One of the good things about the internet is the opportunity for an author to respond to readers quickly about their work.
I linked up to an article by Joe Bageant that created an interesting debate.
I made a mistake, Mr. Bageant is from Virginia, not Texas.
I’m bringing his some of his comment forward to this post.

I thoroughly agree with about everything said here. But I would like to point out that the word limit on the Covert Kingdom story did not allow me to go into the kind of finer points being discussed here.

It is clear to me that folks such as youselves understand the phenomenon far better than I do, given that I write one story on a topic such as this one, then move along to quite a different one.

But I just wanted to point out that my intention was to illustrate one radical end of the Christian spectrum using the recons, then look at the way the Christian right has become embedded in the Republican Party in an unhealthy way with regard to separation of church and state, in my opinion. Sort of two snapshots juxtaposed.

Blogging gives opportunity to fisk, question, compliment and respond.
I’m not one of the ones that understands this topic better than Mr. Bageant. I do understand deadlines, word limits and the frustration of trying to clarify a topic within editorial restraints. I also understand dealing with listeners, viewers or readers who may hear part of what is said, or wish to take you to task or give you further background.

I have watched people be put out of business by cultish pentacostals, teachers pushed out of their jobs, libraries censored, and even local politicians threatened and blackmailed in a couple of cases. The Shenandoah Valley is moreover a tough, uneducated place and though all of you are modern enlightened people, here we still have vestigal religious cultures whose severity goes back to roots in Europe. Given this is where I live and my vantage point, this certainly colored my story to at least some degree. But then, reality and color is desirable in writing and that is part of my job as an essayist, to stand on the ground here in America and write from that point in our culture…bringing in not only what I see, but what it feels like and ask what it possibly means.

Mr Bageant received 3 thousand emails about this particular article, I genuinely appreciate an author using my blog comments to respond to interested readers.

In the end however, the more we as Americans discuss these things, the better off we are as a nation. I worry a lot about the segmentation of information and the balkanization of information constituencies in my business. The fundamentalists I was discussing are not engaging society outside their own church community…just as too many liberals are not engaging their more conservative brothers. They do not even know they exist. (You would not believe the number of liberals who have asked me what Armageddon and the rapture are!)

The bottom line is of course, separation of church and state, which I believe is being deeply threatened. And if that is the message my admittedly liberal readership takes away, then the essay was a success.