No mainstream pundit has gotten Rick Warren’s Saddleback forum for the candidates more wrong than The New Yorker‘s usually astute Hendrick Hertzberg. “With his genial personality,” Hertzberg writes of Warren, “his emphasis on happiness over hellfire, and his instinct for (relative) moderation, he reminds me a little of the young Henry Ward Beecher.” Beecher, of course, was a proto-progressive, and, after a fashion, a libertine, famous for intimate friendships with younger women; Warren is indeed genial, but he’s also conservative, theologically shoulder to shoulder with his angrier brethren of the Christian Right. A couple of days after Saddleback, he instructed Sean Hannity in the finer points of Liberation Theology, declaring it communism under cover and the basis for the even more monstrous Black Liberation Theology, which Warren claims is a doctrine of “black supremacy.” Hertzberg, apparently, missed that show. In fact, it’s questionable whether Hertzberg has had any close encounters with real live Christian conservatives.”Christian denominations take all manner of views of homosexuality,” he writes, “but it’s hard to find a Christian these days who insists that simply being homosexual—having a gay or lesbian orientation—is sinful in and of itself.” Tell that to James Dobson. Hell, tell it toRick Warren.