Discover Religion

Things are looking up, so to speak, for evangelical Christians. Last week, ABC News executives decided that they needed a religion correspondent for "World News Tonight," someone to cover "just how religious and political issues intersect."

Yale Law Professor Stephen L. Carter's book, "The Culture of Disbelief," criticizes Americans' dismissive attitudes towards religion. The widely publicized book has forced many to reassess the position of religion and the religious in our society today. More and more people are deciding that religion is a crucial part of the fabric of America, an element we've been missing.

In this Sunday's New York Times, Anna Quindlen writes--in response, in part, to Carter's work--that "there is a yawning hole in all the psyche of America and Americans" where there should be spiritual satisfaction. Now, people are starting to agree, it's time to patch that hole.

All of a sudden, from many different directions, we're seeing a new emphasis on religion, and a new effort to understand and accept Christianity.

So evangelical Christians like myself are beginning to sigh in relief, believing that we'll finally be accepted as part of the intellectual mainstream.

Unfortunately, Christians can't expect to be rediscovered--because we haven't really been discovered yet. Despite all the hype about religion, the media is still going to have trouble reporting correctly about evangelical Christianity. News organizations will have trouble because they thinks that after 70 years of covering religion, they already understand it. They don't.

Quindlen thinks of evangelical Christians as "the radical right" who seize and exploit "the terrain of the soul." She considers these Christians a problem to be solved, and prescribes a replacement of such "old outmoded forms."

ABC thinks that covering religion means keeping up to date with the eccentric and often dangerous cults in this country. And when Peter Jennings asks ABC's new religion correspondent how different the theology of that apocalyptic cult out there is from the theology of many "normal" Christians, the correspondent will have to answer: "Not very."

Americans are still dealing in misconceptions about theologically conservative Christianity. Consider the critical success of Walter Kirn's She Needed Me, a novel about a love affair between a fundamentalist Christian anti-abortion rights protester and the pregnant woman he stops from entering a clinic. Everyone from Entertainment Weekly to the Wall Street Journal has praised the book; even Sassy raves that the novel should be recommended "to anyone who is serious about understanding all possible perspectives of our current abortion issue."

According to the hype, this book finally offers a fair portrayal of the religion issue. But all of the Christian characters in the book, all of the other "possible perspectives," are either slightly psychotic, or deeply disturbed.

So Christians sigh again and wonder why it is that the media always seems to misrepresent them.

It is time that we Christians recognize that we are not being maliciously misrepresented. The awful truth is that we cannot be understood as being "normal." We are different. Our understanding of the world is necessarily different from what others see.

Much to the surprise of many, most evangelical Christians actually believe the things we say and the things they write. When we claim to "hate the sin and love the sinner," we are not just using polite code words for hate and disgust.

We mean exactly what we say, and desperately try to live out what goes against common sense: heaven and hell, the concept of God. These beliefs are not things that can be explained away rationally.

The problem is that the media, and most of the country, is unprepared to accept what Christians really believe at face value, unwilling to look beyond what they think they know about it.

"The Culture of Disbelief" is, of course, right. Religion has been relegated to the hinterlands of our culture. But we evangelical Christians can't expect the world to totally accept us. And we must not.