John Wilson in NY Times on Evangelicals

John Wilson, the editor of Books & Culture, has written an essay in the New York Times about evangelicals and the alarm spreading among secularists and non-evangelical people of faith.

This is a very well done short piece. Wilson nails it.  The cottage industry that was producing a few 'Look at the scary evangelicals trying to take over' books has become a full-fledged industrial phenonemon, cranking out a flood of books competing with each other to paint evangelicals in the most scare-mongering terms.  Michelle Goldberg's anti-evangelical screed cum secularist call to political arms, The Kingdom of God, is only one example of this breathless immaturity.

Wilson (or the NY Times editor) is too temperate to title this "Evangelicals in the hands of angry secularists" but "God fearing" is a lovely double entendre.  The NY Times requires registration but just do it.  Wilson's essay should be read.

Excerpts
On evangelicals sudden common appearance in literature:

In their fictional guise, evangelicals and their kin — fundamentalists, Pentecostals and all manner of weird cultists calling fervently on the name of Jesus — are usually side characters, rarely protagonists, except, of course, in the alternative universe of so-called Christian fiction, where all the protagonists are evangelicals, and in coming-of-age stories in which a youthful protagonist attains enlightenment and leaves faith behind. Sometimes these fictional evangelicals are ominous figures: glassy-eyed pro-lifers hellbent on murdering doctors and bombing abortion clinics, or charismatic psychopaths like the villain in Henning Mankell’s “Before the Frost,” who is mentored by Jim Jones of Jonestown fame. Mostly, though, they are drawn in broadly satiric strokes (see for example the “moaners” of the First Resurrectionist Maritime Assembly for God in Carl Hiaasen’s new novel, “Nature Girl”). Charmless, ignorant, homophobic and either brazenly hypocritical or obnoxiously sincere, they quote Scripture unctuously and have bad sex.

Then Wilson neatly lacerates the alarmists with the yawning chasm in their logic. To wit, the depictions of evangelicals as neanderthal twits is at odds with their simultaneous  ability to take over the entire country.

A reader who moves from the fiction shelf to the stacks of reportage and commentary may experience cognitive dissonance. The evangelical buffoons who populate so many novels these days seem hardly capable of organizing a local witch-burning, yet their nonfictional counterparts are said to be on the verge of turning these United States into a theocracy. (See, for starters, Kevin Phillips’s “American Theocracy” and Michelle Goldberg’s “Kingdom Coming.”)

Then the best part, on the astonishing blindness about freedom of speech,  bigotry and free-thinking on university campuses:

Many years ago, when I was teaching English at a large state university, I sat through part of a faculty debate on the problem posed by evangelical groups who were “proselytizing.” These professors, you understand, were fully committed to free speech — they’d swear to it, so help me Mario Savio — but they were concerned about the vulnerability of impressionable young minds to the seductive wiles of Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and other such evangelical organizations.

I left while the hand-wringing was still in progress and walked across the campus, passing a row of tables. One displayed books published by Progress Press, including works by Lenin and some classics of Socialist Realism. The books were dingy, as if they had been sitting outside for a long time, but I was tempted by Viktor Shklovsky’s study of Tolstoy. The fellow who took my money — studious, by the look of him, and with hair almost as long as mine — wanted me, improbably enough, to become a Communist.

Read Wilson's article and if you don't already, check out Books & Culture (as mentioned above, John Wilson is the editor). If you're not an evangelical, you might be surprised to find in Books & Culture that some bright, serious and open minds are writing about key questions of our day. If you are an evangelical and haven't seen B&C, you'll find the journal a helpful resource in developing the evangelical life of the mind.

Comments

[Vicky]

Thanks for this post. I get Books and Culture in the mail. This essay revisits what seems to be an ongoing problem: the demonization of Christians by secularists. My lip curls when I read the screeds of Dawkins, et. al. Which naturally brings to mind the attempts by certain Christians to demonize certain others. I'm thinking of the folks who created publicity inventing "The Homosexual Agenda" and "San Francisco Liberals" to incite fear in gullible congregations prior to the last election. Christ urges us not to let ourselves be swept along by tides of hate. We Christians need to live our witness by encouraging fellow believers not to indulge in fear-mongering, and we also need to consider the most Christlike response to the hate-mongers who rail against Christianity. If anyone has any good stories about how they responded effectively, intelligently, and in a Christlike manner to anti-Christian screeds, I'd love to read!

Vicky

[GL]

I think Wilson's essay in the NY Times is one excellent example of how to respond to anti-Christian screeds.

The best response I've read is Kelly Monroe Kullberg's story about being asked by a woman to whom Kelly could not say "no" to fill in for her at a speaking engagement at SUNY Albany. The event was titled, "The Bible and Feminism," and the campus militia had decided, unbeknownst to Kelly, to hijack the event. The way the Lord guided Kelly to respond is beatific.

Kelly tells this story in chapter 6, "Road Trip: Living In Skin" in her new book, Finding God Beyond Harvard.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0830833870/commongrounds-20

Easily this story is worth the price of the book, and it's not even the best chapter in the book.