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The Troubling Future of Ethnicity

For all the beauty of ethnic, religious and racial diversities, there is a troubling aspect to the current rise of ethnic consciousness -- or, as it is sometimes called, the new ethnicity -- and that is the fact that it has become politicized.

Generally, those who talk and write about ethnicity fall into four broad and not totally distinguishable categories. There are the “old” immigrants or descendants of immigrants who are proud of their heritage and are beginning to reassert it with renewed passion and vigor. Never before have so many ethnic groups publicly declared themselves “beautiful,” and never before have they been so wooed and sought after by politicians campaigning for public office.

Second, there are the educational interculturalists who stress the unity and beauty of peoples and groups in all their diversity, and who call for mutual understanding, tolerance and respect. The third group can be called the ethnic romanticists, or romantic ethnics; their passionate appraisal of their own group virtues may seem, to outsiders or even to members of their own group, to have slight correspondence to reality. The fourth group consists of ethnic militants who assert the need for group action to ensure rights and gain political power.

I

The old ethnicists of the first group still abound, holding their festivals, celebrating their holy days, participating in their fraternal, cultural or benevolent societies, publishing their histories, and dreaming of involving their sons and daughters. For a significant part of their lives, they operate within an ethnic enclave. In Polish, Greek, Portuguese, German and French social clubs and organizations the old languages, stories, memories and folkways are nurtured; there people can meet and send their children to learn of the cultural and ethnic history of their forebears. The new interest in ethnicity has inspired them to speak out publicly, particularly on community arid political issues -- foreign aid, discrimination, busing. Americans of Puerto Rican, Italian, Chinese and Polish descent have taken surveys to determine how many of their own are employed in various professions.

Members of the second group advocate understanding and appreciation of all human groups, including their own. They believe that not only is human difference a healthy fact of life, but that individuals should understand the past and present dynamics of ethnic identity, relationships and groups, not only because it will make them more sure of themselves, but also because it will strengthen the democratic nature of tire total society.

Theirs is a universal vision which glories in goodwill to all and which leads to acceptance, understanding, tolerance and admiration of particular groups. Their philosophical guides are persons like John Dewey and Horace Rallen and the Judeo-Christian belief in the kinship of the human race.

The third group of ethnic advocates, who came into being in the 1960s, started with particular identities and sublimated them to a universal pattern of oneness. It is as if their group ontogeny recapitulated the phylogeny of all groups. They see in group similarities and differences a kind of epiphenomenal universality. Their advocacy of ethnicity consists of a combination of psychological awareness, historical recollection and sociological romance.

For example, Michael Novak contends that ethnicity does not necessarily entail speaking a foreign language, living in a subculture being a member of an ethnic organization, responding to ethnic appeals, or exalting one’s own nationality or culture; rather it embodies a growing sense of discomfort with the idea that one is supposed to he universalistic, “incited,” or like everyone else. For him, a positive ethnicity necessitates an appreciation for one’s historical roots, a growing self-confidence and social power, a sense of being discriminated against, condescended to, or carelessly misapprehended; a growing disaffection regarding these to whom one had always been taught to defer.

The last group is that of the ethnic-power politicizers, who claim not only that their group is beautiful, but also that the preservation, maintenance, enhancement and survival of their group depend upon the achievement of political power, whether it be through benign quotas, proportional representation, community control, caucuses -- or in a few cases, outright secession, rebellion or the use of violence. Within this group there is a further division between those who would rise armed force and those who would use the ballot box or constitutional reform to legitimate group rights and claims. What unites them is their advocacy of group rather than individual rights.

II

It is in the mounting protests, pressures and demands of ethnic politicizers and in society’s yielding to them that there are grave dangers to national well-being. Not only do such actions represent a radical departure from past times in America, when government refused to legitimate ethnic-group rights and claims, but they also encourage a polarization rather than unification of our diverse population -- a trend that can result only in the eventual creation of de jure ethnic and racial geographic enclaves and political parties, with the appointment and election of individuals mandated along racial, religious and ethnic lines. With such a system, this nation would be plagued with all the intergroup suspicions, resentments and conflicts that continue to characterize many parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.

On various levels of society we already see the introduction of racial and ethnic quotas, proportional representation, caucuses, preferential treatment, government subsidies and community control. If the Black Muslim call for the establishment of “a separate state or territory” supported by the government once sounded improbable, it sounds almost rational today as some ethnic leaders and intellectuals rationalize and legitimate political and ideological group claims. For example, Vine Deloria, Jr., has called for a restructuring of our national system, with groups rather than individuals regarded as the basic elements of the nation:

The contemporary interpretation of “we the people” in reality means “we the peoples,” we definable groups, and thus admits minority groups into Constitutional protection which they should have received as groups a century ago. . . . To continue merely on the basis of an abstract individual contracting with other individuals would he to court disaster[We Talk, You Listen (Macmillan, 1970) p. 52].

Ironically, such proposals come at a time when this form of government, which is but 200 years old, has been expanding rather than restricting freedom for all its citizens, and has been doing so despite massive immigration, legal and illegal, and despite having added “foreign” territories like Hawaii and Alaska.

The irredentism and revanchism of Europe have not taken root among Mexican or Spanish descendents in the southwest, nor have the Indians federated to expel all the “foreigners” -- some zoo tidllion -- who are on their lands. And instead of calling for autonomy, Hawaii and Alaska voted to join the union; Puerto Ricans continue overwhelmingly to vote down independence or “national liberation.”

If American democracy has generally eroded or transcended ethnic and racial separationist aspirations, it has also allowed them to survive and even flourish, but on a voluntary basis, so that many “ethnics” are more nationalistic in America than they were in the lands they or their parents left, where identities were usually grounded in family, village or town rather than in the nation as a whole.

In the desire for political expression of group identity there is a stage at which ethnic group aspirations can clash with and threaten the unity of the country. Such a situation can be fostered by governments which directly or indirectly aid the disaffected groups on the basis of their ethnicity in the hope that they will not rebel, riot or cause societal dislocation. Government can also validate group rights and benefits in exchange for ethnic votes and support.

Europe has been a maelstrom of such relationships which, in this century, resulted in the Balkan Wars and the breakdown of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. The embers of ethnic autonomy and self-determination still smolder in Europe -- and periodically flare up in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Spain and Belgium. And on the North American continent, we are beginning to see the possibility of French-speaking Quebec’s separation from English-speaking Canada.

III

In America since the racial revolution -- and to some extent as a result of it -- political ethnicity has grown, encouraged both by groups and by the government. New ethnic associations have sprung up to defend and promote ethnic-group dignity, as well as to gain political power and position. Italians, Poles, Irish, Puerto Ricans and Indians are adopting the activist tactics and strategies of blacks and the research methods of the Jews. Demonstrations, confrontations and accusations have become common, as have. studies proving underrepresentation in jobs, income levels or housing. Negative overpercentages -- in crime and welfare dependency, for example -- are blamed on society. If the percentages are positive -- such as high numbers of college graduates, personal incomes or status jobs -- they are said to be due to individual achievement.

Ethnic-action associations and ethnic studies programs have been established on college campuses across the country. Increasingly, city, state and federal governments are funding ethnic projects, ranging from festivals to bilingual education. Courts and political parties have recognized and often validated racial quotas. Businesses and universities have instituted benign quotas and affirmative-action programs, which openly admit to hiring some minority group members while excluding other applicants solely on the basis of race or ethnicity. The same is true of political appointments on all levels of government.

These actions have inevitably led to numbers of court cases charging reverse discrimination, and to rivalry, resentment and conflict between majority and minority groups and among various minority groups themselves, each believing that their group is no less deserving of attention, privilege or preference than others. No longer is the complaint one of discrimination because of race, religion or national origin, but rather one of under- or overrepresentation by virtue of the group’s proportion of the total population. In recent years, blacks -- the most discriminated-against group in America -- have been charged with discrimination by other groups. For example, both the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have been accused of ignoring or discriminating against other minorities. In late 1975, the executive director of New York’s Congress of Italian-American Organizations charged that “white ethnics have been ignored in favor of Blacks and Hispanics” (Time, December 8, 1976). Boston’s Spanish weekly newspaper, El Mundo, in opposing “reverse discrimination,” noted that whites discriminate against blacks, blacks discriminate against whites, whites and blacks discriminate against Spanish, and Spanish discriminate against each other.

Certainly one of the most far-reaching actions ever taken by the government in dealing with ethnicity is the Justice Department’s April 1976 ruling ordering multilingual elections in some 513 political jurisdictions in 30 states. Election officials in those areas must henceforth issue all public announcements, notices and voting instructions in the languages of minority groups, including American Indians, Alaskan natives, Chinese-Americans, Filipino-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Korean-Americans, and Americans of Spanish heritage. The basic purpose, said the attorney general, was “to allow members of applicable language minority groups to be effectively informed of and participate effectively in voting-connected activities” (New York Times, April 22, 1976, p. 25).

Instead of being viewed as threats to societal well-being or as radical departures from past history, such developments are defended as long overdue cultural affirmations which can only benefit America. Over and over, we are told that America is not a “melting pot.”

IV

That some ethnic advocates distinguish between ethnic chauvinism and creative ethnicity is all to their credit. To the extent that they advocate the need for intercultural understanding, they are to be commended -- as long as the task is done voluntarily, without state or federal assistance. One of the distinctive characteristics of American democracy is its voluntary associations, which citizens are free to join or not to join. But what ethnic groups cannot or will not do for themselves to maintain their ethnic heritage should not be done by government.

