The actors in This Beautiful City did an extremely good job portraying contemporary worship. Below: Brad Heberlee portrays a New Life pastor. Photos by Harlan Taylor | Actors Theatre of Louisville.

When I walked into a rehearsal of This Beautiful City at Actors Theatre of Louisville last month, I had to reorient myself: Yes, I was indeed in Actors Theatre, in the midst of preparations for the Humana Festival of New American Plays, not down the road at Southeast Christian or some other contemporary worship church.

The writers, director and actors in This Beautiful City spent several weeks researching the play in Colorado Springs, which they identified as the unofficial capitol of evangelical Christianity in the United States, and with the presence of megachurch New Life Church and organizations such as Focus on the Family in the town, it’s hard to argue. Embedding in the places or situations they portray on stage is the modus operandi of The Civilians, the New York-based company that created This Beautiful City. The intention of the chief creators — director/writer Steve Cosson, writer Jim Lewis and composer Michael Friedman — was to research a movement that had exerted a tremendous influence on the country over the last several decades, but with which they were relatively unfamiliar, as is most of the New York performing arts crowd.

God love NYC artists, they’re tremendously talented, but sometimes you want to say to them, "you’ve gotta get out more."

To The Civilians’ credit, they did. And true to those first few moments I saw in rehearsal, their portrayal of contemporary worship, the brand that is fortifying growing churches across the country, was spot on. But, as a writer who covers both performing arts and Christian popular culture, I went in wondering what it would say about the Christian faith and how the evangelical community would come across.

The play, which already has engagements lined up in Los Angeles, New York and Washington D.C., makes Colorado Springs look like a tense town where a religious group has made a calculated effort to take over the culture of the city and some people who are not of that group are very mad about it. A Jewish Air Force veteran denounced efforts to evangelize his sons who are at the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, and an alternative newspaper editor frothed over the evangelicals’ attitudes and efforts to dictate public policy.

There are positive portrayals of faith, with numerous people talking about how their turns to Christianity saved them from lives of drug abuse and other vices and even how the style of worship was a key to drawing them in: "If I had just walked into some boring old church, I’d still be sitting on my couch smoking pot," one woman says. There is a rousing sermon toward the end of the overlong play from an African-American minister, telling people not to wallow in self pity: "Don’t look in the morning paper to see if you made it through last night!"

The Civilians just happened to be in Colorado Springs at New Life when its pastor, Ted Haggard, was revealed to have been in a relationship with a male prostitute and drug dealer. In the aftermath of the scandal, there were some great insights into what has made the evangelical movement successful, and what some of its flaws are. One of Haggard’s sons observed, "he had this performance going on, like he had it all together. But he didn’t. None of us have it all together."

A few scenes later, a woman observed that she and others submit to the church’s authority because they’re, "willing to release everything if someone will tell us what do."

It showed devotion, but there was precious little depth in the Christians, as they were portrayed in the play. The leaders of the church were shown as slick marketers. One New Life pastor calls The Bible God’s text message to us, but there was little recitation of or specific reference to said message. Many of the followers were shown as simple, like the woman looking for people to tell her what to do.

In general, the opposition usually got all the good lines. At least one person the night I saw the show left at intermission, offended because he thought his faith was being mocked. A New York-based director I talked to between shows last weekend, which was the theater professionals and critics weekend, seemed to take it as a given that the evangelicals were a negative influence in the play.

Let’s go back to the original point of this piece: the portrayal seemed authentic. These guys did interviews, they spent time in the place they were portraying. So, if the image of evangelical Christians they came up with was slick and shallow, was that because that’s what this brand of Christianity is, or what they saw, or how they chose to see? It is easy to — and people of faith often do — have a knee-jerk reaction of offense to such things. But sometimes the best thing to do might be reflect: why did these gentlemen get this impression? How do admitted outsiders see faith through the people who profess it? Is the message clear and well articulated? Are its roots in scripture or Madison Avenue?

Spending time engaging Christian pop culture, I’d say there’s more to it than what the Civilians found, though I give them a lot of credit for authentic performances and finding some profound truths, though they are truths that may be uncomfortable to some modern evangelicals. One of the pitfalls of marketing faith is if you get too caught up in the marketing, you can miss the centuries-old basis of what you believe, and then others will never have a chance to see it.