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One morning last summer, leaving my apartment on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, I noticed there weren’t many people outside. It was a fine June day, but there wasn’t the usual line of cars in front of Starbucks. No commuters schlepping insulated mochas, no dog walkers, no window washers at Cafe Latté, and no one else waiting for the 7:23 bus to downtown Minneapolis.

On the bus there were about a third as many riders as usual, and the kindly woman with the thick black braid was not in her usual seat. I tried to read, but panic was setting in. By the time I reached the skyway, my stomach was a prickly ball. I passed the jewelry store near the U.S. Trust Building and checked my watch. At least two clerks should have been in the display windows, draping necklaces and stabbing rings onto their holders. But the shop was dark and empty.

I knew it had happened: Jesus had fulfilled his prophecy, returned to Earth, and taken the believers. Now the Apocalypse was beginning. My hands were clammy as I dialed my mom’s number; I was certain she would not answer, now or ever again. When she picked up and chirped “Why … good morning!” my shoulders eased, but my heart was still pounding from the adrenaline. “Hi, Mom,” I said weakly.

It’s strange being the kind of person who sees a half-empty bus and thinks “Apocalypse!” In part it’s the result of watching Armageddon-inspired movies like Left Behind, but mainly it comes from being raised in an ultra-conservative church. When I was growing up, our congregation in the hamlet of Phillipsburg, Missouri, interpreted the Bible with the kind of literal fervor with which a non-believer might read IKEA assembly instructions—midway through a construction effort. On the outside, we looked like any other Christians: we dressed up, we sang, we went to Sunday school, we read the Dr. Dobson inserts in the church bulletins. But we also followed rules against women preaching, praying aloud during church, or serving communion; as well as the tenet that the only way to heaven is to make a public testimony and be fully immersed in water. Most of all, we believed that we had the one true way to heaven. In other words, we actually took the Bible at its word—unlike the Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Seventh-day Adventists who were, sad to say, bound for hell.

Given this background, and my family’s continued devotion, I was rather smug during the 2004 election campaign, when national magazines were breathlessly reporting on the huge swaths of the voting public who considered themselves “born-again Christians.” “No shit,” I thought. (I had already left the flock.) After Bush’s win, I read how Karl Rove and the president’s other operatives had used a database of some 5,000 churches, as well as church directories gleaned from across the country, to home in on and court evangelical voters. Some 350,000 “pro-family” conservatives volunteered for the Bush campaign and nearly six million evangelicals—including three and a half million who hadn’t voted in the 2000 election—cast votes for Dubya. As Bush moved into his second term, the power of the religious right seemed palpable. Pundits talked in awe about Dr. James C. Dobson—the one who we read in church bulletins, the so-called Protestant Pope who built Focus on the Family, a $130 million, 1,300-employee media ministry in Colorado Springs, and the venerable National Association of Evangelicals, with thirty million members. It seemed like Rove had indeed established a “permanent majority” of conservative Republicans.

But behind the scenes, in the conservative Protestant capital of Colorado Springs, there was some serious soul-searching over a study released by George Barna, a well-respected evangelical pollster in southern California who had developed a reputation for delivering scientifically sound data on U.S. religious trends. In December 2003, he conducted a telephone poll of 2,033 randomly selected Americans from numerous cross-sections of the population, who were asked a series of questions:

1. Would you call yourself a Christian?
2. Have you made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in your life today?
3. Do you believe that you will go to heaven when you die because you have confessed your sins and accepted Jesus Christ as your savior?
4. Do you believe that you have a personal responsibility to share your religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians?
5. Do you believe that Satan exists?
6. Do you believe that eternal salvation is possible through grace, not works?
7. Do you believe that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on Earth?
8. Do you believe that the Bible is accurate in all that it teaches?
9. Do you believe that God is the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity?
10. Do you believe that God created the universe and still rules it today?

Barna discovered that a solid thirty-eight percent of the U.S. population could be classified as “born-again” Christians, meaning they answered yes to the first three questions. The part that knocked strict Bible literalists on their heels was how few of those born-again Christians have a “Biblical world view”: only nine percent of them qualified by answering yes to all ten questions.

