not a biblical name. No, it's a name I bestowed upon her. That comes from an old R and B song from Louis Jordan.

[Interviewer / Host]

Is she the manifest? You said her. Is she the manifestation of your shame?

[Josiah Hesse]

Among other things, yes. I felt just an overwhelming pressure cooker of shame. Shame building on shame. Because I was ashamed of the things. Things I was ashamed of. So it was just something that was compounded and you had meta shame. Exactly. Shame squared. Shame squared.

[Interviewer / Host]

Shame is not enough. We need to square it. And what is it to live with a presence like that so close to you and so persistent? Can you describe what that feels like in your mind and in your body?

[Josiah Hesse]

Yeah, I mean, my nervous system was on high alert throughout my childhood. And that's something that doesn't really change. Even if your intellect changes as an adult, your understanding of the world changes. The architecture of your brain in relation to your nervous system is shaped during that time in your life. So I was just on high alert about everything around me. How I was physically presenting the world, how I was talking. And it often reached a kind of fever pitch that led to dissociation. So there are, you know, swaths of my childhood that I have a difficult time remembering, or I remember it as just staring at people's shoes or patterns in the carpet when things just became too difficult to handle.

[Interviewer / Host]

That can't have made it easy to write a memoir. I can't stop thinking about the opening paragraphs of your book. Will you read them for us? And this takes place in 1994?

[Josiah Hesse]

Sure. This is set at an Assemblies of God church camp that I attended as a child pretty regularly, I think. I was going to two church camps every summer, and there were similar conventions throughout the school year. I think I did like four or five of those on average. I was attending about nine church events a week. So this was really nine a week? Yeah, this was my whole world. I didn't have sports drama.

[Interviewer / Host]

Oh, you had drama,

[Josiah Hesse]

without question. And so this is a little taste of what it was like to attend one of those services. The children are weeping and handing over all their money. Used tissues litter the church floor, making me think of dead bodies spread across a battlefield. You'll soon know what that really looks like. A voice speaks within my head. That's the voice of Caldonia.

[Interviewer / Host]

That's Caldonia.

[Josiah Hesse]

I am surrounded by hundreds of other preteens. Our faces pale and splotchy from hours of crying. Mascara soaked tears trickle down baby fat cheeks. The boys beat Their chests rip at their hair and scream like they are being dragged through barbed wire. More than a hundred children are laid across the ground of the sanctuary, twitching and flopping about like fish out of water. It's the last night of church camp, and we've been instructed to give every last dollar in our wallets to tonight's offering. But for me and most likely everyone else, this does little to soothe our guilty hearts. We are sinners, and try as we might, we will never feel clean. Feel the Holy Spirit, A stylish man with a microphone shouts from the church camp stage. Speak it. Rebuke the demons of hell that surround this camp. Believe and your mouth will follow. I am surrounded by three older male counselors who are leaning in close to my face, their ears less than an inch from my mouth, also demanding that I speak it, that I let it flow. I start speaking in a language I do not understand, a gibberish of random syllables, believing my mouth to be taken over by God's Holy Spirit. I will repeat this ritual almost daily for the next decade. You must be on fire for God, our camp speaker proclaims, waving his arms over a crowd of moaning children. In Revelation, we are told, God rejects those with weak spirits, saying, because you are neither hot nor cold, I will spew you from my mouth.

[Interviewer / Host]

And there's that phrase, on fire for God. You go on to write that you bite your tongue hard enough to bleed, and that's among many self inflicted wounds throughout your childhood. And Josiah, let's check a fact in my introduction. Do you have religious trauma and how legit is that as a diagnosis?

