WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 (UPI) -- More than 50 million Americans, perhaps even twice as many, including a substantial segment of Catholics, consider themselves evangelicals, according to the Rev. Gerald R. McDermott, an Episcopal scholar.
They are a highly diverse group of Christians united in, among other things, their faith in Jesus Christ as incarnate God and Lord and Savior of sinful humanity -- and the supreme authority of scripture.
But if you watched CBS's "60 Minutes" Sunday, you'd think most evangelicals fervently embraced the kind of theology expounded in Tim LaHaye's and Jerry Jenkins' "Left Behind" bestsellers describing the impending end-time tribulations.
You'd think most evangelicals are convinced that God will all of the sudden remove all children and the elect -- meaning true-believing Christians -- to a safe place and then condemn all others to eternal suffering."
You'd think the likes of President George W. Bush, an evangelical Methodist, ranked themselves among the former, whereas people such as "60 Minutes" reporter Morley Safer belonged to the latter -- in the eyes of most evangelicals.
"What would be my fate?" Safer asked the Rev. Todd Wagner of the Watermark Community Church in Dallas.
"Folks like yourself that are gonna be here, are gonna go through all the events Christ outlined in Mark 13 and Matthew 24 -- some of which are quite horrific," the pastor replied.
The "60 Minutes" narrative then informed the viewers: "For evangelicals, the rapture and what follows are factual history, history of the future, prophecy. "It's not a minority view. ... It's a very mainstream view," Wagner told Safer.
Not surprisingly, this stereotypical portrayal of their faith group infuriated many evangelicals, who consider themselves the new mainstream of U.S. Protestantism and have in recent decades made enormous strides in theological scholarship.
"I was appalled," fumed Richard Cizik, the Washington-based vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals. "They ("60 Minutes") have merged a speculative theological belief system with contemporary evangelical political views.
"They created a caricature that might apply to some evangelicals on the fringe. It's hard to know where to begin to correct the stereotype. One gets to the conclusion that the interviewer had his mind made up before he started the program."
Was it this -- or was it another example of the "religiously ignorant journalism," which sociologist Christian Smith of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill keeps chastising with increasing urgency?
He may have a point. The shoddiness of the "60 Minutes" story was further evidenced by images of non-Christians facing tribulation. They showed, for example, worshiping Sikhs -- a strictly monotheistic Indian religion -- and called them Hindus (who believe in thousands of deities).
Smith fumed at the "ridiculous broad-brushing of evangelicals, a highly complex community."
His charge that the media enter an alien universe when it reports on evangelicals echoes a decade-old complaint by Peter Steinfels, the former New York Times religion editor.
Steinfels attributed the media's failings in covering religion properly to a multiple of "I's" -- ignorance, indifference, incompetence, ideology and insufficient resources.
As McDermott, Cizik and Smith pointed out, the likes of LaHaye, Jenkins and Wagner are not representative of U.S. evangelicalism, which is affiliated with superb academic institutions such as Wheaton College in Illinois, Calvin College in Michigan, Pepperdine University and Fuller Seminary in California, and Baylor University in Texas.
Nor is the American Airlines pilot who allegedly spoke to passengers over the loudspeaker on Flight 34 from Los Angeles to New York last Friday about Christianity a typical evangelical. Over the loudspeaker, he reportedly asked Christians to identify themselves and urged non-Christians on board to seek out advice from passengers who had obediently raised their hands.
As McDermott said, evangelicals reiterate simply what the church has taught for nearly 2,000 years -- tenets whose reversal by liberal Protestantism has gradually emptied mainline sanctuaries over the last 200 years.
Evangelicals differ little from Roman Catholics and Lutherans in their biblically grounded belief that nobody but God himself knows the time of Christ's second coming (Acts 1:7) and that therefore all eschatological expectation was impermissible.
They also agree that Christ is the only way to salvation. But according to McDermott, they differ over whether one must consciously know and name Christ before death in order to be saved.
There are the "exclusivists" who say, you must.
But then, said McDermott, there is the growing "inclusivist" wing of evangelicalism, which concurs with the Roman Catholic position, that one must not necessarily know Christ before death for salvation.
Nobody can tell if a person accepts Christ at the moment of death, or if a non-Christian will be given a chance to meet and embrace Christ after death. Moreover, McDermott added, "exclusivists often don't realize that they have to be inclusivist in principle because even they believe that babies and the retarded go to heaven -- and that the Old Testament saints went there as well."
What evangelicals find so egregious about the "60 Minutes" report is that it lumped them together with a minority called the dispensationalists, whose center today is Dallas Seminary.
Their system of theology sees God working with man in different ways during different ages; in Christianity, the term "dispensation" refers to a period in history in which God dealt with man in a specific manner -- conscience, the law, and grace.
According to dispensationalists, the present era of grace will soon be followed by the future millennial kingdom. They insist that the millennium described in Chapter 20 of the Book of Revelation cannot be interpreted as symbolic.
This is not the place to discuss the merit of this theology, other than to quote scholarly evangelicals such as Gerald McDermott who hold that it is based on a false reading of scripture.
And this is precisely what makes the stereotyping of perhaps a third of all Americans by their own media a dangerous undertaking -- it sets them up for ridicule.
(CBS correspondent Morley Safer did not return UPI's call Monday.)
