MM doesn’t like evangelical missionaries. He thinks they’re heretics.

My response: Maybe so, technically. But so is their intended audience, including many putative “Catholics” that are practicing animal sacrifice, etc.

MM’s response: Better animal sacrifice than 1 million dead Iraqis.

My response: What a ludicrously false dilemma. If a missionary to Haiti converts one of the pagan-Catholics there to become a practicing Baptist, there is absolutely nothing whatsoever about that conversion that makes the Haitian more likely to engage in war. Moreover, none of the promoters of the Iraq War (including Bush himself, a mainliner) were evangelicals. Sure, some of the voters who supported the Iraq War were evangelicals, just as some were Catholics or Methodists or atheists or Jewish. That doesn’t mean that Catholicism or Judaism or atheism or any of the above are to be blamed for the Iraq War, and it is egregiously big0ted for you to blame a particular religious faith.

Irrelevant. Faith may influence lots of questions, but there’s nothing particularly “evangelical” about the Iraq War, nor have you even remotely shown as much. You’re not even trying.

The point, which you can’t answer, is that if you’re going to get out your heresy-o-meter, and you apply it honestly, you’ll have to concede that a lot of so-called “Catholics” in the world are alarmingly pagan, and converting to a decent evangelicalism (which need have nothing to do with supposed war-mongering doctrines) would be an improvement.

In any event, we’ve been through the whole “Calvinist” shtick before. Your one wanna-be authority in the Vatican doesn’t make a cognizable argument tying American foreign policy to the traditional TULIP doctrines of Calvinism. If you’re falling back on your old standby argument that “cultural Calvinism” consists of viewing other countries as “other,” then you’ve merely identified a universal human trait, and one that has zero to do with Calvinism. Indeed, given the centuries-long history of wars sponsored or initiated by Catholics or the Church itself, it is foolish beyond belief for a supposedly educated person to suggest that Calvinists are to blame for war.

If so, then you are precisely the kind of Catholic who places the nation-state above his or her faith. The exactly wrong thing to do.

“In the view of some in the Vatican, underlying both the harsh American response on sexual abuse, and its dualistic approach to foreign policy, is the legacy of Calvinism. The Calvinist concepts of the total depravity of the damned, the unconditional election of God’s favored, and the manifestation of election through earthly success, all seem to them to play a powerful role in shaping American cultural psychology.

After Cardinal Pio Laghi returned to Rome from his last-minute appeal to Bush just before the Iraq war began, he told John Paul II that he sensed “something Calvinistic” in the president’s iron determination to battle the forces of international terrorism.

Recently I was in the Vatican, and happened to strike up a conversation with an official eager to hear an American perspective on the war. He told me he sees a “clash of civilizations” between the United States and the Holy See, between a worldview that is essentially Calvinistic and one that is shaped by Catholicism.

“We have a concept of sin and evil too,” he said, “but we also believe in grace and redemption.”

Vatican officials, it should be noted, are not the only ones to detect a strong Calvinist influence in American culture. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago made a similar statement during the Synod of Bishops for the Americas in November 1997. George said that U.S. citizens “are culturally Calvinist, even those who profess the Catholic faith.” American society, he said, “is the civil counterpart of a faith based on private interpretation of Scripture and private experience of God.” He contrasted this kind of society with one based on the Catholic Church’s teaching of community and a vision of life greater than the individual.”

Says who? The fear of alleged WMDs doesn’t have much to do with religion, nor does the belief that democracy should be installed in certain areas of the world.

This is incorrect. Countless americans, including George W. Bush, “justified” the Iraq War using supposedly “Christian” principles. Many soldiers fighting in the war see what they are doing as if it were a crusade.

Except that the latter isn’t a religious practice, so it’s quite the straw man if the question is who you want to call a heretic.