Maggie Gallagher: "The Christianist Conspiracy"

Eric Rudolph, who bombed the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, two abortion clinics and a gay nightclub, wrote to his mom about born-again Christians: "They have been so nice I would hate to break it to them that I really prefer Nietzsche to the Bible." His letter was published by USA Today.

Oops, there goes another Christian fundamentalist terrorist....

Even Islamists, as many have pointed out, have far more in common with Marxist and other avant-garde ideologies than with traditional Islam. Random bombs that kill women and children on London buses do not represent a return to the Muslim past, but avant-gardism in a new context. Like good social constructivists, Islamists indulge in a sophisticated new interpretation of an ancient text in order to escape a traditional moral prohibition (in their case, the killing of innocents). (What makes genteel academic social constructivists believe that they are the only ones who get to dream up new stories, once those old absolutist moral taboos are swept aside?)

I hate conspiracy theories. But one can't avoid noticing the ongoing effort among certain powerful groups to craft a dramatic new storyline for religion in America: to lump Christian "fundamentalists" in with Muslim "fundamentalists," to equate evangelicals with fundamentalists and Catholics with evangelicals, merging all traditional religions into one scary, irrational and potentially violent "Christianist" mass. A traditional religion, in this view, is any faith community that does not accept sexual liberalism. This is the core of liberalist drama in America today, the line that if crossed will put you in the crosshairs.

A Catholic cardinal announces that Catholics believe that creation has meaning and purpose and was not a random event. How can this be front-page news?

Perhaps because it is useful to the grand liberalist metanarrative portraying religion as an irrational, backward force for evil in America today?