From the review:

In fact, after reading Rodney Clapp's new book, "Border Crossings," it's hard to escape the conclusion that the principal problem with American evangelicalism is that it's so, well, American. In many respects, the book is a follow-up to Clapp's 1996 book, "A Peculiar People," in which Clapp made the case that Christians--specifically, American evangelicals--ought to see themselves as a culture that functions independently of the mainstream. Instead of trying to serve as a "sponsoring chaplain" to American culture in the hope that people will love them, or to regain power and influence through politics, Christians should work at being an alternative to the "technologically-oriented" and "consumer-based" mainstream culture. [    ]

Clapp is saying that almost everything American evangelicals know about relating to their non-evangelical contemporaries is wrong, or at least outdated. Other Americans share neither their spiritual aspirations nor their moral reasoning. Sticking to the "foundationalist" script is not only unproductive, it's counterproductive. Why? Because in addition to assuming something about your interlocutor that isn't true, it "inclines us towards believing that those who disagree are necessarily benighted or ill-intentioned." [      ]

The countercultural Christianity Clapp is advocating would require nothing less than a reinvention of the species Evangelicus Americanus. The reinvention would also reshape American evangelicalism's approach to politics. As Clapp points out in the essay entitled "Calling the Religious Right to Its Better Self," the Christian right can be fairly understood as "the latest manifestation of the evangelical refusal to accept the passing of American Constantinianism--which basically mean's evangelicalism's own hegemony over the culture." With no real sense of what it means to be the church--what Christians call an ecclesiology--evangelicals depend on being American--and Americans being Christian--as their sole source of a corporate identity. Little wonder so much of the "religious right's" rhetoric is characterized by fear and sense of crisis. There's no plan "B."

From an interview:

I continue to hear people say things like, "We're going to take this nation back for Jesus." Well, I don't want to convey that I'm saying, "To hell with America. I don't care about what happens to the United States, or to Britain, or any of these other nation states." But I am trying to say that that's not our primary focus, and I think there has been-for most evangelicals-an understanding that Christian "civil religion" is the glue that is going to hold America together, that America really is the last best hope of earth. I very clearly want to contradict that and say, "No. It's not America. The church is the last and greatest hope on the face of the earth." [   ]

I think of the Gulf War, for example; the Congress took more seriously the question of waging war than your typical evangelical church! There was very little discussion of that in many of our churches. I think of George Bush's 1992 address to the National Association of Religious Broadcasters where he thanked evangelicals for "helping America, as Christ ordained, to 'be a light unto the world.'" And then he linked this to the Gulf War. The evangelical leaders, of course, responded with rousing standing ovations. I don't think you have to scratch very far before you start getting into ways in which we are much more shaped by the American ethos than by the Christian ethos.