The New York Times reported yesterday that, according to a 2007 Pew Center voter survey, one of the most essential qualities in a presidential candidate is that he or she believes in god. In recent years, the leaders of the Christian right have depended on that fact as they extended their political influence. The surprise this election season, especially in light of the seven born-again Bush years that have preceded it, is that the Republican front-runners each in their own way represent a special kind of horror to those same Christian leaders.

Rapidy fading John McCain is no friend, despite recent overtures. When evangelicals attacked him in support of Bush eight years ago, he called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell “agents of intolerance” who were corrupting both politics and religion. There’s also the fact that McCain is firmly against torture-as-policy, now and forever, not to be swayed even when threatened in national debate with the bone-chilling “ticking terrorist nuke” hypothetical— a stance that mystifies his Republican opponents and from a fire-and-brimstone, End Times-obsessed Christian viewpoint seems to signal a watered-down faith.

Rudy Giuliani is a metropolitan Roman Catholic— ie, a damned dirty papist who has been corrupted by Gotham City life and whose family values, no matter what he says, include abortion and divorce and not talking to his own annoying offspring when he doesn’t want to.

Mitt Romney is a true man of faith, except of course that it’s the wrong faith. Romney is a Mormon and even in America that might qualify as too religious. The Christian Broadcasting Network warns readers off Mormonism as simplistic and cult-like, driving home the point by using simplistic and cult-like language. “Mormonism teaches that God is not the only deity and that we all have the potential of becoming gods. Remember that Satan’s fall came about because he wanted to be like God.”

In March James Dobson of Focus on the Family asserted that actor-candidate Fred Thompson was not a true Christian, and indeed it has recently come out that in the 1990s Thompson, despite denials, worked as a lobbyist for an abortion-rights organization. Whether or not Thompson believed he was acting as a “true Christian” when he supported the right to an abortion will never be discussed because he reportedly remembers nothing about that chapter of his recent adult life.

Why this ragtag assembly of the not-wholly saved? Weren’t the evangelicals supposed to be taking over the country? What happened to the political juggernaut that was Jesusland?

Only last fall, Lauren Sandler made a splash with Righteous, her book-length version of a million magazine articles published over the last ten years on the alarming rise of politically committed Christian Americans. Her book, due out in paperback in September, is about the evangelical youth movement in particular— the real story for her being the way the movement attracts young people from every corner of American life, easily cutting across all the categories usually presumed to divide the demographic.

Completed in the wake of the last Bush election, Righteousis the product of a big-city hipster frightened and compelled by an America she no longer recognized. Her experience resonated with the experience of a lot of young urban Americans who were stunned by the social divisions that suddenly seemed to define the country— the religious aspect, the fact of faith as a political matter in twenty-first century America, being, on both sides of the divide, one of the most powerful aspects of the reality we were all suddenly living— and that we’ve been living ever since.

In the United States today religious faith remains one of the most-intensely-felt social identifiers across the population and particularly among young adults. It is also, apart perhaps from race, the most powerful force for unification and division in the country. These facts will surprise almost no one. Research like the recent Pew Center study consistently bolsters their validity. Yet they shock me, those facts, the way they define the era we’re living through, the way they underline a routine acknowledgement on all of our parts that this is how it is here. Thinking about that reality always gives me pause, much less typing sentences about it and then reading those sentences and knowing they’re true!

Do you attend church? Do you accept Jesus as your personal savior? Do you believe the Bible is the actual word of God and should be taken literally? Do you support the president because you believe he is guided by true faith in the Lord? Yes or no? Are you with us or against us?

Roughly 50 million white American adults alone are evangelicals, nearly a quarter of the voters in the country. President Bush is born again and doesn’t quibble in pronouncing that he believes he is doing the work of God. Early on he called the War on Terror a crusade and under his leadership it is that, to a large degree, a pitting of one set of religious-cultural values against another.

The situation in America today is that there are (1) a lot of some of us who think fundamentalism is barbaric; (2) a lot of others of us who think the wrong kind of fundamentalism is barbaric; (3) a lot of all of us thinking a lot of things are barbaric; and (4) a hell of a lot of barbarity all around, almost everywhere you look.

Clearly driven a little mad by all of this, Sandler, a journalist and editor at Salon, took to the road and embedded herself among the young “soldiers” of the evangelical movement, members of what she calls the “disciple generation.” The book that resulted is a sort of nonfiction Planet of the Apes, where liberal, secular, Brooklyn-dwelling Sandler comes upon one seemingly mock-civilized gathering after another, subjecting herself to Christian heavy metal fests, grunge erotic bible-study sessions, Skateboarding for Jesus tours, crusader military services, smug Christian college seminars and endless coffee talk with know-it-all pastors who instruct her in the lessons of the “sacred scrolls.”

The world she enters is a world of “agape,” that is, of Christ-centered brotherly love, a place where Sandler sees an America turned upside down, where independence looks like isolation, freedom like subjugation, rebellion like conformity, learning like ignorance, and leadership like bullying authority, a land where the Constitution of the United States is interpreted not as an answer to European religious intolerance but as a reaction to it meant not only to protect but to advance the religious faith of its drafters at the expense of all other beliefs.

Righteous is an incredible anthropological snapshot— both of the evangelicals and of the journalist; the kind of anthropology that reveals as much about the observer as the observed. Righteous is the work of someone used to riding the waves of cultural cool, someone used to keeping up in order to be down, and so someone also susceptible, despite professional skepticism and education, to the counter-culture proselytizing of the tattooed, pierced, skateboarding, multicultural dudes who populate the book.

