Red, blue and green (tea)

One perk of covering a White House race from day one is that early-bird journalists snag lots of one-on-one time with the candidate.

Thus, Candy Crowley of CNN found herself sitting with John Kerry in a super-ordinary coffee shop in Dubuque, Iowa. The veteran political correspondent ordered coffee.

The senator, from Massachusetts, ordered green tea.

The waitress, from Iowa, was puzzled.

"I advised the senator that he would need to carry his own green tea in Iowa and probably several other states, as well," quipped Crowley, speaking at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches in South Florida.

Yes, it's time for "post mortems" on 2004. So far, said Crowley, the experts insist the race was decided by -- take your pick -- the 22 percent of the voters that yearned for "moral values" or the 23 percent that were white evangelical Christians.

Crowley grew up in the Midwest and she thinks she can tell red zones from blue zones. Democrats have cornered the green-tea crowd, she said. Republicans are winning what Capital Beltway insiders now call the "Applebee's vote." This schism may have as much to do with cappuccinos and chainsaws as with the New York Times and the Southern Baptist Convention.

Faith played a major role, but it's simplistic to say that religious people voted for President George W. Bush and secularists for Kerry, said Crowley. The religious left has its own moral and spiritual beliefs and it will, in future elections, find ways to express them in the public square.

It would also be inaccurate to claim that evangelicals marched into voting booths and seized control. Bush won 52 percent of Catholic voters, facing a Catholic candidate, and 59 percent of the overall Protestant vote. The New York Times noted that the president, in four years, raised his share of the Jewish vote from 19 to 25 percent, winning two-thirds of the Orthodox Jewish votes.

The elites just didn't get it. "Somewhere along the line, all of us missed this moral-values thing," said Crowley.

This will be painful for journalists to hear. It is one thing, after decades of dissecting media-bias statistics, to know that armies of religious conservatives believe American newsrooms are packed with God-forsaken libertines. It will be harder for journalists to admit that they are blind to important stories.

Nevertheless, it's time to face the facts, said Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

"I am now taking seriously the theory that we mainstream journalists are different from mainstream America. 'Different' is too pale a word. We are alienated. We may live in the same country, but we treat each other like aliens," he said, in an essay called "Confessions of an Alienated Journalist."

"The churched people who embrace Bush, in spite of a bumbling war and a stumbling economy, are more than alien to me. They are invisible. ... My blind spots blot out half of America. And that makes me less of a citizen, and less of a journalist."

As a Catholic progressive, Clark said he finds it hard to hear "moral values" without thinking of "showy piety and patriotism, with more than a dash of racism and homophobia." He knows all about "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and Bubba the Love Sponge. How come so many other Americans know what it means to be "evangelical," "charismatic" and "born again" and feel at home at church suppers?

Right now, there needs to be "more self-doubt in the journalistic system, as opposed to arrogance," said Clark, reached at his office. "We need to be able to say that we don't know it all and that we need to learn. We need to take a step back."

Most of all, said Crowley, journalists and blue-zone leaders must grasp that many parents feel threatened by the "coarsening" of American culture. They feel attacked.

"It's like they are saying, 'I was made to feel like a freak because I go to church' or 'I was made to feel like I was an idiot because I believe in God,' " she said. "They're telling us, 'I want my family safe and I want to be able to teach my children what I believe is true.'

Can Christians vote 'no'?

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre is opposed to abortion and the rise of what Pope John Paul II has called the "culture of death."

But this does not mean that he backed President Bush.

The University of Notre Dame scholar is concerned about health care and fair wages. But this doesn't mean that he marched into a voting booth and picked Sen. John Kerry. During a year in which religion and politics constantly made headlines, MacIntyre published an essay that frayed nerves on the religious left and right.

"When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither," he said, writing for the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. "When that choice is presented in rival arguments and debates that exclude from public consideration any other set of possibilities, it becomes a duty to withdraw ... so as to resist the imposition of this false choice by those who have arrogated to themselves the power of framing the alternatives."

