The back flap of Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel World of Christian Pop Culture notes that author Daniel Radosh is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, a former writer at Spy magazine, and a resident of Brooklyn. Given this résumé, it’s hardly surprising that, on the book’s second page, he informs the reader that he is a New York liberal. Radosh spends much of his book’s 300-odd pages reminding readers of this fact—snarking at opponents of gay marriage, expressing concern at the freedoms that might be lost in an anti-abortion regime, and worrying that a teenage rock fan’s religious convictions might lay a “path to creationism and abstinence education.” He even goes so far as to admit—without irony—to having “secular elitist” friends.

This makes the worldly and with-it Radosh quite the outsider as he dives into the decidedly un-hip universe of Evangelical pop culture—a world that is, above all, determined to be neither secular nor elite. That Radosh openly filters everything he sees through the lens of his own class means that his book is often as revealing about the mindset of the secular and urban elite as it is about Evangelical culture.

Nevertheless, Rapture Ready largely succeeds as a guide to the variegated world of spiritually inflected pop. Radosh goes in expecting uniformity, but quickly learns that there is no such thing as a singular Christian culture. The world he encounters is sprawling and self-contradictory, defined by no particular politics or ethos. Some of his subjects are simply in business; others are determined artists. Some view conversion as their primary goal; others downplay their commitment to proselytizing.

The breadth and variety of Christian pop culture, as well as its purveyors and consumers, is reflected in the individuals Radosh meets and interviews throughout the book. We encounter—to name only a few—a glow-stick wielding Mennonite DJ who throws raves in churches; an environmentally obsessed freegan indie rocker who eats exclusively from dumpsters and schedules his days around grocery-store disposal patterns; a pair of creation-science ideologues; a spiritual horror novelist; and a man who runs a Christian wrestling association. Radosh exhibits genuine interest in the particulars of their lives and pursuits, delving into the details of, say, the wrestler’s feelings about violence and the novelist’s frustration with the sensitivities of his Christian audience. Radosh may not succeed in combating the idea that pop-obsessed Evangelicals are a strange bunch, but he humanizes them all the same.

He paints complex portraits of modern, spiritually engaged Americans struggling to define their faith and its role in the world at large and is at his best in these encounters, proving himself a keen observer. He is skilled at teasing out the truths and contradictions of his subjects, many of whom he describes with lyrical precision. Take, for example, Radosh’s description of Ken Hamm, a leading creationist who runs the group Answers in Genesis:

Ham is a somber, imposing figure. Born and raised in Australia, he speaks in a clipped, heavily-accented baritone that conveys a combination of boundless suspicion and macho authority. His hooded eyes and lycanthropic chin-curtain beard complete his aura of Old Testament prophet.

The book is replete with similarly vibrant, impressive passages. More often than not, his prose is equally felicitous when engaging with ideas. “If science is the search for answers, creationism is the elimination of questions,” is his succinct summation of creation science’s anti-intellectualism. Upon witnessing yet another altar call—the invitation for nonbelievers to come forward and become Christians—cap off a Christian event, Radosh writes that “the fetishization of the altar call as a single moment of victory seems to obscure the need for the hard work that it must take to bring somebody to a genuinely meaningful faith.”

Still, there are times when he allows his cultural proclivities to get the best of him. At an abstinence conference, he notes that the hotel has been made to look like a fantasy Victorian town, complete with a miniature indoor river and lovingly recreated shops and houses. He writes, “It was a perfect little world that did not, in any meaningful way, exist”—a too clever literary touch that Radosh was unable to resist. At the same conference, he picks up a “clean sex quote and joke book” and on finding a handful of jokes on women’s liberation adds, “I checked the copyright date. It said 2004.” He seems to be shocked that, even in modern America, some men still joke—cleanly—about feminism.

Similarly, the personal style of reporting in the book leads to occasional unevenness. At one point, he finds himself engaged in a heated, serious dispute with an anti-IVF activist. (Radosh’s children were conceived through IVF.) At another, he conducts an absurd mock-interview with aging Christian skater Stephen Baldwin, of the famous Baldwin brothers, using passages clipped entirely from Baldwin’s book. Does Radosh intend to be observer, participant, or researcher? It’s never quite clear. The book has great range, but does not always maintain a consistent tone.