[Josiah Hesse]

Well, it's not something that's appeared in the dsm, but it's a subset of complex ptsd. You know, not just an isolated incident, but something that occurs regularly throughout a period of time. It is something that's been in academic papers and studied by a variety of mental health professionals, and there's a lot of symptoms of it. Cognitive impairment, difficulty socializing. You're often behind in school or just the developmental stages of adolescence. A kind of feeling of being a fish out of water, like you're living in a very isolated world. So maybe you don't understand the same cultural references that other people are just absorbing and a feeling of shame, dissociation from your body, an overwhelming shame when it comes to your sexual energy. I often interpreted my sexual development as a demonic presence as a young person because we are taught that angels and demons are around us in an invisible realm, warring for our souls. So I was interpreting my thoughts as a demonic presence as well as my pubescent sexual development.

[Interviewer / Host]

So you would say plainly that you have religious trauma.

[Josiah Hesse]

Without question.

[Interviewer / Host]

Without question. Was that a diagnosis that you have only recently come to? When was your awareness beginning around the idea of that?

[Josiah Hesse]

Well, there's been a kind of movement of what's called exvangelicals for some time. And, you know, it started with people just sharing their stories online, hashtags like rapture anxiety or Church 2, which was a subset of the MeToo movement. But it's something that's become more professionally diagnosed in the mental health sphere. And I've been in therapy for about eight years now and was diagnosed pretty early on with complex ptsd.

[Interviewer / Host]

Your new book includes interviews with your siblings, your parents, and your author's note has the line, this book is not intended to shame or condemn any of my friends or family. Why did you feel the need to preface the book that way?

[Josiah Hesse]

Well, I have a great deal of compassion for people who are in this world because I was never a rebellious teen. I was never the person who was sitting at the back of the church with his arms folded saying, well, this is all nonsense. I don't want anything to do with these people. I was the biggest zealot in the room for most of my childhood, surpassing my parents pretty early on. I was the one that was judging my parents, who were quite, quite evangelical themselves.

[Interviewer / Host]

And so if there was going to be speaking in tongues, if there was gonna be wringing of hands, if there were gonna be tears, they would be your tears.

[Josiah Hesse]

Absolutely. And so I know what it is to inhabit that deep conviction in this world. And I don't wanna condemn or shame anyone who is still in that world. And in that author's note, I quote Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court justice who I disagree with on nearly everything. But I really resonated with his quote of, I don't judge people, I judge ideas. And there are some really good people with really bad ideas. That really resonates me with me when it comes to this world because I still have a great deal of love for my family, for my hometown, and a lot of those people are still believers.

[Interviewer / Host]

Well, I might be jumping ahead here, but what is one, to use a biblical phrase, what is one epiphany that you had about your own upbringing or about the way your family lives, their lives that you didn't have before this journey?

[Josiah Hesse]

Well, one that really struck me was when my brother, I did an interview with him. We're not terribly close, but I was kind of reminding him of the experiences we had growing up. We lived in the same house. We're three years apart. And I said, like, don't you remember dad telling us, like, we may have to live off the grid and we may be hunted by the Antichrist and have to grow our own food and have to avoid getting the mark of the beast so we don't live in hell. And in that moment, he kind of leaned back as if recalling for the very first time, like, oh, yeah, that was pretty weird, huh? He's like, I just didn't really think about it that much. And I thought you didn't think about it that much. I thought about it all the time. I didn't think about anything else. I mean, if eternal torture is at stake, is there any higher priority than avoiding that? So I was obsessing over this, and that happened some other times with other people that I met that had gone to church camps with me. And they're like, yeah, I just thought it was weird. And I didn't really engage with it that much. And I engaged with it aggressively and quite literally. Yeah. And what I.

[Interviewer / Host]

These were not just parables for you.

[Josiah Hesse]

What I've realized since then, or what the patterns that I've seen, and there has been some research on this, is neurodivergence is a kind of determinant factor in how aggressively you believe in this, but also research it, and you end up. This is a pattern that I've met several people that followed the same path that I did, where we are zealots when we're young and we want to dig into the theology. We want to understand what is sin, what is salvation? How do I avoid this? What are the rules? And then we end up digging so deep that we realize none of this adds up. And you research the history of how the Bible was written and assembled and edited, and it's just so complex, and it's just not the simplistic cartoon that we were presented with at a young age. And so many of us end up becoming atheists later in life because we just soaked up all that world had to offer and ended up rejecting it.

