Villegas is pastor of Chapel Hill (N.C.) Mennonite Fellowship and a columnist for The Mennonite. He informed all the pastors he knows about the project--many of which are Mennonite. As of Nov. 4, several Mennonite pastors told him they would participate. Some of the non-Mennonite pastors told him they would receive negative response if they preached about this issue. "It's hard here in North Carolina," said Villegas on Nov. 4. "Our economy is tied to the military-industrial complex. Preaching about the suffering cause by U.S. forces in Iraq hits too close to home in a state that has such a high military population."

I remember it as if it happened yesterday. Just before Christmas vacation during my freshman year of college, I had a couple of dates with a girl I really liked. The feelings for one another seemed mutual and we both looked forward to seeing each other after the holidays. When we were back on campus, she refused to see or even talk to me. This drove me crazy and after weeks, her roommate explained the real story. When she told her parents she liked an Italian, they forbade her from having any contact with me.

Liberals and centrists wring their hands over Miller and giggle about O'Donnell, hoping that her political hopelessness somehow proves that the movement isn't going. They compile lists of what they take to be her craziest statements, such as her confession that as a young woman she dabbled in witchcraft. That's a strategic mistake, because they're mocking what is, in fact, a mainstream evangelical view -- that witchcraft and "spiritual war" are real -- and a narrative with powerful resonance in American life. Consider not O'Donnell's words, but her theme: Once I was lost (making bad choices), but now I'm found. Who didn't do something stupid in their youth? But it's the "found" part that reveals the religiosity of the Tea Party movement, spirituality not at odds with the Tea Party's economics but intertwined with it.

As for the dreaded “Constantinianism,” I don’t buy that it existed, at least in the form I understand has been described by Yoder. Leithart acknowledges that Yoder “provided the most sophisticated and systematic treatment” of this concept (that after Constantine came “a heretical mindset and set of habits that have distorted Christian faith since (at least) the fourth century”). But there was, I join Leithart in believing, no fourth-century “fall” of the church attributable to Constantine. As Leithart puts it, “Far from representing a fall for the church, Constantine provides in many respects a model for Christian political practice. At the very least, his reign provides rich material for reflection on a whole series of perennial political-theological questions: about religious toleration and coercion, about the legitimacy of Christian involvement in political life, about a Christian ruler’s relationship to the church, about how Christianity should influence civil law, about the propriety of violent coercion, about the legitimacy of empire.”

Throughout early Christendom, bishops consolidated power around the tomb. The cemetery where St. Peter was buried was well outside of Rome’s city walls in a distant plot of land named Vatican Hill. But it was here, not in the city itself, that his followers built his basilica. The religious power base—in Tébessa, Nola, Rome, and elsewhere—had shifted to the periphery, creating an imbalance that could not last. One way or another, the saint would have to come inside the city.

Regarded as one of the finest of all illuminated manuscripts in existence, the Ottheinrich Bible was thought to have been commissioned in about 1425 by the Royal Court of Bavaria. The unusually large manuscript was not completed until the following century when the German painter and engraver, Mathis Gerung, was offered 60 Rhenish guilders and winter clothes to decorate the text (the employment contract survives to this day).

On the six-hundred-and-eightieth page of a six-hundred-and-eighty-two-page book that consists almost entirely of detailed accounts of politics, Blair writes, “I have always been more interested in religion than politics.” It is just about the only mention of religion in the book. Blair nowhere says what his religious beliefs are, and nowhere discusses how they affect his politics or his decision-making or his daily life. It is a bizarre silence in a book of this type and title. The issue of Blair’s religious beliefs matters, because it bears on the question of how he changed during his time in office as a political leader. He came to office as an exemplar of the “third way” in politics, the Clinton-like standard-bearer of a reinvented political left that was determined to listen more to the electorate than to its own rhetoric. “Progressive parties are always in love with their own emotional impulses,” Blair writes—one of the infrequent moments where he allows a glimpse of his inner chilly hardness.

I do not understand you Americans," he said, sighing.  "Look at a woman like Hillary Clinton, supporting the killing of babies, and then you say no, you should not threaten to punish somebody with death."  He was coming to terms with the possibility that the threat of losing foreign aid -- Sweden said they'd cut theirs; Germany would offer Museveni $148 million to muzzle Bahati -- would force him to make a deal:  no death penalty.  He'd have to settle for prison and purges.  He'd have to settle for prison and purges.  "Leviticus is very clear.  If a man sleeps with a man -- punishable by death.  If a woman sleeps with a man -- punishable.

I’m all for social justice. I’m passionate about it. Christians have to be serving people and loving them not just in word but in deed. But man, if I hear another well-fed, Toms-wearing evangelical kid quote St. Francis (“preach the Gospel always, and if necessary, use words”) one more time as a justification for their unwillingness to utter a word to anyone about Christ as the one true hope, I don’t know what I’ll do. It’s an ongoing debate in missiology: Should missionaries in foreign countries prioritize meeting physical needs (food, water, social justice, development) before they preach the gospel, or should evangelism always be given primacy? To me, the debate is silly. Can’t we do both simultaneously? Can’t we serve others and meet their circumstantial needs while at the same time telling them about Jesus? Yes, we should be in Africa building water wells, or in Haiti building schools, but what’s the harm in mentioning along the way that we are Christians acting as the church, loving the world because God loved it?

The basic argument of what follows is this: Fundamentalism in America changed after the 1970s–perhaps so much that the word “fundamentalism” is no longer appropriate for what it became. In that decade, the movement began a tectonic shift from protecting theological truths in infra-denominational fights to guarding “Christian morality” in a nation specially chosen by God. To be sure, “correct” views of the person of Christ and his atoning work, along with vividly detailed end-time scenarios, have continued to occupy an important place in the movement, but these things are not what the “new fundamentalists” are most centrally about. No, they have seen America locked in a battle with a secularizing juggernaut, and they have rushed to take up the “arms” of pragmatic political measures and boundary-breaking religious alliances in order to gain the upper hand.