What Do Evangelicals Listen to on Their iPods?

Reviewed: Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Popular Culture by Daniel Radosh (Scribner, 2008).

The president of the United States may be a mental midget, but we are all a little smarter because of him. The Bush years have been graduate school for Americans on a host of previously arcane subjects. Before the Supreme Court settled the 2000 election, few nonspecialists knew anything about sectarian splits within Islam or could locate the cities of Kandahar and Basra on a map. On the domestic front, the Bush years have seen painful learning curves on everything from Florida voting law to the ABCs of military subcontracting, to the federal courts' role in safeguarding our constitutional rights.

And of course the Bush era has been a crash course for those of us who knew little to nothing about the tens of millions of evangelical Christians in our midst. This awareness peaked dramatically after the much-hyped role of "values voters" in Bush's improbable 2004 re-election. For secular and moderate religious Americans alike, questions about the GOP "base" gained new urgency: Who are these people? What do they want? How scared should we be?

There was no shortage of volunteers ready to address these questions. More like a stampede. Often placing an unfair emphasis on the fundamentalist end of the evangelical spectrum, publishers have cranked out dozens of dire and earnest books about the threat posed by these American Fascists (Chris Hedges) and The Rise of Christian Nationalism (Michelle Goldberg). There have been major television events (PBS's The Jesus Factor; HBO's Friends Of God) and too many magazine features and public radio segments to count. Then there was Jesus Camp, which lit up the art-house circuit and probably would have won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary if not for An Inconvenient Truth.

The books about evangelicals and politics, meanwhile, keep coming like Old Testament locusts, from every direction and with no end in sight.

I, for one, am sick of it all. Call it Fundie Fatigue or Baptist Burnout -- I just don't want to read or think about evangelicals for a while. Especially now, with Mike Huckabee relegated to sulking on the creationist lecture circuit, the evangelical moment feels, if not passed, at least ripe for an extended pause. A breather in this "national conversation" is warranted and deserved. America -- red, purple and blue -- has earned it.

Depending on how chronic is your own Fundie Fatigue, you may or may not want to make room on your summer reading list for Daniel Radosh's just-released Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture. While in one sense the book is just-another-book-about-evangelicals-for-secular-liberals, it distinguishes itself from the pack by not caring how evangelicals vote or why. His subject is how they relax-where they vacation, what they read, and what's on their iPods.

The sum total of all this divine downtime is more than the marginal and amateur market you might imagine. Christian pop culture is now a $7 billion industry that includes a vast, growing, and diverse publishing sector; Christian comedy circuits and sex advice seminars; creationist theme parks that compete in the shadow of Disneyland; a thriving music and recording industry; and enough Jesus-branded T-shirts and trinkets to keep all the prison-factories in Godless China busy until the Rapture. (These trinkets, Radosh reports, are referred to affectionately if quietly in the industry as "Jesus Junk.")

Rapture Ready! isn't the first book on Christian popular culture, but it is the breeziest. Radosh, a veteran magazine journalist and a former editor at Spy, is a good comic writer and thus a refreshing guide to a world where most people believe homosexuals burn in an eternal hell of unforgiving flames. One of the problems with the Michelle Goldberg-types who navigate this parallel world is their heavy touch and perma-furrowed brow. Murdered abortion doctors and organized attempts to fulfill prophecy through U.S. foreign policy are not things to take lightly, but there's also no getting around the fact that much about evangelical culture is, among other things, very funny. At least it is to the kind of people these books are written for and marketed to. Christian culture is as funny to seculars as secular culture is horrifying to Christians. No one writing on this stuff should pretend it isn't.