[Interviewer / Host]

So. So where did you land on the fact that in very similar circumstances, your brother turned out a lot different? You know, it makes you wonder how much of your journey is specific to you versus universal within the community, you know?

[Josiah Hesse]

Absolutely.

[Interviewer / Host]

And it must make you doubt to some extent.

[Josiah Hesse]

Yeah. And I wanted that process to be at the forefront of the narrative of this book. The kind of struggle that I was going through with understanding myself. I didn't want to, from the jump, be like, I know what's going on, I know what's real, I know what's nonsense, and I'm going to present it to you as such. I wanted the readers to come with me on this journey of struggling, that it's a messy process and there isn't any fundamental black and white conclusion, and that there are a lot of similarities with my story and other people's, but there are a lot of differences as well.

[Ryan Warner]

Josiah Hesse's with us at the Denver Press Club for the release of his book On Fire for God, which he describes as a personal history. Coming up, things get musical. This is Colorado Matters from CPR News. It's Colorado Matters from CPR News. I'm Ryan Warner. Fear, shame, poverty and the making of the Christian right. That's the tagline for Denver journalist Josiah Hesse's new book. We're in front of an audience at the Denver Press Club for the release of On Fire for God.

[Interviewer / Host]

I want to widen our lens, as you do in the book, to poverty, to the Christian right and to a certain musical One fine night they leave

[Musical Performer / Narrator]

the pool hall, heading for the dance of the Armory, Libertine men and scarlet women and ragtime, shameless music that'll grab your son, your daughter, put the arms in a jungle animal instinct mass sleep area. Friends, the idle brain is the devil's playground. Trouble right here in River City. We're the capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool. We've surely got trouble right here in River City.

[Interviewer / Host]

Your hometown. Mason City was the inspiration for River City in the Music Man. Composer Meredith Wilson grew up there. And that line you got trouble echoes throughout your book. What is the parallel to the story you're telling, Josiah?

[Josiah Hesse]

So, yeah, the Music man, this guy is going from town to town looking for whatever is new that he can freak people out about and then offer his marching band this wholesome vestige of the past as the solution. Like in this case in the Music man, when he comes to River City, it's a pool table coming to town. No one's freaked out about this pool table until this guy tells them, like, your daughters are going to become whores, your sons are going to be gamblers. Like it's just going to be crazy. And he has like a low key racism in that song as well when he talks about the arms of a jungle animal instinct, you know, coming for your daughters. And that's something that I saw was a beat of history that repeated again and again with the Klan in 1925, when they came to my hometown, started recruiting people, talking about evolution as being taught in your schools, colored people coming to town. Because there was a lot of industry in my hometown. But then again, throughout the Red scare in the 50s, feminism in the 70s, abortion, satanic panic in the 80s, gay marriage in the 2000s, trans people today. And there's a lot of parallels between Donald Trump and the Music Band. So I felt like I was kind of gifted this narrative device about my hometown that just clicked right into place with the book that I was writing.

[Interviewer / Host]

Yeah. And let's identify the elements. You need a foil. You need an enemy. First off, you need something to villainize,

[Josiah Hesse]

something new, something people don't understand.

[Interviewer / Host]

Yeah. And are thus afraid of. And then inherent in the Music man is the idea that you'd buy an instrument and join a band. So there's a little profit in there, isn't there?

[Josiah Hesse]

Yeah. And that happened with the Klan in the 20s. They had a circus and a parade in my hometown, and they got people to, you know, sign up for membership and buy a robe and a hood, and they're making millions of dollars. This was the second iteration of the Klan. There was one in the 19th century, but there was one in the 20s where they were a little bit more media savvy and they knew how to work people in the same way that the Music man did.

[Interviewer / Host]

Will you tell us about the Hardee's location? The fast food joint? Yeah.