While some argue that good citizens must vote, MacIntyre said that the only vote worth casting in 2004 was "a vote that no one will be able to cast, a vote against a system that presents one with a choice between Bush's conservatism and Kerry's liberalism, those two partners in ideological debate, both of whom need the other as a target."

These are fighting words for many politicos.

Late in the 2004 race, some religious activists spoke out against "single-issue voting," a phrase often used to condemn those who cast votes based on a politician's stance on abortion. Other activists said MacIntyre and other writers who advocated political abstinence were naive and irresponsible for focusing on so many issues.

In one of his "BreakPoint" radio commentaries, evangelical apologist Charles Colson said Christians must vote in order to take part in God's work in this culture. In this case, Colson was specifically rejecting the views of historian Mark Noll of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill.

Colson said that some Christians seem to yearn for a return to the past, when fundamentalists retreated from politics rather than face the temptation to sin through compromise. Is this retreat what Noll and others seek?

"That position is dead wrong and damaging to democracy," said Colson. "It's the utopian notion which assumes divine perfection in fallen humans. His assumption that we can support only candidates who have perfect scores according to our reading of the Bible makes me wonder how he votes at all. And if that9s the standard, all of us should stop voting."

Obviously, Noll disagrees, arguing that it is not wrong to seek consistency on faith-based issues. Here is his short list -- race, taxes, trade, health care, religious freedom, the international rule of law and "life issues," such as defense of the unborn.

"Each of these issues has a strong moral dimension. My position on each is related to how I understand the traditional Christian faith that grounds my existence," writes Noll, author of "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind." Yet neither the Democrats nor the Republics have made "a serious effort to consider this particular combination of concerns or even anything remotely resembling it."

MacIntyre agrees and cannot imagine embracing either major party, right now.

"Try to promote the pro-life case ... within the Democratic Party and you will at best go unheard and at worst be shouted down," he said. "Try to advance the case for economic justice ... within the Republican Party and you will be laughed out of court."

The philosopher has, in recent weeks, declined to defend his essay or to state how a Bush win or a Kerry win might affect his political views.

One thing is certain: religious believers will face similar choices again, or worse. It's hard to imagine how the religious left can compromise on abortion or same-sex unions. It's hard to imagine how the religious right will cope with the rise of cultural progressives such as Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"I don't feel that I need to elaborate on what I have written at this time," said MacIntyre. "Besides, I plan to write about this subject again at greater length. These issues are not going away because I do not believe that major parties have the right answers. I also don't believe they are asking the right questions."

After the Baptist baptism bus tour

They are some of America's most infamous religious statistics and conservatives have been known to quote them with glee.

The United Churches of Christ lost 14.8 percent of its members during the 1990s.

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) was down 11.6 percent. The United Methodist Church fell 6.7 percent and the Episcopal Church another 5.3 percent. But there was nothing earth shattering in the Glenmary Research Center's 2000 data. The Protestant mainline has been fading for a generation.

The Southern Baptist Convention's new leader knows all that.

The Rev. Bobby Welch also knows that his flock's totals have crept higher in recent years. But he isn't gloating. He's worried about the fine print in the baptism pages of the North American Mission Board's "Strategic Planning Indicators."

"The last thing I would want to do is put down what people call the church-growth movement," said Welch. "We've got a lot of fine people doing fine work and we have some fine churches out there that are growing. But I do think that sometimes we forget that just because we have church growth doesn't mean we're growing the church.

"Sometimes, we get so focused on filling up our church buildings that we forgot to ask if we're winning any new people for the Lord."

This is the way Welch talks when he starts wrapping his soft northern Alabama accent around the scriptures, statistics and theories linked to his favorite topic -- evangelism. But the veteran pastor of the First Baptist Church of Daytona Beach, Fla., doesn't talk much about the kinds of large-scale evangelistic projects that grab media attention. His passion is for quieter forms of one-on-one persuasion that have a steady impact on church life.

