Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War

Years before Hillbilly Elegy and White Trash, a raucous, truth-telling look at the white working poor -- and why they have learned to hate liberalism. What it adds up to, he asserts, is an unacknowledged class war. 

By turns tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, this book is a call to arms for fellow progressives with little real understanding of "the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks."

Deer Hunting with Jesus is Joe Bageant’s report on what he learned when he moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia. Like countless American small towns, it is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. Two in five of the people in his old neighborhood do not have high school diplomas or health care. Alcohol, overeating, and Jesus are the preferred avenues of escape. 

He writes of:

• His childhood friends who work at factory jobs that are constantly on the verge of being outsourced
• The mortgage and credit card rackets that saddle the working poor with debt
• The ubiquitous gun culture—and why the left doesn’ t get it
• Scots Irish culture and how it played out in the young life of Lynddie England

• Rainbow Pie: a redneck memoir
• Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball: the best of Joe Bageant
• Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich
• Rainbow Pie: A Memoir Of Redneck America
• Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class -- And What We Can Do About It
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
• The Beans of Egypt, Maine
• Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)
• The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream?
• What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia