STANDUP FOR THE LORD.

Adam Green discusses the trend of Christian entertainment

From 1993, John Lahr on the subversive comedy of Bill Hicks

Most accounts of religious awakening feature a dark night of the soul, a moment just before God reveals his grace, when everything looks hopeless and faith seems impossible. For Brad Stine, a forty-four-year-old politically conservative, Evangelical Christian standup comic, that moment came at the end of the last millennium, when his agent and his manager both stopped returning his calls. For more than a decade, Stine (who was nine when he found Christ) had earned a decent living in show business--first as a magician, then as a clean, though not overtly pious, comedian, doing his bits in front of brick walls in clubs across the country. But his career had slackened, and his chances of making it to the big time--the "Tonight Show," his own sitcom--had grown remote. Mired in depression and doubt, he started to question his most fundamental beliefs. As Stine recalls it, "I thought: Jesus, either you're not real or I'm missing something."

Then, one afternoon in the tiny kitchen of a one-bedroom apartment in Las Flores, California, where Stine was living with his pregnant wife and young son, he began to pray. He asked God to take over, to tell him what to do, offering to forgo wealth and fame in return for peace of mind. "It was Abraham and Isaac," Stine told me. "I finally brought the knife down on my life and my career, and said, 'I'm willing to sacrifice this thing. I'm willing to let go of what I love most--my comedy--in order to have God.' "

Later that day, he got an offer to appear on a televised Christmas special on North Carolina's Inspiration Network, and he realized, he says, "I was a mainstream artist who wanted everything the secular entertainment industry had to offer, but he--God--had bigger plans." Stine quit the club circuit, found new management, and started working a different set of rooms, bringing what he calls his "progressive, contemporary-style" humor to a new audience. The enthusiastic response showed Stine that he had at last found his calling--that his career had become a ministry. "What these churches are becoming, as venues, is sort of what those comedy clubs were in the seventies and eighties," he told me. "It's this gigantic market of people who literally have never had this before. I've been stinkin' digging for years in this mine, and suddenly it's like--oh-ho-ho-ho--I've struck the mother lode."

Last year turned out to be one of Stine's busiest ever. He played dozens of church dates, at five thousand dollars a show--more than he used to make in a week in the clubs. He recorded his first DVD, "Put a Helmet On!," at the Thomas Road Baptist Church, in Lynchburg, Virginia--or, as he sometimes calls it, "Jerry Falwell's joint." He went on an eighteen-city tour with the Promise Keepers men's ministry. He appeared on Pat Robertson's television show, "The 700 Club," and he entertained at private holiday parties for the staffs of Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, Falwell's church, and Promise Keepers. Recently, there have been discussions about his performing at the Republican National Convention in New York, later this month.

Stine went back on the road this year to try out material for a second DVD. His first gig was in Estes Park, Colorado, a small town about forty miles northwest of Boulder, where he performed at the Y.M.C.A. of the Rockies for several hundred Christian men on a spiritual retreat. His Saturday-night and Sunday-morning shows capped a weekend whose highlights included a lecture by a motivational speaker, Dr. Steve Farrar, called "Men Leading the Charge: God's Game Plan for a Man and His Family," and a series of workshops, among them "Missions Awareness: The Muslim World," whose moderator said, "9/11 is a natural outgrowth of what the Koran tells its followers to do."