The number and the intemperance of the attacks on “the religious right” has increased in recent months. We seem to be going through a period of hysteria about religious conservatives’ involvement in politics, not unlike the one that occurred between 1989 and 1995. Not a day goes by without my reading two or three criticisms that seem to me to lack all sobriety. The topic has even persuaded Alan Wolfe to drop his usual pose of moderation–check out his essay in the latest New Republic. (The essay is not without its comic touches, as when Wolfe authoritatively informs the reader that Jim Wallis’s reading of Scripture has it all over Pat Robertson’s.) Then there’s this, from Katharine Seelye and Neil Lewis in the New York Times story on the Newsweek retraction: “Both [Afghanistan and Pakistan, analysts] pointed out, have political forces seeking to undermine their respective United States-allied heads of state: the Taliban against President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, the religious right against the self-described moderate, General Musharraf, in Pakistan” (emphasis added).