Essays look at religion, those who believe and those who don’t

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Jeff Sharlet is best known for his hard-hitting “C Street and the Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,’’ in which he exposes influential conservative Christians who flaunt the line between religion and government. But for Sharlet, the story of American religion is not a polarized one of fundamentalists vs. secularists.

It’s a vast landscape, and each essay in his remarkable new collection of literary journalism, “Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between’’, explores a different crag or cranny of it - the evangelical BattleCry group, New Age healers, a New Yorker returning to her Amish family.

“Sweet Heaven’’ is intimate in tone, and expansive in scope. Some of the people Sharlet writes about don’t appear to be related to faith at all: indie musicians who both are and are not shills for Clear Channel, the intellectual impresario Cornel West, and anarchists protesting at the Republican convention - they, Sharlet writes, are about " ‘religion’ as broadly defined as the mouth of the Hudson.’’

No one parses the history of Christian fundamentalism as succinctly and elegantly as Sharlet, as he does here in a brief piece about two Ohio radio hosts: “. . . World War II changed the steady plod of Christian futurism, quickened it . . . old-time religion resurrecting as cyborg doctrine.’’ Or, for that matter, its present: the BattleCry youth crusade, which fills stadiums with angry teens fighting holy war against the secular world, is “a cramped little country in which there is not enough room to be lost or found, just ‘saved’ as a static condition.’’ But Sweet Heaven takes Sharlet far beyond his comfort zone.

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2011/08/20/jeff_sharlots_essays_look_at_religion_those_who_believe_and_those_that_dont/