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“Lauren Sandler obliterates the naïve and complacent hope that keeps most secularists and religious moderates sleeping peacefully each night-the hope that, in 21st century America, the young know better than to adopt the lunatic religious certainties of a prior age. The young do not know better. In their schools, skate-parks, rock concerts, and in the ranks of our natio‛s military, our children are gleefully preparing a bright future of ignorance and religious fascism for us all. If you have any doubt that there is a culture war that must be waged and won by secularists in America, read this book”
—Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation
“It is no easy thing to enter into the world of the young evangelicals, to feel deeply their alienation, to breathe their air and share their electric conviction that they are the rising counterculture against an empty world. Lauren Sandler has done it, and done it with an effervescence and honesty that make her travels in Disciple America jump off the page”
—Todd Gitlin, Professor of Journalism and Sociology, Columbia University, and author of The Intellectuals and the Flag
"At once controversial, critical, blasphemous and compassionate, Righteous offers a compelling journey into a growing youth subculture typically dismissed by urban intellectuals. Sandler has written a provocative and illuminating portrait of young people desperately seeking meaning, community and love in an empty, often terrifying social landscape. Evangelical youth---the Disciple Generation--- are a generation rising, and we do need to pay attention”
—Dr. Donna Gaines, sociologist and author of Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids and A Misfit's Manifesto: The Spiritual Journey of a Rock & Roll Heart
“Lauren Sandler has traveled among the believers and returned with a story that alarms, informs, and enlightens. She reveals the rise of a fundamentalist-style youth movement that has replaced faith with closed-minded certainty and is frighteningly cult-like. Read this book and you will understand this Disciple Generation and the challenge it poses to a civil society”
—Michael D'Antonio, former Newsday religion writer and author of Fall From Grace and Heaven on Earth
“Righteous is a lively, probing account of today's fresh, sometimes bizarre sub- cultures of American evangelism. Both the term ‘alternativ‛ and ‘evangelica‛ will mean something new to you after this book. Sandler's conclusions are important: These kids have been forgotten by their original social worlds, by secular organizations and even by Left-Liberal causes. In a cold new world, getting saved can now seem like a young American's only source of community and warmth”
—Alissa Quart, author of Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child
“Righteous is the most adroit and fascinating examination of a great national ill, the muddling of faith and politics, the secular and the divine”
—Brad Land, author of Goat
Review:
"Ever since President Bush's 2004 re-election demonstrated the strength of so-called values voters, liberal activists have fretted about the Democratic Party's inability to capture the loyalty of a comparable purpose-seeking populace. As a remedy, some have urged Democratic politicians to embrace explicitly moral and religious language in their appeals to voters. In 'Righteous,' journalist Lauren Sandler... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) goes further: She urges her fellow liberals to embrace the tactics of the evangelical youth movement. An unlikely amalgam of Christian skateboarders, pierced and tattooed pro-lifers, hip-hop and rock musicians, and straitlaced Christian college debate champions, the movement includes creation-science buffs, former drug addicts and the sons of the well-known Christian evangelists James Dobson and Jim Bakker. These believers, Sandler argues, are united in their mission to redeem American culture. She calls them the 'Disciple Generation' and describes them as 'an ever-growing population of people ages fifteen to thirty-five who are equally obsessed with Christ and with culture as a means to an Evangelical end.' She views their movement as 'something that is at once political, emotional, deeply anti-intellectual, and more galvanized than I ever imagined.' Sandler, an editor at the online magazine Salon, has an old-fashioned reporter's knack for telling details. Her portraits of the leaders of this movement are sharp and often hilarious (she skewers the proselytizing pretensions of born-again actor Stephen Baldwin, who parlayed his status as a minor Hollywood actor into celebrity on the Christian youth revival circuit). And Sandler is honest about her own perspective. An 'unrepentant Jewish atheist,' she is frequently appalled by the worldview of young people who flock to the skateboard demonstrations and Christian rock concerts so popular among this group. She is baffled by young women who proudly embrace anti-abortion policies and traditional gender