Silly Show-Biz Book Club #16: Stephen Baldwin's Guide to Better Sex Through Christ
I owe a debt of gratitude to Daniel Radosh's Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture for hipping me to the existence of today's entry in the Silly Little Show-Biz Book Club, The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the New Hardcore Movement of Faith as well as the mind-boggling genius of Larry Norman. If you own just one album by a freakishly pale, long-haired eccentric Christian outlaw obsessed with the Rapture you cannot do any better than the utterly essential Norman retrospective Rebel Poet, Jukebox Balladeer: The Anthology. Seriously. Buy that shit. You won't regret it.
I was a little wary of Radosh's book initially. If it were dedicated exclusively to ridiculing what Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip indelibly called those Crazy Christians it'd get old pretty fast. But Radosh's book is a fundamentally serious, sober if amusing and entertaining attempt to create a bridge between progressive Jesus-lovers and the secular world. It's less concerned with scoring cheap points at the expense of zealots than in understanding them. It's as interested in what unites Christian Fundamentalists and the secular world as it is in what divides them.
That isn't to say that Radosh entirely refrains from snark. When Stephen "Sarah Palin's favorite" Baldwin won't sit down for an interview Radosh conducts a mock-interview where his questions are "answered" with passages from Baldwin's gloriously meat-headed exploration of why Christianity is totally tubular. Heaven knows Baldwin gives him a lot to work with.
I expected Baldwin's book to be 90 percent Hollywood tell-all, ten-percent theology. Instead it's ten percent heavily sanitized memoir, 90 percent dumbass theology. Baldwin should be able to deliver a powerful testimony about the power of faith. Baldwin was, after all, a man who enjoyed all sordid temptations of the ungodly world: blow and fame and women and booze and palling around with Pauly Shore. Yet he forsookified–to the X-treme!–the sinful pleasures of the wanton and hellbound for the delayed gratification of an eternity in heaven.
Yet Baldwin whitewashes his pre-saved existence to an almost perverse degree. Fans expecting sordid revelations will have to settle for a passage where Baldwin writes of hanging out at the Playboy mansion with Robert Downey Jr. Baldwin headed down the primrose path to a wine cellar where he and the poster boy for drug abusage spied an image of unimaginable decadence and sin that will haunt him til his dying day. I hope all of you are holding onto your monocles with a steady grip for what I am about to tell you will shock you to your very soul–Baldwin stumbled upon a handful of playmates smoking pot! Can you believe it? That's not even legal! They could totally get arrested for that! Where others saw only hot chicks blazing a fatty Baldwin sensed the presence of pure evil.
When describing his pre-saved existence, Baldwin has a most unchristian habit of making himself out to be King Shit of Fuck Mountain. He writes that fans want to know if he banged all his sexy female co-stars before Jesus hit like an atom bomb. Baldwin writes that he didn't–but he could have. Now, I'm not too well versed in the New Testament. What does it say about pride again? That it's awesome and everyone should have a whole lot of it?
Here's Baldwin on his pre-Jesus days:
People constantly ask me for details of my "Damascus Road" experience (see Acts 9) that made me give my life to Jesus Christ. Most assume I hit bottom and had nowhere else to turn. They're wrong. Nothing in my life made me say, Oh God I can't live like this anymore. I can't do it. I'm going to kill myself. Help me! I've got to admit, my life was pretty awesome. When I woke up one morning and realized some studio had just paid me eighty times what my old man made a year to play Barney-freaking-Rubble, how could I not pinch myself and say, "Is this a great country or what!