When it comes to cultural matters, the religious right obviously does play a prominent role in shaping the GOP's agenda. It has done so by claiming to speak on behalf of the Bible-believing masses against the God-hating secular elites. In the same breath, of course, right-wing theologians routinely describe America as a fallen country whose entire culture has rotted to the core. One cannot have it both ways, a point made by Damon Linker in his illuminating new book The Theocons, which focuses on a small but influential group of right-wing Catholic thinkers organized around the journal First Things, where Linker used to be an editor. The journal was founded in the early 1990s by Father Richard Neuhaus, a Catholic priest who nowadays is chummy with George W. Bush and Karl Rove. Back in the 1960s, Neuhaus kept rather different company: He was a radical Lutheran pastor who, along with Father Daniel Berrigan and Rabbi Abraham Heschel, headed the group Clergy Concerned About Vietnam. In 1970 he published an essay, "The Thorough Revolutionary," in which he openly advocated the overthrow of the US government and criticized Che Guevara from the left, upbraiding the Argentine guerrilla leader for his "unwillingness to use terrorism" to seize power. Two decades later, in 1996, First Things published a forum titled "The End of Democracy?" in which Neuhaus again pondered revolution, this time from the right. The US government, abetted by courts that affirmed the legality of abortion and other moral abominations, had evolved into a tyranny that "cannot command the consent of the people," he wrote. This made "morally justified revolution" a reasonable option.

Then as now, Neuhaus wrote as if he were speaking for a silent majority against the unaccountable elites, a claim so pervasive these days that Americans who are prochoice, support stem-cell research and don't actually believe the judiciary should be abolished might well assume they're vastly outnumbered. But they're not. The Neuhauses of the world are right that the United States is a lot more religious than the media and many intellectuals think. But they're wrong that most Americans see eye to eye with them. In fact, on many issues, most churchgoing Americans don't, which is perhaps why, as Linker shows, Neuhaus and other theocons have been quite content to see the will of the majority thwarted by elites when it has served their minority agenda. Not a peep was raised in the pages of First Things, for example, when the Supreme Court intervened to prevent a recount in the 2000 election. Neuhaus actually praised the decision, just as he and others will surely laud the Justices if they overturn Roe v. Wade, even though a majority of the public opposes this. Selective in their populism, the theocons are equally selective in their adherence to church doctrine: Michael Novak, another First Things contributor, believes American women should be forced to accept the Vatican's teachings on abortion, but he went to Rome at the invitation of President Bush's ambassador to defend the war in Iraq, which the Pope staunchly opposed. From the death penalty to poverty, what the church says can be ignored, except when its encyclicals support the right side in the culture wars, in which case everyone must take note.

There are, of course, millions of Americans who would rejoice if Roe were reversed, just as there are many who think the separation of church and state is a myth, that mandatory school prayer should be reinstated and that sex between two consenting adults of the same gender should be a punishable crime. It is perfectly fair for Americans who disagree with such views to say so--the louder the better. It is nevertheless a mistake to dismiss those who hold them either as victims of false consciousness or as fools, the way Sam Harris does in his slender, entertaining but misleadingly titled new book, Letter to a Christian Nation, which is actually addressed to people like himself who want to get a good laugh at the expense of those silly enough to believe in God. Harris's unabashed disdain for all forms of religion is in some ways bracing--he has as little patience for moderate believers as for biblical literalists. And much in his letter will likely prove amusing to atheists and agnostics fed up with hearing pastors insist that only the churched are capable of viewing the world through a moral prism. "According to the most common interpretation of biblical prophecy," he writes,

Jesus will return only after things have gone horribly awry here on earth. It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ.

One can practically hear Upper West Side liberals chuckling to themselves, aghast at the irrationality of the heartland. But one wonders if they'll nod approvingly as Harris turns his attention to Muslims. "It is now a truism in foreign policy circles that real reform in the Muslim world cannot be imposed from the outside," he observes. "But it is important to recognize why this is so--it is so because most Muslims are utterly deranged by their religious faith."

