Christian Zealot Roundup

No one is actually rounding up Christian zealots. But the term or at least the concept has come up a dozen times in the last couple of weeks. Evidently I’m not the only one who’s noticing, so here are a few links on the subject. I heard it last week at dinner in a restaurant. Another diner was complaining loudly and bitterly about politics and people like me and wishing something could be done. (Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?! Actually I think he just wants people like me silenced in the public arena. I gathered that he’ll suffer us to continue to live as long as we don’t vote or speak. We’re dangerous, you see.)

In Good Theocracy, Bad Theocracy, the Hatemonger’s Quarterly noted that according to some,

The Islamists who pine for an American caliphate and Sharia law are harmless, benighted fellows deserving our sympathy and aid. The Christians who don’t hunger for gay adoption are fascists who must be stopped at all costs.

And when I was catching up on Anchoress posts, I noticed this post which includes info and links on the Ann Althouse smackdown of professional hysterical Andrew Sullivan, a writer I once respected. Well, my respect and a buck-fifty will get you a cafe au lait and a beignet, but Sully has taken shark-jumping to new extremes in his anti-Christian zealotry.

On that topic, Althouse has a quote from Instapundit:

The problem with the term “Christianist” isn’t that it adds “ist” to the end of a religion. It’s that, by parallelling “Islamist,” it is a deliberate attempt at conflating people who oppose gay marriage — or, apparently, Madonna’s schlocky posturing — with people who blow up discos and mosques, and throw gay people off of walls. That’s the kind of execrable moral equivalence engaged in by the Soviets and their proxies, and it’s the sort of thing that Andrew Sullivan used to oppose eloquently, before he started to engage in it himself.

I don’t deny that the Phelps of the world exist. I’ve repudiated them and their brand of lunacy as strongly as I’m able, and they are marginalized by pretty much all Christians. We don’t like them, and we don’t want them associating with us. We’re completely different. When people like that start garnering the respect of say, John Piper or perhaps a following like the one this guy has, then I’ll know that all is lost.

I don’t know if things have been like this for a while and I’m just noticing, or if these are anomalies. But really, this surge of anti-Christian sentiment is quite surreal.

Updated: I’d forgotten all about this Rosie-ism noted by Mark Steyn along with some other interesting examples:

And at this point Rosie interrupted. “One second. Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have a separation of church and state.”