That's why he cares that the number of baptisms has declined in Southern Baptist churches four consecutive years. What is just as disturbing, said Welch, is that the SBC's baptism rate had been parked on a statistical plateau since 1951 -- averaging 384,000 a year while the nation's population boomed.

Immediately after his June election as president, Welch announced a high-profile project to promote evangelism efforts from coast to coast and beyond. He got himself a star-spangled bus and set out on a 25-day, 20,000-mile marathon to visit each of the 48 contiguous states and, by airplane, Alaska and Hawaii.

The goal is to baptize 1 million people between June of 2005 and June of 2006, which would require a jump of 600,000-plus over last year's total of 377,357. The purpose of the bus tour was to get people to take this challenge seriously, he said, during a post-tour visit to South Florida.

Part of the problem, he said, is that too many Southern Baptists are camped inside their big, safe, healthy churches and think this is enough. Most of them believe that the church is supposed to win converts -- sort of.

"Not all evangelicals are evangelistic," said Welch. "They say they believe in evangelism, but they don't get out and do it."

The denomination's baptism statistics reveal other sobering truths. After the age of 11, it becomes increasingly difficult to win converts -- even among children in church families. Also, only 40 percent of the adults baptized into Southern Baptist congregations are true converts. The rest were already members of other Christian flocks.

Welch describes this in blunt language: "What that means is that we're not reaching the pagan pool. ... We're just rearranging the furniture inside the church."

Christians have all kinds of excuses for why they don't talk to other people about faith and forgiveness, heaven and hell, he said. It's easy to say that modern Americans believe that "soul winning" is rude and intolerant or that all religions are paths that lead to the same eternal destination. Truth is, some people don't want to talk with real people who are facing real problems in the real world, he said.

"It's no harder to talk to people about Jesus today than it ever has been," he said. "The problem is that we've been frightened away from even trying. We've become content to wag our finger at the world and tell it how sorry it is and how good we are, instead of telling people about the grace of God. We've got to get over that."

W. Bush -- theological Rorschach test

In Iowa, some United Methodists want the president and vice president tossed out of their church for "chargeable offenses" against its doctrines on justice and peace.

"Our hope is that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will recognize the sinfulness of their actions, sincerely repent for what they have done and move on to change their ways," say leaders of the liberal TheyMustRepent.com network. "Although we recognize the improbability of that outcome, we believe that with God all things are possible."

Meet President Bush -- theological Rorschach test.

Throughout this campaign, Catholics have debated Sen. John Kerry's claim to his place at the Communion rail. The Democrat has drawn both criticism and applause in pulpits and pews while wrestling with the specifics of his Catholic heritage.

Bush has been caught in a different vise. If he affirms specific beliefs, secularists and liberal believers call him a fundamentalist. If he declines to be specific, critics ask what he is hiding. Is he a fundamentalist, a born-again Christian, an ordinary megachurch evangelical or some other brand of believer?

The New York Times Magazine says the president's faith is irrational and dangerously simplistic. That's the word from journalist Ron Suskind, whose acidic Oct. 17 profile ignited fresh debates about religion and the White House. According to critics in this camp, Bush thinks he's on a mission from God and, thus, has the same black-and-white moral worldview as al Qaeda. The result is an American version of the conflict "raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion."

Not all progressives agree.

Jeff Sharlet, co-author of "Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible," says it's nonsense to call Bush a fundamentalist. The president rarely digs into biblical details, at least not publicly, and lacks the rigid literalism at the heart of true fundamentalism. Instead, he talks about following his "instincts," his "gut" and his "heart" when he makes big decisions.

"Believing, it seems, is more important to the president than the substance of his belief," argues Sharlet, in an essay called "Our magical president" at TheRevealer.org.

The key to Bush is his belief that "if you believe you can do something, you can," he said. This "gentle disdain for perceived reality" is a kind of faith in faith itself. What many critics miss and what most of "Bush's more orthodox Christian supporters seem to dodge, is that this is not Christian doctrine by any definition. It is, in fact, a key element of the broad, heterodox movement known as New Age religion."