Those ethnic advocates who think that government support will ensure their cultural survival are deluding themselves. For generations various public schools have taught “foreign languages” without significant success. Public-school French and German courses are as unsuccessful in producing fluent speakers of those languages as courses in Swahili, Gaelic or Yiddish would be. Even the old national churches have failed to teach significant numbers of their congregants Armenian, Polish, Russian or Latvian. Ethnic newspapers are either going out of business, beginning to publish partially in English, or switching entirely to English.

The only circulation increases in foreign-language publications are in papers published for recent immigrant groups, like the Spanish-speaking. However, as with past generations of immigrants, they will undoubtedly succumb to linguistic amnesia. Evidence of this trend is found in a recent survey of ethnic newspapers in and around Boston, which showed that the Lithuanian newspaper Keleivis has dropped in circulation from 7,000 in 1953 to 2,200 in 1976. “Every year we lost a little bit,” said the 83-year-old editor, pointing out that those who want to learn Lithuanian “are fewer than peoples who died” (Boston Globe, June 22, 1976).

The Finnish newspaper Raivaaja, which once had a circulation of 10,000, now has 2,500 and has reduced its frequency from daily to once a week. “The old immigrants, the people who came before World War I, are gone,” explained the editor. “First the men died, then the women, and their children are Americans, naturally,”

The Hellenic Chronicle, “America’s largest newspaper for Greek Americans,” is printed in English, as are the Jewish Advocate and Jewish Times. Liria, the only Albanian weekly in America, prints its four-page edition partly in English. Novidades, a Portuguese weekly, is considering publication half in English because “there are many people who do not read Portuguese but who are interested.”

It is against such a background that government support of ethnicity and concessions to particular ethnic requests, claims and demands become all too similar to the paternalistic actions of colonial powers, who gave cultural cake rather than economic bread to those they wanted to placate and control. Instead of combating ethnocentrism, the government appears to be reinforcing it. Rather than unifying citizens, it is fragmenting them. It is not the enrichment of ethnic heritage, but an ethnic politicization that is taking place.

Without governmental support, the future of ethnicity is not bright. First, there is in America an absence of territorial primogeniture, except for that of the Indians, and their chances of regaining control of their ancestral lands are quite limited; then, too, many Indians are leaving the reservations for the big cities. True, there are enclaves of Italians, Polish, Irish and Chinese, but their small size bespeaks the futility of any significant control outside their boundaries, and these groups’ second and third generations are moving to the greener suburbs beyond their communal turf.

In addition, various studies continue to show a decline in ethnic identity in the fourth generation, whose members are characterized by forgetfulness or ignorance of the parents’ language, customs, mores and values. Third- and fourth-generation ethnic sons and daughters do not affiliate with their ethnic group organizations, unless they are aspiring politicians trying to exploit their background for votes.

Third, the forces of assimilation are awesome. The melting pot is boiling, fueled by affluence or the opportunity to get ahead, the steady movement to the middle-class suburbs, the ease and inexpensiveness of road and air travel, the readiness to relocate to other cities and states, the decline of religious institutional power, the increase in education, the steady rise in interfaith and interracial marriages, the decline of foreign languages, the fracturing of the extended family, and above all, the expansion of personal freedom.

Such sociologists as W. Lloyd Warner, Leo Srole and Neil C. Sandburg believe that assimilation and acculturation are not likely to be reversed. Herbert Gans sees the “new ethnicity” as “a wishful extension of the nostalgia for simpler times that is gripping many Americans as their contemporary society becomes more conflict-ridden” (Ethnic Identity and Assimilation The Polish Community, by Neil C. Sandberg [Praeger, 1974], p. 74).

V

The danger to society is not in private, voluntary, visceral, cultural or intellectual ethnicity, but in the politicizing of those ethnic components which will move America from an open pluralistic society to a circumscribed plural one, where eventually force rather than consensus will be used to maintain national well-being.

By a plural society is meant one “comprising two or more elements or social orders which live side by side, yet without mingling, in one political unit” (Politics in Plural Societies: A Theory of Democratic Instability, by Alvin Rabushka and Kenneth A. Shepsle [Merrill, 1972]. p. 10). Such a society isolates the demands of its separate communities and fails to mold a common social goal; it also leads to intergroup conflict and the need to maintain order by force. On the other hand, pluralistic societies are defined as having “one or more relatively distinct subcultures, but their value systems are compatible with the national political consensus” (ibid., p. 16).

As Rabushka and Shepsle point out, what distinguishes the plural from the pluralistic society is the practice of politics along almost exclusively ethnic lines. In the plural society, political conflicts are perceived in ethnic terms. In contrast, in pluralistic countries, there are coalitions which often vary from issue to Issue, and ethnicity is not the determining factor. “Italian-Americans, for example, though they vote cohesively on some issues, often divide on a great many others. And in the United States, Italian and Irish highway contractors view themselves as businessmen, not ethnic representatives, in competition” (ibid., p. 20).

Thus, when a society is characterized by cultural diversity, politically organized cultural communities, prominence of ethnicity, and existence of intense ethnic preferences, political entrepreneurs will usually exploit them -- and that is just what is beginning to take place in America.

In newly independent nations, there seems to be at first a pattern of cooperation followed by fragmentation. Prior to national independence, there is ethnic cooperation, which sometimes carries over into the postindependence period, but an added element of ambiguity generates a feeling of loyalty to one’s own ethnic group rather than to. the new entity. For example, in Guyana, there are calls for Apanjaht -- voting for one’s own kind: in Sri Lanka, citizens have been urged to buy from Sinhalese only. Ethnic rivalry and competition develop; multiethnic cooperation and coalitions languish; electoral machinations and mistrust and the formation of ethnic political parties hasten the process.

Political ethnicity and conflict are certain to grow when government validates or legitimates racial, religious or nationality quotas, proportional representation, community control, communalism or sectionalism. To the extent it does so with any one group, to that extent will it trigger conflict with other groups.

Buying ‘Christian’

Christianity, rightly understood, seeks to unite people in common community -- not to raise barriers and separate them because of theological differences.

Text:

For years campaigns have occasionally been waged to persuade the public to buy locally or even to buy only American-made products. Now in the religious realm a kind of “born-again” Yellow Page directory is being issued which limits its listings to businesses operated by those who “accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.” The project is under attack by a Jewish group that terms it “a throwback to Germany under Hitler,” recalling the “buy Christian” campaigns that started in Germany in the 1930s, and that resulted in a widespread refusal to trade with Jewish merchants in the years preceding the Third Reich’s more brutal acts of anti-Semitism.

I

The man behind the “born-again” Yellow Pages says that such Jewish critics are being “paranoid,” and insists that “Christians need to know who their fellow Christians are in the business community in order to do business with them.” Says W. R. Tomson, national director of the Christian Yellow Pages: “We believe that if you need an electric drill, you should purchase it from a Christian hardware dealer. If you need dental care, we can tell you where to find a Christian dentist. The directory says in effect, ‘The persons listed herein are Christian businessmen.’” The unspoken assumption -- a questionable one -- is apparently that the Christian consumer should find such merchants to be more honest, reliable and ethical in their business dealings than other merchants, who may identify themselves as Jewish, as secular humanists, as Christians who reject the “born-again” tag, or whatever.

Milwaukee Journal cartoonist Doug Sanders lampooned those assumptions in a panel that pictured a grimly determined matron forcibly leading her bleary-eyed spouse from “Art’s Bar and Grill,” as he protests, “But honey! Ol’ Art is listed right here in the Milwaukee Born Again Christian Business and Professional Directory!”

National headquarters for Tomson’s firm is in Modesto, California, a thriving city of more than 60,000 in the lush San Joaquin Valley between Sacramento and Fresno. A similar enterprise, the Christian Business Directory, operates out of San Diego.

The Christian Yellow Pages are published in regional editions in more than two dozen U.S. metropolitan areas, including Richmond, Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. The books resemble the Yellow Pages of a telephone directory except for their cover illustration, featuring a large white cross looming above the picture of a city skyline. Tomson claims that about 1 million copies will have been printed before the end of 1977, with 10,000 to 50,000 copies available in each city. A fee is charged each advertiser; the directories are distributed through churches or sold in Christian bookstores.

From his Modesto office Tomson oversees 150 salesmen who solicit advertising. He says that his men approach prospective customers with an outstretched hand and the greeting, “I understand that you are a born-again Christian.” Says Tomson: No degree in theology is heeded to determine a man’s reaction. If he looks at our man quizzically and asks, ‘What are you talking about?’ then we know that he’s not one of us. But if he should reply, ‘You bet’ or ‘Praise the Lord!’ -- then we know that he is. It’s merely a matter of discernment. The Holy Spirit gives us a certain feeling if the man belongs with us.” All business people who wish to advertise must sign a statement that they have “accepted Jesus Christ as personal Lord and Saviour.” Since the advertisers are limited to those who identify themselves as “born-again” Christians, the directory naturally excludes a great many Catholics and Protestants, all Jews and all other non-Christians.

For this reason, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has filed simultaneous suits in San Francisco and Los Angeles against the Christian Yellow Pages, and in San Diego against the Christian Business Directory. The Jewish organization alleges religious discrimination and unfair business competition, on the basis of several California statutes, including the state’s civil rights act, which prohibits the refusal to engage in a business transaction on the basis of race, creed, religion, color, national origin or sex. In one suit a Roman Catholic real estate agent charges that he was refused advertising space because he would not affirm that he was a “born-again” Christian. Plaintiffs in the other two court actions are Jewish business people who make similar allegations. Robert F. Miller, attorney for the Christian Yellow Pages, insists that the directory is protected by the constitutional guarantees of freedom of press and religion.

