BY THE BOOK

It seems an unlikely combination -- investigative reporting and the evangelical Christian press. But it's a workaday reality for Jon Trott and Mike Hertenstein, the Woodward and Bernstein of their particular beat. Trott and Hertenstein write for Cornerstone magazine, which started out in the early 1970s as a handout published as part of the ministry of Jesus People USA, an evangelical Christian community in Chicago's inner city. Over the years it evolved into an oversize magazine with wild graphics, arts reviews, interviews, theological and social commentary, and investigative stories, and now claims a circulation of some 50,000.

Their evangelical Christianity aside, Trott and Hertenstein differ from their mainstream counterparts in several ways. For one thing, they live communally with about 400 other Jesus People in a ten-story building that was once a luxury hotel. Living communally means that from time to time the investigative duo must report to the kitchen for dishwashing duty. Another difference: they don't draw a salary but live from a common purse, from which they receive money for everything from tickets to a movie to a new pair of sneakers. (The community's income comes from several sources, including a Jesus People roofing company, a painting company, and a woodworking shop.) Bibles are more common in the office than Roget's Thesaurus, and the Kaypro computers are antediluvian.

Neither Trott nor Hertenstein has had any journalistic training. Trott, who is thirty-five dropped out of college. Hertenstein, four years younger, joined the Jesus People straight out of high school. Both worked at various other jobs in the community, including roofing and house painting, before joining the magazine staff.

Trott took on his first major investigation in 1989. The subject was Lauren Stratford, the author of Satan's Underground, who claimed in her book and in talks to church groups that she was a survivor of satanic ritual abuse. Trott and two colleagues scrutinized her claims and concluded that her story was a complete fabrication.

More recently, Trott and Hertenstein checked out the story of a stand-up comic and evangelist named Mike Warnke, who bills himself as "America's number one Christian Comedian" and has sold more than a million records and tapes. Warnke had built a twenty-year career on claims that he had been a drug addict and high priest in a rich and powerful church of Satan before converting to Christianity. For a 20,000-word article that appeared in Cornerstone this past July, Trott and Hertenstein interviewed Warnke's "closest friends, relatives, and daily associates," who "knew the real Mike Warnke, who was not a drug fiend or a recruiter for Satan. But he was a story-teller." The orphan-to-drug-addict-to-Satanist-to-Christian saga laid out in Warnke's best-selling book, The Satan Seller, doesn't jibe with other evidence, Trott and Hertenstein wrote, or even with accounts in Warnke's other books and tapes. Word Inc., a subsidiary of ABC-Capital Cities, has halted the sale of Warnke's records until he answers questionsaised by the Cornerstone article and subsequent coverage.

Cornerstone writers answer to a board of pastors, including editor Dawn Herrin. When they discuss their journalism, they talk about ethical standards based on the Bible, say, or their responsibility as Christian journalists to expose wrongdoing among fellow Christians.

"Even if something is uncomfortable to us, or will be detrimental to us or our Christian cause," Trott says, "we feel that as Christian journalists we have to tell the truth about that."

"We always remind ourselves, Don't take pleasure in destroying people," Hertenstein adds. "We can take joy in the hunt, but you can't be excited that you've got the dirt."

Trott joined Investigative Reporters and Editors this past spring, in time for Cornerstone to put the IRE logo on the masthead of its Warnke edition. During their investigation of the comedian, the two reporters took the IRE handbook into courthouses as a manual for learning their way through records rooms. "We just went by the book," Hertenstein recalls. "By about the fourth courthouse, we were Batman and Robin."

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