Sandler works hard at discovering and then convincingly describing for non-evangelicals the attractions of the movement. Boiled down, it’s the movement’s togetherness and purpose— things that postmodern secular life fails almost by definition to provide. Contemporary young people are starved for meaning and desperate to stay together and care for one another— to extend the tender groupiness of the college dorm years into adulthood and beyond, and to do so with confidence and in service to a higher cause!

“In the global internet age,” she writes, “information overwhelms, and the choices we may make— what to wear, watch, study, believe— increase exponentially, offering no certainty at all… the angst of modernity has spun out of control, resulting in a crisis for this generation. To some I’ve met, such a boundless world is freeing, but most seem to seek protection from a ubiquitous onslaught of information. We have been liberated from the limits of the past: nothing today is what it was— not war, not sex, not family. The result is a population that wants liberation from liberation… A complicated world gives rise to an extraordinary yearning for the literal.”

If Sandler sometimes veers into the land of under-informed over-expressiveness, it’s no doubt a byproduct of the jolting experience of living among the disciples, who also seem to hold forth like this in the book, only more so, leaping from thesis to conclusion, moving always from discussion to sermon, stacking words upon words in the timeless style of the scripture-obsessed. Sandler, for example, surely doesn’t believe she’s the first observer to conclude a generation of youth was “in crisis” or that postmodern people want “liberation from liberation,” and so on. Indeed, the only evidence for these clichés, as far as the book goes, is the fact that lots of seemingly normal young people are taking the, to her mind, desperate turn to Christian commitment. Yet isn’t crisis one of the gifts of youth, like shiny skin and iron stomachs? Beats, hippies, punks, mods, goths, rap-loving hip-hop heads… they have all been theorized as the products of “generational crisis.” Clearly the most radical thing you can be today is religiously committed. Muslim, Christian— either would be suitably shocking and utterly incomprehensible to all of the respectable adults I know.

More interesting is Sandler’s impression that the power of the movement comes from the way it seems to dissolve the usual borders that characterize youth, where “kids across well-defined cultural boundaries are integrated by a dominant ideology without a dominant aesthetic.” In other words, in the face of everything popculture and personal experience tells us is possible, the young people in this book believe the same thing as one another but look and dress all kinds of different ways. Sandler underlines this observation in the form she has chosen for the book, which moves with each chapter from one subculture to the next, in effect walking readers through a sort of enormous high school lunchroom— a really scary sort of lunchroom because everyone there pretty much thinks alike— and what they think is that the world’s coming to an end and that they can hardly wait because, after the end, they’re all going to paradise together… and without you!

Yet, for all that, and even combined with the outrageous number of people she reports are attending the megachurches and Christian skate tours and Rock for Life concerts, I couldn’t help but think (perhaps as a form of denial) that this “movement” is more predictive of subsequent similar movements than of any evangelical revolution. In the rapid conversions, the weeping at brokenness, the relieved ennui and guilt, the massive laying on of hands and revived macho culture, I see a reflection of the popular Promise Keeper movement of the 1990s, which baffled me then as much as any Christian skate tour does now. Granted the Promise Keepers held no design on nor hope of achieving any variety of cool, but the cool factor that so seems to intimidate Sandler about the disciple generation is what marks it out as faddish to me.

To my Catholic parents, the idea that one of the attractions of their faith could be that it was cool would be a mockery of their faith. In their eyes, there’s nothing less Christian than cool. Sandler never seizes upon this thread of the new evangelism, though, upon the uncoolness of trying to be cool, upon the faddishness of cool, because she’s too wrapped up in the trappings of the disciple generation lifestyle— the hip-hop bling, the tattoos and skate-chic grunge— the lifestyle aspect that’s the advertisement for the faith, which, like all advertisement, is always threatening to become larger than the product it serves. Of course she keyed on the lifestyle largely because she thinks that’s what kids are into and why the allure of the new evangelism is so strong. It’s an insight that drove a damned fine investigation but one that ultimately throws her off course.

Sandler concludes, for example, with a proposal that secular-humanist America offer a program to compete with the rad agapeness of the evangelicals— and that we do it fast. She thinks that if we fail to provide a lifestyle choice for young people that’s full of purpose and that’s communitarian and also hip, then we are going to be plowed under and replaced by the Christians and their converts like the Roman pagans before us.

Yet the surest way to lose ground to a faddish Christianity has got to be to combat it with a faddish secularism. Please let’s not try to make the humanism of Erasmus and Frantz Fanon cool. Let’s not officially water-down and popularize through rock shows and skate tours the ideas that are the foundation of the approach to life we propose to pass on— rock shows and skate tours of any variety or denomination, after all, being the result on some level of the liberty gained through the rise of secular philosophy in the first place, same as dancing and miniskirts and democracy. Why not just fight instead and in earnest for the right and the resources to properly teach the secular-humanist ideas in our schools and through our public institutions, unabashedly in their full form, and demand that the division of church and state remain as effective as possible in fulfilling the purpose for which it was originally written into and accepted as the law of the land?

It will be interesting to see if the paperback version of Sandler’s book includes an update of her analysis, especially given what seems to be a national-psychological cooling down from the political Kalahari of the middle Bush years and the apparent waning influence for now of the evangelical right.

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John Tomasic is managing editor at P+P. Images of some of Sandler’s “disciples” by Justin Lane.