II

In July the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (Southern) adopted a resolution asking members of the denomination not to patronize the directories, declaring that they are “divisive among Christians” and “discriminatory in relation to the Jewish community.” Charles Davidson, the Jacksonville, Florida, pastor who wrote the resolution, said that he was told that as of June, the directories had been published in 57 cities. “The ethics of it,” he said, “run counter to the highest Christian principles of fairness and nondiscrimination in the market place. There is little difference between religious discrimination in a public advertising medium and racial, creedal or sexual discrimination in the voting booth, the sale of housing, or as the basis for employment.”

Davidson suggested that there is an even more disturbing aspect to the enterprises: “For those who may wish to establish a financial and political as well as religious base across the nation, this kind of thing is a useful but subtle and insidious device. He noted that the San Diego operation is linked with the California Christian Campaign Committee, which seeks to elect Christians to public office. Dan Loeffler, president of the firm that publishes the Christian Business Directory, is executive director of CCCC.

Some Christians may insist, as does W. R. Tomson, that the directories do not represent “bias against anyone per se, but rather for born-again Christians,” and that it is good to trade with likeminded believers in a fellowship of mutual spirituality. But Christianity, rightly understood, seeks to unite people in common community -- not to raise barriers and separate them because of theological differences.

The Making of Jesus

Oklahoma-raised Bill Bright came to Los Angeles in 1944 and started a business selling candies, fruits and jams. He was drawn to the large First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood and there came under the considerable influence of Christian educator Henrietta Mears. Her circle of friends included the men who founded Fuller Seminary in 1947 and a youthful Billy Graham, who shot to national fame during his eight-week L.A. tent crusade in 1949. Bright would start on his own path toward evangelistic prominence in a more modest way in 1951 when he began Campus Crusade for Christ on the UCLA campus.

Five years earlier, however, Bright was uncertain about his business, his career, his faith commitment and the alluring power of Hollywood. He went east in 1946 to study at Princeton Seminary, and an enamored starlet tagged along. With his thin mustache and dark hair, the young William R. Bright strikingly resembled Clark Gable, at least in his photos. Yet needing to tend his candy business in L.A., he returned a year later to enroll in the first class of Fuller seminarians in Pasadena. He also kept in touch with Vonette Zachary, the young Oklahoma woman who reminded him of actress Diana Lynn. Joining him in Hollywood, Zachary married Bright at the end of 1948, several months after Mears guided her to faith in Jesus.

A number of actors, song writers and film professionals attended First Presbyterian of Hollywood or were part of the Hollywood Christian Group meeting at Mears’s Beverly Hills home. In his autobiography, Just As I Am, Graham recalls speaking in 1949 to Mears’s group, which attracted the likes of Connie Haines and Jane Russell. "I was inspired especially by the testimony of actress Colleen Townsend, who had a contract with Twentieth Century-Fox and whose picture had just been on the cover of Life magazine," Graham wrote. Townsend later married Louis Evans Jr., son of Hollywood Presbyterian’s senior pastor.

Heeding the Mears directive to think big, both Bright and Graham dreamed in the late 1940s of using motion pictures to spread the gospel. Bright even approached several producers (including Cecil B. De Mille, who had directed the silent King of Kings in 1927), but without success. Graham had better luck. His quick rise to celebrity enabled him to launch World Wide Pictures in 1952, which eventually had some success with movies such as The Restless One, The Hiding Place and Joni.

Bright was also seized with the idea of evangelizing on college campuses. Graham and others advised him to go ahead, so Bright quit Fuller Seminary and abandoned his goal of becoming an ordained minister. He started well by targeting a popular UCLA sorority, but his ministry was close to collapsing after he and his wife lost their rented place near campus. Mears came to the rescue, according to longtime Hollywood Presbyterian member Anna Kerr. Mears’s sister had recently died, and Mears needed companions to live with. She bought a mansion on Sunset Boulevard near UCLA for herself and Bill and Vonette Bright.

Soon the campus ministry blossomed. Campus Crusade spread to dozens of other U.S. campuses. By 1968 it had workers in 32 countries. About 80,000 people attended its Explo ‘72 gathering in Dallas, and more than 300,000 attended Explo ‘74 in South Korea.

Campus Crusade was in the middle of a national media campaign in 1976, promoting the slogan "I Found It!" on billboards, bumper stickers and lapel buttons, when an unexpected opportunity arose to realize Bright’s longtime goal of making an evangelistic movie. Knocking on Bright’s door at Campus Crusade headquarters in Arrowhead Springs, California, was producer John Heyman.

Heyman headed a London-based artists agency which represented Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Michael Caine, among other film stars. Heyman also had begun to co-finance major movies such as Chinatown, The Odessa File, The Rocky Horror Show and Marathon Man. His World Productions films won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971 and 1972.

Heyman, whose Jewish family left Germany for England before Adolf Hitler took power, had a grandiose plan of his own: to put all the Hebrew and Christian scriptures on film. His Genesis Project had already filmed verse-by-verse 22 chapters of Genesis and the first two chapters of the Gospel of Luke for what he called the New Media Bible. The series of 15-minute films, in which the actors’ words in Hebrew and Aramaic are muted under a voiceover narration in English, were designed for educational purposes. "People tend to know what their preacher says the Bible says, or what Billy Graham says the Bible says," Heyman said in later years, "but few have ever read it sufficiently to know what it really says."

But the New York -- based Genesis Project, founded in 1974, was a costly one. It was unlikely to make a profit or even survive unless church folks began to see the value of a cinematic version of the Bible.

Heyman and Bright decided to seek backing for a feature film on Jesus that would be suitable for showing in theaters. Heyman hoped that the revenue would offset his investment and help publicize the Genesis Project. Bright saw an opportunity to make a pioneering evangelistic tool.

What developed from this joint venture was the movie Jesus, which may be the most-watched film ever made, and which continues to be used around the world in remote villages and massive evangelistic campaigns sponsored by Campus Crusade. But the collaboration has lately resulted in strife. Heyman, embittered over what he sees as unauthorized alterations of the film, filed suit this year asking a federal court to return all film rights to the Genesis Project and to himself.

In 1976 Paul Eshleman, who was directing the "I Found It!" campaign, left Campus Crusade to work with Heyman on the movie project. The men first took the proposal to studio heads in Hollywood, but to no avail. One executive said the concept was too dull. "How about if we give Jesus this good-looking sister, and have this interplay of how’s it like to have your brother on the cross?" the studio president said. Heyman’s response, Eshleman said, was along this line: "Look, we are not going to crap it up. For once, we are going to do it like the Bible said."

Eventually, Bunker and Caroline Hunt, of oil and silver fortune, attended a seminar at Arrowhead Springs and were moved by Heyman’s talk of his love for the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Texas couple gave Campus Crusade a $3 million guarantee toward making the film, Eshelman said, and about $6 million was raised for the project altogether. Hundreds of Protestant and Catholic thinkers were polled for ideas on the script, and most endorsed the plan of sticking to one Gospel -- Luke -- rather than blending Gospel accounts, Eshleman said.

Upon returning to Israel for filming, however, they had to reshoot Genesis Project’s start on Luke because the actress who played Mary was no longer available. British actor Brian Deacon was picked to portray Jesus, but all other actors in the movie were Yemenite Jews, "because their facial features have changed least over the past 2,000 years, said Eshleman.

Released in the US by Warner Brothers, the two-hour Jesus opened in October 1979 in 250 western and southern cities. The few reviews were lukewarm. After a year’s run in US moviehouses, promoted mostly by pastors, Jesus had been seen by some 4 million Americans. Showings on cable TV followed. "When the film did not recover its cost in theaters and on television, Bunker Hunt converted the debt to a contribution to Campus Crusade for Christ" according to Heyman, who said the debt amounted to $4 million.

Though Jesus was not a box-office hit, Campus Crusade had other things in store for the movie. As early as the spring of 1980, the ministry began dubbing the film’s sound track into other languages to take the cinematic Jesus abroad. The film was telecast in Hindi to 21 million viewers in India. The first small team of Campus Crusade staffers, headed by Eshleman, took the Tagalog version to the Philippines. By the end of 1980, the film ministry had 31 language versions of Jesus, exceeding the then record of 26 translations of Gone with the Wind.

More than two decades after its original release, Bright’s movie has become not only the most-translated film ever, but perhaps the most-viewed movie in history. As of April 1 this year, 4.04 billion people had seen Jesus, as reckoned by the statistics-minded Jesus Film Project, the Campus Crusade arm created for Eshleman in 1985. Films and videos in 654 languages were in hand at that point, and another 278 translations were under way. The project’s goal is to put Jesus into at least 1,154 tongues.

More than 1,000 mission agencies and denominations -- nearly all of them theologically conservative -- have employed the film. Roman Catholic, Nazarene and Salvation Army mission officials are among the latest signing agreements. Close to 140 million people have made "decisions for Christ" after seeing the film, which ends with a low-key "altar call" segment. Thomas Trask, the Assemblies of God top administrator, commends the film for its "clear salvation message," and others see it as a way of telling about Jesus in a straightforward manner. "Nonthreatening; nonintrusive," is how a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention describes the film.

Few, if any, mainline denominations utilize the film, partly because Campus Crusade officials prefer to work with theologically compatible partners. In addition, according to Jonathan J. Bonk, editor of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, some mainline mission agencies are uneasy about using a North American-made film featuring a white Jesus, or "cannot believe that the film is much more than a hokey piece of promotion . . . for Campus Crusade."

