She can’t say that, can she?

Press critic Tom Engelhardt’s invaluable Tom Dispatchblog is featuring a story or two written by his students in the UC Berkeley journalism graduate school. The first comes from Lisa Lambert, who takes on the subject of morality among the ultra-religious right. Read the piece and try to imagine it appearing in any of the mainstays of that Damned liberal media.

GodAssault

Morality as the Ultimate Game
By Lisa Lambert

Because certain trees are sprouting in the Middle East, the world will soon end. Because the European Union has grown to its current size, fiery death and plagues of locusts are about to descend on the planet. Because Israel established a homeland, non-believers will, in a short while, suffer agonizing horrors before being damned to an eternity of pain.

…

Like many evangelical forms of Protestantism, Calvary Chapel preaches that everything a Christian needs is written, word by holy word, in the Bible. In Miller’s surveys, everyone from Calvary Chapel’s pastors to its recent converts said they took the Bible literally. If you read the Book of Revelations as the physical, material truth, then you come to see God’s game as one played in a swirling, planet-devouring vortex of blood and violence.

…

Calvary Chapel’s Apocalypse, however, bears a resemblance to the fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons. Just as “D and D” players excel by learning complicated strategies and knowing arcane sub-rules of sub-rules, Calvary Chapel Christians win by following a set of instructions taken straight from the Bible. They must know the secret passwords, identify their enemies correctly, and understand what lies beneath the various layers of evil. False prophets will become popular in the end times, for example, and those who don’t want to be damned will recognize these poseurs and refuse to worship with them.

Whether heaven’s riches are 17 virgins or a beautiful set of angel wings, Calvary Chapel won’t say. Prizes aren’t important to the game, because winning is defined as not losing; not having to endure unthinkable tortures. And not losing rests on adhering to all of the rules.

The piece is the kind of thing that would never make it past the self-censoring New PC guidelines of most papers. You can’t say unflattering things about people who profess religion because 1) they’re moral, and 2) they’ve a regrettable tendency to react to people who say or do things they don’t like by saying things about you—such as that you’re a murderer who’s getting away with it—that the more nihilist among them might interpret as a call to blow your ass up.

Engelhardt says Lambert’s story will be published in The San Franciso Chronicle this Sunday. I expect the paper will get some letters.