A couple of years ago, browsing through a used bookstore in St. Helena, CA, I discovered a paperback edition of Alexis de Tocqueville's classic, Democracy In America. The volume was flawless, the spine and the covers uncreased, the pages without a mark or fold. I bought it, only to discover that the book had a story to tell beyond Tocqueville's. St. Helena is a fascinating artifact in itself, one that dramatizes the problem I write about in my forthcoming book, The Diversity Culture.

The town's Main Street might have been the set for Bedford Falls, and you half expect to bump into George Bailey outside the Building and Loan. It was an all-American, white, Christian town, its economy agricultural and its ways rural and bourgeois.

St. Helena is anything but that now.

While its economy remains heavily agricultural, one has to specify that the crop is grapes and the product wine. The storefronts that once held dry goods, hardware, and clothing at middle-class prices now display oils and soaps, Cartier fountain pens, designer jeans, and prints of John Lennon drawings. The old movie theater that once would have shown It's a Wonderful Life now shows indie flicks.

Ethnically, there are Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Latinos, Blacks, and a healthy number of people whose background can't be determined at a glance. Sexually, there are gay and lesbian couples, and the number of married tourists spending the weekend is declining.

The spirituality of the town is Eastern. There are evidences of Buddhism and Hinduism, often in the forms of those systems' gods themselves. And the politics of St. Helena . . . well, the town's in the orbit of San Francisco.

Such was the context in which I opened my new literary treasure to find something I'd overlooked -- an inscription inside the front cover.

Uncle Jack has given this copy of Tocqueville to Kyle (my guess at the handwriting), addressing him pointedly as "Sir" and referring to his new "career defending America." The choice of Tocqueville tells us a great deal about Uncle Jack, as does his ebullient patriotism: democracy is "in Americans' souls," and it "empowers all great Americans onward to greatness."

Uncle Jack is a red-blooded, conservative, Fox News guy, busting his buttons about his nephew's joining up.

July 19, 2003 is well into the period when post-invasion Iraq was looking muddled, with WMD nowhere to be found and security almost as rare. But the invasion was still seen as a military success, and the 9-11 mindset remained strong.

So who sold Uncle Jack's gift, unread, the cover not even bent back, to that bookstore? Was it a disillusioned Kyle, rejecting the cause he had joined? Or was it a bereaved parent or spouse, embittered by too steep a sacrifice?

Either way, the gift given with pride seems to have been rejected viscerally. Uncle Jack would've felt right at home in old St. Helena. But the rejection of Democracy in America belongs to the new.

With America polarized about politics, sexual morality, war, and religion, any discussion about Jesus Christ is threatened by hot emotions. Evangelicals now are wondering how to navigate the hostility between left and right, the points of view of interest groups, and the intersections of church and state.

If Uncle Jack is an evangelical, he is probably trying to "reach" his St. Helena relatives, fumbling for some way to get his spiritual views across, and finding it hard even to get a response. If any dialogues about Christ do take place they do not go well, ending somewhere in "Bush lied, people died" territory.

The Diversity Culture is about a recovery of confidence that the Gospel can be heard powerfully in this atmosphere. It gives a tour of the barriers between evangelicals and other Americans. It develops a theology for reaching diverse groups. And it gives practical help for dialogue.

I wrote this book because I've lived at the intersections between evangelicals and the diversity culture my whole life. I graduated from public schools and a secular university. As readers of this blog know, I am committed to the arts. I am, in some ways, more at home in the diversity culture than among evangelicals. But I have also learned how needful the gospel is on the diversity culture's own terms. And I've learned how potent the message of Jesus Christ is when I give it as he did.

Main Street in St. Helena, changed though it certainly is, offers more opportunities for the gospel than ever.

The apologetical style I exhibited in recent sermons and developed in a series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) is not designed to be aggressive. That is, my argument is not intended to close the sale with unbelievers, but to supply what is appropriate for a season. I think the stance of evangelists has been too rigid about procedure. There is a moment in which you become a Christian, the moment when you pray the sinner's prayer. When you pray the prayer you pass from darkness to light. The appeals of evangelists and the arguments of apologists have often been designed to drive a person to that moment.

Many Christians are rethinking this stance, wondering if important decisions are really settled by a single prayer. Two theological truths are relevant.

First, there is no middle ground between those who are in Christ and those who are not. The two heads of household in the world, Jesus and Satan, are at war, and a person is in one house or the other. "[The Father] has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." (Colossians 1.13-14)

The purpose of the sinner's prayer, to articulate a moment of transfer, is important.

Still, secondly, the Bible prescribes no spiritual pitocin for inducing the new birth. The sinner's prayer is not found in any conversion in the New Testament. Baptism declares a faith that already exists, and is not a means of belonging to Christ. The gospels show many individuals engaging with Jesus in a process of transfer (e.g. John 3.1-21; 7.45-52; 19.38-42) that is slower than the moment of praying the prayer. This process is under the direct management of the Holy Spirit (John 16.7-11).

While there is nothing inherently wrong with the sinner's prayer, then, it is only one possible means of coming to Christ, and I know many people who have shown the fruits of the new birth without it. Biblically, the radical change that moves a person into Christ's household has a process behind it. The change does not occur in a moment, but perhaps may become apparent in a moment.

The aggressive style of apologetics that claims positively to prove Christ's claims, and to disprove competing claims, has been too focused on The Moment of conversion, and not focused enough on the process in which people find themselves dealing with Christ.

I am trying to develop a style to bring clarity to that process, a style that frames choices instead of driving points. It involves several assumptions about audience.

For starters, I assume that no one needs me to drive them to Christ. Christ is driving them to Himself through his Holy Spirit. If the Spirit is at work in a person, then I need to assume the honesty of the person's intentions. If the Spirit is not motivating the person, then no argument from heaven or earth will work.

In other words, I am talking to people who are well and rightly motivated in their decision-making. They will be moved by words that are in harmony with the Spirit's voice (1 Corinthians 2).

Furthermore, I accept that someone investigating Christ is uncertain. He or she is weighing claims, and is trying to find the best basis for deciding between them. That uncertainty is not a spiritual problem, but is, in fact, the Spirit's goad. The evangelist who tries to force certitude before the individual has genuinely found it is making the disastrous error of being disrespectful. In accepting people's uncertainties, I am not compromising with "relativism," but am recognizing that their questioning is what God will use to draw them to himself.

Where the Spirit is involved, a person's doubts are an ally, not an adversary.

Finally, I recognize that there are many factors involved in making life decisions, and each of these factors has to be treated with its own ethic.

Intellectual factors are significant in such decisions, and these must be addressed with rigor. But people also make spiritual decisions in response to pain. It is not appropriate to intellectualize someone's pain, as if suffering can be "answered." Even further, people make life decisions out of their sense of who they are: can they see themselves on a particular course with a particular group? Facts and logic often have little to do with this issue, since it turns more on culture and experience.

To treat all of these factors appropriately and biblically is to treat the process of conversion with the respect it deserves.

In other words, there is a time to reason, and a time to react; a time to think, and a time to feel. There is a time to analyze and a time to synthesize.

In the process of life-change, there is a season for every kind of word.

by Matthew Raley On March 20th in Dallas, TX, I will give a workshop on my new book, The Diversity Culture: Creating Conversations of Faith with Buddhist Baristas, Agnostic Students, Aging Hippies, Political Activitsts, and Everyone In Between.

This book is about the new openness to anything and everything in America, and about how you can be like Jesus in the midst of it. Here is an excerpt.

My workshop will be part of the Christian Book Expo, for which you can register at the top of my sidebar. If any of my Texas readers can be there, I'd love to meet you.