Evangelical critics have similar reservations, said Bonk, as well as a concern about "whether a film, any film, can have the capacity to communicate the gospel without reference to local contexts." Bonk added, however, that there is "a great danger of being unhealthily patronizing by ignoring what the viewers themselves have to say about the film."

Eshleman addressed the issue of whether the film itself is patronizing in a speech in January at the Overseas Ministries Study Center, in New Haven, Connecticut, where Bonk is director. Many people today still live in a first-century culture," he said. "They fish and farm for a living. Many wear sandals; a wealthy man is someone who owns an ox-cart. The illustrations used by Jesus are extremely relevant."

A shorter (83-minute) video of the Heyman-produced film has been circulating widely in America for the past decade. The impetus for this version came partly from pastors like Jack Hayford of the 10,000-member Church on the Way in Van Nuys, California. He said most of his congregants invited friends into their homes to show the video around 1990 and recorded hundreds of "first-time decisions for Christ."

The San Bernardino-based Jesus Video Project, begun in 1992, invites church groups to buy huge quantities of the videos for under $5 each and give them away, usually through the mail. An Alabama campaign mailed 1.8 million copies, and a similar campaign is planned for South Carolina this summer. Smaller mail blitzes have already hit southern Vermont, the Salem area of Oregon, and central Illinois, among other locales. When videos arrived in mailboxes of heavily Jewish Palm Beach, Florida, in May 2000, however, some public backlash arose.

But the biggest push by Campus Crusade is to use the film to reach all corners of the world. The Orlando headquarters of Campus Crusade handles studio chores of dubbing and reproducing new versions, while the Jesus Film Project directed by Eshleman, operating out of San Clemente, California, manages the foreign distribution. In an interview, Eshleman pointed to a chart illustrating the growing annual donations to the project -- from $1.3 million in 1986 to $51.4 million in 2000. "Most of the money that comes in goes for more work" on translations and dissemination, he said.

Asked if Heyman receives any residuals from the film or other payments, Eshleman said, "No." In the beginning, he said, "we hoped the film would make enough money so that if it paid back all the investors, then the profits would be divided between the Genesis Project to make more films and Campus Crusade to distribute the feature film. It made some money, but it never recouped the $6 million investment." As for Heyman, "he’s had some disappointments that we haven’t promoted the whole Bible project as much as we have been promoting the film," Eshleman said. He emphasized that Campus Crusade’s mission of getting "the message of Christ to everybody" took priority: "I think [Heyman] hoped that we would have gone on in the lucrative markets of the world to get the Genesis films and the Gospel of Luke out as teaching tools. And it’s hard to do both."

What Eshleman did not mention in that early April interview was that Heyman had, without fanfare, filed a suit on February 15 against him and Campus Crusade, alleging breach of contract. Heyman told me of the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in New York when I contacted him in May. The suit centers on Heyman’s charges that a shortened version of the film released in the winter of 1999-2000 as The Story of Jesus for Children "contains a substantial amount of unauthorized additional and substitute footage, all of which deviates from the Gospel of Luke," including the retelling of the parable of the rich man. As of April 1, more than 462,000 children’s videos were in circulation.

Heyman’s suit said he agreed to a Campus Crusade request in 1998 for permission to release a short version of the two-hour film to accommodate youngsters’ shorter attention span. But he contended he did not agree to changes that were introduced. Since he remains in the film’s credits as producer, Heyman said his business reputation has been severely damaged. The court was asked to order Campus Crusade to turn over any revenue earned by the children’s video, to award damages and, finally, to restore all film rights to the Genesis Project.

The Campus Crusade attorney, Dennis Kasper of Los Angeles, said his organization does not believe there is "any merit to the allegations" and will continue to distribute the films in the meantime. Disappointed that the suit was filed, Kasper added, "In the past Campus Crusade and Genesis Project have been able to resolve their differences over the film through negotiation."

Indeed, Heyman’s suit noted that the Jesus Film Project received certain distribution rights to Jesus in the past, and that Heyman consented in 1991 to a shorter video version. But the editing of the children’s video, he contended, resulted "in an inauthentic and historically inaccurate version of the life of Jesus."

A Campus Crusade newsletter describing the new, 62-minute video said six child actors were filmed to insert those scenes into the video. "Their conversations, observations and intepretations [are] seamlessly woven throughout segments of the original Jesus film," the newsletter said. They meet to discuss what they’ve heard from Jesus. "At the end of the video, two children explain how to take the initial step of trusting Jesus for forgiveness and a new life with God." Young viewers are told they may say "yes," "no," or "I’m not ready yet."

In interviews by e-mail, Heyman, now 68, said, "I personally doubt that Eshleman and I will be able to sort things out -- wounds caused by backstabbing do not heal quickly, and the abuse of scripture perpetrated by [Campus Crusade] is an ongoing affront to the Word."

Meanwhile, his own Bible-filming project has long been stalled, Heyman confirmed. "Having lost $22 million, we could not continue," he wrote. The Genesis Project sells two videos ($59.95 each) on its Web site (www.genesisnewmediabible .com) -- the same films produced in the 1970s on the opening chapters of Genesis and the Gospel of Luke. Eight posters, with scenes from the Jesus film and a biblical verse, sell for $16 apiece.

While agreeing that Campus Crusade had no obligation to pay film royalties to him, Heyman said ruefully: "Had [Campus Crusade] paid a one-cent royalty for everyone they claim to have led to Christ by showing the Jesus film, we would have been able to translate Acts of the Apostles onto film and we would have had a much more ‘Christian’ world than we do -- but they did not and so we could not."

Currently chairman of the World Group of Companies, including World Productions, the British producer has continued to invest in more proven sources of revenue. After the Jesus film, Heyman helped finance Grease, Home Alone, Saturday Night Fever, Awakenings, the first of the Star Trek movies, and others. In April this year, said Heyman, "World Productions, Britain’s leading producer of drama, was awarded the British Academy of Film and Television Arts’ Special Achievement Award for consistently high standards of programming and for the encouragement of new talent."

Eshleman’s book, I Just Saw Jesus, indicates that Heyman converted to Christianity in 1977 after many discussions with Bright. But asked about his religion today, the producer said, "I am a Jew, born and bred, and my wife and children are Jewish too." He said his effort to film the Bible was not a religious venture but "an examination of our roots."

An attempt to interview Bill Bright did not succeed. The 79-year-old Bright has limited his public appearances and interviews because of pulmonary fibrosis, a debilitating condition that doctors confirmed in October and say give him only a few more years to live. Bright announced last summer that Steve Douglass, a close executive in the ministry, will succeed him as president of Campus Crusade on August 1.

Bright will leave an evangelistic empire based in Orlando, Florida, that now has 24,000 full-time staff and 553,000 volunteers worldwide as well as nearly 70 niche groups for athletes, prisoners, business executives, inner-city residents and others. Bright was the 1996 winner of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, with the Jesus film counted as one of his principal achievements. This year the National Association of Evangelicals presented him, in absentia, with a lifetime achievement award.

If Heyman’s suit puts the brakes on part of Campus Crusade’s film distribution, or shuts it down, such a scenario might not disturb Bright greatly. Speaking in general about his ministry, he has said, "We play games with God when we think we own anything. At best, we’re stewards."

Despite his long fascination with filmmaking, Bright has been critical of the entertainment industry. In 1988, amid a widespread religious protest against director Martin Scorcese’s film rendition of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel The Last Temptation of Christ, Bright offered to raise donations to reimburse Universal Pictures for its monetary investment-reportedly as high as $10 million -- if the studio would turn over all copies of the film for them to be destroyed. He said he anticipated that "concerned individuals across America" would contribute to cover Universal’s costs. Lew Wasserman, chairman of Universal’s parent company, MCA, declined, backed by other studio executives in saying that freedom of expression was at stake.

By 1998, Bright had a mellower view of Hollywood. It may have helped that his Jesus film has reached unprecedented audiences while Last Temptation has been largely forgotten. Furthermore, the highly rated CBS program Touched by an Angel and the DreamWorks animated film Prince of Egypt have demonstrated a friendlier attitude by studios toward religious and family themes. Along with sending a mailing to 30,000 churches encouraging a more positive approach to Hollywood, Bright formed a leadership committee of Protestant clergy that met with studio executives to extend an olive branch.

Regarding Bright’s initiative, Movieguide publisher Ted Baehr said, "I think it says to Hollywood that they can make a film like Joan of Arc or Prince of Egypt and expect more communication and cooperation from the church." Baehr, who arranged Bright’s meetings with studio heads, annually stages the largest film award show for moral and religious content. Though unwilling to criticize Southern Baptists for their Disney boycott on gay issues, Bright was quoted as saying, "I think working together we can accomplish a lot more than if we assume adversarial roles."

Simpsons Have Soul

The enormous popularity of The Simpsons, now in its 12th television season, suggests that religious people have a sense of humor -- contrary to the usual wisdom in Hollywood. The program takes more satirical jabs at spiritual matters than any other TV show, yet the erratic cartoon family has an appreciative audience among many people of faith and among many analysts of religion. The reason? Perhaps it’s because The Simpsons is an equal-opportunity satire: it shrewdly targets all sorts of foibles and hypocrisies, not just religious ones. Perhaps it’s also because the show is exceptionally aware of the significant place religion has in the American landscape.

"The Simpsons is not dismissive of faith, but treats religion as an integral part of American life," says William Romanowski of Calvin College, author of Pop Culture Wars: Religion and the Role of Entertainment in American Life. "Episodes that I’ve seen are not so much irreverent toward religion, but poke fun at American attitudes and practices."

