Any reportage on American Evangelicals that cautions its audience not “to dismiss these people as… zealots who have surrendered their ability to think rationally” immediately stands apart from most religious journalism. So Tom Krattenmaker’s The Evangelicals You Don’t Know: Introducing the Next Generation of Christians is a welcome work by that standard alone.

Unsatisfied with the attitude that “not only insults these Christians but also mocks what is supposed to be a hallmark of the progressive, secular train of mind: the ability to see clearly and think expansively,” his disposition sets him apart from innumerable other figures in his position. As a writer and columnist for USA Today, living in an Oregon city that is the subject of a satirical cable show, it would be easy for Krattenmaker to be equally satirical of his subject. But this book is neither a venture into untamed Kansas nor a breathless report of the basic facets of Christianity in the style of T. M. Luhrmann. Rather, Krattenmaker’s interest is in “the millions of Evangelicals who defy the stereotype,” and the enemy, he says, quoting a Florida pastor, “is never as scary or threatening up close.”

The book is basically a work of sociology, though one with a winning enthusiasm for its subject and an easy-to-read journalistic style. It proceeds through statistics and news clippings, which punctuate stories and anecdotes gathered from extensive personal interviews. Many of the interviewees are recent college graduates from places like Wheaton, along with some who grew up in more old-school fundamentalist environments, and some more prominent people like blogger Jonathan Merritt.

The picture that emerges is the now-familiar critique that Evangelicals invested too much in political efforts at the national level in the second half of the twentieth century, and that their current recession relative to the broader culture is largely its price. This is not a narrative about the withering away of the church, though, and it runs to more interesting places than a basic assertion that membership in the body of Christ is not identical with enrollment in the Republican Party, or an easy diatribe against embarrassments like Pat Robertson or hucksters like Jim and Tammy Bakker.

As Krattenmaker shows, as interesting as what the Evangelical religio-political apparatus built and who it re-elected was what it overlooked. Its intense focus on winning Washington influence, mobilizing voter turnout, running broadcasting networks, and building up various guru-like figures all came at the expense of local civic involvement and ecclesial infrastructure. Repairing this will take years of labor, and it will require getting to know the neighbors.

What would such rebuilding look like in practice? In one particularly convincing example, Krattenmaker recounts several Portland churches’ partnership with the city government to clean up a park. In order for this to happen, leaders of individual congregations had to first undertake a self-examination and consider whether “critiquing the culture” from the sidelines was a satisfying enough response to the demands of the Gospel. The churches that eventually allied, a mix of edgier urban groups and more-traditional suburban congregations, also had to overcome their (perhaps passive) judgments about fellow Christians from different backgrounds.