An eager young thing with a national paper was interviewing me about yet another instance of political corruption. “Is this something new?” she asked. “No,” I said, “it’s been around ever since that unfortunate afternoon in the garden.” There was a long pause and then she asked, “What garden was that?” It was touching.

What prompts me to mention this today is that I’m just off the phone with a reporter from the same national paper. He’s doing a story on Pope Benedict’s new encyclical. In the course of discussing the pontificate, I referred to the pope as the bishop of Rome. “That raises an interesting point,” he said. “Is it unusual that this pope is also the bishop of Rome?” He obviously thought he was on to a new angle. Once again, I tried to be gentle. Toward the end of our talk, he said with manifest sincerity, “My job is not only to get the story right but to explain what it means.” Ah yes, he is just the fellow to explain what this pontificate and the encyclical really mean. It is poignant.

Wherever you go, you run into people who say they were disillusioned with the press when they saw how a story in which they were involved was reported. What they knew for sure had happened was grossly misrepresented. Frequently they say the reporter was biased or even malicious, and that is undoubtedly sometimes the case. But over the years of dealing with reporters–and, again, there are notable exceptions–I have been led to embrace something like an Occam’s razor with respect to journalistic distortions: Do not multiply explanations when ignorance will suffice.

Anyways, to help journalists like Neuhaus’s interviewers, holyoffice has put together a glossary of important Christian terms. Two of my favorites are the description of Orthodox Christians as “Catholics with beards” and this explanation, which “shades from humor into journalism,” as a friend put it:

The Emerging Church

This is a term that refers to churches attended exclusively by white people in their 20s and 30s who have at least one tattoo or body piercing. Their distinguishing characteristics are a refreshing, “up to date” interpretation of Christianity, and a reluctance to directly answer questions.

With the prospect of Republicans losing control of one or both houses of Congress in the 2006 midterms, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins are starting a campaign in churches to support pro-family candidates. It’s called “Left Behind but not Left Now: What End-Time Prophecy Says About American Politics.” The first day of the two-day seminar will focus on “Patterns of Destruction,” the parallels between the disintegration of the family and the nation in Greece, Rome, England, America, and the tribulation; the second day is on “Hope in the Midst.”

In fact, evangelical Christianity is thriving in Boston. During the past 30 years, church growth, fueled by evangelical university groups and immigrant communities, has dramatically outpaced population growth. At the same time, mainline denominations have dwindled and the abuse scandal in the Catholic church has forced the closing of dozens of parishes. Evangelical leaders expect this “quiet revival” not only to continue, but to blossom into another Great Awakening.

As evidence for the revival, Moll points to the increase in the number of evangelical students attending various of the sixty-some colleges in town (“Not since the 17th century has there been so many evangelicals at Harvard University”). And he notes that college students compose forty percent of those attending Park Street, Harold Ockenga’s old church.

I’m not so sure that’s a sign of “revival.” Boston is very much a college town, meaning that a significant part of its population comes from elsewhere and will leave in a few years. The greater proportion of evangelical college students more likely reflects national trends than anything specific to Boston. Likewise, the growth of “small storefront churches full of minorities” probably has more to do with international students than those intending to stay here. Churches need to comprise more than just students to thrive, and it seems to me that a true revival would involve the regular citizens of Boston as well.

Welcome to the latest front in America’s culture wars. The Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), the Calvary Chapel Schools and six Calvary Chapel students are suing the university, whose campuses include that traditional bastion of liberal thought, Berkeley, as well as the huge UCLA campus, for what they call “viewpoint discrimination”. The Christian schools add that the university is violating the students’ constitutional right to freedom of speech and religion. The university naturally denies the charges, and this week a federal judge in Los Angeles began considering the preliminary arguments of a contest which could eventually reach the Supreme Court.

. . .

UC denies it practices secular intolerance and “viewpoint discrimination”. It notes that it has approved plenty of courses at Christian schools and in the past four years has accepted 24 of the 32 applicants from the Murrieta school. And it says that if the courses had used these textbooks “as supplementary, rather than primary, texts, it is likely they would have been approved.”

