Well, good to see "excitable Andrew" has made an important contribution to our culture. A while back, we had Madeline Murray O'Hair and her "dirty Christers" epithet. More recently Doug Ireland has attempted to revive the term.

Indigant, Andrew Sullivan decried using Jesus's title ("Christ") as part of a term of abuse:

It's a retro slur against Christians originating in the 1960s. It's basically the equivalent of calling a Jewish person a "kike," a heterosexual person a "breeder," or a gay person a "faggot", except I think it's worse than that because it also manages to use the sacred word "Christ" as a form of abuse.

So it's interesting to see the new intellectual depths Andrew has sunk to, when he coins a new term which does exactly that:

"So let me suggest," Sullivan pontificates in Time, "that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque.

You know, historical "Christanity" has never been involved in politics. Take Sullivan's own faith, which -- I guess -- he is pretending to be authentic heir to: Catholicism. There's a sect which never dabbled in the affairs of this world -- only heavenly matters. Good thing Andrew is here to "take it back" from all the other Catholics (like the Pope, who is surely not an authentic Catholic) who have "corrupted their faith" by failing to fall in line behind Andrew's recent sexual-political agenda.

Of course, Sullivan is deeply into projection here. His entire goal is to use the power of the state to force general acceptance of gay marriage -- so it's more than a little ironic that he believes his opponents should have no right to participate in the public sphere.

And Sullivan would never similarly defile his own faith, right?

To deny [marriage] to gay people is not merely incoherent and wrong, from the Christian point of view.... We are human beings, and we need love in our lives in order to love others, in order to be good Christians!

Hmmm: We all must publicly accept "gay marriage" as equal to marriage in order to allow Andrew to be a good Christian. Without that change, we're interfering with his relationship with God and emotional well-being.

It's the usual game here: Gay marriage advocates like Sullivan push for a radical change in our laws -- and they admit they're doing it to change our very thoughts -- then boldly accuse their opponents of trying to co-opt state power for an ideological agenda! My that's rich.

Update: It appears the term "Christianism" may have first appeared at (guess where?) uber-lefty blog DailyKos back in 2004; and "Christianist" has similarly impressive origins [1]. Great minds think alike, I guess.