Will Leitch writes in New York Magazine about The Jets Have Made Pat Robertson Part of Our Lives Again. The piece is ostensibly about Robertson’s comment that because of the Tim Tebow trade, it would serve the Denver Broncos right if Peyton Manning got injured.

Why would Robertson say such a thing? I don’t really know. According to him, the Broncos treated Tim Tebow “shabbily.” Over the course of two weeks, there was a lot of publicity about the trade negotiations. Apparently Tebow got his feelings hurt. That and his multi-million dollar contracts will buy him, well, any damn thing he wants.

According to the Denver Broncos’ management, Tebow was involved in all the negotiations. In fact, they turned down a better offer from the Jacksonville Jaguars because they thought that the Jets were a better fit for him. Tebow, like a good Christian, took the low road whining to reporters on a conference call that the Broncos held “all the power.”

Tebow is an annoyance. And yes, I am talking about his ostentatious religiosity. I don’t mind people doing their whatever in public. If people want to walk around naked, I really don’t mind. But I do mind hypocrisy. It all comes down to the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 6:5 reads (New American Standard Bible):

It would have been fine with me if Tebow had done his religious thing as long as it wasn’t a media sensation. But the moment he started getting coverage about it, he should have backed off. In addition to being counter to probably the most important speech of Jesus’ career, Tebow was making his Christianity about himself.

And I say to you, he has had his reward in full.

Jeff Sharlet’s C Street, the follow-up to his best-seller The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power is a must-read, even though it is not as good as it should be nor what its title implies. The book is not tightly written, and not really about C Street, the $2 million three-story brick building in Washington D.C. Nor is it primarily about The Family that runs C Street—legally as a church, but practically more as a boarding house and bordello. The book starts and ends with C Street and The Family, but its heart is only interested in this subject on the margins. Still, the follow-up to The Family is frightening, motivating, and informative—the best researched political book I’ve read since Naomi Klein’s 2007, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. But C Street is better thought of by it’s subtitle: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy.

C Street begins with an overview of The Family, which explains more about the Christian Conservative movement than any book in recent history. The guiding philosophy of this secret and powerful group is an interpretation of the Bible that is not only bizarre, but also counter to what the vast majority of Christians (liberal and conservative) believe. To members of The Family, Christianity has nothing to do with the poor, the needy, the marginalized—not directly, anyway. Instead, it is all about helping “the chosen” (read: “the powerful”) create a Christian world.

In one of the clearest examples of this mentality, Sharlet explains why Family members reject welfare programs. If the government takes care of the poor, how can the chosen show their worthiness by feeding crumbs to the poor? Sharlet destroys such thoughts with great ease:

If this line of reasoning sounds repulsive to you, then you are a long way toward understanding The Family. But if you wish to fully understand The Family, you are better to read Sharlet’s earlier book, The Family. (There is surprisingly little over-lap between C Street and The Family, so there is no reason not to read both.)

After the brief introduction to the group and the building, Sharlet spends a chapter on the sex scandals that brought The Family out of the shadows. It is basically his take on this recent history. The chapter unfortunately assumes that the reader is already well aware of the cases of Senator John Ensign, Governor Mark Sanford, and Representative Chip Pickering; I was not; conservative sexual hypocrisy is not exactly news. So I was often confused, and it was only thanks to many Internet searches that I got things sorted out. After this, however, I found Sharlet’s treatment wonderfully humane—especially in the case of Mark Sanford.

The core of C Street is contained in the next two chapters that have relatively little to do with The Family and nothing to do with C Street itself. The first is the heartbreaking story of the anti-gay movement in Uganda, where David Bahati—a Family apostle in the Ugandan Parliament—is trying to make homosexuality a capital offense. It has been widely reported that Bahati’s bill is dead. This is largely due to Peter Boyer’s whitewash of The Family in his 13 September 2010 article, Frat House for Jesus in the New Yorker Magazine. This is not the case as discussed on Jeff Sharlet’s blog, Call Me Ishmael (with a follow-up the next day) and elsewhere.

