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Among the many books this season warning about the dire influence of the Religious Right, the one I was most looking forward to—maybe the only one I was looking forward to—was Randall Balmer's Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America—An Evangelical's Lament (Basic Books; not to be confused with Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, published by Norton, nor with Mel White's Religion Gone Bad: The Hidden Dangers of the Religious Right, from Tarcher, or any one of a dozen or so other books with similar titles or subtitles). Balmer is an excellent writer as well as a first-rate scholar; his 1998 Christianity Today profile of Jimmy Swaggart, "Still Wrestling with the Devil," is one of the finest pieces I've read in the past ten years. Randy is also someone I consider a friend. I think he would say the same of me, though we don't see each other often. And although we disagree about all sorts of things, I've always felt that the core convictions we share as believers outweighed such differences.
I still felt that way after reading Thy Kingdom Come, but the book was very disappointing. "Disappointment" suggests that reasonable expectations were not fulfilled. I couldn't honestly say I was disappointed by Balmer's apocalyptic take on the Religious Right, since other things he's written have already pointed in that direction. And I have become resigned to a state of affairs in which many people I respect seem to be living in a parallel universe, where—as in a number of science fiction novels published in the late 1980s, when the "Moral Majority" was on every pundit's lips and Pat Robertson was being described as a plausible presidential candidate—theocracy is the greatest threat to our nation, and where evangelicals in particular need to walk around wearing placards disassociating themselves from the excesses of their mean-spirited brethren, as Brian McLaren lamented recently in The New York Times.
Even so, I admit, I was surprised by some of the details in Balmer's account—the notion, for instance, that Reconstructionism or "theonomy," as propagated by R. J. Rushdoony, is "popular among leaders of the Religious Right." (Footnote: In the unlikely event that anyone who is reading this was present during my public argument with Rushdoony when he was speaking at Westmont College, probably in 1969 or 1970, please give me any recollections you have of the event, so that I can check my memory against them.) And I was downright astonished by Balmer's attack on homeschooling—in the name of pluralism, a dazzling feat of rhetorical contortion. (Perhaps Balmer could take a look at Mitchell Stevens' book, from Princeton University Press, Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homechooling Movement. Maybe he could even get to know some of his homeschooling neighbors.)
But never mind. What really disappointed me about Balmer's book was the absence of the depth, the nuance, the texture, the alertness to human complexity that made his portrait of the aging Jimmy Swaggart so powerful. Consider, for example, the chapter in Thy Kingdom Come entitled "Creationism by Design," which includes Balmer's account of a debate between William Dembski, one of the leading figures in the Intelligent Design movement, and the distinguished molecular biologist Lee Silver. Here is how Balmer introduces Dembski:
Wearing a dark suit slightly too large for his lanky frame, Dembski had the mien of an assistant vice president at a local bank or of someone who has just been dispatched to notify the next of kin. The moderator introduced him as having an unspecified affiliation with Baylor University, but that was somewhat misleading, and Dembski made no effort to correct the impression that he was a member of the faculty at Baylor.
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