I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but Andrew Sullivan seems to be on a crusade (no pun intended) to popularize the term “Christianist.” He’s used it on his blog more than twenty times over the last three years, especially during the last few months.

The goal, it seems, is to draw an analogy with radical Islam. Indeed, Sullivan made this comparison explicit in a June 1, 2003 post coining the term:

I propose a new term for those on the fringes of the religious right who have used the Gospels to perpetuate their own aspirations for power, control and oppression: Christianists. They are as anathema to true Christians as the Islamists are to true Islam. And they have to be fought just as vigilantly.

I went back and took a quick look at the history of the term in mass media usage. The first major newspaper/magazine usage in the US came from Hendrick Hertzberg in the New Yorker in Sept. 2004, who referred to “what might be called the Christianists.” In November of that year, syndicated columnist Ted Rall decried “militant Christianist Republicans.”

In April 2005, Hertzberg again referred to Terri Schiavo’s “Christianist ‘supporters’” in the New Yorker. This time, people started to notice. A National Review Online reader, in a published email to Jay Nordlinger, wrote to inquire out about “the word ‘Christianist,’ which is not one I’ve seen used before. Did Hertzberg coin this himself…? The word is clearly formed on the model of ‘Islamist,’ and is as pretty a piece of moral equivalence as I’ve ever found.” Hertzberg then used the term again in a second column later in the month, calling Tom DeLay a “hard-right Christianist crusader.”

In May 2005, Hertzberg’s repetitions drew the attention of William Safire in the New York Times Magazine and Ruth Walker on the Christian Science Monitor blog (Safire noted Sullivan’s 2003 coinage quoted above).

Since then, Hertzberg has used the term three more times in New Yorker columns and bloggers like Sullivan have also continued to invoke it. Currently, Technorati has 486 hits in a search for the term, while Google Blog Search has more than 300.

The problem, of course, is that the people are using the term “Christianist” to smear the religious right by associating it with the most extreme Muslim fundamentalists. Do extreme Christian fundamentalists exist for whom such comparisons might be appropriate? Yes. But the linguistic function of these labeling terms is to erase the some/all distinction by suggesting that all so-called “Christianists” (basically any socially conservative Christian Republican as Sullivan uses the term) are analogous to radical Islamist fundamentalists. And that’s just wrong.

Update 3/11: Ted Rall emails to point out that his June 8, 2004 column used the term “Christianist.”