[Josiah Hesse]

Well, in Mason City, it blows my mind because this story is basically a satire about small town people being very gullible and easily manipulated. And Meredith Wilson changed the name of the town from Mason City to River City in the play because he thought, like, he'd never be welcome home again. They're going to tar and feather him. But no, Mason City loves the Music man. You can't walk 100 yards in that town without encountering a sculpture, a mural or something about the Music man and the local Hardee's, which is a fast food chain in the Midwest. It's called Carl's Jr. Out here. But in my hometown, it's a museum for the Music Man. They have instruments, uniforms, movie posters, and that's the case throughout the town. Meredith Wilson's childhood home is a museum that you can revisit, but that just

[Interviewer / Host]

means a lot of town folk don't get it. Or do they? And still it's so beloved. It's nice to be associated with.

[Josiah Hesse]

Well, since it takes place in the early 20th century and these people are freaked out about a Pool table. It's seen as quaint. You know, who would fall for such a ruse today? You know, but that does exist today when it comes to being freaked out about trans people in the bathrooms or participating in high school sports.

[Interviewer / Host]

The farming crisis of the 1980s, very prominent in your book. And I wonder if you'd describe how it affected Mason City and nearby Clear Lake, which you also claim is something of a hometown.

[Josiah Hesse]

Yeah, I grew up in. Both of those towns are right next to each other. It's kind of in the weeds. Pun intended. In the 1970s, agriculture was booming, and farmers were encouraged to take on big loans, expand their operations. And when Russia invaded Afghanistan, there was an embargo against grain. There were a whole bunch of factors that led to just this plummeting in the price of goods from the Midwest and the value of the land. And a great deal of farms, family farms that had been passed down from generations were foreclosed upon. And the suicide rate spiked 400%. A lot of people were drinking and just kind of going crazy. There were murders that happened. It was a very dark period in the Midwest. And this happened during the Great Depression. But FDR had a lot of programs to bolster farms during that time. The white farmers didn't care for it so much in the 60s when LBJ expanded those protections to people of color and women and other industries. But, yeah, a lot of family farms were lost. And we got this big corporate agriculture that we have today that's just bankrupting the soil and leading to terrible food coming out of the Midwest. But, yeah, a whole way of life that was brought over from Europe to create America's breadbasket was lost in the 1980s. And there was a great deal of despair that was spread across the land and isolation.

[Interviewer / Host]

And indeed, the social safety net is almost nil.

[Josiah Hesse]

Yeah, and there was a resistance to embracing that social safety net, because by that time in the Reagan era, in the new conservative era, there was a stigma against government assistance that didn't extend to the corporations that were buying up all of this land and creating this new industry. They were happy to get the subsidies from the US Government, but the individual farmers felt a kind of shame about it.

[Interviewer / Host]

Meanwhile, preachers are telling people to laugh at their bills.

[Josiah Hesse]

Yeah, so there was a thing called prosperity gospel that spread across the Midwest. I mean, really across America at this time. But it's something that landed really well in the Midwest. It lands well whenever there's any kind of catastrophe happening. A lot of American evangelists love to go to developing nations and spread this thing called prosperity gospel, which is basically the idea that the more you give to God, that is the church, financially, the more you will be blessed. And this is something that goes back centuries. There's a lot of convoluted theology behind it, but we were taught that the more risky behavior you engage in with giving money to the church, the more you will be rewarded. It was kind of like snake handling with your finances. You know, the more dangerous it was, the more reward you would reap. And the preachers would talk about how much they'd been blessed by God. They would brag about the cars they own, the vacations they went on, the private planes they had, the expensive suits they wore, including the church that I grew up in. And for the rest of us in the congregation, you know, I noticed as the years went on, everyone's still buying thrift store clothes and living on food stamps and burnt tater tots. No one's climbing the ladder of success in the congregation, but it's working out quite well for the people on the stage.

[Interviewer / Host]

Echoes of the music Man a bit.

[Josiah Hesse]

Exactly. Harold Hill, the music man, had this thing called the Think System, where he told his students when they would ask him, how do we play these musical instruments that you just told us to invest all our money in? He'd be like, well, don't touch the instrument. Like, you don't need to learn anything. And he didn't know anything. There's a line in the book or in the play where someone says he doesn't know a bass drum from a pipe organ.