Worse still, Barna found that the ideological move from being “born again” to having a “Biblical world view” is crucial to developing evangelically “correct” views on divorce, gay sex, pornography, gambling, abortion, and other social issues near and dear to Bible literalists. As it happens, born-agains are not all that statistically different from their heathen counterparts in terms of how they act, or what they believe. For instance, the divorce rate for born-agains is exactly the same as for those who haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as their savior: thirty-five percent. But overall compare those with a Biblical world view to born-agains and there are marked differences down the line. True evangelicals (those who take the Bible literally) are thirty-one times less likely to accept cohabitation, eighteen times less likely to condone drunkenness, fifteen times less likely to condone gay sex, and on and on and on.

“There was a growing sense even before the Barna study that things were bad, that a large number of Christians were not living the Christian life,” says Marc Fey, an evangelical life coach and consultant in Colorado Springs, and director of something called “Christian Worldview” at Focus on the Family. “But what the Barna study really did was galvanize us in our belief that something had to be done.”
The question they faced: How do you convince ninety-one percent of born-again Christians that showing up at church, voting Republican, and putting a Jesus fish on the SUV isn’t enough?

^{Leading the charge: Dr. Del Tackett heads up Focus on the Family's The Truth Project.}

Strategizing at Focus on the Family began in May 2004, mere months after the release of Barna’s survey. Two years later, the ministry had its answer: a multimedia production and coordinating DVD series called The Truth Project. These tools were part of a bold plan that they hoped would reach out to millions of errant sheep and lead them deep into an ideological Promised Land.

The Truth Project was introduced through an expensive traveling spectacle run by Del Tackett. A retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, Tackett had reached the pinnacle of his secular career as the director of technical planning for the National Security Council under George H.W. Bush, then entered the sanctum of think-tank academia. Grandfatherly, well-groomed Dr. Tackett, as he’s billed (thanks to an honorary doctorate from the American Christian College), teaches Christian Worldview studies at the Focus on the Family Institute.

Tackett’s Truth Project presentation includes snazzy, sophisticated video clips playing on an enormous multi-panel screen, and is supplemented with prayers and mini-lectures. He traveled with it to Anchorage, Honolulu, and to virtually every other state. In October 2006, 800 people showed up at Cedar Valley, a mega-church in Bloomington and paid $119 each ($149 per couple) to attend the two-day teach-in and take home their copy of the 12-disc DVD set. From Focus on the Family’s perspective, the Truth Project is an enormous undertaking, and they’re leaving nothing to chance. Says Fey: “We believe in this so much that we have thousands of volunteers in Colorado Springs praying for each participant by name.”

Since its launch, at least one hundred Minnesota churches have worked with the Minnesota Family Council, a self-styled non-partisan, pro-family nonprofit, to establish Truth Project study groups, according to council president Tom Prichard. (The number of churches or individuals who have started groups without the MFC’s partnership could be much higher.) Dave Eaton, an Excelsior resident who made considerable waves on the Minnetonka school board for pushing “intelligent design,” has helped facilitate dozens of Truth Project groups in schools and churches, sometimes signing up eighty or ninety people at a time. He and his wife Diane were so excited about the Truth Project that they didn’t even wait for the autumn training in Minnesota. The previous spring, they flew to Charlotte, North Carolina, to hear Tackett speak and get their hands on the DVDs.

Eaton says the Truth Project is different from the Christian study programs produced by the likes of moderate Christian authors like Rick Warren or Beth Moore. Basically, it cuts the crap. “It challenges people to ask the question: ‘If there are two different truth claims here, how can both of them be right?’ ” says Eaton. “There’s a professor on the DVD that says if Darwin is right, then mankind basically rose out of the evolutionary goo—then when you die, you’re dead, and there is no God. That’s one truth claim. The other truth claim is God’s perfect plan. I think for some people, this series is the first time they’ve ever had to examine material at that level.” The DVDs cover a range of topics, from evolution to ethics, philosophy to sociology, with a healthy dose of anti-feminist and anti-gay sentiment.

Throughout the series, Tackett (and by proxy, Focus on the Family), expresses plain disgust at how far Christians have fallen from the true path. In an e-mail newsletter introducing the program, the good doctor writes: “Do you want to peek into the home of a broken man who is experiencing the devastating consequences of an addiction to the lies of pornography? How about peering into another home, where a young father is struggling to raise two kids alone because his wife believed the lies that motherhood is a worthless task and that real significance comes from the corporate world? Would you like to slip into a child’s bedroom at night and listen to her silent cries because her parents believed a host of the world’s lies and are going through a bitter divorce? Would you like to follow me into a small room in an abortion clinic and watch the horror that results as a young woman acts out her belief in a lie? Should we speak of spousal abuse? Child abuse? Rampant sexually transmitted disease? Gambling addictions? Drug addictions? Homosexuality? The attack against marriage? Which direction would you like to turn? The weeping and the wailing are everywhere, testifying that believing lies results in heartbreaking calamities.”

