The most important function in the Bush presidency was the spreading of fear. — Robert S. McElvaine

They are so certain that they know God’s mind because they equate their own minds with that of God.

That is the essence of ChristianityLite. Its standard for what to take literally from a putatively inerrant Bible boils down to this: Anything that doesn’t seem too difficult is to be taken literally. The rest of it? Give me a break! All that stuff about turning the other cheek and loving our enemies and being nonviolent and helping the poor—some damned liberal subversive must have sort of, like, infiltrated that stuff into the Bible, you know?

“Economic conservatives,” Kevin Phillips notes, “often warm to sects in which a preoccupation with personal salvation turns lower-income persons away from distracting visions of economic and social reform.”