A book review and other comments (moral, minority, America, church)

[Bright-ness' Shadow]

Complete review here
Can an excess of Christian entertainment trigger a fundamentalist crisis of faith?

Tim LaHaye, The Secret of Ararat (Bantam Books, 2004)

Reviewed by Jana Prikryl

It was the religion that made them do it -- that was the immediate liberal response to last November’s election. The country’s secular minority suddenly went into crisis mode, certain that it shared no common language with the vast majority of church-going Americans. Within a few weeks of the election, that first impression was corrected. Both conservatives and liberals eventually agreed that 22% of Americans (who claimed in exit polls that “moral values” were the election’s top issue) do not a moral majority make. But that has been scant comfort for many secular liberals, who long believed that large swathes of the country were inhabited by strange, religious creatures. Whatever the polling results, they are sure there is no common ground between themselves and church-going Americans.

Yet American culture has never been so simple or monolithic (this is the one case where a schizophrenic state of affairs may actually be healthy). In a weird way, the most hopeful sign that secular and religious Americans do share a common language is the bizarre and phenomenally successful series of Left Behind novels, which have sold more than 60 million copies since they first appeared in 1995. For nonbelievers, these books are a strange blend of Biblical prophecy and Indiana Jones knock-off. For many (but certainly not all) Christian conservatives, they are simply the truth disguised as entertainment. But it is significant that believers should tolerate truth in such a disguise.