Goldberg ends with recommendations, some sensible, some quirky, for building a progressive movement to counter the dangerous brew of fundamentalist Christianity and belligerent nationalism. Among them is the advice that progressive should “win their neighbors over, not just beat them in court.”

That is not likely to happen without a significantly greater effort to understand those neighbors and their beliefs. At the end of her book, calling for a movement to oppose the theocrats, Goldberg runs up all the old banners of the war between secularism and religion, pitting “freedom and Enlightenment” against “stale constricting dogmas” and “holy books.” Reading those words, I question not only whether I — and a lot of people like me — belong in her ranks, but also whether she, or Kevin Phillips, or even my friend Jim Rudin, really want us. ~Peter Steinfels, The American Prospect

As I observed at the time that Goldberg’s book was coming out, her denunciation of “stale constricting dogmas” and “holy books” left little wiggle room for her program, which becomes more and more obviously not simply anti-fundamentalist but simply anti-religious and specifically anti-Christian. Goldberg truly is a child of the Enlightenment–and anyone who has read my blog over the past two years knows that this is not a compliment–in her intractable hostility to public religion in general but most especially hostility Christian public religion. In this she is at least more serious than the people who try to have it both ways, pretend that Voltaire and Bossuet, Locke and Laud, Spinoza and St. Peter can all live together under one big roof of Christian-laced liberalism. To such people there can only be one response: Ecrasez la blasphemie!