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Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement, by Lauren Sandler

Sarah Peasley, Rocky Mountain News

Published September 21, 2006 at midnight

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Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement

• Nonfiction. By Lauren Sandler. Viking, $24.95.Grade: A

Book in a nutshell: Evangelical Christians are wooing American youth in astonishing numbers, courting them at skateparks and malls, sharing common interests in tattoos and rock music, and offering community and certainty in an uncertain world. Sandler gives a sweeping view of what she dubs the Disciple Generation, these counterculture evangelists and the broken people, ages 15-35, that flock to them. Typical of fundamentalism of any kind, it stresses the coming apocalypse, subjugates women and squashes competing ideas - and devotees make no secret of the fact that they are committed to imposing their extreme beliefs on others via institutions of the state. Sandler takes us on a wide-ranging journey, from the classrooms of chaste home-schooled students to the 6,000-member Mars Hill Church in a hip Seattle neighborhood, where "a bright candy coating of secular cool (sweetens) the bitter pill of addictive orthodoxy."

Best tidbit: More than a year after officials promised to investigate religious intolerance at the Air Force Academy, Sandler claims three-quarters of cadets call themselves evangelical Christians. Senior Master Sgt. Wayne Babb says military life merely camouflages his true job: "If you're a Christian, being in the military is the best way to be on the missionary field. We're out there on the U.S. government dime. They house you, feed you, and pay you to be missionaries on the front line. We all know that's what we're there for. We all know what's behind this war (in Iraq)."

Pros: A secular Jew, Sandler does her homework, plunging deep into enemy camp without disguise. Compassion for her subjects and brisk writing make her increasingly alarming story go down easily.

Cons: Maybe too easily. Her warm profiles make it easy to forget her point: collectively, these people endanger a secular society.

Final word: Sandler exhorts secularists to fight back with a passion to rival these evangelists: " . . . we must recognize the same hunger for meaning that Christians do, and we must respond by lacing our television shows, newspapers and magazines . . . with a greater sense of life's value, all with enough humor, style, and rock and roll to make it palatable; a teaspoon of irony to help the medicine go down."