Wild Faith, like a lot of works, is a project that makes the critical error of trying to approach a book like a piece of journalism.

There is a great book — or at least a great piece of journalism — buried in these pages, for which author Talia Levin interviewed hundreds of people about their experience growing up in Christian nationalism.

The issue, however, is that journalism is a medium of qualitative data, for the most part. As one professor told my class in graduate school, in qualitative data extrapolating anything may not be the point. Documenting what one community or group experiences is valuable in its own right.

If there is one case of abuse in one town and a reporter finds it, it is useful in and of itself as a report on abuse. A pattern of abuse might be extrapolated, but journalism tends to concern itself with the specifics of one case, one incident, one miscarriage of justice.

Journalism can in fact cause problems when it throws up so many data points that people start drawing extrapolations. A newspaper is likely to report on every single murder in a city; but the fact there is a murder on the front page of the paper every week does not mean the city has a high murder rate necessarily, it means that murder is such an extraordinary and horrific event that it is important to document it regardless of how common or uncommon it is. “If it bleeds it leads” journalism, however, feeds directly into people’s perception that murder and crime is far more common than it actually is.

Levin’s book is a “if it bleeds it leads” approach to the issue of the religious right. The number of evangelicals in the entire country is brought up for the first time in the book 67% of the way through. Most of the contents prior to that are interviews with professors or experts (not, tellingly, citations to their scholarly works — an extremely journalistic approach that works on short deadlines but feels slapdash in a book) and a medley of horrific incidents of abuse or overreach by evangelical officials.

Are these issues worth noting and raising up? Absolutely. Are the voice of abuse victims Levin brings in to the book worthwhile even if those voices were the sole examples of abuse among the Christian right? Clearly.

But the book is not framed around the interviews, which would be a good and valuable book to have written. It’s not framed around statistical analysis of disproportionate political power by evangelical lawmakers, which would also be an intriguing read. It’s framed as a scrapbook of incidents, with much attention devoted to finding clever ad-hominin epithets for various political figures and not much to doing what the book claims to be doing: explaining their power.

The number of evangelicals, by the way, is 14% — not exactly an overwhelming majority. There could be interesting arguments about how this 14% has grown to have significant power over right-wing politics, more so than, say, libertarians. But instead the author parades a set of context-less images saying to the reader again and again, isn’t it awful? Isn’t it just terrible?

I wanted to like this book, not least because I did enjoy Levin’s first work (although in retrospect I do think it suffered some of the same issues). Even this book could have been a really excellent work of journalism if the author stuck to centering personal experience. But instead it is a book that largely tries to extrapolate trends from qualitative data that cannot support the assertions; a crime-beat explanation of a movement in American politics that deserves better analysis.