Meanwhile, one of America's top evangelical historians has decided he cannot step into a voting booth and endorse either candidate. This is news in some circles because Mark Noll teaches at Wheaton College, Billy Graham's alma mater.

"Seven issues seem to me to be paramount at the national level: race, the value of life, taxes, trade, medicine, religious freedom and the international rule of law," said Noll, writing in the Christian Century.

"Each of these issues has a strong moral dimension. My position on each is related to how I understand the traditional Christian faith. ... Yet neither of the major parties is making a serious effort to consider this particular combination of concerns or even anything remotely resembling it."

Another evangelical says Bush deserves special attention because he has gone out of his way to find favor with religious conservatives. Whatever Bush has said about the conversion experience that saved him from his wicked, alcoholic past, the available evidence about the rest of his life "raises questions about whether Bush is really a Christian at all," according to Ayelish McGarvey, in the American Prospect.

The president rarely goes to church, has little interest in evangelism, has a history of nasty campaign tactics, flip-flopped on the tough issue of embryonic stem-cell research, lacks humility about his mistakes and has edited the Bible down to a convenient set of commandments she calls "evangelical agitprop."

"I'm no Kerry fan. I mean, I don't think he's a very good Catholic," said McGarvey. "But if Catholics can dissect Kerry, point by point, then I think it's more than appropriate for evangelicals to do the same for Bush. What does it say about us if we're afraid to do that?"

After the Veggie sale, Part II

While brainstorming the other day, Phil Vischer thought up an idea for a wacky late-night show that could also deal with faith issues.

This show would not feature digital vegetables and Vischer playing a big, red, silly tomato named Bob. It would not be a VeggieTales show produced under the Big Idea brand he created a decade ago. It would sink or swim on its own.

This felt exhilarating and terrifying.

"That was the whole thing with VeggieTales," said Vischer. "It was wonderful, but everything we did had to end up as a digital-animation video product. We had a studio to protect and everything had to feed that franchise. ...

"What if you had an idea for a live-action movie? Too bad! How about new characters? Too bad! How about new children's books? Too bad! Maybe an old-fashioned animated movie? Too bad! What if we went back and did a puppet show? Too bad! We had to stick to Veggies."

The good news, said Vischer, is that he is now free "to chase all these creative bubbles" wherever they go. The bad news is that he is free to do so because Big Idea Productions crashed into bankruptcy last year after losing an $11 million lawsuit about a verbal contract with a distributor, only 10 years after releasing the first Veggie video called "Where is God When I'm S-Scared?"

VeggieTales started with Vischer and Mike "Larry the Cucumber" Nawrocki, two wisecracking puppeteers who exited Bible college because they were in trouble almost as often as they were in chapel. Vischer learned computer graphics, Nawrocki wrote silly songs and a dream was born.

At its peak, Big Idea was a 210-person animation studio in the Chicago suburb of Lombard. The reorganized Big Idea, Inc., has downsized and moved to Franklin, Tenn., just outside Nashville. The new owner is Classic Media, which controls Lassie, Rocky & Bullwinkle, the Lone Ranger and other wholesome products.

Nawrocki and a circle of others made the move. Vischer did not, but agreed to keep providing the voice of Bob the Tomato and legions of other characters. He will write one of three Veggie scripts each year and consult on others. "The Lord of the Beans" is just around the corner.

"I'm trying to tell the stories that God is putting into my head," said Vischer, pausing. "And I'm still trying to learn how to let go. But it's good to let go. It was killing me, trying to run a studio and be creative at the same time."

The late Bob Briner would have agreed, 100 percent. Throughout the 1990s, the president of ProServ Television used "Roaring Lambs" and his other books to urge believers to stop cranking out predictable products to sell to the converted.

Briner was a big VeggieTales fan. Yet, weeks before dying of cancer, he offered sobering media insights that would soon become highly relevant to the Big Idea story. Briner said that when he started paying attention to the Christian marketplace, he feared that the artists didn't have what it takes to make competitive, mainstream products. This was not the case.