Harris belongs to a group that Timothy Garton Ash recently described as "secular fundamentalists." He is an engaging writer, and the popularity of his book suggests that many people think it is about time the faith community received its comeuppance. But by his standard, many African-Americans who took part in the civil rights movement were also deranged. So were others who gathered in church basements during the 1980s to stop the Reagan Administration from arming death squads in Central America (among whose victims were many nuns and priests who preached liberation theology). So was William Jennings Bryan, the populist orator and born-again Christian who for several decades served as the voice the excluded in America, supporting everything from legalizing strikes to progressive taxation, and whose passion and appeal Michael Kazin convincingly demonstrates in a new biography, A Godly Hero, were inextricably related to his biblical faith. So was the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, perhaps the greatest moral agitator of the nineteenth century, whose abhorrence of slavery, according to his biographer Henry Mayer, "cannot be understood outside the context of the Christianity that was its inspiration." "Nothing but extensive revivals of pure religion can save our country," wrote Garrison in 1831, the year he began publishing The Liberator, a statement that might have led the secularists of his era to brand him a fanatic, which is indeed how many of his less devout contemporaries saw him. "Radical popular religion helped eradicate an evil with which socially liberal theological opinion had learned to coexist," notes Mayer.

The same religious conviction that has propelled many conservatives to support George W. Bush in recent years also motivates many progressive people of faith to volunteer at homeless shelters and turn out for antiwar rallies. Churches have played a major role in the recent wave of demonstrations on behalf of undocumented immigrants' rights. They have been active for decades in assisting the needy, not least because, as Randall Balmer notes, the Bible contains roughly 2,000 references to the poor (compared with zero explicit mentions of abortion). If faith in God helps explain why Bush has been such a terrible President, it also explains why Jimmy Carter has been such an admirable former one. In his latest book, Our Endangered Values, a scathing critique of the religious right's misplaced priorities, Carter, a devout Baptist, admits that he never prayed more frequently than during his four years in the White House. He also eloquently articulates why, in his view, religion should foster compassion and humility, not the arrogance and intolerance that many of his Bush-supporting fellow Baptists project these days.

There are, to be sure, plenty of religious people whose ideas are decidedly less attractive than Carter's: imams who insist a newspaper editor should be executed for insulting the Prophet Muhammad; "prolife" activists who believe in the morality of shooting doctors who perform abortions; Israeli zealots who advocate "transfer," i.e., the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories. But there's also no shortage of secular people who have propagated murderous ideas through the years. Hitler hardly mentioned God, and Pol Pot, Stalin and Mao never mentioned God at all. The President of Iran may be a Holocaust-denying Muslim, but he is arguably no more dangerous than the atheist dictator running North Korea. Intolerant and repressive worldviews come in many forms. So does an air of self-righteousness and moral superiority. In this regard, at least Sam Harris is consistent. Conservatives like David Brooks have no problem seeing Muslim fundamentalists as fascists and fanatics who threaten the Enlightenment (the love affair with the anti-Soviet Afghan mujahedeen came to an end on 9/11), but they are far more forgiving when it comes to Christian fundamentalists in the American heartland and Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Some on the far left, by contrast, do the opposite, happily disparaging Bible Belt Christians while giving a pass to Islamist forces in Palestine, Iraq and southern Lebanon. When it comes to the latter, care is taken to understand what draws people to Islam--the failure of secular ideologies, the persistence of occupation, the yearning for dignity, the fear that cultural traditions are being uprooted. Might not some of the same factors be at play among born-again Christians in places like rural Alabama?

To acknowledge this hardly requires us to sympathize with the Christian right's social agenda, any more than attempting to understand why people join groups like Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood demands that one accepts their views on the status of women or gays. Nor does a less dismissive attitude toward religion mean secular progressives should cede ground to right-wing ministers who insist an absence of faith renders people incapable of distinguishing right from wrong or acting compassionately. It does mean the secular left should think twice before seeing religious people as their foes, not least since such an attitude risks alienating many potential allies and confining ourselves to a small sect of like-minded believers. This, after all, is what fundamentalism is about.

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