Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory:

...Standing in judgment of contemporary culture and believing that, any minute now, Christ will return to claim his own before the seven-year tribulation and the thousand years of theocratic rule on earth, most of these folks would be inclined to agree with what Dwight L. Moody, founder of the Moody Bible Institute, said more than a century ago: "I don't find any place where God says the world is going to grow better and better...

...Like Wesley, these men and women claim to have had individual, isolable, and overwhelming experiences of God, datable meetings with Jesus which have transformed their lives...

...Like the woman I met at the front door that morning, they are also dauntingly precise in their assessments of the universe, its meaning, the designs of its Creator, and their place in the whole arrangement...

...At least we ought to recognize that most criticism of them fatuously appropriates the secular culture's incapacity to see religious belief as anything other than an engine of social behavior...

...Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggart little more than an allusion or two, Balmer implies that there is less to their conspicuous "ministries" than meets the eye, and even when he goes to Iowa and New Hampshire during Pat Robertson's and Jack Kemp's Republican primary campaigns, it is not to interview the celebrities but their evangelical campaign workers...

...Believers who stand apart from the world can't all be dismissed as anal retentive curmudgeons, and many of them, in the writings of the ancient church, for instance, have expressed their alarm profoundly...

...With few exceptions, the men and women Balmer presents are sincere, thoughtful, and congenial people of deep and abiding belief...

...He is a keen and sympathetic observer of evangelical phenomena, but aside from his general uneasiness about the truculent face that the evangelical subculture presents to the world, he is reluctant to comment on the belief that we are poised at the end of human history and what that might mean...

...There are exotics here, of course...

...Nor is it possible for even the most jaded reader to snicker at the witness of a Native American evangelical, Father Innocent Good House, pastor of the Sioux community of St...

...Generations of children in fundamentalist households were instructed to eschew ' worldliness,'" he writes with apparent disapproval, "and to adhere to strict codes of morality that forbade card-playing, gambling, cosmetics, motion pictures, dancing, alcohol, and tobacco...

...and computes the odds against the Soviet president's being the Antichrist at exactly 710,609, 175,188,282,100 to 1. But these people seem to be the Mother Angelicas and Matthew Foxes of the evangelical subculture, highly noticeable products but inadequate representatives of a substantial, lively, and self-critical tradition...

...I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation...

...This is unfamiliar terrain for those of us who rely (as I do) largely on television, newsweeklies, supermarket tabloids, and the New York Times for our information on evangelical doings...

...and Mrs...

...Sectarianism gets kicked around a lot these days, usually by commentators who are unaware of their own membership in another, more powerful, more secular sect...

...and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death...

...Douglas Frank, an evangelical historian who informally presides over a community of scholars at the Oregon Extension of Trinity College, laments the subculture's exclusionary "temptation to moralize," and argues that it equally afflicts the boorish Jerry Falwells and the impeccably feminist, pacifist, communitarian, wholistic Sojourners-commu-nity sorts...

...Michael O.Garvey One summer morning years ago in San Francisco, awakened by the doorbell of the house in which I was staying, I encountered an abrupt, stout, black woman who clutched a Bible and a fistful of pamphlets in one hand and a briefcase in the other...

...These people might appear to us as grotesque refugees from some Flannery O'Connor short story, but their refusal to join in the delirious chorus in our ongoing don't-worry-be-happy daydream is honorable and brave...

...There is far more going on here than the high-stepping, sweaty antics of Jerry Lee Lewis's cousin, Jimmy Swaggart, where most media inquiries falter...

...Has the Real Antichrist Come?, assigns numbers to each Cyrillic letter in Mikhail Gorbachev's name, analyzes the birthmark on his balding head ("I see a red dragon and over the right eye, there's a tail that hangs, representing stars...

...Speaking as one television-watching, beer-drinking Roman Catholic, whose mother taught him how to shoot craps when he was seven and whose five-year-old daughter recently received a garish Little Miss Makeup Kit for her birthday, I think that the people of the evangelical subculture might be onto something...

...In roughly a dozen paragraphs, he summarizes a popular evangelical movie entitled A Thief in the Night, a thriller about the last days...

...The very term "evangelical" is used by Balmer (a religious historian who was raised as an evangelical) in a provocatively broad sense...

...Giving televangelists like Oral Roberts, Mr...

...Luke's, amidst the squalor and despair of a North Dakota reservation...

...of bodies and souls...

...A few minutes later our meeting ended in a burst of faulty catechesis, and I'd forgotten all about it until a few days ago...

...For all that, they are a remarkably diverse crowd, and Balmer admits at the outset that several of the people about whom he writes "would be embarrassed, even outraged, to appear in the same book as some of the others treated here...

...Precisely where many of us "nonevangelical" believers might find a kinship with the people in these pages is in their mistrust of contemporary culture...

...There are worse things, aren't there, than such suspicion...

...It refers to "conservative Protestants-including fundamentalists, evangelicals, pentecostals, and charismat-ics-who insist on some sort of spiritual rebirth as a criterion for entering the kingdom of heaven, who often impose exacting behavioral standards on the faithful, and whose beliefs, institutions, and folkways comprise the evangelical subculture in America...

...The world is passing away, after all, and the assumption that it isn't needs a bit more challenge than it's been getting lately...

...Having stayed up far too late the night before with friends and pizza and beer and tequila, at that very instant I was confident that I would die, but that was about it...

...At the Capstone Cathedral in Phoenix, a building designed after the pyramid on the back of a one dollar bill, we meet a faith healer named Neal Frisby, who claims to be the "Rainbow Prophet" described by John in the tenth chapter of the Book of Revelation, the "mighty angel with a rainbow wrapped round his head...

...Some of the proscriptions have eased somewhat in evangelical circles, but the suspicion of worldliness, of theological and cultural innovation, endures...

...I find that the earth is to grow worse and worse, and that at length there is going to be a separation...

...Balmer also introduces a quietly courageous, black, evangelical minister, John Perkins, whose interracial ministry and pas-sion for reconciliation in his native Mississippi has stubbornly survived police violence, corporate oppression, and the onslaught of "prosperity theology-the God-will-make-you-rich-and-happy notions propagated by...televangelists...

...I gave the only reply available to a sinful son of the Catholic church: "I hope so...

...At the annual convention of the Christian Booksellers Association, author Robert Faid, plugging his new book, Gorbachev...

...Frank's preaching surrounds a one-sentence summary of the Gospel: "We're all bastards, but God loves us anyway...

...Leaving aside some admittedly major doctrinal differences with these sectarians (the Lord's presence in the Eucharist and my need to read the Bible with the church looking over my shoulder come to mind) and also some significant disagreements about recreational pursuits, household administration, and appropriate topics of conversation, I can't manage to believe that it is really such an unhealthy thing to mistrust the world and to nurture in our children a revulsion for the collective pride, the zest for power, and the predilection for illusion that have in our own century slaughtered and stifled whole generations of bodies and souls...

...Balmer, a fine writer, is also a bashful one...

...Not all, but most of the encounters in Randall Balmer's American travelogue reminded me of that morning...

...She wanted to know whether, if I died at that very instant, I would go to heaven...

...Most of the evangelicals he meets and writes about are spiritual cousins of John Wesley, who reported that on May 24, 1738 during a meeting in Aldersgate Street, London at a quarter to nine, "I felt my heart strangely warmed...

...One suspects that Perkins speaks for many evangelicals when he says, "This prosperity stuff is deadly...

...A lucid and compelling guide through the doctrinal thickets, he fits a whole semester's worth of evangelical theology into six magisterial pages of a chapter on the Dallas Theological Seminary...