[Interviewer / Host]

Yeah.

[Josiah Hesse]

And he would say, like, you just need to visualize yourself playing this instrument, and you will one day, when you pick it up, know how to play it. And these people who were being given financial advice from their pastors and you know, who really needed some kind of financial literacy, because that is something that working class people struggle with. They were just told, you need to believe in your heart that God is going to provide for you. So, yeah, laugh at your bills, because God's got it. It's going to work out. And if you have any doubts, that is the reason why it is not working out for you. If you have any sin in your life, that is the reason why God is not blessing you. And everyone had something in their life that they could point to as the reason that it wasn't working out for them financially. But what they really needed was to learn about their credit scores, learn about budgeting and saving and investing.

[Interviewer / Host]

Did you need to learn about that?

[Josiah Hesse]

Absolutely. I live with no financial literacy for most of my life. I mean, I'm still struggling with it today, but I didn't have a credit card until I was 38. I think I was 40 before I got my first loan. I didn't know what a credit score was until I was like, 25.

[Ryan Warner]

Our show, recorded at the Denver Press Club, continues in this next half hour with Josiah Hesse, whose new journalistic memoir is On Fire for God. The farming Crisis mixes with anhydrous ammonia to create a meth epidemic. Plus the pernicious myth of the welfare queen. I'm Ryan Warner. You're with CPR News and krcc. You're back with Colorado Matters. From CPR News and krcc, I'm Ryan Warner. Denver journalist Josiah Hesse considers himself an exvangelical, but his admiration for and curiosity about the evangelicals who remain among his friends and family persistent. His new book, a work of nonfiction, is largely set in his hometown of Mason City, Iowa. Inspiration for the Music Man. Let's get back to our discussion at the Denver Press Club about On Fire for God.

[Interviewer / Host]

In the farming crisis, people struggle to find jobs. They struggle certainly to find jobs that provide a living wage. And a drug comes along that gives them the energy to take on two and three jobs and to burn the candle at both ends.

[Josiah Hesse]

Methamphetamine. Yeah. My hometown has one of the largest rates of methamphetamine use in the state of Iowa, which has one of the largest uses of meth in the nation. I mean, it started because farmers having hydrous tanks which allow people to manufacture methods. But yeah, also these industries were crumbling. You know, what once could pay for a whole family on a single income now is hardly enough for one person to survive on. So you need to work longer hours, you need to take on a second job, and there's someone close by who will sell you something that allows you to work through the night and the next day. Uh, it's a drug that is cheaper than cocaine and lasts longer than cocaine. So it's very appealing to people who are in this precarious position of needing to take on a much longer workload.

[Interviewer / Host]

That connection was a new one for me and so powerfully told in this book. And yet there's a trope you hear over and over again in your hometown. Nobody wants to work anymore.

[Josiah Hesse]

I think we've all heard that, especially around Covid. And there was a very complex economic situation going on at that time that everyone ascribed to laziness, entitlement, like we're just being taken care of by the government, and now nobody wants to work anymore. But no one was getting. Well, I don't wanna say no one was getting rich off Covid. There were people at the upper echelon of our economic ladder that were stealing money from the government. But for, you know, the people getting $1,200 checks, what, two times, weren't exactly like, rolling in cash. But, yeah, that's something that, you know, just extended throughout the 20th century of America. My dad heard that when he was a kid when people would go on welfare, like, oh, you're on food st. Well, that's because you're lazy and you don't want to work anymore. Reagan made his whole political career based on the welfare Queen speech in 1978, where he found a woman who was running a very elaborate con getting money from the government. But it was a very isolated circumstance that most people who get government assistance Aren't living any high on the hog life. It's very difficult to get and maintain welfare, Whether it be food stamps or rent assistance or energy or childcare. We intentionally make this very difficult. And culturally, there's a great deal of shame around it.

