The Dish

A new global survey sparks a new Becker-Posner debate.

A reader writes:

"Christianist" is a strictly neutral term – it describes a specific political position about the relationship between Christian faith and the state. If I actually believed that Christianity is the one true religion, and that the US government should be based on my understanding of the dictates of Christianity, I’d think that Christianist would correctly describe me, and I wouldn’t take offense. If you had said something like "evil Christianists," then I’d take offense.

The real reason that the current political leaders who can be rightly called Christianists take offense is not, as you suggest, because you are equating Christianity with Islam, but because, for political purposes, they wish to deny the truth about the radical nature of their claim on the state. They wish to keep claiming that their agenda is not radically at odds with the Constitution.  It is the way Communists often took power by claiming that they are merely agrarian reformers. Christianists are mad because the term tears off their mask. Or, to be more charitable, they don’t want to admit to themselves the radical unconstitutional nature of their claim. Agreeing to be called Christianists will force them to be as honest as Islamists are about their political claim.  They can’t do that and stay in business.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost …
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows

From Leonard Cohen’s "Everybody Knows." Merry Christmas.

(Photo: Brooks Kraft/Corbis for Time.)

It’s … John Edwards. Joe Klein elaborates.

The man exposing Mitt Romney’s aggressively pro-gay past has appeared on the Daily Show. Let’s put it this way: he’s no liberal. Here he is being interviewed by Ed Helms.

A soldier’s stick-figure guide.

"It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view. The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, It is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that can be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection, No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. That enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results. But that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are the workers, not the master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own. Amen."

By the martyred archbishop, Oscar Romero.

The Romney candidacy is staggering under the weight of its own contradictions. Ryan Lizza explores Romney’s past and one activist’s attempt to broadcast it to the world. Money quote:

Camenker reminds his fellow conservatives that Romney appointed numerous openly gay men and women, including the state employee responsible for adding a box to driver’s license renewal forms to indicate whether the applicant’s sex has changed. He points out, with links to many interesting pictures, that the governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth–the same government body whose fisting seminars so rankled Camenker back in 2000–organized a "Youth Pride Day" and "Transgender Proms." No detail escapes Camenker’s attention. He notes that Romney’s Department of Education distributed a publication, The Little Black Book: Queer in the 21st Century, that includes the following practical information: "There is little risk of STD infection and no risk of HIV infection from playing with pee."

Spin that, K-Lo. 

That’s Stephen Bainbridge’s view of the politics sketched in "The Conservative Soul." Sounds a lot like Burke.

Today is the anniversary that Ronald Reagan was declared president by the electoral college in 1980. So let me annoy my liberal readers with a YouTube tribute to a man I still revere: