America is in the midst of a culture war, or so we’ve been told, over and over again. The idea that the United States is made up of two and only two factions that have nothing in common—groups whose divisions run so deep that there is no chance for reconciliation—has been repeated so often that it has become the default jumping-off point for all sorts of cultural and political arguments. Things got particularly heated after the 2004 presidential elections, when numerous commentators argued that gay marriage was as important to most voters as issues of war or economics, and that John Kerry lost because he couldn’t speak the language of faith. Since then the culture war has become a hugely profitable cottage industry for provocative pundits: Bill O’Reilly has summed up the culture war as a battle between the “armies of the traditionalists” and “the committed forces of the secular-progressive movement that want to change America dramatically”; Dinesh D’Souza has argued that secular liberals bear some of the blame for 9/11; and John Gibson has raised the alarm over the liberal plot to ban Christmas.

The culture war makes for good theater and serves as a tidy conceptual framework for liberals or conservatives frustrated with this or that new law or court decision. But it also ignores the huge amount of overlap between the secular and the religious, and simplifies into black-and-white something which is far more difficult to describe. Sometimes it takes a good work of fiction to explain what pundits and columnists can’t, and this is certainly the case with The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta’s newest novel. Perrotta offers a much more shaded, realistic account of the interactions between secular and religious America than do the bloviators of CNN and Fox News.

The action in The Abstinence Teacher splits between Ruth Ramsey and Tim Mason. Ruth is a 41-year-old divorcee, a mother of two, and a human sexuality teacher at the public high school in Stonewood Heights, a well-off suburb in the Northeast. Her trouble begins when, in response to a question about oral sex, she tells a class of ninth graders that “some people enjoy it.” When word gets out, outrage ensues, much of it egged on by Pastor Dennis, the charismatic young leader of The Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth, a burgeoning new evangelical church. Two members of the church sue Ruth and the school district. A tabloid paper describes the incident with the headline “Oral Sex A-OK, Teacher Tells Kids.” One “angry old man” gets up at an emergency school board meeting and suggests that Ruth “had more than a thing or two in common with ‘a certain lady from Babylon.’” Ruth, despite being a longstanding, respected teacher, is able to muster only tepid support in the face of such vociferous, ostentatious moralizing.

As a result, the school is presented with a special assembly on “Sexual Abstinence: Saying Yes to Saying No,” put on by a group called Wise Choices for Teens. The speaker is an extremely attractive 28-year-old named JoAnn who lists the reasons she’s “glad to be a virgin.”

She was happy because she’d never had gonorrhea, like her friend, Lori, a straight-A student who didn’t realize she was sick until prom night, when she discovered a foul puslike discharge on her underwear; or the excruciatingly painful pelvic inflammatory disease suffered by her ex-roommate, Angela, who’d let her chlamydia go untreated, and was now infertile; or herpes, like her old rock-climbing buddy, Mitch, who couldn’t walk home some days because of the agony caused by the festering sores on his penis; or hideous incurable genital warts like her otherwise-cute-as-a-button-neighbor, Misty; or crabs, which were not actually crabs but lice—real live bugs!—having a party in your public hair, like they’d done to her ex-dancing partner, Jason.

Soon, the school board brings aboard Wise Choices for Teens to overhaul the school district’s sex-ed curriculum over the summer. The book begins as Ruth is set to teach the new class—and the curriculum she despises—for the first time.

Her problems get more complicated when she meets Tim Mason, her daughter Maggie’s soccer coach. Tim is a former musician who found Christianity—and Pastor Dennis—after a series of addictions cost him his family. With the pastor’s help, Tim has righted himself, has married a fellow member of the church, and coaches a youth soccer team. Tim and Ruth’s paths cross when, after a particularly emotional soccer victory, Tim forms a spontaneous prayer circle at midfield. Ruth is outraged and drags Maggie off the field.

