“Sweet Heaven’’ is intimate in tone, and expansive in scope. Some of the people Sharlet writes about don’t appear to be related to faith at all: indie musicians who both are and are not shills for Clear Channel, the intellectual impresario Cornel West, and anarchists protesting at the Republican convention - they, Sharlet writes, are about “ ‘[r]eligion’ as broadly defined as the mouth of the Hudson.’’
No one parses the history of Christian fundamentalism as succinctly and elegantly as Sharlet, as he does here in a brief piece about two Ohio radio hosts: “… World War II changed the steady plod of Christian futurism, quickened it … old-time religion resurrecting as cyborg doctrine.’’ Or, for that matter, its present: the BattleCry youth crusade, which fills stadiums with angry teens fighting holy war against the secular world, is “a cramped little country in which there is not enough room to be lost or found, just ‘saved’ as a static condition.’’ But Sweet Heaven takes Sharlet far beyond his comfort zone.
His observations are never simple, and his eye is focused less on ideology and more on character, including his own. Sharlet describes himself, somewhat self-effacingly, as a “religious voyeur,’’ but he is never far from the action here. In one essay, he carries a package containing new analysis of the activist’s Brad Wills shooting death in Mexico to Wills’s solid Midwestern parents: … bearing what passes for good news to the Wills these days.’’ When an evangelical teen trying to save him struggles for the right Biblical reference, Sharlet helps him out: “I flipped his Bible open to Genesis 25 - through luck or divine intervention, the middle of the Abraham story.’’ Investigating the economics of New Age spirituality, Sharlet finds himself undergoing an “emotional cord-cutting’’ ceremony with Sondra, a spiritual healer, after which he gets the flu, and is “down like a sedated hippo for a week.’’
