>I think Carrol asks an important question: is christian
>fundemenatlism an ideological resource ready to hand that
>conservatives gravitate towards to legitimate their conservatism or
>populist reactions? Or rather, is christian fundementalism that
>which produces conservatism and populist reaction? The former makes
>one want to ask the further question about why people come to hold
>conservative values and employ reactionary populism. The latter
>terminates the conversation.
Fundamentalist Protestantism is so much a part of American culture it's hard to treat it as some external object that one can "gravitate" towards, like a moon of Uranus. It's embedded in the common sense of large chunks of the U.S. population.
Doug