roles, and unnerved by their male peers who express unquestioning support for the war in Iraq. Her hostility to traditional conservative values makes her an unlikely tour guide through the world of evangelical Christianity. Yet Sandler clearly has a talent for getting people to open up about their beliefs, and she has enough respect for her subjects that she rarely indulges in caricatures. (The exception is her portrait of students at conservative Patrick Henry College in Virginia, describing them as 'like robots' and the experience of being surrounded by them as 'creepy.') Sandler is at her best when she documents the longing this generation feels for certainty, community and purpose, and her interview subjects often speak movingly about having endured broken homes, addiction and adolescent anomie. But she oversimplifies when she suggests that evangelical faith is just this generation's form of therapy; 'fundamentalism offers a snake-oil cure for their ills,' Sandler writes, and 'I can't help but wonder, though, how many people have convinced themselves they believe, just to experience the benefits of being a believer.' Although she is wary of the evangelicals' mission, it is her fellow liberals whom Sandler chastises for failing to court these disaffected youths. Of one young anti-abortion activist, who 'sparkles with compassion and intelligence,' Sandler laments, 'if only leftists had offered the promise of love articulated within a genuine expression of youth culture' that the evangelical youth movement did. Then, Sandler concludes, 'she'd make a formidable feminist.' Perhaps. But Sandler leaves unexplored the fact that these kids are part of a generation that is coming to terms with the more ambiguous consequences of the secular (and sexual) revolution she so eagerly supports — and what they have endured in the form of divorce, anything-goes sexual relations and cultural relativism has not made them as enthusiastic about it as she is. Problems also arise when Sandler abandons careful observation for sweeping (and ultimately unpersuasive) assessments of this movement's broader significance. She embraces the tired metaphor of Christian conservatives as an army that 'aims to destroy everything that it is not' and believers as people bent on establishing dominance through 'a trifecta of indoctrinating, voting, and breeding.' Since her intent is to prod her secular audience into action, Sandler needs to link these disparate Christian subcultures together in order to bolster her claim that a monolithic right-wing movement is on the march. But in attempting to do so, she treats religion like just another homogeneous political interest group, a characterization belied by the multifaceted portraits of believers throughout the book. Indeed, in her effort to appeal to another kind of true believer (devout secularists), Sandler demonstrates the same weakness that she claims to find in her faithful subjects: too rigid an orthodoxy. Rather than advancing alarmist conclusions, Sandler would have done better to explore what this Christian youth movement might look like when its members reach middle age. Nevertheless, Sandler's book is an intriguing journey into a burgeoning and often contradictory phenomenon. The glimpses it gives us of a new, God-fearing generation of young Americans — intelligent, comfortable with popular culture, technologically savvy and intent on saving souls — will surprise many readers, even if it does not convince them of the righteousness of this movement's cause. Christine Rosen is a fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and the author of 'My Fundamentalist Education.'" Reviewed by Christine Rosen, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Synopsis:
What happens when today's counterculture has a mindset more akin to Jerry Falwell's than Abbie Hoffman's? Sandler's eye-opening and empathetic investigation uncovers America's new moral majority--dressed up in punk-rock garb--and how it is shaping the future of America.
Synopsis:
Advanced Praise:
"Lauren Sandler obliterates the nave and complacent hope that keeps most secularists and religious moderates sleeping peacefully each night-the hope that, in 21st century America, the young know better than to adopt the lunatic religious certainties of a prior age. The young do not know better. In their schools, skate-parks, rock concerts, and in the ranks of our nation's military, our children are gleefully preparing a bright future of ignorance and religious fascism for us all. If you have any doubt that there is a culture war that must be waged and won by secularists in America, read this book."
Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation
"It is no easy thing to enter into the world of the young evangelicals, to feel deeply their alienation, to breathe their air and share their electric conviction that they are the rising counterculture against an empty world. Lauren Sandler has done it, and done it with an effervescence and honesty that make her travels in Disciple America jump off the page."
