That Old-Time Religion

STEALING JESUS

How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity.

By Bruce Bawer.

340 pp. New York:

Crown Publishers. $26.

When I was in college, one of my WASP classmates gave me what he thought was good advice. ''As a Catholic,'' he said, ''you'll never get hired by the best firms or join the best clubs. You should become an Episcopalian.'' I ignored him and let my Roman Catholicism lapse, replacing it with nothing. Eventually, I moved to New York and became one of the ''liberal intellectuals'' to whom Bruce Bawer has addressed ''Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity.''

Like most other university professors and contributors to mainstream media, I am urban, secular and, Bawer says, foolishly, dangerously ignorant. For instance, when Andrew Delbanco published ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil'' (1995), people like me believed him. Satan may be long dead for us, but it was blind of Delbanco to put ''Americans'' in his subtitle, as if we were everybody. In fact, Bawer points out, ''tens of millions of Americans'' believe in an active force of evil: ''They are haunted by it. They call it Satan.'' They are the fundamentalist Christians, and they are legion.

No matter that they're also mostly poor, uneducated and reside mostly in the Midwest and South. Their masses may be pathetic, but their leaders are cunning and ruthless. The agenda of organizations like the Southern Baptist Convention and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition has in the recent past not stopped short of calling for God's swift judgment on homosexuals, Jews and members of the many other groups the so-called fundamentalists hate, along with the abolition of every liberty Americans supposedly pride themselves on and the transformation of this country into a theocratic police state, ruled of course by fundamentalists. So long, Bawer says, as the national media go on regarding fundamentalists as harmless or marginal -- so long, indeed, as they are allowed to get away with the preposterous assertion that they stand for Christian fundamentals -- their power and danger can only grow. We badly need a wake-up call, and he intends to deliver it.

In many ways, Bawer belongs to the sleepy crew he means to jolt into action. Urban, highly literate and frequently published in mainstream magazines, he is also gay. His earlier book ''A Place at the Table'' (1993) was another sort of alarm bell, informing the public that most gay people neither pierce their genitals nor despise the nuclear family; all they want is their fair share. Bawer differs from his compadres, however, in that he has visited the hinterlands and attended fundamentalist services. He has even read the books fundamentalists swear by, from the Scofield Reference Bible (first published in 1909 and revised in 1967) to Hal Lindsey's ''disastrously influential'' ''Late Great Planet Earth'' (1970). The bulk of ''Stealing Jesus'' is devoted to informing the ignorant reader what those people actually believe.

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