By Jeff Sharlet

Alan Jacobs, a literature scholar at evangelical Wheaton College, did not like my recent Harper’s essay, “Through a Glass, Darkly.” In his online column for Books & Culture — sort of a Christian
New York Review of Books — he accused me of being a member of a new “know-nothing party,” “largely or wholly innocent of religious culture, religious language, and religious belief,” waging “war on religion.”

Oh, my. I’ve been discovered. If you squeeze some lemon juice on your computer screen, you’ll see that the real title of this site is, “The Revealer: A Daily Review of Religion, and How I Will Destroy It!”

Jacobs generously opened up his column for my religion-destroying response, to which he then responded. Peace is not achieved, but “religion” survived, so I’ll leave it at that and send off for another order of blasting powder from my ACME catalogue. This strange exercise (if you don’t already have an opinion on Francis Schaeffer, skip it) is called “Some Fanged Enemy of Christendom.”

As pushing matches go, it’s not very thrilling — it’s hard to have a brawl with a devout English professor who studies Narnia — but I think it raises a bigger question. If evangelical intellectuals such as Jacobs don’t like outsiders highlighting the nastier corners of contemporary evangelicalism, why don’t they take the job on themselves?