Akenaton, I don't know where in the world you found sand deep enough to bury your head in that far! It's obvious you haven't spent much time around the underbelly of the evangelical "Christian" movement.

I'm sure that people like Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer, two smiley, photogenic self-help gurus, are the kinds you think of when you think about American "Christianity". They are ignorant of our religious and political climate at best.

Google a man named R.K. Rushdoony in your free time... he was a pro-Israel (read: rabidly anti-Arab) zealot, an advocate of armed Christian theocratic law enforcement ON THE LEVEL OF COMMON CITIZENS, NOT just a standard military configuration, and a person deeply committed to the laughable lie that men like Washington, Jefferson, etc, were Bible-believing, evangelical Christians who believed exactly as Rushdoony himself did.

I personally know families that are sending their children to what are supposed to be public-speaking and other character-building classes and "camps". The organizations hosting these events are actually actively working to indoctrinate these children in their Dominionist theology and philosophy.

While it is often parroted to the press by certain evangelical leaders
that they do not, in fact, hold to Dominionism or its cousin, Christian Reconstructionism, these denials only placate the uninformed. Certainly, there are political and theological differences between many evangelical sects, and often, those differences seem to be insurmountable.

Watch, however, a documentary like "Jesus Camp", and see exactly how the non-Calvinist, hyper-experiential mysticism of one subset of evangelicals is married permanently to the hard-line ethos of those who wish for America to be run by theocratic, Christian men.

With the exception of some very relatively minor theological differences, you could take the sound-bites of the wackos who see angels flying around the room (like the nutjobs of the NAR) and exchange them quite neatly for the narrow-minded, racist and homophobic diatribes of the Dominionists. These are people who believe that it is God's "will", and therefore their duty, to stop at nothing to ascend the political and economic ladders in this country in order that their interpretations of Biblical principles might be regarded as enforceable laws.

Conspiracy theory, my ass... I have met some of these men, and talked with and listened to them, and can tell you that even on the most grass-roots level, there are people who would gladly take your friends, neighbors, family members and even YOU straight to prison for not adhering to their brand of "faith-based politics", which is really to say "political religion".

When "God" insists that MY special group of "true believers" MUST be the only ones in charge, the shadows of the concentration camps and US detention centers for the Japanese loom very, very large indeed.

Oh, and just in case you don't think these people are all that strictly hard-line about their beliefs, take a minute to ask yourself a question: Why is it that the closer you get to the top of the US political food-chain (when referring to the religious right), the more and more homogenous the culture is? It's because the so-called Christian right in the US is more like Amway than it ever was like Jesus. You, too, self-professed Christian, will find yourself shunned if you don't follow these people unswervingly. Your "dance card" will only be as full as your wallet and your gun-rack are.