Homer Simpson, the show’s awesomely underachieving Everyman, moans about going to church ("What if we pick the wrong religion?"), and invites daughter Lisa to watch an afternoon football game with him, saying it "helps get rid of the unpleasant aftertaste of church." Nevertheless, churchgoing is a regular Simpson routine -- a practice rarely seen or mentioned in other TV shows.

Prayer is also a common Simpsons activity -- especially when some special pleading is in order. Young Bart prays when he starts missing his soul -- which he sold to another boy for a few dollars. Wife Marge asks God to stop a hurricane and save her family, adding, "We will be forever grateful and recommend you to all of our friends."

One of Romanowski’s favorite episodes is one in which Homer justifies himself to God: "I’m not a bad guy. I work hard and I love my kids. So why should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I’m going to hell?" Homer later concludes, "So I figure I should try to live right and worship you in my own way." It turns out that God has no problem with that. According to Romanowski, scenes like this aptly capture American individualism. "Episodes generally leave the matter of God and religion open to multiple interpretations, perhaps so as not to potentially alienate audience members, but also as a reflection of American attitudes," he said.

Religious content appears in nearly 70 percent of the shows, according to a study by John Heeren of California State University at San Bernardino. Heeren spent eight weeks last year watching reruns of 71 programs from the first 11 years of the series. He counted at least one religious reference in 58 percent of the shows and "religion as the context" in 11 percent.

"This would seem to be a far higher proportion than is found in most other programming, with the exception of a specifically religious show like Touched by an Angel," said Heeren, who previously examined religious content in newspaper comics. Comic strips from the 1950s through the 1980s took an increasingly secular attitude toward religious symbols, Heeren said, whereas The Simpsons displays a "much greater freedom in the lampooning of these symbols."

In the world of the Simpsons, God is omnipotent, capricious and responsive. After Homer and another man compete as snowplowers, then form a common enterprise, Homer is moved to proclaim,

"When two best friends work together, not even God can stop them." From the heavens a voice is heard, "Oh, no?" and rays of sunlight rapidly melt all the snow.

Wanting to repay God for saving him from a fire, Homer prays, "Oh, spiteful one, show me who to smite and they shall be smoten." When Homer asks God the meaning of life, God tells Homer he has to wait until he dies to find out. Homer says he can’t wait that long, and the deity quips, "Can’t wait six months?"

Two regular characters help keep the religious themes spinning: Ned Flanders is the hyper-cheerful evangelical next door, and the Reverend Timothy Lovejoy is the smarmy, amorphously Protestant pastor of the First Church of Springfield.

Even God agrees with Homer that Lovejoy’s sermons are boring, Heeren points out. Confessing that the pastor "really displeases me," God says, "I think I’ll give him a canker sore."

Some of The Simpsons church humor is a mild sort, typical of an earlier era of churchgoing about sleep-inducing sermons or tactics to elicit more money in the offering ("And as we pass the collection plate, please give as if the person next to you was watching," Lovejoy intones). But most of the satire is culturally savvy in the extreme, with a sharp critical edge. For example, the sign outside First Church of Springfield reads at various times "God, the Original Love Connection," or "Today’s Topic: He Knows What You Did Last Summer," or "Private Wedding: Please Worship Elsewhere" or "God Welcomes His Victims."

Religious satire abounds in an episode on the Movementarians, a sect that temporarily seduces most of the Simpson family. Lovejoy takes on the sect in his sermon: "This so-called new religion is nothing but a pack of weird rituals and chants designed to take away the money of fools. Let us say the Lord’s Prayer 40 times, but first let’s pass the collection plate." When the plate returns nearly empty, the pastor starts pouring gasoline on the church floor, lamenting, "I never thought I’d have to do this again."

Upon departing Springfield, the sect leader takes off in a shiny spaceship. An astonished Lovejoy gasps, "Oh mercy, he’s the real deal!" The minister rips off his clergy collar, throws it on the ground and stomps on it. Seconds later, the flimsy spaceship falls apart and crashes. Lovejoy spots his collar: "How did that get down there?"

Lovejoy appears on a hip Sunday evening radio program called Gabbin’ with God with Catholic and Jewish representatives. But as Heeren points out, the pastor’s religious knowledge and tolerance have definite limits. When Marge asks Lovejoy if he will conduct last rites for gravely ill Grandpa Simpson he replies, "That’s Catholic, Marge. You might as well ask me to do a voodoo dance."

In another episode, when Lovejoy is citing the various religious traditions of the neighbors who saved Homer’s life, the minister pauses in the case of Apu, the Indian who runs the Kwik-E-Mart. He finally labels him "miscellaneous. Apu objects, saying he is Hindu, and that "there are 700 million of us." Lovejoy says soothingly, "Ah, that’s super."

In the mid-1990s, when some Simpsons episodes made fun of a sculpture of Ganesha, the popular elephant deity in the Hindu pantheon, some southern California Hindus objected. Prithvi Raj Singh, president of the Federation of Hindu Associations, said a Fox Television spokeswoman returned his call. "She said it was not a planned attack on Hinduism," Singh said. "‘The show treats other religions humorously too,’ she said." The explanation was accepted and the matter was dropped.

Fox did not so easily placate the media-savvy Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. The New York-based Catholic League raised its eyebrows at a 1998 episode featuring this exchange in the Simpsons’ car while driving home from a church service:

Bart: "I’m starving. Mom, can we go Catholic so we can get communion wafers and booze?"

Mom: "No, no one is going Catholic." Three children is enough, thank you."

Thomas Chavez , Fox’s manager for broadcast standards and practices, wrote to the Catholic League, saying in part that Bart, like many unknowing children, "sees the wafer merely as food and wine as a forbidden drink." He said that Marge’s response " may be perceived as short and curt," but that she was responding by "stating why she would not be comfortable converting to Catholicism."

On January 31, 1999, an episode that followed Fox’s broadcast of the Super Bowl showed a gas station scene in which a trio of buxom, scantily clad women greet a driver. One of the women bends over to reveal a large cross, then says, "The Catholic Church -- we’ve made a few changes." This prompted the Catholic League to organize more protests.

Deluged with angry letters, Fox directed writers to lay off Catholics, according to Los Angeles Times television critic Howard Rosenberg. He reported that Mike Scully, executive producer of The Simpsons, complained bitterly about the directive, but was told that any future episodes containing offensive lines should not be attributed to Catholics. Scully was told it was OK to target "Methodists, Presbyterians or Baptists," but not Catholics. When the program appeared as a rerun in May, the reference to the Catholic Church was changed to "the church."

Conservative evangelicals have generally either seen the positive side of the show or taken a live-and-let-live stance. A 1992 master’s thesis at Pat Robertson’s Regent University complimented the program. "While it may not completely resonate with the evangelical Judeo-Christian belief system, The Simpsons does portray a family searching for moral and theological ideals," wrote Beth Keller.

Her favorable comments and others’ were cited in a 1999 article in the Orlando Sentinel by religion writer Mark Pinsky. His The Gospel According to The Simpsons: The Spiritual Life of America’s Most Animated Family will be published late this year by Westminster John Knox Press. Pinsky quoted the conservative Family Research Council’s Robert Knight, who noted that the Simpsons do function in a moral universe in which "evil often -- if not always -- is punished with consequences." PRISM, the monthly published by Evangelicals for Social Action, has called the series "the most pro-family, God-preoccupied, home-based program on television."

The main characters and the show’s concepts were created by cartoonist Matt Groening. Groening has said that with The Simpsons on the air, "right-wingers" should not complain about God not being on television. Not only does the Simpson family speak to God, "we show Him, and God has five fingers -- unlike the Simpsons, who have only four," he told Mother Jones magazine. Groening told The Simpsons Archives Web site (www.snpp.com) last year that the program’s "Krusty the Clown" is based on a real TV "Christian clown" he watched as a kid in Portland, Oregon.

Fans of the show note that Marge is rock-solid faithful, so much so that she once detained Jehovah’s Witnesses longer than they wanted to stay. Lisa, only eight, is spiritually wise beyond her years.

Most of the religious content of the series comes from George Meyer, "who is generally considered a mad genius, with emphasis on ‘mad,"’ said Steve Tompkins, former writer for the show, who spoke to a seminar last fall at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. Like many of the writer-producers who have worked on the program, Tompkins said, he once was associated with the Harvard Lampoon magazine.

Tompkins was with the show in its sixth, seventh and eighth seasons -- the last one being 1996-97 when he was listed as a co-producer with Meyer and Scully. Tompkins then left to become executive producer for PJ’s, a claymation program created by actor Eddie Murphy.

Simpson writers "were atheist Jews or atheist Christians, and only two of us were churchgoing Christians when I was there," said Tompkins. Yet, despite the frequent focus on religion, "there is no agenda one way or another," Tompkins said. "It’s all about the joke." Other writers want the story line to be true to the character, and still others seek "an omnidirectional assault on anything that is sacred -- hypocrisy will be mocked at all times," he said.

Asked how he and other writers view the show’s two main foils for religion, Tompkins said, "Lovejoy is pretty much a pan-denominational windbag." As for nerdy Ned Flanders, "there is a lot of affection for him . . . even though he is often the object of humor and annoyance."

In a well-remembered episode, Flanders saves Homer from a house fire, an act of love and courage which rekindles Homer’s faith. Lisa declares, "This is truly an act of God." Homer doubts it -- the house of faithful Ned Flanders is now engulfed in flames. But just then a cloudburst puts out the fire and a rainbow appears.

