"Books and Culture" Again

How is Evangelical Christianity nearly indistinguishable from "the world" that it so often claims to be "in but not of"? [What a laugh!] Let me count the ways . . . no, on second thought, let me not. It would be too depressing. On the other hand, let's do read Books & Culture, the mission of which seems to be to reintroduce a lively intellectual honesty into the Christian dialogue. Example: this article about the gross misuse of statistics in order to draw a consumer response. [Funny, that sounds just like, Hmm, "the world."] For a sample, I'm going to cut to the chase, where author Christian Smith pegs the problem with commendable precision:

But I suspect that to squarely address this question, the self-criticism and raising of standards needs to go deeper. The real question is not whether evangelicals can clean up their statistical act. The deeper question is whether American evangelicals can learn to live without the alarmism that is so comfortably familiar to them. Evangelicals, by my observation, thrive on fear of impending catastrophe, accelerating decay, apocalyptic crises that demand immediate action (and maybe money). All of that can be energizing and mobilizing. The problem is, it also often distorts, misrepresents, or falsifies what actually happens to be true about reality. And to sacrifice what is actually true for the sake of immediate attention and action is plain wrong. It should be redefined as a very un-evangelical thing to do.