Gods of the Smoke Machine: Power, Pain, and the Rise of Christian Nationalism in the Megachurch

We are entering a new era of religion in America: For the first time, fewer than half the country belongs to a church.
But within that group, growing numbers are consolidating in megachurches, which are amassing social and political power in our age of convenience and easy celebrity.

Megachurch pastors have never been more influential--with media empires, networks, and entire colleges under their control. But their churches have also never been more prone to abuse and hurt. Gods of the Smoke Machine goes inside America's largest churches to uncover the hidden stories of trauma happening within our most powerful Christian institutions and meet the survivors, attorneys, and advocates fighting for accountability. It is a cloaked world of sex, power, politics, and money, but also a human story of pain, betrayal, and resilience.

Combining personal storytelling and original reporting, author Scott Latta pulls back the curtain on a dangerously insular institution of more than seventeen hundred churches nationwide that is answerable to almost no outside accountability.

Even those who have never set foot in a church can feel the implications of this societal shift. Megachurch pastors were the kingmakers of Donald Trump and drove the rhetoric behind the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. For decades, they have crafted their own laws even as they fought to influence ours.

Gods of the Smoke Machine tells a sweeping story of those who commoditized our search for meaning into a machine that preserves privilege, profit, and power at the cost of those it wounds along the way.


Author: Scott Latta
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 10/28/2025
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.23lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.10w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9798890680136

About the Author
Scott Latta is an award-winning journalist who has spent a decade reporting for humanitarian organizations on conflict, displacement, and climate change around the world. He has interviewed Syrian refugees in Lebanon, nomadic farmers in Niger, migrant families in Ecuador, and midwives in Sierra Leone. His writing has been featured in the Believer, CityLab, Modern Farmer, the Awl, and the Southampton Review, which awarded him the 2016 Frank McCourt Memoir Prize. He lives in Portland, Oregon.