A Christian Science Monitor writer last year opined that The Simpsons has lasted so long because, for all their manifest flaws, "the Simpsons love each other." And no matter how acerbically the writers skewer human pretensions and social ills, "there’s a kindly spirit about the show," wrote M. S. Mason. Or as Tompkins observed, "Somehow there is goodness at the end" of every show.

Close-knit Megachurches

The first systematic survey of U.S. megachurches has shown that while they average some 3,850 worshipers weekly, a full 50 percent of them say they feel like "a close-knit family." The study also found that the very big congregations affiliated with a denomination tend to have tenuous ties at best to their national bodies.

Theological Character of Megachurches:

Evangelical 48%

Charismatic 14%

Moderate 12%

Pentecostal 11%

Traditional 8%

Seeker 3%

Fundamentalist 2%

Other 3%



The "close-knit" sense was due largely "to extensive use of small-group fellowship in megachurches," said principal researcher Scott Thumma of the seminary-based Hartford Institute for Religion Research. Fifty percent said the small-group structures were central to their strategy for Christian nurture and spiritual formation; another 44 percent said they had small groups but it wasn’t a key strategy.

While independent congregations made up a third of the responding churches, the survey also included numerous Southern Baptist and Assemblies of God churches and several mainline congregations. Only 30 percent of the megachurches with denominational links said their congregation "expresses [its] denominational heritage" and 49 percent said that denominational leadership was "of no importance," according to the survey related to the large Faith Communities Today (FACT) study, which was released earlier this year.

Mainline-aligned congregations totaled only 10 percent among both the 604 churches that were sent questionnaires and the 153 that returned usable responses, Thumma reported. The survey includes only churches with an average attendance of at least 1,800 per week. As expected, most very large churches are conservative in theology, with 48 percent seeing themselves as evangelical, another 25 percent as charismatic or Pentecostal. The least popular self-description was fundamentalist (2 percent), with moderate (12), traditional (8) and "seeker" or "other" (3 percent each) rounding out the choices.

The fact that many high-profile megachurches do not feature their connections to, say, Baptist, Presbyterian or Lutheran denominations is not a totally disturbing trend, suggested Thumma. "After all, the denomination has more to gain by having these congregations as part of its flock than the church benefits from being part of a denomination," he said. The average yearly income for the survey-participating megachurches was $4.8 million in 1999. Given their choice, many megachurches create their own educational materials with only 27 percent purchasing worship, educational and other supplies primarily or exclusively from denominational sources.

Megachurches represent less than 1 percent of U.S. non-Catholic congregations, but Thumma said that they warrant further study because of their impact on other churches. Aspiring big-church pastors read about them. In addition, the survey showed that 47 percent of the megachurches sponsored pastors or ministerial conferences, and about four of every ten churches in the study had a radio or television ministry.

"Even if a small congregation doesn’t desire to have a 3,500-person worship service, it still looks to the programmatic characteristics of the megachurch for clues about what it should be doing," wrote Thumma in an analysis of the data recently posted on the Hartford Seminary Web site (www.FACT.hartsem.edu).

Since churches with large attendance usually cannot accommodate everyone Sunday morning, nearly half in the survey have a Saturday service and 20 percent conduct a service on Friday. Some 65 percent have a Sunday evening worship time. The average Sunday morning attendance alone is 2,913 people and the median seating capacity is 1,700, the study showed.

Sixty percent of megachurches always or often have altar calls in their services. About 72 percent use visual projection equipment and 43 percent include recorded music in services. Though organ and/or piano music is a staple in 92 percent of the churches, 75 to 80 percent report using some combination of electronic keyboards, guitars and drums.

The senior pastor is almost always male -- 99 percent in this survey, said Thumma. Six percent are African-Americans and another 6 percent of other racial or ethnic backgrounds. Nearly all (97 percent) of the senior pastors had at least an undergraduate college degree, and 73 percent had at least one seminary degree. An average of 13 full-time paid ministers and 25 full-time paid program staff serve those churches.

"Megachurches are predominantly a phenomenon of the suburbs of very large cities," said Thumma, who was assisted in the research by John Vaughan of Church Growth Today, Bolivar, Missouri. Nearly four in ten churches were founded before 1961, but about two-thirds moved to their current locations after 1970. States with the greatest concentrations of megachurches: California, Texas, Florida and Georgia.

Churchgoers From Elsewhere

Before the American Unitarian Association merged with the Universalist Church of America in 1961, the former group ran an ad campaign suggesting, "I was a Unitarian all along and never knew it." The Unitarian Universalist Association could revive such a slogan today in view of recent surveys. Two polls indicate that only 10 percent of its members were born and raised in UU traditions.

Both a new, regional survey by an Ohio University scholar and a nationwide poll conducted in 1997 by the association determined that UUs found a philosophical-ethical home in the socially liberal, creedless, gender-inclusive denomination after rejecting the teachings and practices of their previous religious traditions.

"More so than for any other religious tradition, a person can become UU because of what he already believes rather than believing what he does because of becoming a UU," said James Casebolt, coauthor of two papers on the regional survey read at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion annual meeting in October. Casebolt surveyed UUA congregations in Ohio, West Virginia and western Pennsylvania.

Reasons given by Unitarian Universalists there for leaving other churches were along the line of "couldn’t believe dogma, but wanted community" (ex-Methodist), "could not accept Jesus myth" (nominal Episcopalian), "my wife and I could not reconcile the Christian theology with a rational approach to life" (nominal Presbyterian). The second-most common theme was the perception that one’s original tradition was restrictive and exclusivistic, said Casebolt and student researcher Tiffany Niekro.

There have been enough seekers aligning with the now-1,000-plus congregations and fellowships to help the Boston-based UUA to post 19 consecutive years of growth. Adult contributing members number 156,968, said John Hurley, communications director.

However, 629,000 U.S. adults -- four times as many as UUA members on church rolls -- think of themselves as Unitarian Universalists, according to directors of a third poll, the Religious Identification Survey 2001. That estimate was extrapolated from the random survey of 50,000 households released in October by City University of New York. CUNY’s previous poll in 1990 came up with 502,000 adults calling themselves Unitarian Universalists -- many more than those active in congregations.

"We have a chuckle over those figures," said Hurley. The huge gap between actual members and self-identified members was attributed by Hurley partly to the individualistic legacy of New England transcendentalism. "They may consider themselves UUs but do not see that it is necessary to belong," Hurley said.

Former UUA president John Buehrens, who completed eight years in office this year, pointed to some trends that contribute to the drifting away of members as well as to the replenishment of congregations. "We have a very high rate of mobility -- some 15 percent of UUs change their address each year," Buehrens said in an e-mail interview. "Our young people also tend to ‘marry out,"’ he said. "They often are more adaptable about the religious nurture of children than their more religiously conservative spouses." (Indeed, the 1997 UUA survey and Casebolt’s poll also found that current members rarely cited "religious education for children" as a reason they joined a UU congregation.)

Nevertheless, a concerted effort to appeal to high school youths and young adults has apparently paid off. "During the past decade the number of high school youth in our congregations increased fivefold, and the number of young adults increased sixfold," said Buehrens, who this fall is a visiting professor at the UUA’s Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, the number of high school youths increased and the UUA transformed "a large number of lay-led fellowships into congregations with professional ministry," Buehrens said. From 1993 to 1997, congregations sponsoring campus groups went from 19 to 135, and the growth has continued, he said.

Buehrens was skeptical about surveys showing only 10 percent of members being born-and-bred UUs. Among young adults, he said, roughly one-third were "raised UU." And the percentage of New England church members whose parents were in Unitarian or Universalist congregations would be much higher than 10 percent, most observers say.

Nevertheless, the denomination-run survey in 1997, to which 8,100 members responded, tallied 9.9 percent who said they were "lifelong members" in answering one question and, to another question on what influenced them to join the UUA, 10.4 percent said, "I was born into UUism."

So, just what is "UUism," the denomination’s unusual umbrella term? Though critics usually look upon the UUA as a union of unbelief and uncertainty, the church body’s Web site upholds a belief that "personal experience, conscience and reason should be the final authorities in religion.’ Since "human understanding of life and death, the world and its mysteries, is never final," the association endorses the "free search for truth," or more precisely, "unfolding truths" over time. Underlying its actions is the belief "that ethical living is the supreme witness of religion."

Whereas "human reason and knowledge" was called very important by 96 percent of UU congregational leaders who took part in the multi-denominational Faith Communities Today (FACT) survey released early this year, the Bible was termed only "somewhat important" by 50 percent and had little or no importance to 48 percent as a source for worship and teaching. God’s presence, at best, was sensed significantly by only 25 percent in church and somewhat by another 36 percent.

As for a preferred theological label, among respondents in the FACT survey and in two other polls previously cited, "humanist" always got the most votes. The UUA’s in-house survey four years ago asked church members to chose only one label (though some chose more). The top choices were humanist (46 percent), earth/nature centered (19 percent), theist (13 percent), Christian (9.5 percent), with mystic, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu and Muslim in ever-smaller percentages. Another 13 percent picked "other."

The FACT survey and Casebolt’s Ohio-based survey asked respondents to pick as many self-descriptions as they wanted. In the FACT survey, which had seven categories, humanist (91 percent), earth-centered, theist and Christian were the top four in the same order as the 1997 survey, but Buddhist and Jewish were also picked by a quarter of the respondents.

Casebolt offered 20 labels, including pagan, atheist and agnostic in his Midwestern survey. Humanist was again a clear choice (54 percent), but agnostic (33 percent) beat out earth-centered (31 percent). Atheist was picked by 18 percent and Buddhist by 16.5 percent. Pagan and Christian tied at 13.1 percent. "That the typical respondent felt the need to circle three or four terms to describe his or her theological views" demonstrated the complexity of many UUs’ outlook, Casebolt said.

