Pagan Worship is a coming-of-age story about a young man named David, who is at first a negligible figure in his parents’ all-consuming ambition to build an outsize base of Christian power, but who is slowly, while his parents largely ignore him in favor of his younger sister, developing his own strong identity and discovering a world far outside the dumbed-down reportage of Fox News and the strict, right-wing constraints of Orem, Utah, where he lives. But perhaps it would have been better for David if he had allowed himself to remain the same dim bulb his parents consider him to be. For as his discoveries multiply and his awareness grows uglier after seeking greater and more detailed exposure to the larger world, he finds himself increasingly overwhelmed. First, of course, there is Trump and his monstrous reign of lies, ineptitude, and hypocrisies.

But if Donald Trump is at the diseased heart of these outrages, there are others, at home, that are equally terrible and altogether more personal: his father’s sexual predation, certainly against his female parishioners but perhaps against his “beloved” daughter, Angel, as well; the pastor’s further moral failings, in numerous ways similar to Trump’s, as he wrings more and more money out of his poorest church members, among other transgressions; the heinous arrest of a girl David knows at school, and her mother, for obtaining an abortion across state lines; and finally, the horribly needless death of David’s oldest friend, Jim, from Covid-19, because his parents, for political reasons, refused to allow him to be vaccinated—all this, in the end, forcing upon David’s wounded psyche a mission he must carry out.