Ooga-Booga Christians

Published on February 5, 2004

Are evangelicals real, or just a story to scare the children of the Upper West Side? 60 Minutes ponders, Wonkette investigates. As it happens, Morley Safer has a religion-smart producer in the person of Diane Simon, but Wonkette is right to wonder where the hell such gee-whiz memos come from. The Revealer, meanwhile, wonders why 60 Minutes turned to the Rev. Peter Gomes, a Harvard theologian, for […]

Are evangelicals real, or just a story to scare the children of the Upper West Side? 60 Minutes ponders, Wonkette investigates. As it happens, Morley Safer has a religion-smart producer in the person of Diane Simon, but Wonkette is right to wonder where the hell such gee-whiz memos come from.

The Revealer, meanwhile, wonders why 60 Minutes turned to the Rev. Peter Gomes, a Harvard theologian, for answers about conservative evangelicals. As a voice of moderation no doubt, but despite his fine thinking on other subjects, here he comes across as hysterical and ill-informed: “Evangelicals,” he told 60 Minutes, “have waited in the wilderness and now, in the fullness of time, they have come into possession of what they felt was once rightfully theirs.”

“Wilderness”? Tell that to Jimmy Carter, the first evangelical president. “Rightfully theirs”? Tell that to the millions of evangelicals who eschew politics as too worldly. But that’s not a story, apparently.

Wonkette, by the way, is an off-shoot of Gawker, edited and mostly written by Ana Marie Cox, a friend of The Revealer‘s who’s always been too damn smart for her own good. But not for ours! She’s just the right kind of smart in our book — funny with fangs, earnest & witty & well-informed. Back when we worked with her at a paper that shall go unnamed, she was shopping for a religion, or, at least, a church. Now it seems she’s found it — a virtual temple of wonkery redeemed.

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