What he lacks in focus, however, Radosh makes up for in curiosity and civility. Faced with a procession of Bible-thumping wrestlers, heavy metal acts, and armor-of-God-clad superheroes, the easy route would be ridicule. Certainly, the Christian marketplace is overrun with deserving products. Radosh visits a conference for Christian vendors and catalogues the “Jesus junk” on offer. There are Gospel Golf Balls, Bible-believing action figures (invented by the man who gave the world G.I. Joe), fake tattoos, kazoos, and, somewhat famously, scripture-bearing breath fresheners called Testamints. Far from the sacred and the profane, we are in the land of the sacred and the silly.

Applying a veneer of religiosity to such products is absurd. Their creators insist, however, that their keychains and assorted knick-knacks are heaven-sent tools for spiritual growth. Understandably, Radosh cannot help but crack wise when encountering these oddities and their sellers. (Seeing two sets of Bible-passage birthday cards, he quips, “Sometimes God gives two people the same idea, just to watch them fight it out.”)

Stephen Baldwin aside, he resists easy mocking and cruelty and is willing to engage some of the most preposterous characters—Bibleman, anyone?—in challenging and thoughtful dialogue. Sometimes he judges their ideas, but rarely, if ever, does he judge the people behind them. True, his quips occasionally betray a hint of a sneer, but he clearly works to tamp down this tendency. The Evangelical world may be unfamiliar, but Radosh seems determined to treat it with respect.

This is not to say that the book is free of bias. On the contrary, it is explicitly presented as a product of the author’s individual cultural and political milieu; he calls his work “personal and idiosyncratic rather than comprehensive.” On the blog he has set up for the book, he explains that he writes from “an outsider’s perspective.”

That Radosh regards this alternative cultural landscape as largely foreign is to be expected. What is more telling is how he seems to view it as invisible—he describes it as having been “completely off [his] radar”—and, at least at the start, as somewhat insignificant, except as a “covert delivery mechanism for conservative ideology.” Evangelical Christians, he assumes, are disconnected from reality and obsessed with politics. Their beliefs on everything from evolution to sexual purity lack credibility. They are unwilling and possibly unable to engage with the obvious truths of modernity.

It is undeniably true that many of this country’s Christians are out of touch with the educated urban liberalism that Radosh represents—what many consider the American “mainstream.” Yet Radosh’s reporting shows that the universe of Christian pop culture—its books and music, its gimmicks and gifts, even its popular science—is often as pervasive and popular as anything in the larger secular world. Christian books regularly top bestseller lists when they are counted; Christian rock increasingly winds up on pop charts; polls consistently show that various forms of creationism are believed by a majority of the public.

The question then arises: Who is really out of touch? If anything, the Evangelicals Radosh meets seem interested in reaching out beyond their own familiar worlds, and the diversity of political opinion among believers puts lie to the myth of Evangelicals as a monolithic conservative political block. It is undoubtedly true that Christians seem excessively concerned about the threat of secular culture. But how many secular books and magazine articles in recent years have warned of impending theocracy, the Christian menace to secular society? When it comes to insularity and suspicion, the Christian world and its resolutely secular counterpart seem to have quite a bit in common.

Indeed, it’s worth noting that Radosh approaches his project much as the Christians he meets approach theirs: through the lens of his personal and cultural identity. Being Jewish, he is naturally sensitive about anti-Semitic slights, and, being liberal, he is resistant to religious notions about abortion, homosexuality, and evolution. He hopes his words will prove meaningful to Christians, yet it is clear he is writing primarily for his own culture and class.

It’s not surprising, then, that he appears most comfortable around the Christians who most resemble him: liberal, urban, educated, and steeped in alternative culture—the Evangelical secular elite. In particular, he seems to take to Jay Bakker, the tattooed, punk-rock-loving son of the famously disgraced Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. These days, Jay runs a church that operates out of a bar in Brooklyn. He smokes and curses, expresses regret at the power of the Christian Right, and preaches acceptance of homosexuals. He is one of the book’s most sympathetic characters.

Not only does Radosh latch on to modernist Christians like Bakker, he finishes the book by calling on his secular counterparts to be more open to them and their ideas, believing that, if allowed greater prominence in secular culture, they would prove a “moderating force” in Evangelicalism. Aware that this notion may seem counterintuitive, he frames his alliance with what he calls “Christian moderates” as an act of good will, tolerance, and inclusiveness. And in some ways that’s right; certainly, he refrains from obvious attacks and imparts dignity to his subjects.

Yet for all the respect he shows, his evenhandedness only goes so far, and it undoubtedly carries an undertone of self-interest. It’s hard not to see his final call as a strategy to persuade Christians to become more liberal, more urban, or to put it bluntly, more like him. Secular elite or not, Radosh has issued a brief for conversion—an altar call of his own.
____________________________________

Peter Suderman is editor of Doublethink Online.