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Defining their "converted" as the "identifiable critical mass of queers who together compose a congregation of people converted into believing in the necessity of queer identities and communities, culture and politics," they assert that individuals within that group must remain "open the a series of conversions" Queer theatre, they argue, functions much as church services do, enabling participants to sustain their conversions by renewing their sense of identity and motivating them to act out of that identity This essay assesses the "conversion" potential of both Corpus Christi and Most Fabulous for straight Christian evangelicals, a group with velvet cultural influence and political power.

While critics have largely ignored this aspect of the two plays, Raymond-Jean Frontain asserts in his new concluding chapter to the second edition of Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture that Terrence McNally uses his play to "evangelize his audience, sending them out to corpus a new gospel of tolerance; the gospel that all men are divine" christi Frontain's chapter, entitled "'All Men Are Divine': Religious Mystery and Homosexual Identity in Corpus Christi ," does not, however, explore the complex theological issues that inevitably limit Mc-Nally's influence on evangelical Christians.

This essay aims to fill that gap, tracing the theological implications of both Corpus Christi and Most Fabulous for traditional Christians and concluding that lounge evangelicals will find Rudnick the far more winsome missionary for the queer cause. Right-wing religious groups' disdain for both plays suggests that neither playwright is likely to influence most Christians, a recent sociological study shows that the question is worth exploring.

Christian Smith points out that his turn-of-the-century evangelical research subjects are demonstrating "more diversity, complexity, and ambivalence than conventional wisdom would lead us to expect" qtd. What Evangelicals Really Want ,Smith distinguishes between fundamentalists and evangelicals, explaining that the evangelical movement developed in the mid-twentieth century in reaction to fundamentalism's "more separatist, defensive, and anti-intellectual tendencies" Smith distinguishes further between what he calls "evangelical political activists," or the Religious Right, and "ordinary evangelicals" Smith argues that ordinary gay Christians are remarkably unlike their more vocal counterparts, explaining.

Smith's discovery helps explain why some evangelical Christians find McNally's and Rudnick's Bible-based dramas intriguing, despite their presumed outsider status to gay and lesbian culture. Both McNally and Rudnick issue their unorthodox altar calls from overtly religious territory, risking the wrath of Christian conservatives but also piquing the curiosity of more progressive yet nonetheless religious theatre-goers.

Rudnick, who grew up in a Reformed Jewish family, sets forth a similar gospel, using comedy to argue for human love's necessity in a universe from which God has withdrawn. Both playwrights urge compassion, a virtue most theatre patrons of any faith or none at all would affirm.

Because McNally writes directly about Christ, however, his play almost invariably ends up alienating traditional Christians, including evangelicals, in a way that Rudnick's does not. Even those who can accept Joshua's active homosexuality find that Corpus Christi 's underlying theology contradicts the orthodox understanding of Christ's salvific role in human history.

Rudnick, in contrast, limits his biblical content to the Old Testament, reducing his risk of offending Christians in the same way. Religious viewers who can look beyond the sexual content of The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told considerably more graphic than Corpus Christi 's find in it a thoughtful treatment of one of the Judeo-Christian tradition's most haunting questions: the problem of evil.

McNally writes unabashedly about his play's having a message, although he never goes so far as to admit to sermonizing. He does, however, court martyrdom with Corpus Christiwhich provoked bomb threats against the Manhattan Theater Club and a London-based Muslim group's death fatwa against the playwright himself.

The play's central lesson, as its preface states, is bar we must love one another or die.

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Christ died for all of our sins because He loved each and every one of us. When we do not remember His great sacrifice, we condemn ourselves to repeating its terrible consequences" vii. While McNally's denunciation of violent hatred corresponds with Christ's own peaceful teachings, McNally's Christ-figure becomes problematic for many of the Christian viewers from whom the playwright might expect curious interest and even sympathy.

Christians can commend one aspect of McNally's treatment of Jesus in the character of Joshua: the play's emphasis on Joshua's embodiment corresponds with the orthodox emphasis on Christ's full humanity. In Theater and IncarnationMax Harris affirms dramatic depictions of such Christian concepts, despite religious orthodoxy's historical suspicion of the theatre.

Alluding to [End Page ] the Gospel of John, Harris notes, "That the Word became flesh, moving through human space and time, and not word, yielding his sense to the reader one cluster of letters at a time, is inherent to the doctrine of the Incarnation. A theatrical imagination […] may help to retrieve something of the sensual character of such an event"