Predictable

When I saw this story on Drudge earlier today, I thought to myself, "Wait for it...here comes the hysteria...5...4...3...2..."

ONE!

As Saint Kansas says:

I don't recall a similar reaction back when Jimmy Carter, "the first evangelical president," spoke of his faith. (Of course, Jimmy Carter is the kind of evangelical Christian that even the left can love.) Southern Baptist Bill Clinton too had just the right amount of faith to not be so threatening. But W mentions the Lord even after all the evangelicals have cast their votes. That's just scary.

But Jimmy Carter is fashionably pacifistic, plus he's so tolerant and non-judgmental of dictators like Castro. And Bill Clinton wasn't some repressed prude hung up on silly, trivial things like sexual morality.

I have noticed that among George W. Bush's detractors, there seems to be two different ridiculous takes on his faith.

One is that he isn't a real Christian because he isn't a pacifist or a socialist. Because, of course, all real Christians are pacifists and socialists.

The other is that he's a scary, horrible warmongering fundamentalist* Christian who's on a crusade to establish a hegemonic Christian theocracy with the help of those diabolic neocons.

So, along with Sullivan's whine about atheists being disenfranchised, expect the usual boring hysteria and outrage over Bush's statement over the next few days. It will come from both of the camps mentioned above.

It's all so predictable.

*Never mind that he's, I think, a Methodist, and Methodists are hardly fundamentalists. But then again, most of the people who throw the word "fundamentalist" around have no idea what it really means. To them, it refers to any Christian who is orthodox in his beliefs and takes those beliefs seriously.