Unitarian Universalists are not oblivious to the ironic humor of their association. One question posed in the internal UUA survey in 1997 was: "What tickles your spiritual funny bone?" Writers of the questionnaire offered several possibilities gleaned from their experience. The top choice (31 percent) was: "That UUs claim to be seekers at the same time we act like we have the answers.

Men Behaving Badly

"Women are more religious than men." That’s a longstanding generalization made by pastors surveying their pews and by social scientists surveying the public. Husbands and single guys with other weekend plans might even offer that truism as an excuse for skipping church.

Why the gender difference? Old explanations said women were less educated, or cited their nurturing tasks at home and secondary roles in society. Yet when droves of well-educated women took on jobs and busy schedules, they too tended to pray more than men, to attend services more, and to affirm (to pollsters) more religious beliefs.

Now a provocative scholar known for innovative social theories is suggesting that the disparity lies in the biochemistry of certain men. Six percent of young males have been identified in criminology studies as physiologically disposed to take risks for momentary excitement without regard for consequences. This cohort of men serves as a dismal model of masculinity for many other men, said Rodney Stark, who has taught sociology and comparative religion for nearly 30 years at the University of Washington.

"We’ve all been taught to laugh at the idea that some people were ‘born criminal,"’ said Stark to a packed room at the Religious Research Association meeting last month in Houston. The RRA meets annually with the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and both groups of specialists are interested in social and cultural bases for behavior, not physiological or genetic causes.

"If I have offended you to say it’s in the genes, it is so that I might provoke sociologists to do [new] research," said Stark.

Stark invaded the realm of historians and biblical scholars in 1996 with The Rise of Christianity, a sociological account of why the early church grew. Earlier this year, in Acts of Faith, Stark and coauthor Roger Finke of Pennsylvania State University defended their influential and controversial principle of "rational choice," which they apply to the study of religion. According to this theory, religious bodies expand by demanding strong commitment while providing social and personal benefits. Critics says this mode of analysis gives too little significance to religious motives.

In Houston Stark presented polls results from 49 nations that show women consistently exhibiting higher levels of religious belief and practice than men, demonstrating that the differences are not just North American. In arguing for more research in physiology, he cited "a definitive health survey of nearly 4,500 Vietnam war veterans revealing that men with the highest levels of testosterone -- a male sex hormone -- were violent and impulsive, committed crimes, abused drugs, were promiscuous, beat their wives and had poor work records.

"Recent studies of biochemistry . . . imply that both male irreligiousness and male lawlessness are rooted in the fact that far more males than females have an underdeveloped ability to inhibit their impulses, especially those involving immediate gratification and thrills," Stark said.

"These men set some very unfortunate examples -- some men pick up on that," said Stark, in conceding that social influences are a factor as well. The fearless risk-takers "serve as undesirable role models, setting quite excessive standards for masculinity: ‘Real men take what they want.’ ‘Only wimps go to church."’

Responding to Stark, Paula Nesbitt of Denver University said that "as a feminist, I am uncomfortable with biological arguments" for assessing the capabilities of men and women. "In my work on women’s ordination," she said, "the fact that women can give birth has been used as an argument against social equality." At the same time, she said, "I cannot tell you that hormonal levels [in men and women] are not influential."

Before sociologists "jump on the biological bandwagon," Nesbitt said, they should consider whether the male affinity for outdoor activity and athletics might also fit into the definition of religiosity and spirituality. And consider also, she said, "women who may be attracted to religion for community and friendship" more than prayer and otherworldly concerns.

Darren Sherkat of Vanderbilt University contended that gay men "are more avid religious participants than are male heterosexuals . . . and are similar to female heterosexuals in their rates of religious participation." People who call themselves bisexuals in the same General Social Surveys in the 1990s were the least pious and attended religious services the least. Lesbians were a little more religious than bisexuals, but they prayed and attended church less frequently than gay men, he said.

Not one to mince words, Stark dismissed most earlier sociological explanations of women’s greater religiosity as "tautological, inconsistent with the evidence, or silly." He credited researchers Alan S. Miller and John P. Hoffmann with "a remarkable insight" in a study published five years ago.

Miller and Hoffmann said that only one other gender difference is similar to the one involving religion: females are far less likely than males to commit violent crimes. Studies have shown that men and women are roughly equal in committing premeditated crimes (like poisoning and forgery), but that violent, dangerous acts such as assault, robbery and rape are predominantly committed by men.

Stark’s linking of impulsive, short-term gratification by young males to their nonreligious behavior appeared to draw a sympathetic hearing. That wasn’t the case, however, for another part of Stark’s theory -- his claim that males who shun faith and worship services do so because they get a kick out of risking hellfire and damnation, or at least the loss of a heavenly afterlife.

Several academics demurred. If the irresponsible male is seeking thrills without considering long-term risks, then he is not going to be worried about hell (or figures there is always time left to repent).

Sociologist Dean R. Hoge of Catholic University of America in comments after the session, said that during a summer studying Pentecostals in South America he saw that many men "don’t participate because they don’t want to give up alcohol, gambling and womanizing," which are strictly prohibited by the churches.

Others pointed out that the notion of an afterlife threat is irrelevant to some religions. Among Western religious groups, said Marion S. Goldman of the University of Oregon, "Reform Judaism and Christian Science are almost risk-free in terms of an afterlife." And: "Perhaps men want some risk in religious activities."

The Jesus Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which jolted stodgy evangelicals with its hippie-like clothing and long hair, was disproportionately masculine, Goldman pointed out. Revitalization movements from Jesus-preaching weightlifters to Promise Keepers have enjoyed peaks of popularity.

"Perhaps religiosity with risk is what is necessary to bring men back, and Bikers for Christ is the wave of the future," she said, noting also the many male followers in the Nation of Islam. And what about young Muslims in the Middle East ready to risk their lives in some form of holy war? Asked another scholar.

On the whole, Goldman praised Stark’s latest work. "Like much of Stark’s other work, [it] forces us to consider issues that most sociologists of religion take for granted," she wrote. "Now that the outrage over ‘rational choice’ has somewhat subsided, Stark’s back!"

Stark said in an interview that he and his wife currently live and work on their research projects outside of Albuquerque. However, he retains his professorial title and benefits at the University of Washington. He said he was eager to return to his research on the Middle Ages. Let that be fair warning for medievalists.

TNIV Bible Braves Gender-Inclusive World

Publishers of America’s best-selling Bible, who a few years ago retreated when the Religious Right scorched their first gender-inclusive version, have unveiled another try with a New Testament endorsed by evangelical supporters and backed by a six-figure marketing campaign.

Today’s New International Version (TNIV), expected to be in bookstores by the end of March, is being touted by Zondervan and the International Bible Society (IBS) as a "thoroughly accurate, fully trustworthy" Bible in contemporary English. As a part of its ad campaign, Zondervan is giving away 50,000 free copies of TNIV’s New Testament to pastors and key figures, according to Zondervan officials.

Publicists and officials are not calling it gender-inclusive -- an adjective associated with feminism and liberals. Some opted briefly for "gender-neutral," but IBS and Zondervan spokespersons now label the new version "gender-accurate."

Within days of the January 28 announcement, however, a small clergy-professor group rejected the translation as inaccurate and driven by the desire to be politically correct. Also, William Merrell, a Southern Baptist Convention media spokesman, told the Washington Times "No one is authorized to treat the Bible like Silly Putty"

The earlier controversy was slow to erupt. In 1995, an inclusive-language NJV Bible was published in the United Kingdom. In 1996, David Scholer, who teaches New Testament at Fuller Seminary, in an article in an evangelical feminist publication praised the new translation but thought it was "mysterious" to keep it quiet. Scholer later published a letter from the then-IBS president saying that Zondervan and IBS would release an inclusive version in the U.S. by 2000. World magazine then wrote about the "Stealth Bible" amid heavy criticism from Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, Jerry Falwell and others. IBS withdrew its publishing plans at that point, but a translation committee quietly continued its work.

The IBS and Zondervan reassured folks this time that the NW Bible, which holds a 4.3 percent North American market share of Bible sales, will remain available even when the TNIV Old Testament is published in a few years. Among people lauding the TNIV New Testament in press releases were popular evangelical author Philip Yancey, Pastor Ted Haggard of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, and Adam Hamilton, senior pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, one of the fastest growing congregations in the denomination.

Hamilton volunteered a story about his daughter reading her new Bible and asking when he put her to bed, "Daddy, why is the Bible only written to boys?" Hamilton said he tried to explain how male pronouns are sometimes used to refer to both men and women. "She was utterly perplexed by this," he said. "I am very excited about this revision that will allow the NIV to speak to an entirely new generation,’ said Hamilton.

Inasmuch as the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) Bible sponsored by the National Council of Churches has been out since 1989, the TNIV is playing "catch up" on avoiding male terms when gender-inclusive words are valid translations or when humans in general were meant. Ever careful, IBS and Zondervan officials said there is only a 7 percent change between NIV and TNIV wording, and much of that in using modern language -- for example, Mary is "pregnant" instead of "with child."

As for the inclusive wording, the TNIV has Paul addressing not just "brothers" but "brothers and sisters." In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God" -- not "sons of God." Instead of "he who" used twice in John 6:35, Jesus declares "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty."

