Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity.

by Bruce Bawer Crown, $26,340 pp.

Bruce Bawer makes one central point in this book with which I am in complete agreement. He argues that certain conservatives and fundamentalists have appropriated the word "Christian" so that, in common parlance, the term has come to mean a very specific brand of Christianity. When one hears the phrase "Christian music," for example, it is Pat Boone, not Bach, that comes to mind. "Christian" has become, as it were, a code word.

Apart from that helpful insight, Bawer's book is very disappointing. He distinguishes, in his opening pages, "legalistic" from "nonlegalistic" Christians. Legalistic Christians are those evangelicals and fundamentalists who have strong traditional creedal and biblical teachings. "Nonlegalists" are liberal Protestants of various stripes who represent the once-upon-a-time "mainline." (Bawer deals mainly with Protestants; his few excursions into Roman territory are almost always wrongheaded.)

The bulk of this book is devoted to criticizing the usual suspects (Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Ralph Reed, James Dobson, and a whole gaggle of other televangelists, preachers, and political pundits on the right) and contrasting their pinchbacked version of things with such historic figures as the late Harry Emerson Fosdick and contemporary nonlegalists such as Marcus Borg (of Jesus Seminar fame) and, God help us, the ever fatuous Bishop John Shelby Spong. Bawer is also partial to the later work of Hans Kung, who seems to be the only Catholic theologian he knows.

Bawer deals with a subject that has been treated too many times and, in some instances, by people who have the wit to ask why such religiosity shows such staying power. Bawer plows along chronicling the dim theories of Charles Dobson, Frank Peretti, Pat Robertson, et al. Such a picture of a good-and-evil religious universe allows Bawer to sympathize with the blasphemous ACT UP disruption of Mass at Saint Patrick's Cathedral while being scandalized at some rough language used by Christian Coalition members at the 1992 Republican Convention.

The tendentious nature of this book was all the more disappointing to me because I have read Bawer's literary criticism in the New Criterion with great profit. This present work, born, I suspect, from the perceived rough treatment gays receive in "legalistic" church circles, is too angry, too polemical, and too one-sided to be taken seriously. The author's snobbishly condescending description of worshipers in a little church in Georgia who, as he sniffs, listen to country music and don't read books, might have given the whole thing away: why can't they be liberal, educated, tolerant, and socially conscious just like Bruce Bawer?

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.