Q.: What does “religious right” mean if being religious, and on the right, isn’t enough to qualify?Steven Waldman and John Green, two very knowledgable observers of American religious life, offer up some strange logic at Waldman’s Beliefnet. Catholics and “moderately religious” voters were just as essential to Bush’s victory as were “Born Agains,” they find; therefore, talk of the new strength of the religious right is overblown. Find that math confusing? So do we. What happened is much simpler to understand — the religious right expanded to include Catholics and Protestants who’re only occasional churchgoers. Guided by religious principles, they elected the most rightwing president in modern American history. That’s not a slur, it’s a fact.

Michael Huang of Summa Dementia, a traditionalist Christian groupblog, takes up The Revealer‘s challenge by attempting to explain what his conservative co-religionists mean when they oppose gay marriage, and why he does himself. There’s some shaky history in his response, but a lot of good, honest, thinking and useful amateur ethnography. It’s certainly more insightful than the disingenuous non-thought of David Brooks (from the right) and Nicholas Kristof (from the… please-sir-may-I-have-another camp) in today’s NYT. The Revealer isn’t linking to such facile reasoning. If you need it, find it yourself.