Radosh covers the Creation Museum, Cornerstone Festival, the largest Christian bookstore in the country, the Holy Land Experience, the Great Passion Play, Christian raves/DJs, Christian wrestling, eschatology, chastity movements, hell houses, Bibleman, and the Bible, in all its marketable editions. I might have missed something, but you get the idea. He spends a year doing things that I would go to jail to avoid. And he's funny. Damn funny. It might be my close association with many of these phenomena in my previous life as a theist, but I'm pretty sure it's funny anyway. Along the way, Radosh makes observations that I find incredibly astute for a sojourner in the strange land of evangelical entertainment/evangelism.
For example, Radosh is perceptive enough to parse the definitions of evangelical, born-again, and fundamentalist in a way the MSM never seems to manage, preferring to lump all evangelicals into one pile for the sake of brevity. He gives Barna's definition for born-agains: people who answer yes to "have you made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in your life today and...believe that when you die you will go to Heaven because you have confessed your sins and have accepted Jesus Christ as your savior?" About 86 million people say yes, but Radosh points out that Barna is not satisfied that this makes them evangelicals (nor am I). Barna insists they meet seven additional requirements. As briefly as possible: faith is important in their lives, responsible to evangelize, belief in Satan, sola gratia, sinless Jesus, infallible Bible, omni-, omni-, omni-. 18 million qualified. Now, here's what Radosh notices:
Based on other Barna surveys about the disparate attitudes between "evangelicals" and "born-agains," it is reasonable to posit that the people Barna calls evangelicals are what many non-Christians would call fundamentalists..."
Fuck yes! Obviously. And we've been saying for a while around here that fundamentalists are usurping the label. The cause of kind evangelicals is not helped when a reputable pollster can't decide before writing poll questions the definition of evangelical and how it ought to be different than fundamentalist. The problem, and Radosh notices it, is that the Barna evangelicals always point to their own right and talk of the really crazy, fringe fundamentalists. Those folks are not fundamentalists; they're insane. The Barna evangelicals are fundamentalists.
The book is not sociological analysis though. That's only the introduction, where Radosh has the great good sense to define terms. The intro bookends, along with the last chapter, in which Radosh offers an idea on how to marginalize fundamentalists, the chapters where he actually meets with people and travels the country. Radosh is no passive observer, though. He interacts with people, asks hard questions, confronts equivocation and cowardice (Rock for Life volunteer) and lying (Ken Ham). His interview with Frank Peretti is amazing. And it's the turning point of the book. Radosh is no cynical liberal out to skewer the crazies; he's genuinely curious, and Peretti opens up the possibility that redemptive confrontation and transformation are possible. That possibility is furthered when Radosh hears Aaron Weiss of mewithoutYou speak at Cornerstone. The festival is a nexus of hope and despair for secularists; I feel much the same way about it. So many good kids, so much possibility, and such openness and kindness mixed with some genuine fundamentalist nuttiness, but at least Cornerstone is open to all comers.
I'll spare you funny quotes, because they're funnier in context, and they don't get much better than the eschatology chapter, wherein LaHaye and Jenkins are justly skewered for their shitty writing, sociopathy, and anti-Semitism. The book does bog down in places, usually when Radosh allows the people to talk for too long, most notably the wrestling chapter. It's probably more interesting to genuine outsiders. Those of us who have heard all the rhetoric and "I've got a calling" bullshit probably want to skim through some of those parts.
Radosh ends the book with his second encounter with Jay Bakker, Jim and Tammy Faye's son. Bakker, along with Weiss and others, give Radosh hope that "they are the ones who will bring about the demise of the religious right—probably the only ones who can." He makes a case that pop culture can be "the forum in which we negotiate our common cause." His common cause is that of secularists, centrist and modernist evangelicals, mainline Christians, and people of other faiths against "intolerant fundamentalism." He encourages the market controllers to embrace the gentler forms of evangelical expression—music, art, film, books by centrists and modernists—and eliminate the wall between sacred and secular art. He encourages the evangelicals to make the attempt to "cross over." Interestingly, and again insightfully, he notes: "...the existence of a separate Christian bubble gives fundamentalists greater influence on Christian culture than they deserve based on their numbers (or their ideas)." His case is a good one, but I'll let you read it for yourself. He's hopeful, perhaps too hopeful, but he's right.