"We have people who can tell stories, write songs and be funny," he said, in April of 1999. "We have lots of talented people. I've decided that this isn't the problem. Our biggest problem is that we don't have enough people who know how to handle the money so that the talented people can do what they need to do."

Vischer found that out. He said he started out telling stories and ended up "chasing the Walt thing" as he tried to build a corporate brand that could compete with the Walt Disney Company and the rest of the industrial entertainment complex.

In the end, it was hard to tell funny stories. The pressure was too great.

"I wanted to do as much good as I possible could as fast as I could," he said. "I mistakenly believed that the bigger we got, the more opportunities we would have to do good. What I learned was that just the opposite was true.

After the Veggie sale, Part I

NASHVILLE -- VeggieTales fans know that strange things happen when the big green digital cucumber launches into one of his infamous "Silly Songs with Larry."

The new "School House Polka" salutes words that sound alike, with the chorus: "Homophones, homophones, where the crews come cruising down the plane. Homophones, homophones, I need my kneaded biscuits plain!" The twist is that Larry keels over on his back and delivers an accordion solo that fuses great moments in rock music history.

Some nervous Christian consumers let Mike "Larry the Cucumber" Nawrocki know that (a) Jimi Hendrix was not a Christian musician, (b) "Smoke on the Water" was not a Christian song and (c) "School of Rock" was not a Christian movie.

"There are always people who are going to say, 'We don't think rock 'n' roll like that is appropriate for our kids,' " he said. "You just have to be funny anyway, even if that bugs them."

Nawrocki pondered this artistic dilemma, then continued: "The whole key to humor is to be able to criticize the authorities and make fun of the powers that be. But that's hard for some Christians to do. ... That may even mean criticizing the church, in particular. But how are we supposed to do humor if we can't do that?"

It isn't easy to write computer-animated comedies that are safe enough for Sunday school, yet hip enough for media-soaked youngsters and their parents. Yet this high-wire act has made VeggieTales one of the most recognized brands in family entertainment.

These days, even loyal customers are scrutinizing new products from Big Idea, Inc., the reorganized company that replaced Big Idea Productions. Phil "Bob the Tomato" Vischer created the original company in 1993, but it slid into bankruptcy in 2003 after losing an $11 million federal lawsuit about a verbal contract with a video distributor.

The new owner is Classic Media, which owns Rocky & Bullwinkle, Lassie, the Lone Ranger and a flock of family franchises. Nawrocki, musician Kurt Heinecke and a small team of other Big Idea veterans moved from greater Chicago to join a cluster of entertainment companies in Franklin, just outside Nashville. Vischer will continue to do the voices of his many digital characters, while writing one Veggie script a year and consulting on others.

The key is that the VeggieTales brand is still healthy, said Terry Pefanis, the new chief operating officer. During the bankruptcy proceedings, bidders put Big Idea under a microscope and found that it was selling 5 million home video products a year, with about $50 million a year in total product sales.

No one doubted the future of the Veggies -- if they remained hip and wholesome. But Pefanis said executives from one or two entertainment giants still thought that Big Idea needed to stop quoting the Bible so much.

"They kept saying that VeggieTales needed less God so that we could make it big on mainstream television," said Pefanis. "But the problem is that if we stop talking about God, what use are we? What are we going to tell stories about? ... On top of that, if we start leaving out the Bible, we're going to lose our core audience and we're dead."

As entertainment entrepreneurs, the new Big Idea leaders know they have to do what they have done in the past -- dominate the Christian market, while reaching out to suburban superstores that hail from Arkansas. While the Christian retail industry claimed $4.2 billion in sales in 2003, the Big Idea team keeps talking about two bigger ideas in the marketplace. Forty percent or more of all Americans say they go to church and 80 percent or more say they believe in God.

Thus, the new "Sumo of the Opera" ends with a bite of St. Paul's Letter to the Hebrews, but gets to its lesson on perseverance via Gilbert and Sullivan, professional wrestling, ESPN and "Rocky."

