In Chris Hedges' New York Times bestselling, Oprah-endorsed book American Fascists, Hedges repeatedly uses the term 'Christo-fascism'.

Hedges essentially equates fundamentalist Christians in the deep South with Nazis and Japanese fascists. I have no love for Evangelicals -- especially given my time among them -- but it's obvious that Hedges has not read any Yukio Mishima. Fascism was directly connected with racial purity and physical prowess. Christian fundamentalism is not. If it's not okay to use the term 'Islamo-fascist' because Islamists aren't corporatists, then it's not okay to use 'Christo-fascist' because fundamentalist Christians aren't concerned with biology.

It's sad that men like Rove and Bush, who cared nothing for Evangelicals, have givenShould read "No to 'Bush Christian Fascists'" Evangelicals such a bad rap that you can now reach bestseller status by calling them names. But 'Fascism' is a term with a particular meaning and reference, and shouldn't be inflated to include just any extremist movement.

It certainly shouldn't be inflated to include a movement that is not universally malign. There are some great Evangelicals like Jim Wallis, and even Mike Huckabee is intellectually honest (as per his appearance on the Tyra Banks show). During the Pastor Wright flap, Huckabee said that it was unfair to read too much into Obama's connection with Wright. That doesn't sound like the making of totalitarianism.

Those who (like me) oppose using the term 'Islamo-fascist' and opposed "Islamo-fascism Awareness Week" ought to have the intellectual consistency not to use 'Christo-fascist'. (Encouragingly, another Muslim writer, Shadi Hamid of the Project for Middle East Democracy, agrees.)

The case is different with the terms 'Islamist' and 'Christianist', frequently used in in political parlance as synonyms for 'Islamo-fascist' and 'Christo-fascist'. That conflation is mistaken. Islamism is political Islam of the non-violent variety, i.e the sustained political program by conservative Muslims to acquire --- not impose --- theocratic rule within their nation-state.

It is unhelpful, even from a pragmatic perspective, to collapse 'jihadism' (which refers to a violent movement) and 'Islamism'. The reason is that equating Islamism with violence ruins the opportunity to encourage post-Islamist groups -- who are roughly akin to Germany's Christian Democratic Party and represent a case of Islamism defeating itself using self-evaluation. On the same grounds, if Hedges had been more careful with his language, he would have used the term 'Christianism' to apply to the Evangelicals in his book, since by his analysis, they too are seeking to acquire --- not impose --- theocratic rule using non-violent means.

In the Christmas Eve edition of the Washington Post, Peter Wehner furrows a brow or two over the ascendancy of Mike Huckabee in the Republican primary. Wehner is worried that Mike Huckabee's aw-shucks sectarianism is "fraught with danger" and threatens to cross the line dividing "[t]he City of Man and the City of God." I agree: Huckabee is running on Christianity plus the Fair Tax, and the excellent chance he has of winning the Republican nomination fairly strongly cements the fact that one of our major political parties stands for Christianity first and everything else second. Unlike me, however, Wehner spent 2001-2007 working on speechwriting and strategy (i.e. directly under Karl Rove) for the George W. Bush White House; before that, he was employed in Bill Bennett's policy shop; before that, he was Bill Bennett's speech writer.

You might think, therefore, that Wehner is recounting a Damascene moment, repenting before the disembodied spirit of Thomas Paine for having spent a career persecuting him. You'd be wrong. To hear Wehner recount American political history, for 230 years, the leaders of our fair republic, though deeply religious to a man, and allowing their political beliefs to be informed by faith, nevertheless steadfastly rendered unto Caesar, respecting the separation between church and state. Then suddenly, out of nowhere --- ex nihilo, like the spirit of God upon the face of the waters --- came Mike Huckabee to lead his flock into green dogpatches.

Here is Wehner at his most breathtakingly self-unaware:

They [Huckabee's periodic outbursts of Christian identity politics] are certainly different in degree, and even in kind, from what President Bush, an evangelical Christian, has said. And taken together, they raise a concern: Is Mike Huckabee, a man of extremely impressive political gifts and shrewdness, playing the Jesus card in a way that is unlike anything we have quite seen before?

Wrong on all counts. Huckabee's Christian politicking is precisely alike in kind to Bush's. The difference, if there is a meaningful one, between Huckabee's exhortation to "celebrate the birth of Christ" and Bush's declaration that Christ is his favorite philosopher, between Huckabee's self-appointment as a Christian leader and Bush's "God, guns, and gays" electoral strategy, between Huckabee's flying cross and Bush's coded references to Dred Scott and activist judges, is a difference only in degree. Where Bush used a dog-whistle to rally the yahoos, Huckabee uses a trumpet; the underlying principle is the same for both of them.

The subtext of Wehner's message, of course, is that despite the over-the-top, revival tent treacliness, Bush (or at least his inner circle) never really bought any of it. Which is believable enough. But it's thanks to the diligent work of Wehner and his colleagues over many years that Huckabee's crusade is getting significant traction in the first place. If he wants to take it all back now, one of the steps to his recovery is to apologize to the rest of us.

This being Christmas Eve, I'd like to close with a special yuletide message, from my hearth to yours. Pay extra attention to the last 30 seconds. God bless us everyone.

Editorial adviser Jeff Sharlet sends the following email:

My friend and colleague Kathryn Joyce has just published her first
major magazine article in The Nation, a portrait of a new Christian
fundamentalist "avant-garde" of women who wage "spiritual war" by
birthing as many soldiers for God as they can.

They call their babies arrows, and their movement "Quiverfull," and
they're thinking long term: "if just 8 million American Christian
couples began supplying more "arrows for the war" by having six
children or more, they propose," writes Kathryn, "the Christian-right
ranks could rise to 550 million within a century."

Men are in on it, of course: Kathryn writes of one husband who
abandoned plans for a vasectomy urged even by his pastor when he "saw
a warrior angel in his dream. A "large, worrying warrior angel" with a
flaming sword that he pointed at Christopher's genitals, telling him,
"Do not change God's plan.""

Scariest of all, conservative Democrats are in on it too -- the latter
part of the article reports on a Democratic Leadership Council study
of the "return to patriarchy" to figure out how Democrats can do just
that as a path to victory.

Writing in Time a few months ago, Andrew Sullivan coined the term “Christianism” to describe the archconservative evangelical wing of the Republican Party. Sullivan distinguished Christianists, who traffic in a malign fusion of scripture and public policy, from Christians, who follow the teachings of the Gospels but respect the separation of church and state. As the non-violent ideological twin of Islamism, Christianism has been endlessly dissected in polemical new books, like Sullivan's own The Conservative Soul and David Kuo's ...