Them!

Also in today's NYT Book Review, Books and Culture editor John Wilson writes about how Evangelicals have become the all-purpose bogeymen in our fiction and non-fiction -- even as the authors of such intolerant hysteria show little understanding about who Evangelicals really are -- and particularly how diverse they can be. Excerpt:

Ever since Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority began making headlines in the 1980s, it has served the purposes of certain conservative activists and their ideological foes to exaggerate the influence they wield among evangelical Christians. In fact, it is both a strength and a weakness of evangelicalism that the “movement” lacks a center. Yes, a significant majority of evangelicals voted for George W. Bush. Big deal. At the moment, it appears unlikely that a Republican of any stripe will win the White House in 2008, though the Democrats may yet find a way to squander their advantage. So much for theocracy.

If many commentators give a false impression of evangelical unity, they also underestimate the fluidity of religious identities. My wife and I have four children, all of them raised in an evangelical setting. The two oldest, ages 36 and 28, stopped going to church when they were about 16. We pray that they will return. Our third child — after graduation from Graham’s alma mater, the evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois — converted to Catholicism along with her husband, also a Wheaton grad, who was home-schooled in a self-described fundamentalist family in Texas.

If you have raised your offspring to be freethinkers before sending them away to college, you may be horrified to learn that one of them has fallen in with Christians on campus and is lustily singing praise choruses. You may have an evangelical at your table come Thanksgiving. (Your mail carrier may be one of Them already.) Or you may have grown up in a secular Jewish family, not in the least observant, only to find yourself drawn into one of the flourishing Jewish renewal movements when you begin to raise your own children.

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.

...The university was a marketplace of ideas. Wherever I turned, someone was trying to persuade me to do something. A young woman in a fetching tank top wanted me to join the army of the credit-card indebted. (I had already enlisted and re-upped, foolishly, at great eventual cost before I was discharged.) A couple of beefy guys wanted me to drink beer and do whatever else fraternity guys do. But some ideas are more threatening than others. So the evangelicals were a problem.

Evidently we still are.