LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Slate Magazine has an interesting article about the problems that the "Christian Nationalists" are having in their ranks:

As evangelical Christians gain more political clout within the Bush administration, the ideological gaps between the factions of the Christian right are becoming more pronounced. It's not just environmentalism. Even gay marriage, that touchstone of the religious right, is a source of internecine tensions. Michael Farris, the founder of Patrick Henry College—an elite breeding ground for conservative Christians—opposed the latest constitutional amendment against gay marriage because it didn't go far enough in stripping gays of their rights. But the strains within the evangelical movement don't get much play in the secular media. For liberals, there's little difference between a Dobson, a Robertson, and a Cizik: They're all wing nuts in flyover states with bad hair and a gay obsession.

The specter of an American theocracy, the title of Kevin Phillips' broadside against the Bush administration, has obscured the signs of dissent in what can look like a Christian monolith. Michelle Goldberg, a Salon reporter and the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, misses some of the signs, too, in her otherwise astute study. It's not just that she blurs the more fringe personalities, lumping together conspiracy-minded nut jobs (like theocrat Howard Phillips, who believes that "enemies of Christ in this fallen world must be conquered") with veteran conservative blowhards like William Bennett. As she describes how the Christian Right moved from the margins of acceptability to the Republican mainstream, she also overlooks generational tensions and large-scale dissatisfaction with the Bush administration among many conservative, white evangelicals (only 34 percent of whom, according to a June 6 Pew research poll, "strongly back" the president).