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MESSIAH COMPLEX
...When, when do we call it a crusade? Yes, I think so, and I think so because if you go to the religious press, even the, sort of the moderate evangelical press like Christianity Today, which is sort of the flagship magazine of the movement, Christianity Today has begun using the language of spiritual war much more so than it has, and you can almost chart the growth of spiritual war as a metaphor in the religious right. Now, as an idea, it goes back to the beginning of Christianity, but at certain times, the metaphor kind of grows concrete, and people start talking in very literal terms of spiritual war - spiritual war is being fought in Iraq, and if you look at the religious publishing houses, they're churning out books talking about the war in Iraq definitely as a crusade. And there's also language that is sort of out ahead of James Dobson and Bill Frist. If you go to churches and you talk to regular people, a lot of people on the religious right are talking about civil war, and they're talking about civil war in not a metaphorical sense, in a literal sense. They hope it won't happen, but they are afraid that it might. And I think that has come through this growing metaphor of spiritual war....