I had a lot more written here (specifically, a long-winded comment expressing my appreciation for your bible camp anecdote), but as they say, brevity is like a wildebeest, yearning for the ripe apple of attention, which hangs from the tree of literature, which grows in the blood-soaked soil of the New York Times Bestseller List, which incidentally also nurtures the deadly comma splice!

Anyway, my heart thanks you for the writeup and for linking me to Slacktivist, but my head thinks you’re a jerk for keeping me up all night.

Hope to check in again soon, Professor Fury sounds like a thoughtful soul.

As to the title track, I was raised nominally Christian, but actually liberal secular rationalist, and I have a very similar emotional reaction to it (and to similar kinds of apocalyptic triumphalism elsewhere in Darnielle’s oeuvre, and elsewhere). So to make a mostly-unsupported and probably-invalid extrapolation from my own experience, perhaps it’s more that both the persecution fantasies of the Christian right-wing and that of “Heretic Pride”’s narrator tap into the same underlying impulse, than that the latter evokes the former as such.