2 of 3

But in here doing what? Being silent? Perhaps. Anna Greenberg, vice president of the research company that did the survey for PBS and U.S. News, says evangelicalism has simply "integrated into the mainstream. … Evangelicals are just not that much different from the rest of America."

Kristof makes nice—again
A slightly different perspective emerged from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has for the past few years engaged in a one-man good cop/bad cop routine when it comes to American evangelicalism. On Saturday, he was back in good cop mode.

"If liberals demand that the Christian right show more tolerance for gays and lesbians, then liberals need to be more respectful of conservative Christians," he writes. And, he adds, Christians are showing more tolerance for homosexuals, so some reciprocity isn't entirely out of order.

(Kristof has an odd tangent about the Bible not condemning lesbianism. On the Times web site, he extends this point. Most of the arguments are familiar to those who've monitored the debate. "A number of experts," " Biblical scholars," and "scholars" say that not only does the Bible not lament lesbian sex, but that biblical bans on gay sex are more about patriarchy and "the Leviticus obsession with mixing" than with the Edenic model of human sexuality. [Doesn't that "Leviticus obsession" argument break down when you're explaining why the Bible prohibits sex with the same gender?] Romans 1:26 only seems to be about lesbianism, Kristof summarizes; it's actually about women who were "unnaturally aggressive about sleeping with men.")

Kristof has been down this way before. He's now left off the incredulity about more Americans believing in the Virgin Birth than in evolution (to include it one more time would have been almost prosecutable repetition), but he's still beating the statistic that more elites "can discuss the Upanishads than the Left Behind books."

A people set apart?
What sets Kristof's column apart from the Wolfe angle in the U.S. News article is his emphasis that evangelicals really are different—if not from America, than at least from America's cultural gatekeepers. And not in a bad way:

Liberals often protest that they would have nothing against conservative Christians if they were not led by hypocritical blowhards who try to impose their Ten Commandments plaques, sexual mores, and creationism on society. But that's a crude stereotype, and it ignores the Christian right's accomplishments. Polls show that evangelical Christians are more likely to contribute to charities that help the needy, and in horror spots in Africa Catholics and other Christians are the bulwark of the health care system.

Again, this point is not new for Kristof, and Wolfe's road is similarly well-trod. But the weak point of both is in downplaying the diversity among evangelical attitudes toward "worldly" culture. Few evangelicals will stand up and cheer with Wolfe about the assimilation of their Protestant reform movement into mainstream culture, but many will argue that little cultural change can be made from outside the belly of the beast.

Similarly, Kristof's solution merely replaces "crude stereotype" of conservative Christians with a slightly less exaggerated caricature. To understand conservative Christians, their critics would do better to read the New Testament than the Left Behind novels. It's not only important to understand "red-state Pentecostalism," as Kristof suggests, but also Pentecostalism's similarities to and differences from other conservative Christian communities and movements.

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

April (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48