By Jesse BC

On November 9, 1987, I became a Christian. That is to say, in the parlance of the Evangelical subculture to which I was committing myself, I "asked Jesus into my heart and became born again." It was very important in those days to remember the date you did it. I was 16 years old. I had no idea that I was pledging myself to a sociopolitical movement that had elected the last two American presidents and would elect the next three.

Two years later I left home to attend a Bible college that was politically and theologically moderate -- and, in 1989, this wasn't a contradiction in terms. Feminism was the hottest topic on campus, neatly dividing the student body between those who believed that wives should submit to their husbands and women should not teach men versus those who believed in equitable marital partnership and supported the ordination of women.

But even such a contentious subject led to surprisingly little contention. It was tacitly understood that one's position on the matter did not reflect on one's commitment to Jesus and those on opposing sides could easily enjoy friendships and share the rows of folding chairs that served as pews in the old gymnasium that served as our church.

Such was the Evangelical movement of the late 1980s. Predominantly white, middle-class, and suburban, we consumed a weekly blend of Evangelical and Pentecostal theology served up in a folksy show of booming speakers and the simple lyrics to simple melodies projected onto the gymnasium wall so we could all sing along.

The mood was joyful and the music generally upbeat. Worshipers would smile, laugh, clap their hands, and sometimes feel moved to dance in the aisles. The pastor's lengthy sermons carried a prevailing message of love, comfort, and inclusivity, with only a gentle chastisement of those outside the church (often gays or those with pro-choice sympathies).

Looking back, I see that our pastor's chastisement had to be gentle. There were those with homosexual or pro-choice leanings in his own congregation of several hundred and he didn't want to alienate them. More importantly, he was exhorting his sizable flock to evangelize the unsaved and compassion was implicitly understood to be a superior method to intolerance.

Most of us took notes during the sermons. Filled as they were with uncomplicated platitudes for daily living, we didn't want to forget any pearls of wisdom when we walked out the door.

Even five years later, everything was different. I had left the church for reasons I couldn't yet articulate. In 1994, when I caught a glimpse of Ralph Reed's face, grinning off the cover of a popular glossy, I was filled with a deep dread that I was equally unable to express.

At first, I believed it was I who had changed. I had begun to increasingly identify with moderate-to-hard-left religious and political movements (from the Wiccans to the anti-globalists). But as the bodies began to pile up around me -- ex-Christians and wounded-Christians, those sloughed off by the Evangelical movement, gays and feminists and intellectuals and skeptics -- I've been forced to reevaluate who really changed.

In the late '80s, when I left for college, all my adolescent idealism for a world of peace and justice, I had pinned on the gospel of Jesus. From the time I was old enough to think abstractly, I see now that I was always a liberal – and not only that, I was a radical liberal. When my college pastor preached from the book of Amos: "Let justice roll on like a river and righteousness like a never-ending stream" (Amos 5:24), I was filled with an electric surge of moral certainty that tingled through my body, as only divine revelation can, exhorting me to take up Jesus' work of feeding the hungry and freeing the oppressed. I was an Evangelical Christian and an unashamed evangelist of the radical left. And, in 1989, I saw no contradiction in that.

But by the late '90s, everything had changed. The language of the Evangelical movement had become so incomprehensible to me that I was reduced to calling my ex-Christian and wounded-Christian friends for translations of the dictates that emanated from the likes of Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, or James Dobson. And I am finally forced to accept that it was not I who changed, but rather the Evangelical church. Christianity had become mean.

Only with historical context am I able to fully grasp what this means. According to a Pew Survey of Religion and Politics, 60 percent of American Protestants are now Evangelicals. Since 1970, 70 percent of this growth comes from increased birth rates in Evangelical families and 30 percent from upwardly-mobile Protestants who retained their Evangelical identity as they moved into the middle class in the 1990s.

When I was in college, such a prediction would have filled my heart with the joy of a socialist Christian revolution, a revival marked by the end of poverty and hunger, by racial and gender equality, and an America leading the world in disarmament and human and civil rights. Clearly, there were a few things I never counted on.

The split between mainstream Protestants and Evangelicals began in 1925 when Fundamentalist Christians (loosely allied with the Evangelicals) won the Scopes trial, but lost the support and credibility of the American public in doing so. The social gospel of mainstream Protestant churches was at its height in American culture and the anti-intellectual bent of the Fundamentalists was eschewed by most as the domain of rural and uneducated sourpusses, hunting for the devil under every doily. This was two years before my grandmother married and she used to recall walking down the road with her siblings when a group of such "Jesus fanatics" marched by, crying out that "Jesus is coming!" "You missed him already," shouted her brother. "He just rode by on a big white horse!"

My grandmother's family shared the scorn of American Protestants for the devotion of an Evangelical movement in rapid retreat. The social gospel my grandparents recognized as Christianity continued to grow and merge with the sense of identity of a growing American middle class.

