Democratic Underground - Christian vs Christianist

Andrew Sullivan has suggested - http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1191826,00.html - a new word:

So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist.

Sullivan - always more a provocateur than an original thinker - was beat to the bunch blogger Tristero by some years - http://tristero.blogspot.com/2003_06_01_tristero_archive.html#200373904 - with the following:

In an analogy to Islamism, I would propose the term "Christianism" to describe a political ideology inspired by Christianity that advocates the replacement of a secular government with one that is profoundly informed by a self-styled "literal" interpretation of the Bible. By this definition, Rudolph is perhaps best described as a radical "Christianist," a man inspired by Christianity to effect social change through violence.

"Christianism" is without a doubt an ugly neologism. However, it is a mistake to describe as "Christian" people and groups like Robertson, Falwell, Christian Identity, and those who are even more radical in their mission to transform the US into an explicitly fundamentalist "christian" state. This confuses Christianity, a religious belief, with a purely secular agenda. Furtheremore, it is highly misleading to ignore the hijacking of Christianity and its symbols by the Rudolphs of the world simply by repressing any reference to their Christian inspirations and calling them "anti-abortion terrorists" or some similar name.

In the face of all the repeated charges that DU is somehow anti Christian, and worse the calls for DU posters to make theological distinctions of who is a "real" Christian, I suggest the use of CHRISTIANIST to describe these villains.

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