Things Seen and Unseen
Shopping for Faith
The Lord Will Gather Me In
After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s

A L S O+.T O D A Y

Give me that Prime Time religion
By Mark Schone
In his new born-again book, Deion Sanders asks not what he can do for Jesus, but what Jesus can do for him

The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness
Reviewed by Anderson Tepper
The Nobel Laureate reflects on the potential for healing the wounds of Africa

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Great American novelist
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It's time to add Bret Easton Ellis to the canon
(01/22/99)

It keeps right on a-hurtin'
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Peter Guralnick's story of Elvis Presley's decline is an American tragedy with a rock 'n' roll beat
(01/18/99)

The making of an American historian
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After 12 years, two children, three jobs and a decade in the Yankee limelight, British-born journalist Harold Evans unveils a tribute to his adopted country
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The Salon Interview: Going up
By Laura Miller
"The Intuitionist" author Colson Whitehead talks about elevator codebooks, too many "Good Times" jokes and the lost legacy of the black intellectual novel
(01/12/99)

Colson Whitehead's alternate New York
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His brainy, gritty first novel about a black elevator inspector, "The Intuitionist," is a formidable literary debut
(01/12/99)

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Two nations under God

AMERICAN SPIRITUALITY IS TORN BETWEEN HELLFIRE FUNDAMENTALISM AND NEW AGE NAVEL-GAZING -- AND SOMETIMES THEY'RE HARD TO TELL APART.

BY CAROL LLOYD | My friend Jennifer grew up in the Gothic shadow of Roman Catholicism but in college converted to purple-haired lesbian atheism. After graduation she rediscovered divinity in the thousand-watt smile of an Indian guru. Now she attends Tony Robbins walking-on-coals seminars, studies astrology and self-cleanses with coffee enemas twice weekly. Her mother and stepfather worry that she's out of touch with reality. They're born-again Christians and passionate participants in the conservative movement the Promise Keepers.

I tell my brother, a manager at Clorox Corporation, about Jennifer and her family and he shakes his head. "People are so crazy," he says. "They'll believe anything." This is the same brother who last Christmas sternly admonished my mother that our family lacked "the higher purpose of the Clorox family." My mother and I giggled at his corporate piety, then she recounted a recent dream about a wolf -- her totemic animal -- which she claims led her to find a real wolf just off the highway the next day.

I try to tell my husband about my mother's dream, but he's preoccupied with another visitation from "It," an annoying spirit that appears during his insomnia bouts and pontificates about the cosmic meaning of life. We don't talk about "It" in front of my husband's mother. She already thinks we're unstable for voting Democrat. A few years ago, before the Clinton scandal, this mild-mannered housewife informed us that President Clinton was responsible for the mysterious deaths of 42 administrators. She cited evidence from "the alternative Christian media."

While this picture of my loved ones may resemble a carnival sideshow, it also gives a pretty accurate nutshell of spiritual life in America. America has become a religious garden of such exotic, homegrown and hybrid heterogeneity that it's difficult even to find two people who believe in exactly the same God. These days, it seems, every human being is a theology unto himself.

N E X T+P A G E+| A nation of zealots?

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