After this week's news of Cardinal Dolan's role at the Republican convention (and, subsequently, the Democrats'), one wonders when religion began to feature so prominently at the events. Robin Varghese recently unearthed V.S. Naipaul's 1984 visit to the Republican convention, where he heard a sermon delivered by a Dr. W. A. Criswell of the First Baptist Church of Dallas. Sound familiar?

Dallas was air-conditioned—hotels, shops, houses, cars. ... Yet in this city created by high science Dr. Criswell preached of hellfire and was a figure. And the message of convention week was that there was no contradiction, that American endeavor and success were contained within old American faith and pieties. Karl Marx and homosexuality were on the other side of these pieties and could be lumped together.

The fundamentalism that the Republicans had embraced went beyond religion. It simplified the world in general; it rolled together many different kinds of anxieties—schools, drugs, race, buggery, Russia, to give just a few; and it offered the simplest, the vaguest solution: Americanism, the assertion of the American self.

Richard Lawson found this year's Christianism simmering just below the surface:]]>