As usual, Andrew Sullivan pushes his “Christianist” idea far, far, far beyond any rationality. He actually wrote this sentence in a post about Egypt’s Islamist party victories:

We have the equivalent of a democratic Islamist party in the US. It’s called the GOP.

This is the same thing as wild-eyed conservatives looking at Obama and seeing our Bolshevik-in-Chief. Or not being able to tell the difference between a parakeet and a 747 because hey, they both have wings and fly.

Do you want to know what an Islamist political party looks like? There are different kinds of Islamists — there’s the Iranian kind, the milder Turkish kind, the Egyptian kind — but they all believe that Islamic law should be at the foundation of political governance. Hamas is the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s affiliate in Gaza, which they rule via democratic election. Here is their charter. Read:

Article Two: The Link between Hamas and the Association of Muslim Brothers

The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a world organization, the largest Islamic Movement in the modern era. It is characterized by a profound understanding, by precise notions and by a complete comprehensiveness of all concepts of Islam in all domains of life: views and beliefs, politics and economics, education and society, jurisprudence and rule, indoctrination and teaching, the arts and publications, the hidden and the evident, and all the other domains of life.

And:

Article Eight: The Slogan of the Hamas

Allah is its goal, the Prophet its model, the Qur’an its Constitution, Jihad its path and death for the case of Allah its most sublime belief.

Of course. The Muslim Brotherhood’s slogan is: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” Not only can you not find Republican Party leaders who say anything like this with regard to Christianity and the civil order, you’d have to go to the far reaches of Idaho or somesuch place to find Christians who say such things. To the extent it exists at all in American Christianity, it’s on the fringe of the fringe. In Egypt, political parties who believe this about Islam and the civil order just won a majority in Parliament.

Islamists are called that not as a pejorative, but as a descriptive; they believe that Islam in an all-encompassing system, and seek to govern by its precepts. To be sure, there is a wide spectrum of Islamist belief, and the future of the Arab world will be determined not in the rivalry between secularists and Islamists, but between factions of Islamists. Still, it is sheer crackpottery to say that the Republican Party’s relationship to Christianity even remotely resembles the Freedom and Justice Party’s relationship to Islam — which, by the way, is, theologically and structurally, a far more political religion than Christianity.

Then again, what do I know? Perhaps Sarah Palin will start dressing Trig out like the Hamas Baby in the photograph above. Maybe the Veggie Tales folks are busying themselves creating a Christian version of the tale of Farfour, the Hamas Mickey Mouse murdered by the Jooz.

UPDATE: To be clear, I don’t object to the term “Christianist” because it is offensive. I object to it because insofar as it is meant to draw an equivalence between political Islam and political Christianity, it is untrue and misleading, and makes clear-headed thought and debate about the role of Christian religion in American politics more difficult.