Hot Dogs

Malcolm Bull

• Mine eyes have seen the glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America by Randall Balmer
  Oxford, 246 pp, $19.95, September 1989, ISBN 0 19 505117 3
• In God’s Country: Travels in the Bible Belt, USA by Douglas Kennedy
  Unwin Hyman, 240 pp, £12.95, November 1989, ISBN 0 04 440423 9
• The Divine Supermarket by Malise Ruthven
  Chatto, 336 pp, £14.95, August 1989, ISBN 0 7011 3151 9
• The Democratisation of American Christianity by Nathan Hatch
  Yale, 312 pp, £22.50, November 1989, ISBN 0 300 44470 2
• Religion and 20th-Century American Intellectual Life edited by Michael Lacey
  Cambridge/Woodrow Wilson Centre for Scholars, 214 pp, £27.50, November 1989, ISBN 0 521 37560 6
• New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America by Mary Farrell Bednarowski
  Indiana, 175 pp, $25.00, November 1989, ISBN 0 253 31137 3

In recent years, nothing has done more to reinforce the European sense of cultural superiority than the sight of America’s televangelists. Easily stereotyped as politically reactionary, sexually hypocritical, intellectually retarded and financially dishonest, the televangelists confirmed every prejudice about American society. That such men should be allowed, not only to appear on television, but to run for the Presidency of the United States, is taken as proof of the immaturity of the nation’s social institutions and the inherent gullibility of its people. Whatever the weaknesses of European civilisation, it has been possible to take comfort in its relative secularity; Europe, at least until the Rushdie affair, seemed immune during the worldwide resurgence of fundamentalism – the one place where religious fanatics remained at the margins of public life.