In respect to some comments from Mr. Jeff Sharlet, whom you will see below had a good deal to say about this piece, I am inserting a few editorial notes to indicate where he has either corrected me or heavily disagreed with my interpretation of his book. If you ignore what is in red and in parentheses, my original review is still as it was originally piublished.
Jeff Sharlet is a nice Jewish boy. Well, he's half-Jewish, half-Catholic. (Edit: Evidently, I was dead-wrong about this, and now I'm wracking my brain – as well as Google – to figure out how I became so mistaken in this. Anyway, for the record, he is half-evangelical, not half-Catholic. The Jewish part was right at least... oy.) He's ambivalent about his own personal religious beliefs, but what he seems to believe in more than anything else is that shifting amalgam of sentimental morality, fashion-based religiosity, bi-polar economics and self-righteous politicisation called liberalism. (Edit #2: Mr. Sharlet insists that his faith is not in liberalism. See comments below. Of course, this blows most of my review out of the water right there. Dammit...)
He also writes articles for Harper's. That should probably tell you all you need to know.
But he also wrote a book. Actually, two books. But I'm focusing on the second one. It's called The Family. And while the jacket blurbs give one the sense of it being an ominous tome chronicling the powerful religious elite who are running this nation into the ground controlling our lives, it didn't come off to me so much frightening as it did depressing – because through it all, I held in the back of my mind that the people Sharlet writes about are doing what they do for Jesus. "Jesus Plus Nothing" as Doug Coe, the closet-fascist of whom Sharlet writes about at length, puts it.
It seems that "Jesus plus nothing" can add up to a lot that Jesus would not be happy about.
