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When did proclaiming the offense of the Cross become a way of "cozying up" to someone or to court favor? The unanswered question of why Bob cannot simply do his job and preach Christ reflects little regard for viewers' intelligence. The matter must be construed into an either/or question to advance the drama, at the expense of realism and the consistency of Bob's solicitous character.

True enough, Bob's Christian commitment is firm and single-minded. But realism is again strained when his evangelical zeal is somehow ignorant of the basic scriptural appeal to do everything, including one's job, as unto the Lord.

Even if Bob has cultivated no fully developed spirituality of work—a perhaps accurate portrayal of the typical evangelical—it is improbable that this Bible-imbued believer feels no compulsion to do a good job even under in tense pressure to do so. Nor does his negligence square with the intelligence he is repeatedly said to possess.

The screenplay's artifices thus set Bob up for a good postmodern lecture about integrity, character, and what it means to be fully human. The hypocrisy of this judgmentalism is not initially evident because the secular preachers, Larry and Phil, are constructed as such long-suffering, humble, and reasonable guys; indeed, they have some true things to say.

Asserting that Bob is less human by trying to "market" Christianity, however, is not one of them. This charge is based on Bob trying to "steer" conversations toward Christ like a marketing rep rather than listening with genuine care, though in the film it is clear that if the shiny young man does anything well, it is to listen—to the big kahuna as well as to them. Nevertheless, part of the genuine conflict in the film is that Bob sees evangelism as humanizing the business world, whereas his secular colleagues see it as dehumanizing.

Whether their judgmentalism is more unfair toward faith or business would be another point for discussion. The assumption is that business dehumanizes people by causing others to see and treat them only as functions, whereas it is axiomatic in business that success depends on quality relationships of trust, integrity, and character. This is also often true, of course, for relational evangelism (as the first-century spread of Christianity via the Middle Eastern commercial routes demonstrated).

While Christians in the marketplace do indeed face serious tensions, the false dichotomy between faith and commerce dramatized in this film does justice to neither. Business becomes a cliché for the morally ambiguous. Faith becomes a cliché for intolerance and otherworldliness. Most Christian ceos, as Laura Nash has shown in her Believers in Business (Thomas Nelson, 1994), display a far greater integration of faith and work than what this mirror attempts to reflect about business and evangelicalism.

Indeed, it will be difficult for evangelicals to learn much about themselves by looking into the distorted mirror this film holds up—although, as in any funhouse, a good time is practically guaranteed.

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November 13 2000, Vol. 44, No. 13