If you are a committed evangelical Christian then don't read this book because Mr. Dudley, born and raised a conservative evangelical, will demolish your comfortable world by showing that much of what you believe is based on illusion.
If you are a skeptical Christian on a spiritual journey, such as myself, who has shied away from involvement in organized Christianity, then you will want to read this book. The author, now a medical student at Johns Hopkins, holds a BS in biology from Calvin College and an M.A. in Ethics from from Yale Divinity School. He is also that rarest of humans: an intellectual who can write with brevity and clarity about controversial subjects without forcing the reader to keep a dictionary or encyclopedia at hand.
His thesis is simple: the four main props of evangelical Christian belief are naught but a set of anti-intellectual fulminations against gay marriage, environmentalism, abortion and evolution. This is where the clarity of his writing is so potent. Because he must have spent hundreds of hours of thinking and discussion and study on these issues before writing the book, he expresses himself very clearly. There is no obfuscation in his writing, no confusion, no wandering. As a writer myself, I know how hard this is to do especially with complex and emotionally laden subjects.
His calm explanation of these four issues and their resonance for evangelicals is brief and to the point. Finally, his entire book is informed by his scholarship and deep knowledge of the Bible and of centuries of Christian philosophy and theology. There are many instances where he points out that evangelicals have seized upon an interpretation of a Biblical verse by some dolt who I will refer to generically as Pastor Billy Bob of the Yahoo Megachurch.
Mr. Dudley then traces the interpretation of that Biblical verse back through history and we learn that St. Augustine and many other learned divines and early Christian fathers interpreted the verse completely differently. So who is to be believed, Pastor Billy Bob who went to some hick town Bible college or St. Augustine? You can imagine whose side Mr. Dudley comes down on.
This is a brilliant work and if you are on a spiritual journey in the Christian tradition and very skeptical because Christianity seems to have been hi-jacked by anti-intellectual buffoons who are simply function as a wing of the Republican Party, then this book is for you.
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