Slate On Not Confusing Religion With Politics With Reasonableness

Steven Waldman hits another note in the ode I noted before: please don't get these three things mixed up. Noting that the faith-based vs. reality-based meme has come to symbolize Republican vs. Democrat and Christian vs. Secular, he makes a plea for understanding that "By most accounts, the president's basic intellectual make-up was formed long before his faith conversion. If Bush is incurious, it's not God's fault." He points out that the mix-up is largely Bush's own fault: "He is America's most famous evangelical Christian–and he's proudly anti-intellectual." This completely ignores a long and deep tradition of intellectual faith.
"On the one hand, he has brought great comfort to many Christians through his unabashed defense of his faith life. . . But is it really good for American Christianity to have as its poster boy someone so proudly anti-intellectual? I suspect that believers and non-believers would be better off if secular intellectuals showed less contempt for evangelicals and the nation's leading evangelical showed less contempt for intellectuals."