Why does an Episcopalian like Bawer respond very warily when a stranger asks, "Are you a Christian?" Because, he argues, in the U.S. Christian has become synonymous with fundamentalist the result of a campaign by several severe sects to transform Christianity from the church of love, grounded in Jesus' great commandment to love God and one another, into the church of law, enforcing rigid strictures on especially sex and family life--no homosexuality, no abortions, no divorce, etc. Bawer traces fundamentalism from the nineteenth-century invention of premillennialism to the theocratic politics of the religious right today. He limns the parallel liberal reaction, too, but notes that, after the notorious Scopes evolution trial in 1925, secularism rather than Christian liberalism became the predominant mindset among intellectuals and opinion molders, particularly in the news and entertainment media. Today, journalists are too ignorant of religion to ask the likes of Pat Robertson hard questions, areligious social scientists pooh-pooh the country's high church attendance, and demoralized religious liberals cower behind secular liberals' skirts and fail to counter the religious right's scapegoating of, most notably, gays. Bawer is first and foremost an excellent critic, and this book is an adventure in American religious thought, every bit as exciting and intelligent as his superb essay on gays in America, A Place at the Table (1993). --Ray Olson

(Booklist/October 1, 1997)