Books with the inside dope on right-wingers

I’ve been reading or paging through a couple of books critical of antiliberal Catholics: Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei, by Robert A. Hutchison, and Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism, by Michael W. Cuneo. Both give some interesting background info, although the first seems rather over-the-top and therefore I suppose unreliable (the author views the death of JP I and election of JP II as a right-wing assassination/coup d’etat), and the second takes a point of view that seems very odd to me—the author explicitly accepts an attitude toward religion that is consumerist to a point that I would consider cynical, and then lumps the most ill-assorted people together as representatives of something he calls “Catholic fundamentalism” because they all reject that attitude in favor of something more transcendent and authoritative. Still, he writes clearly, he’s done a lot of interviewing and research, he tries to be accurate and (within limits) fair, and if like me you don’t care about the Bayside apparitions or self-styled popes you can skip those sections.

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