In the Jesus saying about seeing a speck of sawdust in "your brother’s eye" yet not seeing the plank in your own eye, Luke 6:41-42 in the NIV text uses the word "brother" four times. But the TNIV leaves "brother untranslated once and otherwise renders it "someone else," "Friend" and "the other person."

While labeling the translation changes neither specks nor planks, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, based in Louisville, Kentucky, contended that the TNIV contains more than "100 examples of inaccurately translated verses." Some 26 evangelical scholars said they could not commend the new translation to churches.

Besides R. Albert Mohler and Paige Patterson, presidents of Southern Baptist seminaries in Louisville, Kentucky, and Wake Forest, North Carolina, respectively, the signers included Harold O. J. Brown of Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte; R. C. Sproul of Lingonier Ministries in Florida; and Raymond C. Ortlund Jr. of First Presbyterian Church, Augusta, Georgia. "Thankfully, no gender-neutral language is used for God," Mohler said. But he added that translation deficiencies in the TNIV "will add to confusion in evangelical circles."

TNIV’s 12-man, one-woman translation committee -- six of them Baptists -- was chaired by John Stek of Calvin Theological Seminary and included Gordon Fee of Regent College and Ronald F. Youngblood, who chairs the IBS board of directors. "Because the NIV was introduced about 30 years ago, the translation needed to be refreshed to reflect advances in biblical scholarship and changes in English usage," said committee member Karen H. Jobes, associate professor of New Testament at Westmont College near Santa Barbara, California. While acknowledging that "not everyone may agree with our exegetical and translation decisions," she said the committee was "faithful to the translation principles that produced the much-loved NIV."

Fuller Seminary’s Scholer said he was happy to see that the new edition often substitutes "the Jewish leaders" for "the Jews" in parts of the Gospel of John where the Greek word could mean either. In John 9:22, for instance, the TNIV translators decided that the Greek word referred to religious authorities.

The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood particularly took aim at the frequent removal of male pronouns and "man." Whereas the Greek word anthropos can be translated "person" "human" or "humankind," the Greek word aner normally means "man" or "husband," according to New Testament concordances. But the TNIV often changes aner as well into "whoever," "person" and other substitutes in places where translators decided that was the meaning, the council noted.

But to accuse TNIV translators of altering the Bible is "ridiculous," Scholer said. "This translation strikes me as an avant-garde work sensitive to changes in English and sensitive to the original sense of the text."

Left Behind

"I tell you, that on that night there will be two in one bed; one will be taken and the other left. There will he two women grinding meal together; one will be taken and the other left." Luke 17:34-35, NRSV.

 

The "Left Behind" fiction series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins borrows its title from passages like those in Luke 17 in which Jesus describes events of the end times. Verses 34 and 35 are widely interpreted to mean that those taken are the lucky ones. Moreover, Left Behind fans and others influenced by dispensationalist theology tend to see the ones taken as "raptured" heavenward to be with the Lord.

Not so, says New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III.

"A first-century audience would have understood [Luke 17:35] to mean one will be taken away for judgment, while the other will escape judgment by remaining where she is," he wrote recently in Bible Review. "This is clear from the context, which is about the coming judgment -- a judgment that, in Jewish literature, everyone is expected to face."

Witherington says it was very common in both Jewish and Greco-Roman literature of that era to see the phrase "taken away for judgment." The Asbury Seminary professor said he interprets the term ‘taken" in this context "of the long history of Israel’s being taken away into exile, and individuals being taken away for trial and judgment, including Jesus," he said.

"Those left behind are spared judgment or exile or the like," he said. "And, of course, nothing [is said] here about avoiding tribulation." In other words, even the ones remaining were likely to face eventual chaos and tribulation in end-time scenarios. He said he suspects that "Left Behind" theology attempts to harmonize this Jesus saying with Paul’s colorful imagery of believers being caught up, or raptured, into the clouds in 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, as if the two scenarios envisioned the same thing.

Mainstream New Testament scholars are divided on who is the lucky person -- the one taken or the one left -- especially when attempting to interpret a following verse, Luke 17:37. The disciples ask Jesus, "Where, Lord?" He answers, "Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather." The footnote in the HarperCollins Study Bible says: "This saying seems to mean that to find those left, one must look for the circling vultures." Yet it could also be argued that the disciples are asking where those taken will find themselves. The location of those left is known -- still in bed or at the grinding mill.

Robert C. Tannehill of Methodist Theological School in Ohio wrote in a 1996 commentary that "being ‘taken’ would indicate deliverance. This, however, is not certain. Furthermore, there is nothing here about escaping a period of tribulation that is coming on the rest of the world, as in the current doctrine of the rapture."

In another book on Luke published the same year, British scholar Christopher M. Tuckett indicated that those "taken" face sudden judgment. Of the parables in Luke 12 on the thief at night and the waiting servants, he said that "both warn of an event which may come at any moment and catch out those who are unprepared with disastrous consequences. The same is to be found in the apocalyptic material in Luke 17:23-37, he said.

Beam Me Up Theology

The hugely popular "Left Behind" series of novels continues to frustrate mainstream pastors and biblical scholars who object to an "end-times" theology they consider just as fictional as the books’ genre. The readers are real, however. The tenth and most recent volume in the series, The Remnant, picked up 2.4 million orders in the two months before its July release.

In a little-noticed resolution passed overwhelmingly by the 2001 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), delegates declared that the theology of the series is "not in accord with our Reformed understanding" of the New Testament Book of Revelation. The resolution urged pastors to lead their congregations through studies of the novels if they are causing "confusion and dissension."

In addition, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod said the books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins are "filled with very serious errors about what the Bible really teaches." A critical analysis in December 2000 by the late A. L. Barry, then-president of the church, remains on the synod’s Web site.

By contrast, the Assemblies of God Web site carries a friendly interview with LaHaye from 2000, along with the denomination’s stance on "the rapture" as a "blessed hope." For the sinner "to be left behind will involve indescribable suffering as God judges a rebellious and disobedient world" according to the Assemblies’ doctrinal statement.

Recently joining the fray was evangelical scholar Ben Witherington III of Asbury Theological Seminary a prolific author of New Testament studies. In the August issue of Bible Review magazine, Witherington noted the popular appeal that apocalyptic literature has in unsettling times, "Unfortunately, not all apocalyptic thinking is good apocalyptic thinking, and this is especially true of the so-called dispensational theology that informs these novels," Witherington wrote. "The most distinctive feature of dispensational theology is what I call the ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ belief."

In a similar vein, Bill Hull, a Samford University research professor, told Associated Baptist Press recently that "dispensationalism," in which God tests humans in certain time periods, remains a minority view among theologians. The ideas, spread in the 1860s by English evangelist John Nelson Darby, gained popularity with the publication of the influential Scofield Reference Bible in 1909, which contains long footnotes outlining Darby’s views. A dispensationalist precursor to the "Left Behind" series was Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth -- a record-breaking best seller in the 1970s.

The supernatural plot in the LaHaye-Jenkins novels, published by Tyndale House, has true believers taken from the earth in a "rapture" that precedes seven years of suffering -- the great tribulation -- for those left behind. Drawing on images in Revelation, the books predict an Antichrist demanding universal loyalty and acceptance of a "mark of the beast" on their bodies. Plagues and suffering ensue until Jesus returns to establish a 1,000-year reign on earth.

Hull, former dean of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, contends that the "Left Behind" series perpetuates "a massive misunderstanding" of scripture. Hull discounts LaHaye’s account of "a secret rapture where unbelievers don’t know why people have disappeared. He notes that Revelation 1:7 says that when Christ returns "Every eye shall see him." The present dean of the Louisville seminary, Danny Aiken, told the news service that he agrees with the books’ general theology, but is concerned about liberties the authors take with scripture.

"A well-informed minister should be reading the ‘Left Behind’ series, because his people are," Aiken said.

At least one survey has shown that only half of the series’ readers can be called evangelicals. But even nonevangelicals have at least a vague sense of awful predictions in the Bible. Months after the September11 skyjacking attacks, a Time/CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that prophesies in Revelation will come true. Nearly a fourth think the Bible predicted the terrorist attacks specifically.

Two critiques of the novels have appeared over the past year in Bible Review. British scholar N. T. Wright, who has engaged in debates with liberal Jesus Seminar leaders, wrote in the August 2001 issue that the huge U.S. success of the "Left Behind" series "appears puzzling, even bizarre" on the other side of the Atlantic.

The dramatic end-time scenario of believers being snatched up into heaven is an incorrect interpretation of 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, Wright said. That passage about meeting the Lord in the air "should be read with the assumption that the people will immediately turn around and lead the Lord back to the newly remade world" -- similar to residents meeting a visiting emperor in open country, then escorting him into the city, he said. Paul’s words to the Thessalonians, according to Wright, are not the same as Gospel passages about "the Son of man coming on the clouds" (such as Mark 13:26 and 14:62), which "are about Jesus’ vindication, his ‘coming’ to heaven from earth."

Witherington’s column in Bible Review a year later seconded Wright’s interpretation of the Thessalonian verses, arguing that, according to Paul, those meeting Christ in the sky would return to earth to reign with him there. Witherington also disputed an "unwarranted" view by dispensationalists that the last generation of Christians are "exempt" from tribulation. "Why should the last generation of Christians expect to do less cross-bearing than previous ones?’ he asked.

"The idea that John of Patmos, the author of Revelation, intended his message to be understood only by a late 20th-century or 21st-century Western Christian audience is not only arrogant -- it flies in the face of what John himself writes in Revelation 2-3," said Witherington. "Here John states quite clearly that his intended audience was Christians in western Asia Minor at the end of the first century AD."