"You can't just haul off and hit people in the nose," said Nawrocki. "If you do, you've started selling a sermon and that doesn't work.

Beyond the Brighton bombing

Twenty years ago the Irish Republican Army bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton in an attempt to kill Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her entire cabinet during a Tory Party conference.

Jo Berry, Harvey Thomas and Patrick Magee will mark the Oct. 12 anniversary with a reflective evening at the historic St. James' Church near Piccadilly Circus in London. Their goal is to talk about the lessons they have learned from one of the most shocking terrorist acts in the bloody history of the Irish and the English.

Berry is the daughter of Sir Anthony Berry, one of five people who died.

Thomas was Thatcher's press secretary and barely survived.

Magee was the IRA terrorist who planted the 100-pound bomb behind a panel in the bathroom of Room 629.

"The fact that the three of us will stand side by side as friends is a story in and of itself. It shows that true reconciliation is possible," said Thomas, during lectures at Palm Beach Atlantic University. "Reconciliation isn't easy. But how do we move forward if we cannot forgive our enemies?"

The 65-year-old Thomas is a broadcaster who is as well known for a 15-year stint with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association as for his years as Thatcher's media specialist. Thus, he works in two different worlds. Thomas is as comfortable dissecting Bible passages with other Christians as he is fine-tuning public-relation campaigns for politicos and executives in Saudi Arabia and other tense locales. His passport has been stamped in 120 nations.

Reconciliation in the post-September 11th world, he said, must involve secular people as well as religious believers. It means convincing hostile armies of true believers to treat each other with respect, if not tolerance. What is the alternative?

"What happens if nothing is done is almost certainly global warfare," said Thomas. "We have to ask ourselves: What are we willing to do to try to head that off?"

Berry has asked the same question. Two days after the bombing she fled to the St. James sanctuary and sent up a non-believer's prayer to find some way to seek peace and deal with her own grief. This pain led her to seek a meeting with Magee when he was released from prison after 14 years, as part of the Good Friday peace agreements in Northern Ireland. They met privately and then agreed to have further talks about forgiveness, this time filmed by BBC cameras.

The public forum with Thomas is the next stage in this bridge-building process. Berry hopes it draws everyone from political activists to therapists, secular diplomats to believers from many different sanctuaries.

"I dream of a world in which we have choices to resolve conflict other than violence," she said, via email. "Talking with Patrick Magee is a way of learning from the past, which may give insight for creating a different future. I am learning about the effects of blame and looking at how we make choices not to blame."

Thomas was made a similar pilgrimage.

For millions of people in Great Britain and around the world, one of the most unforgettable moments after the bombing was watching -- live on television -- as rescue workers pulled the 6-foot-4, 280-pound Thomas out of tons of concrete rubble. His own memories of those moments center on hours of frantic prayers for his family.

Now Thomas has new memories. His dialogue with Magee began with letters while the bomber was in prison. A few years later, Magee ended up sitting in the Thomas family kitchen, sharing baked beans, stories and regrets. They talked about decades of oppression, the bitter choices of civil war and the dehumanizing effects of violence.

One of Thomas' daughters asked Magee: "You do realize that if you had succeeded in killing daddy, I wouldn't be here?"

Magee wept and so did Thomas and his family.

Reconciliation is a process, said Thomas, but it begins with a decision to forgive. This is a personal choice and it's impossible for one person to tell another when or how to take this step. Seeking personal reconciliation is not the same as seeking justice.

"I have no doubt that I needed to forgive Patrick Magee," he said. "It's what God wanted me to do. So I did it."

Call it church-state espionage

Call it church-state espionage.

Unitarians and other activists on the religious left have been slipping into evangelical pews to endure altar calls, praise songs and sermons against gay marriage. The Kansas-based Mainstream Coalition has a simple reason for doing this. If preachers openly endorse President Bush, its agents can report these crimes to the IRS.

