I could tell, by the way things were going earlier today in this thread, that confusion over nomenclature was the major cause.

Obviously, REB is a Christian -- that is, he's a member of a church, and believes that Jesus was, is, and shall ever be the Messiah prophesied in Isaiah and elsewhere. REB's also a political conservative (and, I would guess, a fiscal conservative as well). However, as a Methodist, he's a "mainstream Protestant" -- no more part of the "Religious Right" than Tom Brosz, who is also a church-going conservative.

I've been acquainted with Christian fundamentalists -- biblical literalist, charismatic, the whole works -- who express no desire to change the behavior of their nieghbors, or their country. I've also been acquainted with radical social "conservative" reactionaries with a big desire to change their country, but without any religious faith at all.

"Religious Right" doesn't cut it any better than "conservative Christian" or "Christian conservative". They're just not exclusive enough for the rabid combination of radical interpretation of scripture and radical demands to change the laws of the land. For someone like Pat Robertson, and the advocates of ID, and the kind of people who steal and/or deface books from Mary Anne's library (among countless others, I'll bet), and the "church" in Kansas which runs the godhatesfags.com website, we need a new coinage.

And I've got just the thing. It's derived from another fairly recent coinage, just as linguistically awkward but already freighted with exactly the same kind of anti-democracy fanaticism and bloody-minded insistence on a return to a glorious past (mostly if not entirely imagined), when all dissent was apostacy -- or worse, heresy and anathema.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Christianicism.