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BOOK REVIEW

An uneven look at religious right's wrongs

The Hijacking of Jesus: How the Religious Right Distorts Christianity and Promotes Prejudice and Hate, By Dan Wakefield, Nation, 210 pp., $23.95

Dan Wakefield's new book joins a library's worth of recent alarums about the religious right, so ominous in their predictions of disaster that you expect a cut out of the author to pop up screaming oogey-boogey-boogey.

``This book is about how the faith of my fathers . . . has been turned upside down to become a cultish kind of Christianity as dangerous as it is distorted, co-opted in the service of a right-wing political agenda," writes Wakefield, a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He surveys the antics of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell , as well as lesser-known lights in the religious right constellation of activists and groups.

The fatal flaw of dwelling on these individual nut trees is that he misses the denuded forest. Robertson, Falwell, and their ilk are intolerant fanatics, but hardly the peril that Wakefield portrays. Indeed, Wakefield approvingly notes political scientist Alan Wolfe's study of evangelical Christians -- without mentioning that Wolfe calls fears of conservative Christians overblown.

There's a lot to support Wolfe's view. The New York Times reported that Robertson's political Tourette's syndrome has made him evangelism's crazy uncle , with conservative ministers repudiating him and his once- formidable Christian Coalition up to its steeples in debt. Robertson still has a following, the article noted. But were it influential -- to cite one proof that it isn't -- the majority of Americans would not have been repelled, as polls showed they were, by the rel igious right's meddling in the Terri Schiavo case.

Wakefield is correct that Lieutenant General William Boykin should have been rebuked when he brayed that Islam worshiped an evil God. But Boykin neither speaks for the government nor sets its policy; his commander in chief has repeatedly made clear that our war is not with Islam. (I too worry that Abu Ghraib and other administration sins painted us as anti-Muslim bigots, but Bush-bashers aren't blameless here: They joined the unwittingly xenophobic hysteria over the Dubai ports deal, which did us no favors in the Arab world.)

Wakefield says that liberals' awareness of the religious right's threat crystallized with George W. Bush's reelection. Yet the myth that religious voters put Bush over the top because of moral issues was exploded before that election year was out. It turned out that the moral concerns pollsters uncovered included matters like the morality of the Iraq War -- and many who voted on that issue voted against Bush. In the end, national security, not religion, doomed John Kerry.

Wakefield, himself Christian, admirably acknowledges that the anti-religion hostility of the secular left alienates conservative and liberal believers alike. ``It's easier to come out being gay in Boston than it is coming out as religious in the Democratic Party," he quotes a gay man telling the progressive evangelical Jim Wallis. Elsewhere, he criticizes a prominent progressive columnist who lumped Wallis with Robertson in a ``guilt-by-association" screed against evangelicalism.

``Why can't it work for the religious and secular left" to cooperate? he asks. Why indeed.

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