One day, the Reverend Bails of this world will be put out of business -- I believe that. But I also believe that when it happens, it won't be the result of any amount of arguing. Arguing with a fundamentalist about anything is always a mistake. "Anyone who gives him so much as a greeting is complicit in his evil deeds" (2 JN 11). If you've ever seen anyone trying to argue anything with Jerry Falwell and getting their pearls trampled, you know what I mean.

Neither will it come as the result of any attempt to "expose " them, since they have the ability to mutate into endlessly "new" forms, cosmetically appropriating just enough change to maintain their authority over the faithful and keep them coming, addicted as they are to seeking, but not finding. The Reverend Bails of this world, both the quick and the dead, will be put out of business first and foremost by their own abysmal media record.

As Jacques Ellul writes of the number of the beast in Apocalypse, "wisdom or discernment does not have to do with deciphering the number 666 itself: it is a matter of discerning what is happening around us...." Knowing what is happening has to do with being hip -- i.e. successfully tracking an ever-changing environment. But while we may try our damnedest to tune in to what is happening, only future generations looking back through the window of the media archives know, for all practical purposes, what actually happened -- i.e. who indeed tracked the environment successfully, thus saving the world into which they were born, and who tried to bend the environment to their own will in an effort to take the future by force, and in the process almost destroyed it.

As for the Bible, I'm certainly no scholar. But I've read enough to know that when it comes to the Bible, fundamentalist Christians don't know the difference between Folgers and fresh ground. Serious modern-day biblical scholarship is waiting for them just outside their hole like a sledgehammer for a mouse.

What interests me as a writer is enticing them out of their hole into the "public arena," having faith in the knowledge that -- though they love to characterize themselves as "manning the watchtower" -- as the ancient proverb says, "Sometimes a man's own mind has a way of telling him more than ten men in a tower."