The poisonwood bible. I loved it in high school, because I was an oppressed little atheist/agnostic with hyper religious parents at a christian school. It was brilliant, vivid, groundbreaking, and wild in its defiance of cultural norms...
and now it's just a sort of sad story of how the christian mindset mirrors colonial/empire ambitions and everyone gets hurt.
The economics of the red states will pale in comparison to the question of where the weapons end up. There are a lot of nuclear weapons in deep red areas.