[Interviewer / Host]

Yeah, we've absorbed these messages. You know, no one wants to work anymore. There's too much shame to ask for help.

[Musical Performer / Narrator]

Yeah.

[Interviewer / Host]

But meanwhile, in contrast, massive subsidies for any number of industries.

[Josiah Hesse]

Absolutely. Subsidies, tax breaks. I don't judge anyone for having a passive income, but it takes as much work to get to a passive income as it does to maintain welfare benefits. It's really just a lack of opportunity that most people on the lower echelon of our economic system have. And a little bit of food assistance, which is not enough every month to fill your refrigerator to feed a family. Not by half in most cases, but we love, you know, getting to a place of passive income where you can just have money rolling into your bank without doing anything. And we don't have any kind of judgment on this term.

[Interviewer / Host]

Your parents who divorced, co founded a church. What do you think they were seeking and did they find it?

[Josiah Hesse]

Well, they came out of a thing called the Jesus movement, mid to late 1970s. It was a very big scene in California. Bob Dylan was a part of it. Bob Dylan put out three Christian rock albums in the late 70s and Barry Maguire. And it was a kind of like post hippie, apocalyptic, almost like punk rock, DIY entity that was very charming and made some great music and really shaped what became like mega church Christian rock culture. But it was very small in the 70s and 80s. And like anything that happens on the coasts you know, it gradually makes its way to the Midwest years later. And so by the late 70s, early 80s, my parents were a part of this scene and, you know, at first really believed that the end of the world was just around the corner, as they were taught. The best selling nonfiction book of the 1970s was the late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay, which predicted the world would end by 1988. Spoiler it didn't. But my parents were very caught up in this and it was very beautiful and charming when they were young. But by the 1980s, by the Reagan revolution, there was a kind of materialism that infected the, this culture. And for my dad, it was both. He thought that the end of the world would happen in 1988. So he was like, let's, you know, have a family. Let's have a really good life before the world falls to pieces. He had a lot of childhood trauma that he was, in my estimation, unconsciously trying to resolve by having the ideal family, by doing it the right way, as a lot of new parents with trauma often do. And so there was a lot of sense of, we're going to be rich, it's going to be great. People often wonder why evangelicals love Donald Trump. He has the same rhetoric that they do. You know, the best, the greatest. No one's ever seen anything like this. You know, prosperity gospel didn't say you're going to have financial security, you're going to have a comfortable savings, you're going to invest moderately in this thing. You're going to have a home, you'll be able to pay your bills. No, it's going to be, you're going to have a yacht, you're going to have an island. You're going to be so wealthy money's going to be pouring out of your ears and you're not going to know what to do with it.

[Interviewer / Host]

It was never. You'll have a Nissan Sentra.

[Josiah Hesse]

Yeah. Yeah. You're going to have seven Cadillacs.

[Ryan Warner]

The final part of our conversation with Denver journalist and author Josiah Hesse shortly his expose of a Christian music hero. This is Colorado Matters at the Denver Press Club. From CPR News, you're with Colorado Matters. From CPR News, I'm Ryan Warner. You can't go home again, as the saying goes, but Denver author Josiah Hesse did for his new book returning to Clear Lake, Iowa, with a journalistic lens to better understand his evangelical upbringing and the social and economic forces that shaped it. We're at the Denver Press Club for the release.

[Interviewer / Host]

As a kid, you devoured media, both secular and religious music and movies. In particular, the Christian rap and rock group DC Talk looms large. I wish we'd all been ready there's

[Josiah Hesse]

no time to change your mind the sun ass cup had chewed Been left

[Musical Performer / Narrator]

behind

[Interviewer / Host]

that's the song I wish we'd all been Ready, covered by many, including D.C. talk and Josiah. As you're putting the finishing touches on your book On Fire for God, you're also breaking a big story about DC Talk member Michael Tate. This is for the Guardian. Would you just boil this down for us and the rather uncanny timing, given how large a space DC Talk occupies in your childhood and in your memoir?

[Josiah Hesse]

Yeah. For people who grew up in this culture, DC Talk were often known as the Beatles of Christian rock. They were as big and influential as it got in that industry. And they really came out of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. That's where they all met. And Jerry Falwell saw them as a kind of mouthpiece of Christian right talking points. So in their albums, you hear Purity Culture. They had a rebuttal to George Michael's I Want yout Sex called I Don't Want it that we all sang along to. And the song that you just played was about the rapture. They were kind of wrapping this, like conservative religious ideology in a cloak of cool. And they were so cool. If you were 13, 14 years old in the 90s and you were a Christian, it didn't get any cooler than DC talk. So fast forward to 2025, the beginning of that year. Someone puts out a TikTok video saying, you know, I can't take it anymore. This guy, Michael Tate, who was one of three members of DC Talk, he was saying, I know for a fact that he is closeted that he's gay. And he was a big Trump supporter. He was a kind of bridge between evangelicals and Trump, one of many, but a very prominent one. And this really angered this guy who knew Michael Tate from years earlier, that he been involved in a lot of same sex relationships with. Well, after that TikTok video spread, a lot of other people jumped on and accused him of sexually assaulting them. And I followed up with a lot of those people and did a series of investigative pieces for the Guardian that convinced me and a lot of other people of the legitimacy of these claims, because there was a consistent pattern over several years of him grooming young, handsome, indie rock ambitious boys who didn't have any foothold in the industry, bringing them into his house, making a lot of promises of helping their career, and then allegedly Drugging them and sexually assaulting them. And the story has grown since then. It's something that's tragic on so many levels. But what was foremost in my mind was the. This was the guy who told me not to use drugs, not to drink, not to have premarital sex. DC Tonk got hundreds of thousands of young people to sign purity pledges, you know, the promise rings that the Jonas Brothers were wearing, to wait until marriage to have sex. And meanwhile, he was addicted to alcohol and cocaine and feeding drugs to underage boys and assaulting them.

[Interviewer / Host]

How do you think about D.C. talk now?

[Josiah Hesse]

Well, by that time I kind of had a sense that there was a double life with a lot of the people in this industry. Jim and Tammy Faye Baker were having all kinds of affairs behind the scenes. Tammy Faye was addicted to benzos. Jim Baker was having gay orgies in his spa. Jimmy Swaggart, Colorado's Ted Haggard, preaching against gay marriage while having sex with a prostitute, while snorting meth in Denver. So there was a level of cynicism in me about the notion that someone could be living a double life while, you know, preaching the exact opposite. But when I listen to those albums, I go right back to being 10, 12, 15 years old and what they meant to me. It's something that doesn't change. I mean, the music is still great. There's some really great songs that they put out. I mean, even after I stopped believing the song God's Not Dead, which I think is just abhorrent from a lyrical standpoint. It's a, it's a banger of a song. The chord changes, the rhythm in it, like it'll get you. So there's a disconnect there, but yeah, I couldn't help but think about 10, 12 year old Josiah just hating himself for his perfectly natural and understandable desires. The pubescent changes that you go through, the discovering what it is you're attracted to. And this person who is telling me that that's Satan, that that's evil infecting my mind and my body, had the same inclinations that I did.

[Interviewer / Host]

Some of them.

[Josiah Hesse]

Yeah, I certainly didn't have the inclination to drug anyone to force anyone. But attraction, same sex attraction, certainly.

[Interviewer / Host]

The thing is, two faced people are everywhere. Do you focus too much on the downsides of organized religion and not the beauty of it and the connection and the community and the love?