Todd Gitlin, Professor of Journalism and Sociology, Columbia University, and author of The Intellectuals and the Flag
"At once controversial, critical, blasphemous and compassionate, Righteous offers a compelling journey into a growing youth subculture typically dismissed by urban intellectuals. Sandler has written a provocative and illuminating portrait of young people desperately seeking meaning, community and love in an empty, often terrifying social landscape. Evangelical youth---the Disciple Generation--- are a generation rising, and we do need to pay attention."
Dr. Donna Gaines, sociologist and author of Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids and A Misfit's Manifesto: The Spiritual Journey of a Rock and Roll Heart
"Lauren Sandler has traveled among the believers and returned with a story that alarms, informs, and enlightens. She reveals the rise of a fundamentalist-style youth movement that has replaced faith with closed-minded certainty and is frighteningly cult-like. Read this book and you will understand this Disciple Generation and the challenge it poses to a civil society."
Michael D'Antonio, former Newsday religion writer and author of Fall From Grace and Heaven on Earth
"Righteous is a lively, probing account of today's fresh, sometimes bizarre sub- cultures of American evangelism. Both the term [alternative' and [evangelical' will mean something new to you after this book. Sandler's conclusions are important: These kids have been forgotten by their original social worlds, by secular organizations and even by Left-Liberal causes. In a cold new world, getting saved can now seem like a young American's only source of community and warmth."
Alissa Quart, author of Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child
"Righteous is the most adroit and fascinating examination of a great national ill, the muddling of faith and politics, the secular and the divine."
Brad Land, author of Goat
Synopsis:
Ther‛s a new youth movement afoot in this country. I‛s a counterculture fusion of politics and pop, and i‛s taking over a high school near you. Like the waves that came before it, i‛s got passion, music, and anti-authority posturing, but more than anything else, this one has God. So what does it mean when toda‛s youth counterculture has a mindset more akin to Jerry Falwel‛s than Abbie Hoffma‛s?
In RIGHTEOUS: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement, Lauren Sandler, a dynamic young journalist, reports from this junction of Evangelicalism and youth culture, traveling across the country to investigate the alternative Christian explosion. Using the grassroots modus operandi of the 1960s, these religious kids – part of the“Disciple Generatio” as Sandler calls it – turn an antiauthoritarian sneer toward liberalism, feminism, pacifism, and every other hallmark of that er‛s counterculture. And the‛re engaging their peers with startling success, fusing pop culture, politics, and religion as they preach from the pulpit of the skate park, bar, and rock concert. Secular, liberal, and practically the embodiment of everything Evangelicalism deems unholy, Sandler travels with skateboard missionaries, hangs out with the tattooed members of a postpunk Seattle megachurch that has evolved into a self-sufficient community, camps out with a roc‛‛roll antiabortion group, and gets to know the rap preachers who are merging hip-ho‛s love of money with old-fashioned bible-beating fundamentalism. Much more than a mere observer, she connects with these young people on an intimate level, and the candor with which they reveal themselves to her is truly astonishing.
Illuminating, often troubling, and unapologetically frank, RIGHTEOUS introduces a bold new voice into the ongoing debate over religion in American life. And it is the first in-depth front-line exploration of the countr‛s new moral majority – dressed up in punk-rock garb – and what its influence could mean for the future of America.
Lauren Sandler is the Life Editor of Salon. She has written about cultural politics for numerous newspapers and magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times, and has been featured on National Public Radio.
"Synopsis"
by Ingram,
What happens when today's counterculture has a mindset more akin to Jerry Falwell's than Abbie Hoffman's? Sandler's eye-opening and empathetic investigation uncovers America's new moral majority--dressed up in punk-rock garb--and how it is shaping the future of America.
"Synopsis"
by Penguin,
Advanced Praise:
"Lauren Sandler obliterates the nave and complacent hope that keeps most secularists and religious moderates sleeping peacefully each night-the hope that, in 21st century America, the young know better than to adopt the lunatic religious certainties of a prior age. The young do not know better. In their schools, skate-parks, rock concerts, and in the ranks of our nation's military, our children are gleefully preparing a bright future of ignorance and religious fascism for us all. If you have any doubt that there is a culture war that must be waged and won by secularists in America, read this book."
Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation
"It is no easy thing to enter into the world of the young evangelicals, to feel deeply their alienation, to breathe their air and share their electric conviction that they are the rising counterculture against an empty world. Lauren Sandler has done it, and done it with an effervescence and honesty that make her travels in Disciple America jump off the page."
Todd Gitlin, Professor of Journalism and Sociology, Columbia University, and author of The Intellectuals and the Flag
"At once controversial, critical, blasphemous and compassionate, Righteous offers a compelling journey into a growing youth subculture typically dismissed by urban intellectuals. Sandler has written a provocative and illuminating portrait of young people desperately seeking meaning, community and love in an empty, often terrifying social landscape. Evangelical youth---the Disciple Generation--- are a generation rising, and we do need to pay attention."
Dr. Donna Gaines, sociologist and author of Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids and A Misfit's Manifesto: The Spiritual Journey of a Rock and Roll Heart
"Lauren Sandler has traveled among the believers and returned with a story that alarms, informs, and enlightens. She reveals the rise of a fundamentalist-style youth movement that has replaced faith with closed-minded certainty and is frighteningly cult-like. Read this book and you will understand this Disciple Generation and the challenge it poses to a civil society."
Michael D'Antonio, former Newsday religion writer and author of Fall From Grace and Heaven on Earth
"Righteous is a lively, probing account of today's fresh, sometimes bizarre sub- cultures of American evangelism. Both the term [alternative' and [evangelical' will mean something new to you after this book. Sandler's conclusions are important: These kids have been forgotten by their original social worlds, by secular organizations and even by Left-Liberal causes. In a cold new world, getting saved can now seem like a young American's only source of community and warmth."
Alissa Quart, author of Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child
"Righteous is the most adroit and fascinating examination of a great national ill, the muddling of faith and politics, the secular and the divine."
Brad Land, author of Goat
"Synopsis"
by Penguin,
Ther‛s a new youth movement afoot in this country. I‛s a counterculture fusion of politics and pop, and i‛s taking over a high school near you. Like the waves that came before it, i‛s got passion, music, and anti-authority posturing, but more than anything else, this one has God. So what does it mean when toda‛s youth counterculture has a mindset more akin to Jerry Falwel‛s than Abbie Hoffma‛s?
In RIGHTEOUS: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement, Lauren Sandler, a dynamic young journalist, reports from this junction of Evangelicalism and youth culture, traveling across the country to investigate the alternative Christian explosion. Using the grassroots modus operandi of the 1960s, these religious kids – part of the“Disciple Generatio” as Sandler calls it – turn an antiauthoritarian sneer toward liberalism, feminism, pacifism, and every other hallmark of that er‛s counterculture. And the‛re engaging their peers with startling success, fusing pop culture, politics, and religion as they preach from the pulpit of the skate park, bar, and rock concert. Secular, liberal, and practically the embodiment of everything Evangelicalism deems unholy, Sandler travels with skateboard missionaries, hangs out with the tattooed members of a postpunk Seattle megachurch that has evolved into a self-sufficient community, camps out with a roc‛‛roll antiabortion group, and gets to know the rap preachers who are merging hip-ho‛s love of money with old-fashioned bible-beating fundamentalism. Much more than a mere observer, she connects with these young people on an intimate level, and the candor with which they reveal themselves to her is truly astonishing.
Illuminating, often troubling, and unapologetically frank, RIGHTEOUS introduces a bold new voice into the ongoing debate over religion in American life. And it is the first in-depth front-line exploration of the countr‛s new moral majority – dressed up in punk-rock garb – and what its influence could mean for the future of America.
Powell's City of Books is an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, that fills a whole city block with more than a million new, used, and out of print books. Shop those shelves — plus literally millions more books, DVDs, and eBooks — here at Powells.com.
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