Sharlet reports on a conversation he had with “a pretty girl named Sharon, at a weekly abstinence rally” at Uganda’s premiere college:

Those claiming that this anti-homosexual legislation comes from “the people” are clearly wrong. How is it that this young girl believes it is right to kill a “homosexual”—a creature she has never even seen? Her understanding of this mythical creature is highly reminiscent of Borat’s understanding of Jews with their horns that he can “hardly see.” But this is not parody; this is reality in Uganda and Sharlet reports on it brilliantly.

The second important chapter concentrates on evangelicalism in the U.S. Military. It focuses on Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) and its work to protect the rights of military personnel of all faiths. Most of those who the MRFF helps are Christians—96% of them, in fact. They are simply not the right kind of Christians. Sharlet explains the origins of the problem:

These two chapters make up almost half of C Street, and they bring vividly to light major problems we face today, moving forward: one domestic and one international. Both are related directly to The Family, but Sharlet never makes the case that this relationship is primary. He takes it as given that the philosophy of The Family is at the root of these problems, and that it is only at the margins (outside the United States and in the military) that this philosophy can be seen in its uncensored form.

C Street ends by coming back to where it started: the red-brick “church” on C Street in Washington, D.C., and a symbol for the all but invisible attack on the principles that we were taught to believe the U.S. stood for. And it gives us hope in the form of two unlikely Christian protesters at the 2004 RNC convention in New York City. One of them wears a paint-by-numbers Jesus, saying, “That’s not what I meant.” It serves as a perfect symbol of what is wrong with The Family and C Street. It also provides a relatively hopeful ending to a book that is relentlessly disturbing.

As much as I am sure that Jeff Sharlet is not interested in the C Street sex scandals, he is most assuredly using them to get an audience for a subject he is interested in—a subject we should all be interested in: the future of our secular democracy. The lurid appeal of these scandals certainly caused the book to be rushed to print before it was ready. There is no question that Sharlet did an impeccable job researching this book. But its prose is bloated and sometimes confusing; its style makes sudden changes from objective journalism to autobiography to awkward polemic; and its structure is a mess that never manages to coalesce into a cohesive whole. These are all editorial problems, of course; C Street reads like a first-draft—but a first-draft of a very good writer. The book still manages to be an engrossing and entertaining read. What is most important, however, is that the content is vital—even explosive: news we should use.

I just read Terry Eagleton‘s Reason, Faith, and Revolution. It is largely an attack on the atheism books by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great). In his typically sardonic manner, Eagleton refers to the two authors as a single entity he calls Ditchkins. The book is, like all of his “popular” writing, funny and insightful; but one would expect this regardless of his past work because almost no one would think Eagleton’s views about religion have anything to do with religion. Indeed, the book is mostly about politics. He seems to be fascinated with the Gospels because of the implicit and explicit political messages of Christ’s teachings. I must admit it is nearly enough to turn me into a Christian—albeit one that few would recognize.

Eagleton largely agrees with Ditchkins about religion. His complaint is that they do not argue against the best case that can be made for faith. In other words, they are committing the straw-man fallacy. However, it is hard to think too badly about Ditchkins when the vast majority of believers are nothing but fideists.

Reason, Faith, and Revolution comes down to an attack on liberal humanism, and as such, was helpful to me in seeing some of my own blind spots. I do tend to believe in the march of human progress without seeing that it is largely a matter of faith. (In my defense, there is a good rational argument in favor of it.) But I think Eagleton overstates how strictly rational liberal humanists are. I, for one, am well aware of the great amount of faith there is in my life; I have never wished for—or thought possible—a culture that was strictly rational. I’m afraid that he is at least as guilty of overstating the rationality of non-believers as Ditchkins is of overstating the irrationality of believers.

In the end, Reason, Faith, and Revolution leaves me where The Meaning of Life did: more committed to living a good life and working toward a culture that is just, forgiving, and above all, humane. Although I may quibble with Eagleton about some details, his book is a welcome reminder that my belief in the existence of this more perfect self and society is a matter of rational faith. This might be something that Eagleton, Ditchkins, and I could all agree upon.