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A: It's a wake-up call that we're letting an awful lot of shabby stuff go on in the name of Christ. I've been in over 30 countries and the prosperity gospel is spreading like wildfire. And it's very strange to see hundreds of thousands of poor Africans or Latin Americans line up to hear one of these prosperity gospel preachers who has four gold rings, drives a limousine, is wearing a $3,000 Italian suit. And they're coming barefoot and in rags and they're giving him money. There's something about this that is deeply distasteful. At the same time, we have to ask: Why does this message have an appeal to these people? One of the reasons is that the prosperity gospel preacher is talking about poverty. And he's saying that God cares about poor people's situation.

Q: A new group of best-selling atheist writers -- Richard Dawkins and others -- are laying the blame for many global crises at the feet of religion, particularly Christianity.

A: In my book, I try to respond. A lot of what these new atheists are saying is, "Gosh, it looks like religious people are always for war. They're very concerned about their own wealth, but not concerned enough about the desperately poor. They're very often careless about the environment and use their religion to justify exploitation of the environment." So they're seeing some bad fruit from the religious tree. Their solution is: Cut down the tree. To me, the best antidote to bad religion is good faith.

Q: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a religious person who went out there and tried to deal with the hurts and injustices of the world. Are there models we can follow? King? Mother Teresa?

A: It's interesting that you mention both Mother Teresa and Dr. King because they represent two important but different models. Mother Teresa represents the model of caring for the poor, being with them as they die and, in a personal and compassionate way, showing the love of God to poor people. Dr. King represents a different approach, which says that we also have to deal with the unjust systems that keep causing people to suffer.

Q: Today, many evangelicals are fascinated with the end of the world. There's the popularity of the "Left Behind" books. Their belief is: Things will get worse in the world; that's part of God's plan leading up to Armageddon.

A: What a lot of well-meaning, committed evangelical Christians don't realize is that the view of the end times that they believe is biblical and historically Christian is actually a newcomer and an anomaly in Christian history. That view of the end times was never thought of until the 1830s. That doesn't make it wrong, but it does make it suspect.

Q: How, then, do you read the Book of Revelation?

A: It turns out that Revelation is a classic example of a genre of literature that existed in the Jewish world from about 100 B.C. to about 200 A.D. Modern scholars call it Jewish Apocalyptic and it is not trying to predict the end of the world. It uses bizarre imagery -- often dreamlike imagery -- to describe contemporary politics and to give people encouragement to be faithful in the midst of oppressive political regimes. When you read the Book of Revelation in that way, it comes alive. Instead of being a kind of strange code book that tells us that there's no hope and we should just expect things to get worse, it becomes a call to courage and faithfulness against all odds.

Q: I've been surprised at the antipathy from a lot of Christians toward Islam. Franklin Graham voiced their concerns when he said it was an evil religion, that Allah is not the God of the Bible. What do you say?

A: I believe there is a form of racism among well-meaning, but misguided and misinformed, evangelical Christians. It's becoming acceptable to create stereotypes of Muslims that are inaccurate. Muslims are just like the rest of us. They're like Christians -- there are wonderful, kind-hearted Christians and there are mean-spirited Christians. One of the messages I'd like to get through to my evangelical brothers and sisters is when we try to practice Jesus' teachings about loving our neighbor toward our Muslim neighbors, we are not being unfaithful to Jesus Christ, we're being faithful. But when we create stereotypes of people and are ready to call a person an enemy and have nothing to do with them, we are being unfaithful to Jesus Christ.

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