a fully enclosed paranoid universe

crooks and liars has an excellent essay by matt osborne positing that the social conservative right and the religious right have become a single entity, at least as played out in the tea party. he notes they have a creation story, a creed, rituals and sacred words, and other holy articles that mimic fundamentalist belief systems. someone brings up, in the comments, an excellent point regarding the distinction between fundamentalism, evangelicalism, dominionism and "plain old protestantism," and thinks it threatens the foundation of osborne's point, but I don't agree. true, those -isms are rarely more than wary cousins to one another, but as with the tendency of the tea party to ignore the differences between, say, liberals and progressives in order to make their salient points, it's just as fair to elide distinctions between prosperity gospel adherents and premillenial dispensationalists in order to make the larger point that there has been an awkward shift to a new religion of the righteous that is "a fully enclosed paranoid universe where the ice is not melting, the government is too big, and freedom is threatened by change."