In his new book, “Believers,” Jeffery L. Sheler, the seasoned journalist and former religion reporter for U.S. News & World Report, never really tells us why he left his first love, the evangelical church he attended as an acne-ridden adolescent boy during the early 1960s, a place he embraced with a passion and fervor that alarmed his far less zealous Christian parents.
First loves are often tricky. There is the infatuation period followed by waves of bliss and then the inevitable decline; the realization that all isn’t as it seems.
Sheler left the evangelical church and settled elsewhere, finding a church that better suited his temperament as he matured, married and had children. But Sheler’s decision to study this movement and its striking evolution over the past few decades into the political arena bristles with the intensity of the young enthusiastic follower he once was.
Sheler still seems to be looking for something. Recalling his early days in church, he writes movingly, “It was here that I was introduced to evangelical Christianity and to the precepts and promises of God-breathed scripture. Here I had my first experience of the Christian community and the care and the nurture that goes with being part of an extended family. Here, too, I encountered and embraced – and eventually discarded – a fundamentalist ethos that would become the baseline for the remainder of my personal quest.”
Sheler is blessed with a reporter’s relentless curiosity coupled with a sharp eye for detail and an earnest desire to understand what draws people to faith. Sometimes his questions seem to reveal him to be somewhat of an anguished patriot, a centrist of sorts, out of sync with the extreme rhetoric of certain evangelical leaders.
But he is equally disturbed by the tendency of those who insist on painting all evangelicals with a broad brush. His focus here is to find out, “Who are these 60 million Americans who call themselves evangelical Christians? What are their motives, aspirations, and agendas? Who speaks for them, and who does not? What is their vision for America, and what might it mean for the rest of us?”
The author’s spiritual road trip has him crisscrossing the country. He attends a huge Christian rock concert in Pennsylvania; and visits several of the mega churches that are sprouting up around the country where parishioners are offered modern style services and music that suits their contemporary taste. He spends time at Wheaton, the flagship of a burgeoning network of evangelical colleges, learning how professors and students integrate faith and learning.
He travels with a group of blue-collar guys on a missionary trip to Guatemala to help build a house for the poor. He analyzes the effectiveness of the leaders of the movement: Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Rick Warren and others who are gaining popularity among large groups of evangelicals. He meets with the chief lobbyists of the National Evangelical Association in Washington and learns about how they are trying to broaden their agenda to more fully embrace social issues such as poverty and race relations and defending human rights.
Sheler paints a complex and intriguing picture of a movement in flux between two opposing forces, those who wish to work with other groups and negotiate and cooperate for the greater good and those who think that “ambiguity is error and compromise is defeat.” Sheler seems interested in finding the middle ground.
Elaine Margolin is a freelance book reviewer and essayist in Hewlett, N.Y.
Believers
A Journey Into Evangelical America
By Jeffery L. Sheler
Viking, 336 pages, $24.95
