Reggie White in the Trenches: The Autobiography.

(Nashville TN: T Nelson Publishers, 1996); 262 pp; $22 99 cloth.

--reviewed by Chris Roth

Reggie White was born in 1961 in Chattanooga,Tennessee. As a growing boy, older relatives gave him "an occasional whupping," which he says he needed. The teenage White sought out "liars" at school and informed them that "the Bible says liars should be put to death" and announced that he'd kill them if they kept speaking falsehoods. White once told his mother that he wanted to be a professional football player and a minister. At age seventeen, he was given a "minister's license." In 1993, White and two other pastors founded a Knoxville,Tennessee, church. That year, he also became a Green Bay Packer, after working the college and professional football circuits. So begins the distorted view of reality presented in Reggie White in the Trenches:An Autobiography.

Today,White is a Super Bowl champion, a minister, a TV ad pitcher, an actor, a multimillionaire, the president of a record label, and a role model for Midwest youth. He's still religious. He's self-centered. He behaves violently for money while people watch. He claims that God personally healed his injured leg. And he wants to be a billionaire.

News anchors tell how Tennessee commuters use Reggie White Boulevard, but how often is the public told of White's attendance at a sexist Promise Keepers rally in March 1996? Wisconsin fans visit the Reggie White Pro Shop, but local media peddle "journalism lite" when it comes to his personal ideologies. Here's an example of how White-- as it says on the back cover of his book--hits hard for the glory of God:

If everyone started getting right

with Him, it will affect the economy.

People will stop buying and

smoking cigarettes, stop using

drugs, stop drinking alcohol, stop

having promiscuous sex-and all

of these activities are big moneymakers

for a powerful few in this

country. You don't believe there's

a profit to be made from sexual

activity in this country? Well, let

me tell you something. When

Magic Johnson came out and

announced that he had the AIDS

virus, condom sales went up 400

percent the next day. The people

who make money off of condom

sales call it "safe sex"--but they

don't tell the kids that condoms

fail about 15 to 25 percent of the

time.

Nobody's preaching abstinence

today because nobody's figured

out how to get rich off of

other people's abstinence--but

there's plenty of money to be

made from other people's sexual

activity. There's pornography, a

$10 billion a year industry. There's

money to be made off of preventing

sexually transmitted diseases,

from aborting unwanted babies,

from exploiting the aborted

babies for fetal tissue research,

from brokering and adopting out

the few babies that are not

aborted, and on and on.

Over and over, White is incorrect. Fact: many people, including Planned Parenthood professionals, support abstinence. Fact: abortion does not involve the murder of "babies." Fact: medical professionals receive more money for delivering babies than for surgical abortion procedures. Fact: the number of births is not "few" by anyone's way of measuring. In Wisconsin, White's home state, the estimated induced abortion rate for 1995 was nineteen abortions per 100 live births. Fact: for many, erotica is a safe alternative to unsafe sex. Fact: no research ]has ever linked"pornography" to antisocial behavior. Fact: condoms save lives, preserve fertility, and reduce the number of abortions performed. Fact: sex is not dirty and shameful.

How is White able to present so many questionable ideas? Through the use of standard propaganda techniques, including confusion, association, omission, diversion, and repetition. He flits from topic to topic. Paired with an energetic delivery that doesn't translate well into print (and therefore loses its "smokescreen" effect), the minister often doesn't write more than a few words or sentences about any specific social problem. Indeed, sometimes White compresses two or three controversial issues of public importance into a single sentence. Reading parts of In the Trenches is like viewing a monitor while a can of Jolt soda pop is depressing the remote's channel selector: the picture keeps changing before anyone has time to think about what's presented. He also uses informal logical fallacies, including either/or propositions and proceeding from false premises.

In person,White's messages are just as questionable. Speaking at a school assembly in Milwaukee, he warned impoverished youngsters that sex is as "addictive" as drugs and forcefully condemned "safe sex". According to White, "nobody" provides abstinence-based sex education and "few" pregnancies do not end in surgical abortion. He believes it's an all-or-nothing world.

The sports star concludes that America is in trouble, yet readers are hard-pressed to find any paragraphs condemning polluters, resource depletion, overpopulation, overreliance on centralized nonrenewables, and military responses to energy crises. Instead,White provides a religious version of everything-is-interpersonal-and-intrapersonal psychobabble.

What does White know about political ideologies? According to his own admission, not much. In his book, he says,"I want to make it clear that this is not a liberal/conservative, Democrat/ Republican thing. To be candid with you, I really don't understand all this liberal/conservative stuff."

When he isn't using words like stuff and thing, he uses the word I--a lot. And one wonders if the busy celebrity even wrote In the Trenches. The words with Jim Denney appear inside the book near the front but nowhere on the dust jacket. In the publishing business, with is often a euphemism for mostly written by.

Ironically, White has been held up as a positive role model for youth by Wisconsin-based media outlets. Take a closer look at the man. Religion and sports have been actively provided a free ride by gatekeepers of profit-seeking media outlets. It's time to subject clergy and athletes to the same scrutiny and criticism endured by other public figures. And Reggie White's In the Trenches is one place to start.

Chris Roth publishes First Amendment Update, an electronic periodical. His e-mail address is [e-mail]. edu.