^{Amber and Scott Woller hold Corner Church services at their Corner Coffee shop.}

Last winter, I spent an evening watching one of the Truth Project DVDs with a study group that, as per the directives of the program, had formed in the wake of the teach-in at Cedar Valley Church. The group was hosted by Scott and Amber Woller, both thirty-one, at their spiffy condo in Minneapolis’s North Loop district. The couple also owns Corner Coffee, a nearby café where they serve several hundred people on a typical workday; on Sundays, they shut down the espresso machine three times to transform Corner Coffee into the Corner Church. The tiny coffeehouse stage serves as an altar platform, and worshippers sip free hot chocolate during the service. Scott is a big believer in New Urbanism, and dreams of having a Corner Coffee/Corner Church within walking distance of everyone in downtown Minneapolis, from Loring Park to the North Loop. “We’ll be a kind of anti-chain chain,” he says.

The Wollers met and fell in love in Springfield, Missouri, where they studied at Evangel College (now Evangel University), an Assemblies of God-associated school whose mascot is a Christian crusader in full armor. They bought the coffeehouse and established Corner Church there with the view that among the few real sanctuaries for young people, almost all sell espresso. A typical Sunday draws about sixty-five twenty- and thirty-somethings for the three services, which open with contemporary hymns and lead into Scott’s cheeky but heartfelt sermonizing. At a recent service, he talked about how important it was to have a “celebrity sighting” of Jesus Christ during the Christmas season.

On this freezing February evening, as part of the in-home training the Wollers, five young evangelicals, and I are watching the Truth Project episode that deconstructs evolution. They all seem to find the material neoteric, like it’s some kind of experimental jazz. It reminds me of mountain banjo—frantic, clucking, and flagrantly familiar. The pierced and tattooed school-bus driver on the sofa is nodding softly, though, like he’s hearing Coltrane for the first time, and the part-time caterer across the room scribbles intently in her notebook. My back begins to sweat, and a paranoid thought occurs to me: everyone here knows I’m going to hell.

When the DVD ends, my anxiety dissipates and I’m almost giddy with relief. Clearly a part of me is still convinced that I will spend eternity in flames. My companions, however, have deeply connected with the material. “It’s really gotten me to consider how opposed the world is to what the Bible says,” says Chanda, an aspiring chef, “and how the Bible is so contradictory to everything else we’re told in the world.” Amber agrees: “I would say that the DVD is right in saying that the true Christian world view is persecuted against, that there’s a war against true Christian beliefs.”

All of the Truth Project DVDs reiterate a classic theme. “The suffering self,” says philosopher Judith Perkins, who wrote a 1995 book of the same title, is one of the hallmarks of American evangelicalism. As they battle the wages of sin, postmodernism, and all the other lies of the world, true evangelicals—people like Chanda, Scott, Amber, and my own family—feel as trod-upon as the Christians under Nero, or, if you will, as misunderstood and alone as gay people in the years before Stonewall. It was through this idea of the persecuted Christian, Perkins wrote, that the movement was able to build social, political, and institutional power.

No wonder, then, that a movement now foundering should step back to reconsider its original strength. The numbers of evangelicals in the U.S. adhering to that “Biblical world view,” according to the oft-cited Barna research, is scarcely more (by some measures) than the number of self-described atheists. In fact, if you look at Barna’s numbers as a kind of prophecy—certainly that’s how the folks in Colorado Springs saw it when they conceived of the Truth Project—a kind of equaling-out is now underway.

Last fall, “The Evangelical Crackup,” a lengthy cover story in The New York Times Magazine, detailed how Wichita’s fieriest evangelical preacher, Terry Fox, got sacked—not because of a sex scandal, but because of his very conservatism. Writer David Kirkpatrick showed how a newer breed of evangelicals like Rick Warren and Bill Hybels are talking about fighting AIDS and poverty, and wrote that these “centrist evangelicals” are “one stirring away from a real awakening.”

