The election of George W. Bush has been a mixed blessing for the nation's 30 million or so evangelicals. Having once complained that the mainstream media barely even knew they existed, they now find themselves subjected to endless scrutiny. Their music, their dating habits, their tattoos, their food, even their beliefs--all are the focus of books, newspaper articles and magazine features. Alas, a lot of such coverage reads like the accounts of a dizzy anthropologist making his way among the inhabitants of a lost island in the South Pacific. What a strange tribe this is! Look at how they live!

"My journey across the country and through the Evangelical youth movement began after George Bush's bewildering reelection knocked the air from my lungs and the hope from my heart." So writes Lauren Sandler in "Righteous: Dispatches From the Evangelical Youth Movement." An "unrepentant Jewish atheist" who was "raised in Harvard Square," Ms. Sandler spent three years working at National Public Radio before embarking on her journey into the Christian heart of darkness.

There is nothing wrong with a writer's telling you, as they say, where she is coming from, but Ms. Sandler never lets you forget it: "Righteous" is really much more about the author and her prejudicial views than about the young evangelicals she is purporting to study. She lectures the readers, and sometimes her interview subjects, about the correct way to see things: She declares that "in most of the secular world--and certainly throughout the fundamentalist world--women's sexuality is demonized (while men's is praised)." When watching black people put money into the coffers of a church, she sneers that "people can't buy themselves out of racism" and "Jesus won't save them when they're turned down for a mortgage."

When Ms. Sandler meets a 20-year-old woman named Samantha at an anti-abortion, Rock for Life concert, the author can barely contain her condescension. Samantha, as it happens, was adopted as a baby: She explains to Ms. Sandler that she was "sacrificed to love" by her biological mother, who, in Ms. Sandler's summary, "could have chosen to abort but didn't." Samantha had a difficult adolescence that included heavy drinking, but she has cleaned up her act now, she says, and lives by her Christian faith, devoting part of her time to abortion-clinic protests.

Naturally, Ms. Sandler doesn't much like Samantha's anti-abortion politics, and she doesn't put much stock in her religious convictions either, seeing them as a form of brainwashing. Ms. Sandler thinks that Samantha would have made a "formidable feminist" if only "a secular group, and not a network of religious right activists," had gotten to her first. "If only the phone numbers of women's rights organizations had begged to be called in times of crisis," she writes, "if only leftists had offered the promise of love within a genuine expression of youth culture." In short: Young lemmings like Samantha might have been saved from running off a cliff--that is, saved from their own ardent religious belief--if only activist outreach had been more aggressive.

The book's title-phrase is a slogan of the evangelical counterculture. The play on "body piercing" is an allusion to the crucifixion, obviously; but the phrase also signals a break with a cultural stereotype. Evangelical belief, it turns out, does not necessarily make young people into buttoned-up preppies or goody-goodies: They may be rebels with a cause--and possibly a nose-ring or two.

Mr. Beaujon is particularly interested in the musical aspect of the evangelical counterculture. He travels to rock festivals and underground clubs, interviewing singers, guitarists and record producers. He tries to discern the origins of Christian rock, finding it among the Jesus People of the 1960s, to whom Southern Gospel didn't really appeal. ("How could you expect 'em to love Pat Boone after they'd heard 'Led Zeppelin II'?").

Mr. Beaujon also tries to puzzle out the relation of Christian rock to the surrounding culture both then and now. He notes that a lot of the music he hears during his travels is mediocre at best, but he acknowledges that most secular rock music is mediocre too.

As for Christian rock's religious message: It is sometimes explicit, aimed at believers or at those ready to hear a Christian message as such. But many of the artists Mr. Beaujon speaks to walk a fine line. Their faith-message, if sincere, is less overt, muffled in feel-good sentiments and vague allusions. They want to appeal to a broader audience--sometimes simply for the sake of commercial success.

Mr. Beaujon's report inevitably raises a host of questions: Is it possible to enter the counterculture and also, so to speak, the kingdom of heaven? More mundanely: Are Christian musicians, caught up in the emotional intensity of their performances and wanting to appeal to rebellious youth, allowed to swear occasionally? Must they mention Jesus? And what subjects are off-limits? At one point, Mr. Beaujon visits a Festival of Faith and Music--really a kind of conference with musical accompaniment--at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich. One speaker declares that there is "no harm in engaging in popular culture." In fact, the speaker says, it's "probably blasphemous" to think that there is "a 'secular molecule in the universe,' since everything is shaped by God." Other speakers sound similar pop-culture-friendly notes.

Mr. Beaujon writes about the event with his usual sense of fairness and curiosity. But he is driven to wonder, when it is over, "whether I'd just driven 750 miles to hear Christian kids get the okay to listen to Eminem." A good question and even a biblical one: how to be in the world but not of it.

This is cache, read story here