Hillbilly Elegy

outside world. I couldn’t listen to Eric
Clapton at Dad’s house—not because the
lyrics were inappropriate but because
Eric Clapton was influenced by demonic
forces. I’d heard people joke that if you
played Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to
Heaven” backward, you’d hear some
evil incantation, but a member of Dad’s
church spoke about the Zeppelin myth as
if it were actually true.
These were quirks, and at first I
understood them as little more than strict
rules that I could either comply with or
get around. Yet I was a curious kid, and
the deeper I immersed myself in
evangelical theology, the more I felt
compelled to mistrust many sectors of