"Sullivan Group Think"

Scott Payne understands what the Dish is trying to do, and I'm grateful for his kind words. But I should say I regret nothing about my blogging about Sarah Palin last year and would do it again - with feeling - if such a duplicitous farce of an apparatchik were to be advanced as a possible leader for the US in the future. None of the crucial factual evidence for her constant fabulisms was ever provided and the MSM, as uninterested in the truth as they are eager for their own reputations, curled up into a little ball of deference. As for my use of the term Christianist, here's my defense of the word, from 2006:

... let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

This noxious corruption of religion is still at large. Gingrich, for example, sees it as a lynchpin for the future of the Republican coalition. And it has clearly helped delegitimize Christianity in the eyes of many who might otherwise be tempted to look at the Gospels in a more open-minded fashion. The damage these fanatics and reactionaries have done to actual faith - let alone a rational politics - is incalculable, and I'm damned if I will allow them to use the word "Christian" to describe their agenda. It isn't.