God's Own Country: Tales from the Bible Belt by Stephen Bates Buy the Book

Hodder & Stoughton £12.99

Working with Stephen Bates as I have for the past few years while he has covered religion for the Guardian, a defining characteristic has been his somewhat pugnaciously-expressed sense of puzzlement that anyone could believe and behave as does the US Christian right. All credit to him for going out there to find out why.

I recall vividly one General Synod session, when we were sat as usual in the overheated press room at Church House and Bates was musing on the preacher he heard on his car radio while driving to Memphis for some of his research. "Satan is out to destroy your children," the preacher said, asking for a member of the congregation to show him a baby. One couple obliged with a six-month-old girl. "Cute baby, very cute," said the preacher "But that cute baby is a Child of Perdition. Ya gotta beat it out of her. Now you don't need a big stick to do that, a 12-inch ruler like you get in school'll do."

I remember thinking then that I couldn't wait for his book to come out, and he does not disappoint. This story, and many more like it, are detailed. As Bates says, we Europeans might not understand or appreciate the religious right, but we do need to understand more about it, so we can comprehend what is going on inside the world's most powerful nation.

The most staggering aspect of it all is its sheer complexity, the many-layered permutations of belief in the US that mean that when the Democrats fielded a Presidential candidate, John Kerry, a practising Catholic who went to Mass each weekend, he could still be dismissed by the right as irreligious. As Bates acknowledges, God is not dead in the US, and nor can fundamentalists be dismissed as irrelevant.

In the end, Bates cannot answer the question he poses to himself, of whether it is the US that is out of step with the modern world in persisting with its "old time religion", or whether it is the UK and Europe who are getting left behind. But just reading his account, from the Salem witch trials to the modern debates over abortion and gays, I couldn't help but pray that it is not us.

A Wing and a Prayer by Katherine Jefferts Schori

SPCK £9.99

In just 13 years since her ordination in 1994, the former oceanographer Katharine Jefferts Schori has swum to the very top of The Episcopal Church's rocky sea and is now its Presiding Bishop. She is also a qualified pilot.

By any account she is an exceptional woman although, not surprisingly given her sex and her liberal views on gay ordination, her elevation has not been welcomed universally in the Church she leads. Rather like Rowan Williams at Canterbury, she is in a bit of a "no win" situation. At present it looks as if neither of them, however hard they try or whatever miracles they work in the various meetings around the world convened to resolve the crisis, are going to be able to prevent, at the very least, the realignment of the Anglican Communion they serve, if not its total break-up.

What is refreshing about this book is that it pretty much steers clear of the politics and shows us the Katharine Jefferts Schori who is woman, priest, mother and wife as well as pilot and biologist. More important, it shows us a woman who has gone from being down in the ocean, swimming with the fish, to becoming a fisher of men and women.

She writes: "Jesus is really saying to Peter that he will become the net, or part of it, as he goes off to fish in other seas. We all make up that net, interconnected, tied together, sometimes torn, setting out - and sent out - to fish for life." She represents a diametrically opposite style of religion to that described by Bates in his book, yet she is also irrepressibly, some might say irredeemably, US Episcopalian.

Yet whatever her critics say, she stands in the two-millennial tradition of the very first disciples of Christ. And if her chatty and proverbial style is not to the taste of some, it really is little different in that to parts of the Bible itself.