Andrew Sullivan had a lively discussion of his new book on the Hugh Hewitt show that raised a lot of interesting issues.

I don't identify with fundamentalist Christians and I think Sullivan is right in his criticism that too many Christians today act like the Pharisees. But Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell do not represent the average Christian, and it seems like Sullivan should know that. They are fundamentalists. They are not evangelicals no matter how they try to position themselves. Rick Warren is an evangelical, not Pat Robertson.

Also, for all the criticism of the fundamentalist Christians who believe they know the "truth," Sullivan doesn't seem to realize that he has just as much certainty about what it true. For example, in discussing his approval of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania versus Casey, Sullivan says:

I believe in religious liberty. I believe in individual liberty. I believe in the right to be left alone in your home, and in your Church, and in your conscience.

That statement doesn't seem to be riddled with the "doubt" that Sullivan complains is missing from the opinions of people who don't share his pro-choice view. Sullivan clearly has a worldview. And according to him, as a Christian, he has a worldview that is based on his interpretation of the teachings of Jesus, so why are other people forbidden from doing that just because their interpretation is different?

It is a common criticism today that if you divine your truth from the Bible, that is unacceptable. But if you divine your truth from your own internal dialogue or from talking to friends or from a philosophy other than that which is found in the Bible, then that truth is okay. The criticism of devout Christians is founded on a faulty premise: that non-Christians come to conclusions about what they believe without the influence of some sort of philosophical teaching. Even atheism is in itself a philosophy. It's based on the premise that humans are random occurrences and that there is no higher moral power. But since that doesn't come from the Bible, it's considered "objective" and developing public policy based on that view is acceptable. Or Sullivan's brand of Christianity -- that interprets the Bible in a looser fashion -- is held up as being "objective" which of course it is not. Sullivan is just as fundamentalist in his view of the world as any fundamentalist Christian. They just have different conclusions.

Plenty of people are uninformed and make decisions based on what their friends think or party identification, and there is precious little conversation about how the public discourse is being destroyed by uninformed, lazy people who spend all their time watching Fear Factor and The Bachelor (which in my opinion is closer to the truth) and a seemingly constant conversation about how fundamentalist or evangelical Christians are the root of all the problems in the political system.

There must be a separation of church and state, for we are not, nor should we be a theocratic state. But a religious person has as much right to make a voting decision based on their faith in God as an atheist person has a right to make their voting decision based on their belief that there is no God.

On topic: Foreign Affairs: God's Country? Summary: Religion has always been a major force in U.S. politics, but the recent surge in the number and the power of evangelicals is recasting the country's political scene -- with dramatic implications for foreign policy. This should not be cause for panic: evangelicals are passionately devoted to justice and improving the world, and eager to reach out across sectarian lines.

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UPDATE:

A poster asks where I got the idea that Sullivan lumps fundamentalist Christians in with evangelicals:

From David Brooks in the New York Times:

"The Conservative Soul" is imbued with Sullivan's characteristic passion and clarity. And yet I must confess, if I hadn't been reviewing this book, I wouldn't have finished it. I have a rule, which has never failed me, that when a writer uses quotations from Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and the Left Behind series to capture the religious and political currents in modern America, then I know I can put that piece of writing down because the author either doesn't know what he is talking about or is arguing in bad faith.
As any number of historians, sociologists and pollsters can tell you, the evangelical Protestants who now exercise a major influence on the Republican Party are an infinitely diverse and contradictory group, and their relationship to these hyperpartisans is extremely ambivalent.

Conservative Christians are fully assimilated into commercial American life and, in a variety of different ways, critical of it. They get divorced as much as anybody else, if not more. They are as consumed by doubts and aware of their weaknesses as anybody else, if not more. They generally share -- along with the pope -- the belief that reason must be used to nurture faith.

The intellectual brutality Sullivan describes in these pages, and which does mark American life, has more to do with bad character and political partisanship than theological rigor, and Sullivan is wrong to claim its roots are religious in nature. The people who are most destructively closed-minded in America are people like Donald Rumsfeld, Ann Coulter and Howard Dean, and they are not exactly religious nuts.

Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/books/review/Brooks.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=books&pagewanted=print