So why are born-agains drifting to the middle? Is it disgruntlement with the war? Anti-abortion overload? Demoralization from the scandals involving Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, and Ralph Reed? And as the 2008 election approaches, many wonder about those evangelicals who used to reliably turn out for Bush: to what extent have they become disillusioned with politics, given reports that Bush’s political advisers privately called evangelicals “nuts” and “goofy”? (Not to mention, what effect might Mike Huckabee have on all this?) I don’t know, and neither did Kirkpatrick. What is plain is that the “permanent winning strategy” to mobilize white working-class voters with “values” issues—so carefully detailed by Thomas Frank in 2004’s What’s the Matter With Kansas?—isn’t a sure thing after all. But here’s another truth: Tackett and other Bible literalists of his ilk aren’t giving up on these iffy centrists. As with swing voters and undecideds in a political campaign, they see an opportunity to turn capricious hearts into heavenly gold.

^{Cedar Valley Church in Bloomington}

A few weeks after sitting in with the Wollers’s study group, I returned to Cedar Valley for a typical Sunday service, my first in a mega-church. The worshippers here, I figured, would be exactly the kind of lukewarm born-agains who are the supposed targets of the Truth Project.

A stone’s throw from the Mall of America, Cedar Valley is a blond brick edifice that resembles a junior high school more than a place where people are saved from the raging fires of hell. The interior is done up in a palette of tan, beige, and eggshell, and features a two-thousand-seat auditorium with upper and lower tiers labeled with section letters. There’s a nice coffee bar on the second level, and a notable lack of religious symbols throughout.

At the late-morning “contemporary” service, the abbreviated, guilt-free sermon is like a little pep talk wrapped in nice thoughts about God. The pastor implores the congregation to think about what special talents they could offer to the Lord. A cheerful woman near me, sporting gorgeously coiffed blonde hair, a tailored pink jacket, and a huge diamond ring, writes “Hospitality” on her church bulletin and underlines it twice. During the hymns—upbeat songs led by a singer with a sweet boy-band voice and a trendy haircut—the congregation dutifully follows along on the huge multimedia screen. A few people close their eyes and stretch their arms toward the stage, but no one speaks in tongues. There are no evocations of the Rapture, no prayers for the unborn. Just a lot of nice chit-chat lunch plans and the children’s Christmas program.

Dave Eaton says the power and popularity of the Truth Project is only going to grow. At the Harbor Church in Hastings, Pastor Jim Anderson expects three hundred to four hundred people for a Truth Project training session this month. But a second Corner Church study group that formed after my visit had to disband because people weren’t showing up, and now Scott Woller is thinking about taking just one group through the whole DVD series rather than trying to have continuous groups. Cedar Valley Church convened a Truth Project group last winter, but it, too, has since disbanded.

Nevertheless, Prichard, the media-savvy Minnesota Family Council president, is entirely on board with the Truth Project. He plans to help start a small group at his home church, Hope Lutheran, on Emerson Avenue in North Minneapolis. But he doesn’t see the project as the answer to evangelicalism’s big problem. His approach is softer and far more cultural in nature. He calls it “going back to first principles.” “It’s the relationship dynamic that’s so important,” he tells me. For him, that means creating a safe, Christian incubator for children, including his own four kids, who range from ten to fifteen years old. The three youngest are home-schooled by their mom (who worked as a registered nurse until she married Tom), and the oldest attends a private Christian school. Attending Sunday school at Hope Lutheran, where the walls are decorated with photos of newborn babies and stacks of Pro-Family News sit by the door, they learn about creationism, God’s sacrifices for humanity—and the kind of staunch opposition they will face as true believers.

Prichard also thinks evangelical adults should go out in the world as much as they can tolerate, serving on school and library boards and county commissions and running for office. “It’s the only thing that’s going to keep us from what Chuck Colson calls ‘the age of moral decay,’ ” he says, quoting the Watergate felon-turned-born-again. That’s a big charge for people who make up such a small slice of the population.

I’m sitting with Prichard’s kids at Hope Lutheran when the pastor bows his head and prays for the end of abortion. Softly and sweetly, the choir begins to sing “Rescue Me” by the Desperation Band: “You are the source of life / I can’t be left behind / No one else will do / I will take hold of you.” When I get home, I immediately go buy the song at iTunes and listen to it four times in a row. What can I say? I’m no longer a true believer, but the religion is in my blood. Whether that’s the case for millions of other centrists out there remains to be seen.