A prodigal son

Journalists and religious true believers stand on opposite sides of a chasm. The journalist is trained to ask how he knows what he thinks he knows; the true believer is satisfied that everything he truly needs to know is contained in a text, a dogma, a practice. For some evangelical Christians, for example, the New Testament reveals that those who have embraced the truth as they see it will be “raptured” to heaven when the world comes to an end; everyone else will burn forever in a lake of fire.

“When a Bible-believing Christian talks about truth . . . he is not talking about a theory or an idea. . . ,” explains veteran reporter John Marks. “The gospel is not conditioned by anything. It does not dissolve in water or burn in fire. It is Truth. It is final.”

Marks looks across that vast chasm in “Reasons to Believe,” a work of courageous investigative journalism as well as a memoir of startling self-reflection. Marks was born again in Dallas at age 16, but he soon left the narrow path of evangelical Christianity and ended up in the latter-day Babylon of New York City, working as a producer for “60 Minutes,” married to a Jewish woman and raising his son in her faith. Popular culture was calling. “If I thought that anything in heaven would sound like either Chicago or Blood, Sweat & Tears,” he writes, “I would willingly serve Satan for the rest of my days.”

Marks explains that he was provoked into writing “Reasons to Believe” while on assignment in Dallas for a “60 Minutes” piece about the “Left Behind” series of bestseller novels loosely based on the end-times scenario of the Book of Revelation. One of the interviewees confronted him with the fundamental question of evangelical Christianity: “Will you be left behind?” On reflection, Marks was forced to concede that, by the lights of his questioner, he was “doomed to cosmic incineration” because he had embraced the corruptions and temptations of the secular world. “I will be destroyed, as will my wife, my son, and my gay friends,” writes Marks, summing up how he was regarded by his born-again kin. “It’s nothing personal. They love me, but salvation knows no loopholes.”

His biggest surprise in researching the book was the reception from the evangelical Christians he interviewed. “God was calling,” they believed. “The prodigal was returning.” They witnessed to Marks, confident he would see the error of his ways and return to the true faith. Exactly here is the tension that makes the book seem so charged and so consequential. “What if, having returned, I say no to the old family on this final occasion? To God? . . . “ writes Marks. “The book came to feel an awesome weight. It felt like a coming act of treason.”

Indeed, the enterprise sometimes seems like a secret mission into enemy territory. Marks ventured into evangelical Christian communities across America -- classrooms, churches, gospel music festivals and “God Dome[s],” -- and reports on the remarkable sights he has seen and the people he has met, some of whom are frankly described as “bizarre” and “creepy.” Even when he ponders the acts of kindness and compassion performed by Christian missionaries at times of crisis and in places of deprivation, he reminds us of their ulterior motives.

“Why in the world would men and women spend their entire lives -- risk their lives -- in the service of telling other people how to think?” he writes. “Believers will answer, first and foremost, the mission is not about telling other people how to think. It’s about telling them the Truth.”

Still, Marks writes with unfailing intelligence, insight and deep compassion about evangelical Christianity. He makes careful historical distinctions between fundamentalism, which was marked in the 19th century by “an adherence to the rules,” and evangelicalism, which he characterizes as “wary of dogma [and] focused on experience.” He detects a “fragile sense of self-esteem” and even “a deep strain of self-loathing” in men and women who appear to be so full of conviction: “You must think we’re all a bunch of idiots,” one woman said after long hours of conversation in Nashville. At the same time, he points out “a seldom-mentioned and yet indispensable part of Christian life” -- “it can be the most delirious of pleasures to believe.”

Marks confesses that he was tempted by the comforting certainties of true belief and deeply affected by the scenes that summoned up memories of his childhood. But he has clearly come too far and seen too much to return. “The ace card, for me, is Jesus Christ,” he had written in his diary as a college freshman. Now, as a middle-aged journalist and sometime amateur theologian, he insists on asking: “Once more, I come back to the reality of Jesus. Who is he, this walking corpse?”

On the very last page of “Reasons to Believe,” Marks consents to answer the question that prompted him to write the book: “Will you be left behind?” But first he points out why the facts of history make it impossible for him to surrender to true belief. “The twentieth century, my century, asks its own terrible questions. Bosnia? Hiroshima? Rwanda? Armenia? . . . A god who can’t stop it has no right to my loyalty or my belief.” And then he declares: “Leave me behind.” *