The Audacity of Hope

But the growing political influence of the Christian right tells only part of the story. The
Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition may have tapped into the discontent of
many evangelical Christians, but what is more remarkable is the ability of evangelical
Christianity not only to survive but to thrive in modern, high-tech America. At a time
when mainline Protestant churches are all losing membership at a rapid clip,
nondenominational evangelical churches are growing by leaps and bounds, eliciting
levels of commitment and participation from their membership that no other American
institution can match. Their fervor has gone mainstream.
There are various explanations for this success, from the skill of evangelicals in
marketing religion to the charisma of their leaders. But their success also points to a
hunger for the product they are selling, a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or
cause. Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds—
dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting,
shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets—and coming to the realization that
something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their
diversions, their sheer busyness are not enough. They want a sense of purpose, a
narrative arc to their lives, something that will relieve a chronic loneliness or lift them
above the exhausting, relentless toll of daily life. They need an assurance that somebody
out there cares about them, is listening to them—that they are not just destined to travel
down a long highway toward nothingness.
IF I HAVE any insight into this movement toward a deepening religious commitment,
perhaps it’s because it’s a road I have traveled.
I was not raised in a religious household. My maternal grandparents, who hailed from
Kansas, had been steeped in religion as children: My grandfather had been raised by
devout Baptist grandparents after his father had gone AWOL and his mother committed
suicide, while my grandmother’s parents—who occupied a slightly higher station in the
hierarchy of small-town, Great Depression society (her father worked for an oil refinery,
her mother was a schoolteacher)—were practicing Methodists.
But for perhaps the same reasons that my grandparents would end up leaving Kansas
and migrating to Hawaii, religious faith never really took root in their hearts. My
grandmother was always too rational and too stubborn to accept anything she couldn’t
see, feel, touch, or count. My grandfather, the dreamer in our family, possessed the sort
of restless soul that might have found refuge in religious belief had it not been for those
other characteristics—an innate rebelliousness, a complete inability to discipline his
appetites, and a broad tolerance of other people’s weaknesses—that precluded him from
getting too serious about anything.
This combination of traits—my grandmother’s flinty rationalism, my grandfather’s
joviality and incapacity to judge others or himself too strictly—got passed on to my
mother. Her own experiences as a bookish, sensitive child growing up in small towns in
Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories
of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones. Occasionally, for my
benefit, she would recall the sanctimonious preachers who would dismiss three-quarters
of the world’s people as ignorant heathens doomed to spend the afterlife in eternal