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Peter Suderman, I think, is far too magnanimous in his response to Andrew Sullivan's knock on his perfectly reasonable blog post concerning faith & politics. Actually, I'd love to see Sullivan's grand declaration that "religious restraint in politics is critical to the maintenance of liberal democracy..."--agreed--reduced down to simply "restraint in politics..." I no more want to live at the whim of the hope-obsessed than the faith-obsessed, but it seems to me that so long as we're going to accept politics' devolution into a game of which team's king of the mountain gets to regulate and mandate, we have little cause for complaining about whatever the fantastical bee in the ultimate victor's bonnet. Sullivan spent a good deal of this year stumping fanatically for Barack Obama, a self-declared Christian dedicated to "discovering His truth and carrying out His works" and a man who wants to lead a government intervention (or, sometimes, unappreciated "nudging") into any number of areas of my life, and chooses to frame all of it in moralistic terms. Sounds familiar, no?

A Christianist, it seems via process of elimination, must be someone Andrew Sullivan didn't endorse for president.