The New York Times makes the Christian Right safe for consumption.

“Christianity, the Brand,” Strawberry Saroyan’s interesting profile of an Christian Right PR man in Sunday’s New York Times magazine, is an entry for The Revealer‘s “Timeless” column not because it’s profound journalism, but because the paper of record’s repeated rediscovery of the fact that evangelicals are good at marketing is a journalistic episode that seems to exist out of time. Have they no access to their own archives? How many times must they report this story?

That said, Saroyan’s profile of Larry Ross, a PR rep who’s done work for Billy Graham, Rick Warren, Benny Hinn, Mel Gibson, and Rod Parsley, among others, does a nice job of revealing a key tactic of the Christian Right: Its strategy of diluting its message for mainstream consumption so that it seems less inflammatory. In fact, Ross does such a good job that in one key regard, he even takes in Saroyan: Ross, she writes, “has largely stayed out of politics.” Even eaving aside the openly theocratic Parsley, a bare-knuckled political preacher to the fire-breathing right of Jerry Falwell, Ross seems to be primarily a political player — helping Billy Graham bump his past anti-Semitic ravings out of the news, smoothing the way for Mel Gibson’s Christ-as-culture warrior Passion, fronting Rick Warren’s weirdly free market approach to fighting AIDS, a program of such dubious merit that even the conservative Christianity Today has called it into question. This may not be electoral politics, but it’s all politics nonetheless, a truth Ross himself seems aware of on the “spiritual” level, at least.

“Ross,” writes Saroyan, “also says he believes he is helping to fight forces of evil…. ‘I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a press conference at a crusade and the copier doesn’t work’ — a small example of what, he says, is ‘spiritual warfare.’ A more striking instance took place when he was approached by a prostitute in the parking lot of his office while he was on his cellphone discussing AIDS programs for Africa with Rick Warren’s wife, Kay. ‘Is that coincidental?’ he said.”

Ross’ evident answer, of course, is “no” — according to his idea of “spiritual warfare,” streetwalkers, considered by some to be folks in need of help themselves, are active agents of the devil.

Why does the Times ignore Ross’ politics? Perhaps because it’s bound by the press’ traditional, mainline Protestant understanding of religion, as other than politics, and private, to boot. Or perhaps for the same reason that it keeps rediscovering the political and cultural savvy of the Christian Right — confronted by a radically different way of knowing the world, and one that seems to have greater traction in American thought than the Times‘ style of rationalism, the paper of record practices the outdated politics of last century’s mandarins: containment. That is, it seeks to wrap up the epistemological challenge of the Christian Right in the amusing language of marketing: Capitalism, the story implicitly suggests, blunts the extremism of every political ideology. It’s safe, so long as it sells.

— Jeff Sharlet