[Josiah Hesse]

That's something that comes up a lot in my reporting on the Christian rite, especially when it comes to my own experiences with it. And I write about this in the book that there is still so much that resonates with me about what I was taught from the teachings of Jesus. Turning the other cheek, praying for those who persecute you. If a man steals your shirt, give him your hat and cloak as well. These are things that are still in my heart as part of my values, not because it harkens back to my childhood. It's not any kind of sentimentality for what I was raised in, but just something that resonates within my spirit as truth. That compassion and patience and even pacifism are virtuous ideals. I can't say that that was at the forefront of the teachings of the Christian rite, but it is in the Bible. And it is something that struck me as a child as beautiful. And as you know, there was so much about the Bible that confused me and terrified me, and I just couldn't really grab on to anything that, you know, felt was true. But that is something that I think is beautiful. And I can still go even to evangelical megachurches and think, well, this music's great and everyone's having a good time and I don't want to tell them to stop having community. You know, they should continue with it. But I'm also not going to be silent about the things that terrorized me as a child and as terrorized my generation.

[Interviewer / Host]

Your book culminates in interviews with your mom and dad. And one question you have for your mother is, why didn't you abort me? It's a tough question for a mom to hear.

[Josiah Hesse]

Very Morrissey.

[Interviewer / Host]

She assures you that she didn't want an abortion, and the flip side, which you ponder is whether you'd have preferred to be aborted. And I'm just going to pause here because I want to make this a spoiler alert, but you write at the end of the book, I think I'm finally ready to say I'm glad to be alive. Have you written a pro life book?

[Josiah Hesse]

Well, that's a pretty loaded term.

[Interviewer / Host]

Someone has said, glad you're here, Pro

[Josiah Hesse]

life in that being alive has been a great thing for me. Or I found greatness in it and it was a long journey to flow, find my place in this world. Another Morrissey line for any super fans out there. But that section came from something earlier in the book when I was at my depth of cutting myself of just complete despair as a young evangelical awaiting the tribulation, the horrors described in the book of Revelation and pondering what I had been told about abortion when I was a young person at church. Camp. And I was asking one of my counselors, well, what happens to the babies that are aborted? Because we heard a great deal about millions of babies who've been murdered. You know, well, okay, what happens to them? And I was told, will they go to heaven? And I thought, would they just get to skip the line? Like they don't have to go through the same trial that I went through of sin, of grappling with my desires, of wanting something. But that is going to damn me to eternal torture if I do what my body is inclining me to do. I'm hungry for something, but eating is going to lead to eternal torture. And, and so I was envious. And then when learning about my parents marriage, they had three kids before they were 21. And before I was born, my, my dad had said, like, yeah, the marriage was more or less over before you were even born. And I thought like, well, you guys were just stuck in a bad relationship. I've been stuck in a bad relationship and I could just leave. But she was pregnant with her third child and she wasn't given family planning advice. She was told that like, once you get off birth control, it's going to be a year or two before you can get pregnant again. Well, they just pumped out three kids in three years, like it was nothing. And so looking back on that, I was like, did it ever cross your mind, like, I, I can't do another one. We've got two kids, I'm in a bad marriage, it's falling apart. My husband is having an affair with a woman he's supposed to be counseling out of suicide. He was having an affair in the church. They were, you know, snorting meth at the altar and watching porn on the projector screen. She didn't, my mom didn't know that at the time. Maybe she still doesn't. I don't know. She probably will. She reads this book. But I thought like, yeah, that would probably cross my mind if I were her. And I had a very horrible childhood. I didn't enjoy life until I was 19 or 20. By that metric, would we all have been better off if she had an abortion? So I asked her about that in the interview. Admittedly, I'd had a bit too much to drink during that interview and was getting a little melancholy. And she said that she hadn't considered it, that she is glad that I was here. And by the end of the book contemplating everything I'd been through being in Iowa, you know, I go at the end of the book, I go skinny dipping in Clear Lake by myself and just kind of have this moment of catharsis of, like, for all I've been through, I'm glad I'm alive, I'm glad I'm here, and I'm ready to embrace life with that kind of joy and optimism.

[Ryan Warner]

Josiah Hesse of Denver, author of a personal history titled On Fire for Fear, Shame, Poverty and the Making of the Christian Right. Thanks to the Denver Press Club for hosting us and to producer Stephanie Wolf, as well as audio engineers Pedro Lombragno and Zan Huck Piccione. I'm Ryan Warner and this is Colorado Matters from CPR News and krcc.