Marked by a commitment to liberal values and a willingness to question basic doctrine (such as the existence of hell and the necessity of salvation), it wasn't until the decades after World War II that mainstream Protestantism began to lose its political relevance to the comforts of consumer culture and a Baby Boom generation that had no reason to go to church if the threat of hell couldn't keep them in the pews.

It was in response to this consumer culture and the instability of the early Cold War, that modern Evangelicals could make their comeback. After a quarter century of American society pinning their backs against the wall, Evangelicals reemerged with a new and glorious political relevance.

With a fervor that can only be generated by a true grassroots movement of the people, they snapped up abandoned buildings in suburban locations and converted them into the sort of makeshift churches I attended in college. These locations were easily accessible, easily zoned, inexpensive, and attracted just the sort of people for whom the Evangelicals' message was most meaningful – consumer-oriented people with middle-class dreams of upward mobility.

Most importantly for the Evangelical message to take root, these were people whose shared middle-class dreams weren't being realized in the post-Vietnam economy. By the 1970s (and increasingly into the 1980s), even an upper-middle-class lifestyle was more likely to mean tract housing in the suburbs than a spacious house on the outskirts of an urban area. Working families increasingly needed both parents to work even for the mixed-luxury of worrying less about money for retirement, health care, and a college education for their children (let alone enough money to provide their children with lessons and other exposures to edifying cultural experiences). In general, the consumerism spawned by the post-World War II prosperity had soured for the middle-class and Evangelicals nostalgically dreamed of a return to that post-War prosperity and everything it symbolized.

The Evangelical movement, though, with its answer to the angst of consumer culture looked very good, what with its comforting, inclusive homilies and its joyful services that connected us so completely to one another and to the idea that Jesus was truly bringing us something larger than ourselves, to a genuine people's movement.

For me, the first hint of trouble didn't come until that dreary Saturday afternoon at the laundromat when I spotted Ralph Reed's fresh-scrubbed face on a magazine cover and read the accompanying article. Reed (the acting director of the Christian Coalition, known until then mostly for picketing Ozzy Osbourne concerts and other events of questionably redeeming social value) outlined his "stealth politics" for handing the Evangelical pulpit over to the likes of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.

In retrospect, there were still a few reasons that my recently de-converted heart was not yet filled with abject terror. Though I had seen first-hand the growing rotten core of meanness in the Evangelical church, that meanness hadn't yet spread very far. My handful of college contemporaries who, by my senior year, were beginning to display the glassy-eyed cruelty of hard-right icons like Gingrich and Limbaugh, were, quite frankly, never very nice people to begin with. They likely would have been unpleasant human beings in any context and the kinder Christians in my wider circle of acquaintance remained politely apolitical in the face of a growing Evangelical shift to the political right.

In 1996, Pat Buchanan (perhaps single-handedly) propelled Bill Clinton to reelection with his vituperative, violent, and anti-Semitic speech at the Republican National Convention. Despite the plastic fetuses that littered the floor at that year's RNC (most of them wielded by Evangelical Christian hands), Buchanan showed America (rightly or wrongly) that Evangelicals were too far to the right for even most Republicans, who were reluctant to break with the nation's long history of more moderate social gospel politics.

Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole that year in an anticipated landslide, but one disturbing fact was undeniable: Christians were becoming mean. If Buchanan's blathering scared the hell out of a moderate majority, it had the same effect in Evangelical circles. There were more hard-right Christian leaders gaining wider prominence (Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Bob Jones) and they effectively invoked in the Evangelical community that bleak past after the Scopes trial when mainstream culture mocked and excluded them -- when a little boy on a Boston street could shout at them, with contempt in his voice and laughter from his siblings, that Jesus had "just rode by on a big white horse," effectively sneering at their most cherished hopes.

It wasn't hard in the late '90s for Evangelicals to find evidence of an America that regarded them with nothing but scorn. While the Evangelicals had demonstrated some commitment to the inclusivity of the gospel by reaching out to blacks and Hispanics and filling more and more churches with a working class feeling the pinch of rising corporatism, they were thanked with a flurry of lawsuits that prohibited them from sometimes so much as mentioning Jesus anywhere in the public domain of American life. Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and their whole breed of shysters seemed to be right! Degenerate America, lulled into moral complacency by the siren song of an unrestrained consumerist orgy, slapped Evangelical hands for their intolerance, but seemed willing to tolerate everything but Christians!

In many ways, this was an inaccurate, if understandable, conclusion for the Evangelicals to draw. As America closed in on the turn of the 21st century, only a fringe of the hard left was delineating a largely-incomprehensible critique of consumer culture. And, to boot, they were a little snobbish about it, often continuing to exclude or malign professing Christians just on principle.

