The Christian Right in America is America--to a huge extent.
But so isolated are the opposing segments of our divided American society, that many moderate or liberal voters--in particular the white middle- and upper-classes of New York City and California's, the Pacific Northwest's, and New England's cities--know next to nothing about the Christian Right or the pervasive Christian nationalism that characterizes much of its powerful culture.
It is a complete parallel reality unto itself--as author of Kingdom Coming, Michelle Goldberg, summarized on NPR's Fresh Air--that has been growing in size and influence for nearly 30 years.
It has:
>its own music, media, radio, and publishing empires supported by tens of millions of American customers that put books like the Left Behind series on the best-sellers list,
>thousands of churches and hundreds of mega-churches used to organize congregants, in part through state-level operations like Ohio's Patriot pastors, into armies of conservative political foot soldiers,
>a propogated revisionist history in which the US was founded without a separation of Church and State in order to be an expressly Christianist nation whose laws are meant to privilege evangelical Christians wtih special powers and rights,
>an educational system consisting of roughly 2,000,000 home-schooled children, hundreds of thousands of students in conservative evangelical colleges such at Patrick Henry College, Bob Jones University, and Wheaton College, and tens of thousands of other students at non-religious schools active on campuses in political or quasi-political activities, sometimes quite subtly through organizations like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.
>organizations formal and informal influencing everything from professional sports to the Air Force Academy (a formal report here) with political Christian radicalism aimed at subverting the Constitution and transforming America into a Christianist (i.e., effectively theocratic) or at least Christian-privileged nation,
>control of large portions of the Republican Party and influence within the Bush Administration strong enough to shape the Bush administration into an agent of war against science itself.
