I just finished reading the book, Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement. Tic Long introduced me to the book a week or so ago. I hadn’t even heard about it until he mentioned it.

The author, Lauren Sandler, is a brilliant author. Sandler is the Life Editor for Salon and she has written on cultural politics and other areas of interest for some very credible publications — New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, LA times, etc. I found her writing very imaginative, a bit sarcastic at times and somewhat over the top at other times. I thoroughly enjoyed the read, however, and if nothing else it was a reminder of just how differently people define evangelical and just how different other choose to live the tenets of it out.

I found her to be a bit of an alarmist but others I have talked to regarding the book have found her quite the opposite. I found myself shaking my head in agreement at times and at other times squinting my eyes and tilting my head as I do when I am a bit frustrated with authors who write about something so important as our youth culture and its movements and then write from only (or mostly) one perspective.

While so much of what Sandler writes about is true (I have seen it with my own eyes and felt it with my own heart), so much of it is from a pocket of evangelicalism that is fighting to survive in the minds and hearts of its own adherents. I wish she would have had a few different experiences in which to view what I find to be a growing number of thinkers and practitioners who haven’t lost our connection to the evangelical tradition but are trying hard to assist in the emergence of a different kind of evangelicalism.