Ruth attempts to mobilize the town to keep God off her daughter’s soccer field even as she is forced to mouth numerous lies to her students. She again finds herself in hot water after suggesting to her students that the curriculum’s stated 36 percent annual failure rate for condoms might be off, and that Planned Parenthood’s Web site could be a more accurate source of information. Meanwhile, Tim seeks to stay on the spiritual straight and narrow and stay close to his daughter, Abby, whom he only gets to see once a week or so, all while preparing for his next soccer game and dealing with Ruth’s ire.

Perrotta’s canvas has always been suburbia, and he is characteristically adept at painting the claustrophobic nature of a smallish, well-to-do town—though perhaps with less nuance than in Perrotta’s previous novel, Little Children—where no ripple is small and no controversy quickly snuffed. And though The Abstinence Teacher does not break down into the simple, secularism-versus-religion divide that its subject matter suggests, Perrotta unflinchingly portrays the damage that a zealous, overbearing religious minority can do to a community. At one point Ruth chastises herself for not identifying the threat posted by the Tabernacle, and for choosing “to view these skirmishes as a series of isolated incidents, storms that flared up and blew over, rather than seeing them for what they were—the climate in which she now lived.”

Like many religious right figureheads, Pastor Dennis seeks conflicts with secular institutions wherever he can find it; in his eyes, the town’s schools and soccer fields are appropriate battlefields. Never is this clearer than in Dennis’ decision that Tim and his co-coach must take a stand on behalf of the Tabernacle by praying with the team after the next game: “The Pastor had devoted a fair amount of time over the past few days to alerting the media—not just the local and regional papers, but TV and radio stations as well—to what he said was going to be a ‘historic battle in the ongoing war for the hearts and minds of our children.’” Perrotta certainly knows his way around the religious right’s vocabulary; from its constant, apocalyptic language of victimization to its attempts to attract a younger, hipper flock, The Abstinence Teacher’s treatment of Pastor Dennis and his church feels authentic.

There’s sweetness here, too, though, and not just in the weird attraction that slowly builds between Ruth and Tim. Perrotta deftly puts both of his main characters in difficult situations in which the belief systems they’ve chosen have nothing to offer. When first one, and then both, of Ruth’s daughters—both raised in a very secular household—express interest in learning more about Christianity and attending church, Ruth finds the idea repellant, but can’t come up with a justifiable reason to stop them. And when Tim comes to fully grasp the scope of Pastor Dennis’ influence over him—the Pastor instructs Tim not to have sex with his wife until he stops fantasizing about his ex-wife—he begins to wonder whether all of the strict proscriptions of his chosen faith are necessary to keep him out of the gutter.

Recent attempts to reconcile the secular-religious divide have often resulted in a rather bland, uninsightful answer: “Well, we need faith and reason!” Perrotta’s message in The Abstinence Teacher is different, and more subtle. The moral of this parable isn’t that you should believe X or Y. Rather, it’s the revelation that, as much faith as you put in X or Y to guide you through life, you’re eventually going to have to borrow from elsewhere. The vicissitudes of human interaction—our attractions, our enmities, our complex family lives—inevitably defeat the ideologies we choose for ourselves. There will always be moments of discomfort when we have to rely on the unfamiliar to guide us through. For Ruth, there’s nothing she can do but trust her daughters’ abilities to explore Christianity while sidestepping the Pastor Dennises of the world. For Tim, his only hope is to embrace the one concept that has always eluded him: moderation.

And moderation is really what The Abstinence Teacher is about. Far fewer of us are zealots than we’re led to believe, and even our most steadfastly held beliefs fail us from time to time. When Perrotta gives us a glimpse of Tim questioning some of the more conflicting portions of the Bible, or Ruth toeing the line between raising her daughters as strictly secular and giving them breathing room to make their own path, he’s providing a much more realistic account than the stale, us-versus-them tripe that permeates conversations about faith in the America.

Jesse Singal is an Associate Editor at Campus Progress.