But being Christian and taking Jesus as your savior was for Janice, Jackie, Madonna, and others a way of saying, “I commit myself to being a moral person. I daily try to be good, to help, to forgive, and in fact to work hard at being good.” “If I know a person is a Christian,” one woman told me, “I know we have a lot in common. I’m more likely to trust that he or she is a moral person than I would a non-Christian.” Underlying all these other bases of honor—in work, region, state, family life, and church—was pride in the self of the deep story. The people I came to know had sacrificed a great
...more
