Saints & Sinners.

Six controversial religious leaders are profiled in this often fascinating book: Walker Railey, Jimmy Swaggatt, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Anton LeVey, Will Campbell, and Matthew Fox. Lawrence Wright's interest in these figures, he notes in the preface, stems both from journalistic curiosity and his own spiritual search. "Journalists have never known exactly what to do with religion," he admits, adding that members of his profession tend "to look upon religion as a marketplace of the weird and the absurd." Wright is a staff writer for the New Yorker, a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone and Texas Monthly (where shorter versions of these profiles first appeared), and a self-described ex-Methodist. Deciding around midlife that his unexamined agnosticism was a cop out, he went on a personal and professional quest: "I thought that by writing about people with various kinds of beliefs, ~ might find something worth believing, some anchor to secure the spiritual restlessness that was my constant shadow. Perhaps only a journalist, who lives so much of his life vicariously, would think this way."

It is no accident that Wright chose to focus on a minister accused of trying to murder his wife, a television evangelist brought down by a scandal involving prostitutes, one of America's best-known atheists, the founder of the Church of Satan, a Southern Baptist preacher whose ministry included the Ku Klux Klan, and a New Age Catholic priest. Throughout the book Wright admits that he is drawn to the bizarre and to extremes: belief and unbelief, salvation and damnation, good and evil, saints and sinners. (Mother Teresa turned down Wright's request to write about her.) Those who have achieved fame and notoriety because of a religious zeal, who are cloaked in a "mask" or public persona of a faith, fascinate him:"... [P]owering this quest was my need to strip away masks and find the hidden truth," he writes. He wanted to find out whether "any faith can survive such scrutiny," whether and what he can believe.

There is no small amount of author ego evident in this book. In many ways, it is a personal book--some readers may find it too personal. From the opening profile of Walker Railey, the Methodist minister of Wright's childhood church in Dallas who was acquitted last spring of trying to strangle his wife, the reader is plunged into the author's opinions, reactions, and ruminations. Indeed, the book is often as much about Wright and his spiritual quest as it is about his subjects. But Wright is a compelling writer. His approach, while sometimes too self-conscious and a bit contrived, seems honest and it engaged me as a reader--even as I questioned his interpretations.

The portraits of Will Campbell, who has been called a white Martin Luther King, Jr., by some, and of Matthew Fox, recently dismissed from the Dominican Order, are worth the price of the book. Almost as riveting are the essays on Railey and Jimmy Swaggatt. I found the chapters on O' Hair and LeVey less interesting.

Many citizens of Dallas were outraged when the Reverend Walker L. Railey of the First United Methodist Church was acquitted of attempted murder. Many believe that he is responsible for the persistent vegetative state his wife Peggy has been in since 1987. (Nine days after his wife was assaulted, Railey tried to commit suicide. Shortly thereafter, his affair with another woman was revealed.) The downfall of Railey--a prominent liberal pastor who was an outspoken critic of racism in Dallas and who many assumed would become a bishop--is presented as a sort of morality play. So, too, is the more well-known downfall of Jimmy Swaggart. "They tried to purge what they called demons inside them; they tried to become as hallowed and sanctified as the masks they wore," the author writes in the preface. "Instead, their demons, their repressed needs, their disowned selves, whatever one might call them, took control."

The essays on Madalyn O'Hair, as an archetype of doubt, and on Anton LeVey, as an archetype of evil, are disturbing. Wright admires their moral courage in "explor[ing] the dark, uncertain territories of the human spirit." He also believes they possess "a certain purity that one might otherwise ascribe to religious ascetics." He argues that the 1964 Supreme Court decision banning public school prayer--a decision that will be forever associated with O' Hair-- was part of a secularization of society that was both intellectually liberating and socially ruinous. In the chapter on LeVey, Wright raises important questions regarding the rising phenomenon of satanic cults and their uncertain link with child abuse.

Will Campbell, a counselor to freedom riders and demonstrators at lunch counter sit-ins, became a legend in the civil rights movement. But when the liberal, Yale-educated, Southern Baptist preacher first reached out to Klan members in the late '60s, he was bitterly criticized and misunderstood. His favorite axiom is: "We're all bastards, but God loves us anyway." Wright brings out Campbell's anti-institutionalism, and his human warts and faults in an essay that bears eloquent testimony to the power of love and Christian belief.

In Wright's final essay, we participate with Matthew Fox in a sweat lodge ceremony on Scotland's remote northern shore. Easter weekend at Findhorn, a New Age community, is in turns hilarious and moving. (One woman in the sweat lodge ceremony prays to the spirit that lives in her pansies.) Coming to a place that is "so far out," explains Fox toward the end of the weekend, helped him to reaffirm his own Christianity--a point made all the more poignant and ironic in light of his recent dismissal from the Dominicans.

Fox's troubled relationship with his father is explored in moving detail in the essay. George Fox had been raised and educated by Augustinian priests, who rescued him as a child from Chicago's slums and a chaotic, abusive family. He went on to become a football legend at Villanova University (where he was appointed to the same all-American team as Vince Lombardi), and later earned his living coaching college football. An angry man and a militant Catholic, George was a tough, demanding father to his seven children. He was thrilled, however, when young Tim entered the Dominicans and became Father Matthew. Tim, who had had childhood polio and was physically frail, now had his father's respect---even reverence.

But Matt Fox did not turn out to be the kind of priest his father had expected. When George lay dying of a brain tumor in 1987, his son went to visit him in the hospital: "'I'll bet you wish I'd been an ordinary parish priest, don't you?' Matt asked. His father squeezed his hand very hard. 'Yes, I do,' he said earnestly, 'yes, I do.' He still had a lot of power, even at the end. 'Well, Dad,' Matt said tearfully, 'I couldn't have been the kind of priest I am without the courage you taught me."'

This essay provides a fascinating look at both Fox and Wright, at the converging quests of a confused, creation-spirituality-centered priest and a confused, agnostic journalist.