Considering that there are around 1,200 Christian denominations in the US alone, I'd say that it is a given that churches and believers are constantly having partings of the way.

However, that isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a specific group of Christians: conservative evangelicals, that seem to be promoting the radical right wing agenda of the Republican party.

In my lifetime, I don't recall religion ever having this sort of vice grip on our national political life, and after asking the oldest people I know, they say they can't either.

So, this looks like a pretty unique phenomenon in the political sense, more than the religious sense. We are living in an era of tremendous intolerance among this group using what the pundits call wedge issues, or culture war issues. The splits in the Episcopal and Baptist churches have been over these issues specifically, rather than, say, the more theological/philosophical split of the US Lutheran churches.

There have always been conservative, mainline, and liberal denominations. Ecumenism and inter-faith practices drive people apart as often as unifies them. One expects to find the same diversity of opinions on some social and political issues among specific denominations, that one would find in the general population, but certainly not on all social and political issues.

It is the mainline denominations though, that have seen these schisms created by the conservatives, who seem to be as evangelical about their Republicanism, as they are their Christian beliefs. The mainline denominations I am referring to are the Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Baptist, and Methodist denominations, which makes up the vast majority of the self-declared Protestant Christians in the US.

Since the conservative denominations of the Christian church already exist, why don't the evangelical Republicans simply leave their mainline denominations to join the conservative denominations, rather than causing such internal strife that they force schisms and splits within their own denominations? And why this emphasis on infiltrating the nation's politics?

The most frightening aspect of the Bush administration to me, is the vice grip this group extremely small, and extremely conservative group of Americans has over the presidency and the policies of this administration.