Our May issue contains a page of Christian kitsch from the collection of Daniel Radosh, whose new book, Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, is available this week. (Radosh is also a popular blogger whose blog has just been named by Time magazine as one of the internet’s best.) Over the course of a year, Radosh spent time hanging out with Christian comedians, musicians, pulp novelists, Bible marketers, wrestlers, action heroes, creationists, sex educators and retailers. He even took part in a Passion Play, a mystical experience that prompted him to become the lone voice among a crowd of angry Jews to call for Jesus’ release.

Playboy: What got you interested in Christian pop culture?
Radosh: I have written about evangelical culture and politics for Playboy for years and kept coming across pop culture manifestations. But the real trigger was attending a Christian rock festival in Kansas with my sister-in-law, who is born again, and her friends. That brought everything together and I realized how vast this world was. It was simultaneously familiar and disorienting. I’m a secular, liberal Jew, so I approached it as an outsider, just as most Americans are outsiders to this culture, including many Christians.

Playboy: The fact that you’re Jewish pops up once in a while in the book, but for the most part you keep theology on the backburner.
Radosh: The bottom line is that evangelicals believe that anyone who doesn’t accept Jesus will be damned, but I didn’t press anyone on that. I didn’t want to spend my time arguing because, first, I didn’t feel that would be very interesting and, second, you can’t win, especially when someone starts citing Scripture. It’s easy to be insulted by the idea that if you are a non-Christian you are damned. But it also reflects, in a perverse way, a genuine concern. Evangelicals don’t want you to go to hell. In any case, many Christians I met seemed to take the attitude that it’s not their responsibility to save anyone, Jesus will take care of it.
 

Playboy: Your book is hard to put down because you nailed the tone—you’re always curious and respectful, if sometimes incredulous.
Radosh: I didn’t want to suspend judgment but I also wanted to fairly represent people, for better or worse. I tried to understand things that looked crazy to me but to the people involved were totally normal.

Playboy: You talk about how some Christian rock deserves a chance in the mainstream. Can you recommend a few bands “secularists” should check out?
Radosh: There are a number of bands that many non-Christians will have heard of but not realized were Christian, such as Pedro the Lion, Over the Rhine and Victoria Williams. Of the others, mewithoutYou, The Myriad and Andy Hunter are as good as anything in the mainstream, to name just a few. To me the most interesting Christian bands aren’t those like Flyleaf or Switchfoot that convey a watered-down, generic, feel-good faith but the ones whose music reflects the struggle of faith. It’s not just a song where you can substitute ‘you’ for Jesus in the lyrics and have a mainstream love song. The best Christian artists write songs that reflect something real in their inner life, so even if it’s not your belief it strikes you as authentic. It’s the same way that many people who are not Rastafarians can still enjoy Bob Marley.

Playboy: You write, “If there’s one thing I learned in my travels, it’s that despite what too many secularists think, evangelicals are not stupid.”
Radosh: There is definitely a strain of anti-intellectualism in evangelical circles, but that’s different from stupidity. It’s a rigorously intellectual anti-intellectualism. That doesn’t make it less offensive, but it’s not stupidity. Take creationists. The elite understand the science of evolution and distort it. The vast majority of evangelicals, like the vast majority of Americans, don’t understand the science so they take the elite’s word for it. Part of the problem is that the fundamentalist leaders have persuaded people that if you don’t believe in creationism, you can’t be a good Christian.

Playboy: You have faith that creationists will eventually come around, that reason will find a way.
Radosh: It may be take a long time and there will be a vicious rear-guard fight, but I think it will happen because the creationists are overreaching. It’s one thing to tell people they didn’t come from monkeys and another to give them this elaborate, convoluted explanation for every aspect of the universe and life that isn’t much simpler than real science, while making far less sense. The appeal of creationism is that it’s simple. The more you have to think about it, the more likely you’ll say, “Wait a minute, maybe evolution isn’t such a far-out idea.”

Playboy: You note that Christian pop culture can be a “force for moderation” because creative people—musicians, novelists, etc.—tend to be the most open-minded members of any society.
Radosh: I’m cautiously optimistic about Christian pop culture bridging some gaps. The creative Christians tend to venture outside the bubble of the church. The teenagers who grow up exposed to these more broad-minded artists recognize the world is not as black-and-white as their youth pastor might have told them. Evangelicals tend to be very respectful of their leaders, and the leaders tend to be extremely conservative and judgmental and intolerant. They drive the culture from the top down. Pop culture, however, drives the culture from the bottom up. If people like a Christian rock band’s music, it is placed in a position of grassroots authority. Good Christian rock musicians may play churches but they also play secular clubs, so they have exposure to the outside world. They know gay people, atheists and Muslims, and while they may disagree with these “lifestyles” they also know these people aren’t so bad and that they don’t all hate Christians. There is a persecution complex in evangelical culture that is extremely destructive.

Playboy: You attended a Christian sex seminar in which they discussed whether the Bible allows for oral sex.
Radosh: Yes, although because the seminar was for women only, they made me hide in the sound booth. If you read the Christian marriage manuals published 40 years ago, there was no question that oral sex was a sin. Today, it’s an act of conscience. The position has evolved. Despite what evangelicals believe, Christianity is not static. As Christian culture changes, theology changes with it. Oral sex is a superficial example, but the same thing happened with slavery. It’s hard to condemn as long as they keep moving in the right direction.

Playboy: Are you hoping the book will be sold in Christian bookstores? How do you expect it will be received?
Radosh: There is no way the book will be sold in Christian bookstores because I use the phrase “sucking cock” [in a funny rejoinder to a speaker who insists that men become gay when they feel disrespected by women]. The good news is that a lot of younger and open-minded Christians do not shop in Christian bookstores. In an early review, one evangelical blogger wrote, “He’s not always kind but, here’s the thing, he’s right.”