Radical Islamists find sympathetic friends among Christian fundamentalists.

>>FORUM

A few years ago, I heard someone call in to a right-wing radio show to rail against the feminists, the homosexuals, the atheists, and other usual suspects. The host enthusiastically agreed. The caller then voiced the hope that the host would join him in supporting the establishment of Islamic law in America, a twist that left the host sputtering incoherently.

These days, the idea of conservative Christians aligning themselves with radical Muslims is not a prank caller’s gag but the subject of heated debate on the right. Dinesh D’Souza sparked the argument with his controversial book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.

D’Souza’s thesis is that America’s cultural left brought 9/11 upon us—not, as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell infamously suggested shortly after the event, by inviting the wrath of God, but by inviting the wrath of Muslims. How? Mainly by fostering “a decadent American culture that angers and repulses traditional societies” and by “waging an aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family and to promote secular values.”

That’s quite a change from the normal right-wing position in the West. In a column for the British Spectator shortly after 9/11, the conservative journalist and parliamentarian Boris Johnson also identified the liberation of women in the West as a principal cause of the anger of militant Islamists, but he came to a radically different conclusion than D’Souza did: “It is time for concerted cultural imperialism. They are wrong about women. We are right.” At the time, Johnson seemed to speak for most of the right.

Does The Enemy at Home represent a shift in attitude? Andrew Sullivan has been charging for some time that American “theoconservatives” have become a politicized “Christianist” movement with many similarities to Islamism (minus the suicide bombings). He sees D’Souza’s book as a sign of an Islamist/Christianist merger. But to advance his thesis, Sullivan considerably exaggerates the welcome that D’Souza has received from conservatives.

So in January, when the Republican blogger Hugh Hewitt announced D’Souza’s new book, Sullivan took note on his own blog with the short comment: “Together at last—as the Christianist-Islamist alliance deepens on the far right.” Yet more recently, Hewitt’s co-blogger Dean Barnett slammed The Enemy at Home as “intellectually obtuse, poorly informed and, most importantly, an irresponsible exercise in putatively conservative bomb-throwing.”

With a few exceptions, such as Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review, prominent conservatives have excoriated D’Souza’s tome. Writing about D’Souza in The New Republic, Sullivan mentions “the occasional sharp attack from the libertarian right”; he does not recognize the sharp attacks that have come from such decidedly non-libertarian rightists as the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson, New Criterion editor Roger Kimball, Powerline blogger Scott Johnson, and >>National Review’s Stanley Kurtz. D’Souza has not quite become a pariah on the right, but the majority of conservatives have strongly rejected his thesis as a right-wing variation on what they call the left’s “blame America first” mentality.

That said, some American social conservatives have long expressed guarded sympathy with the radical Muslim critique of Western “decadence.” Shortly after 9/11, marriage booster Maggie Gallagher wrote a column arguing that the honest answer to “Why do they hate us?” is “our sexual culture, which even to many Americans looks not only deeply destructive, but ugly.” (She went on to add that while both women and children in traditional Islamic culture suffer severe oppression, “the family system itself works.”)

In Christianity Today, managing editor Mark Galli urged a strong stand against terrorism but also sounded a startlingly sympathetic note toward the Islamic militants’ anger at the “hedonism,” “materialism,” and “secularism” the West was exporting into their cultures. In October 2004, in the same magazine, Watergate felon turned evangelical minister Chuck Colson warned that the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States would help radical Islamic terrorists by making “our kind of freedom abhorrent” to Muslims.

Meanwhile, in May of that year, former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan asserted in his syndicated column that on such issues as homosexuality, “conservative Americans have more in common with devout Muslims than with liberal Democrats.”