Reacting to these watchdogs on the left, the Religious Freedom Action Coalition promptly launched Big Brother Church Watch -- www.ratoutachurch.org -- to infiltrate churches that might back Sen. John Kerry. Big Brother agents will, for starters, target Unitarian Universalists, the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the predominantly gay Metropolitan Community Church.

The good news is that this strategy may increase church attendance, quipped the Rev. James L. Evans of the First Baptist Church in Auburn, Ala.

"Reports from both groups seem to indicate that the monitors will be going out two by two," said Evans, in a satirical essay for the University of Chicago's Martin Marty Center. "Monitoring pairs could easily become monitoring teams. We could witness the rise of monitoring communities.

Snakes, Bush and the Greeks

The woman on the telephone was speaking English, but it was hard to understand what she was saying because of her strong Greek accent.

She was a journalist in Greece, but I couldn't catch the name of her newspaper. She told me her name, but I didn't get that, either. Lest readers judge me too harshly, it helps to know that I attend an Eastern Orthodox parish with Lebanese priest who speaks Arabic, Greek, French and English. I am used to interesting accents.

The reporter's first question told me why she was calling -- Google. Before long, I learned that she was interested in American politics as well as religion.

"You are an expert on Christians who worship with snakes, yes?"

Not really, I said. I have read books on the subject and I used to teach in the mountains of East Tennessee, but I never met snake handlers. In modern times, even some of the Baptists there drive Volvos, wear Birkenstocks and listen to National Public Radio like everybody else. OK, I didn't say exactly that, but I tried to explain to her my limited contact with this edgy flock on the far fringe of American Protestantism.

"Can we interview you about this?", she asked. "You have written about it?"

This told me that she had found -- via Google -- my 1996 column on "Snakes, Miracles and Biblical Authority." It was based on lectures by Baptist historian Bill Leonard of Wake Forest University and described the theological lessons he learned from his friendship with the late Arnold Saylor, an illiterate country preacher who took rattlesnakes with him into the pulpit.

In that column, I noted: "Millions of Americans say the Bible contains no errors of any kind. 'Amen,' say the snake handlers. Others complain that too many people view the Bible through the lens of safe, middle-class conformity and miss its radical message. Snake handlers agree.

"Millions of Americans say that miracles happen, especially when believers have been 'anointed' by God's Holy Spirit. 'Preach on,' say snake handlers. Polls show that millions of spiritual seekers yearn for ecstatic, world-spinning experiences of divine revelation. 'Been there, done that,' say snake handlers."

Snake handlers, in other words, believe they have biblical reasons for engaging in their risky rites. They quote the Gospel of Mark, in which Jesus tells his disciples: "And these signs shall follow them that believe; in my name they shall cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover."

The Greek reporter, it turned out, was interested in more than snake handlers. The newspaper wanted to probe American religion, in general. To be specific, it planned to visit Ohio, a crucial state in the White House race. She wanted to know: Did I know any snake handlers in Ohio?

Say what? I tried to figure out the logic behind this question, which seemed to be linked to European stereotypes of this country. The thinking might go something like this: Snake handlers are evangelical Protestants. President Bush is an evangelical Protestant. Therefore, Bush is the candidate of snake handlers. Then again, Bush is a United Methodist. I doubt there are many evangelical United Methodist snake handlers in Ohio. Was this an overlooked voting block?

I urged her to get in touch with Leonard, the actual expert on the subject. That was the least the newspaper could do.

"Can we go ahead and interview you? We do not have a lot of time," she said.

A few days later, Leonard had not received any calls from Greece. He was still fascinated by the beliefs and customs of snake handlers and, come to think of it, he received a recent call from a Chinese newspaper asking questions about this topic. He declined to speculate on the logic of the Greek reporter's Ohio questions.

Truth is, snake handlers "are the bain of liberals and conservatives," he said.

"I can't say why there is this interest," said Leonard. "I don't think it's about Bush, but about strange religion in America -- Pentecostals, healing, evangelicals, snake handlers. ... They are always used as caricatures for something."