What is really being challenged, says the university, is its right to set its own academic standards and admission requirements. In which case the question is what that right implies. The Christian plaintiffs say they have no objection to science students, for example, being taught conventional wisdom, but “their constitutional rights are abridged or discriminated against when they are told that the current interpretation of scientific method must be taught dogmatically, and must be accepted by students, to be eligible for admission to University of California institutions.” In other words, what the case involves is not so much the now-familiar tussle over intelligent design, but a student’s freedom of speech and thought.

The Economist thinks that this conflict will escalate until evangelicals play a greater role in higher education.

Fifty years ago there were only a handful of “megachurches”, drawing more than 2,000 each Sunday; today, there are more than 1,200 such churches, three of them with congregations of over 20,000. Not only is the nation’s president a born-again Christian, but so (according to the Pew Research Centre) are 54% of America’s Protestants, who are 30% of the population.

Will America’s public universities take on a similar tinge? To the extent that educational establishments reflect cultural reality, it may be inevitable. After all, before the liberal era of the 1960s, there were no such things as courses in “Women’s Studies” or “African-American Studies”. Now, no prudent American university would be without them. It would be odd if conservative Christians did not leave similar footprints on the syllabus.

I think the Economist is right on both counts: this issue is much larger than Calvary Chapel’s perceived lack of standards, and this kind of conflict is not likely to disappear.

I know nothing about Calvary Chapel’s quality of education in particular, but having some familiarity with the Christian school movement, I’m fairly confident that UC’s claims are not really about standards. Often, many students educated in the Christian school movement are better-prepared than their secular counterparts in this sense: they learn both the secular dogmas as well as the religious ones. For example, I’ll wager that a good student at Calvary Chapel would be able to explain the theory of evolution as well as creationism, whereas we would expect her public high school counterpart to know only about evolution.

The same is true of conservative students in general. Because those with liberal political views dominate the American higher education system, conservatives are forced to learn both languages. The UC officials should appreciate how that tension–between politically liberal educators’ beliefs and conservatives’ beliefs–actually offers some pedagogical advantages. For one thing, a somewhat adversarial position and skeptical mind on the part of the student further critical thinking skills. For another, the different beliefs and cultural background of conservatives further universities’ vaunted “diversity.”

However, the cynic in me suspects that the UC officials are less interested in improved critical thinking and cultural or viewpoint diversity than in hegemony over California’s secondary schools.

Christmas is fast approaching, and with it, the dilemma of what to give the less likable people in our lives: office mates, ex-spouses, born-again Christians.

My self-esteem hangs largely on what the Globe and Mail writers think of me, especially their drinking columnists, so as you can imagine this is quite a blow.

Next thing you know we’ll be portrayed on popular TV shows as uptight co-workers, annoying neighbors or unaccountable racist murderers.

I’m told it’s all because we’re so intolerant.

Robertson’s call to murder cast a spotlight on the growing power of the loopy religious far right, grouped under the banner of the Christian Coalition, which has grown into one of the most powerful political lobbies in America.

Robertson’s supporters are the single largest block of pro-Bush supporters and a core constituency for the war in Iraq. Nine out of 10 evangelicals voted for Bush.

The Coalition has largely intimidated the weak-kneed U.S. Congress. Christian fundamentalists now control a third of all national Republican state committee posts, and 41 of 51 Republican senators received a 100% approval rating from the Coalition.

Not all evangelicals belong to the hard right. Many blasted Robertson. But many think pretty much like Rev. Pat — and believe the U.S. must become a Protestant fundamentalist theocracy and impose dominion over the globe by military force. Such militant cultists often sound just like the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists.

These “Christian Zionists,” who are allies of the Israel’s hardline settler movement, also urge expansion of Israel and in gathering all Jews to the Holy Land. When this happens, they believe, the “end of days” will occur and the Earth will be destroyed (along with Jews and other non-Christians).

For these cheery folk, there’s no reason to worry about growing deficit, environmental destruction or resource depletion. Who cares? The world will soon end with a big bang.

We rarely see these militants because most are hidden away in deepest Bush Country: Trailer parks, the backwoods, NASCAR tracks, remote suburbs, and strip malls. But they now seem to have replaced fat-cat country club golfers as the Republican Party’s leading voter constituency.