Whatever hope the Evangelicals had of creating a serious critique of corporate capitalism and its unrestrained pursuit of pleasure had been lost. By 2001, the Pew Survey found a 13 percent increase in Evangelicals who identified themselves as "very politically conservative" (including a 9 percent increase among historically-progressive blacks) and Evangelicals comprised more than 50 percent of the Republican voter base.

Consumerism had hit the church hard and, with its Pentecostal wariness of lofty intellectualism, Evangelicals weren't about to listen to the liberals who had shamed them through the '90s. American life was leaving an undeniable spiritual void in everyone's lives and Evangelical wants were both simple and fairly universal: a direct experience of God, moral certainty, and a sense of belonging to a joyful and accepting community.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, the fears of the Evangelicals were fully realized. To their mind, America had shut out God and paid a devastating price for it. Churches now have to preach to post-September-11 anxieties without ever having analyzed how consumer-driven culture has infiltrated the church itself. The result is churches (who long ago cast off any ties to denominational accountability) operating more like fast food restaurants, serving up weekly doses of prepackaged Republican comfort to a frightened and imminently-manipulatable bulk of working class America.

The spiritual void left in all of us by consumerism (that sense that there should be more to life than working a crappy job to buy crappy products at Wal-Mart) has been ironically self-perpetuating as Evangelicals fill that void with moral self-righteousness towards their perceived enemies – gays, secular intellectuals, feminists, pro-choice voters, and that sorry, mealy-mouthed collection of Kerry Democrats who have done nothing for them lately.

The model of spiritual warfare has replaced the model of evangelism within the church I knew and loved in college. The goal is now to vanquish the enemy, not to win them over with the love and hope of Christ, giving Evangelicals a mean and paranoid edginess towards anyone spiritually suspect (including other Evangelicals in their own churches).

The tendency of Baby Boomers (and increasingly Generation Xers) to float in and out of religious identification has laid a groundwork for more and more frightened and unfulfilled Americans to latch onto Evangelical (and now, by extension, politically hard-right) conversion without any sense of belonging, from the cradle, to any relevant spiritual tradition.

Thus, spiritually-starving Evangelical Christians (gaining ever-more converts from the disaffected American mainstream) are easily manipulated by Wall Street, the wealthy politicians who buy their votes, and the particularly egregious Christian leadership (such as Robertson, etc.) who serve as Pied Pipers to bring these otherwise good-hearted lambs to their own Republican slaughter. Which is exactly what's happening.

Political advertising is cynically aimed at this target market of Evangelicals whose working class is rapidly becoming poor and whose middle-class is dwindling into working class conditions even amongst once-respected professions, such as education, health care, and social services.

Political candidates are sold to the American public like brands of toothpaste. This is why the 2000 election fraud generated so little moral outrage. We all know there's no difference between Crest and Colgate so, despite the astronomical funds used to convince us otherwise, it doesn't really matter how you come to use one over the other in the end.

Only 60 percent of the electorate turned out to vote in 2004 and 90 percent of those voted (for either Bush or Kerry) on the basis of the candidate's "personal qualities or values" – in other words, the toothpaste factor. Bush's carefully constructed image of the down-home Texan was simply more believably packaged to mask the reality that he's a rich, spoiled, Yalie frat boy who came to power entirely on his family's money and political connections.

Bush's reelection by an Evangelical Republican base is merely testament to the depths of the political machine's cynicism in manipulating these people to believe that either candidate ever had the slightest intention of addressing their concerns about the nation's ongoing response to September 11, to the increase in terrorism worldwide, and the role of religion in public life. The CEOs who cheered at Bush's reelection were celebrating not only a coup of class warfare, but how sublimely easy it was to use nothing more than the specter of gay marriage to get droves of the American working class to vote themselves further out of fair wages, adequate health care, retirement security, a sustainable environment, and the peacetime prosperity by which the post-War generations have measured their American identity.

The left has aided and abetted this Wall Street victory by continuing to tussle with the Evangelical working class over the same small pieces of irrelevant turf – the Ten Commandments in school classrooms or a Merry Christmas float in the Denver parade. The left has sold out the working class with an unwillingness to stand with them on principle, crowing "separation of church and state," while ignoring the fundamental issues that affect them both.

It's two different worlds sharing the same planet. Despite their similar needs (and, occasionally, even similar aims), Evangelicals would no more dress up like turtles to protest agricultural biotechnology than the current left would be caught dead in a suburban gymnasium singing "Our God Reigns."

Now, when America needs a working class uprising more than ever before in its history, the left is jealously guarding its cultural critique while the Evangelicals are jealousy guarding the numbers of people who could make it happen. And both feel so smugly self-righteous in leaving the other out.

It wasn't a loss of faith that prompted me to leave the Evangelical movement 10 years ago. Nor have I ever believed that Christians are inherently mean people. What I couldn't articulate when I was only 23 was the hijacking of Jesus by America's privileged class and the willingness of the church to participate in its own exploitation that has caused the current mean streak referred to by the pundits as the "religious right."