"Christianist" update

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

back on 3/17/04 Lynne Murphy wondered here about
"Christianist" (parallel to "Islamist"), but found few net uses in
the relevant sense.

Mark Liberman's report on Language Log, 5/22/06, http://
itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003176.html, shows
burgeoning use of the word:

In a May 12, 2005 blog entry "Onward, Christianist soldiers?", Ruth
Walker wrote that

  >Google has rounded up 631 hits for me for "Christianist," along
with the query, "Did you mean to search for 'Christiano'?" [...]

  >I figure 631 hits for ‘Christianist’ is the Internet equivalent of
seeing the first sliver of the sun coming up over the mountain in the
morning.

Now, a bit more than a year later, {Christianist} gets 70,200 hits
(though Helpful Google still asks "Did you mean: christiano"). Some
of the increase has been promoted by Andrew Sullivan, who has started
using the term frequently on his blog The Daily Dish. He has also
adopted the nominal form Christianism, for example in his May 15,
2006 essay "My Problem with Christianism"...

{Christianism} gets 592,000 Google hits, many more than Christianist
-- but that seems to be because the term has a number of prior realms
of use, both positive and negative.

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now in the mainstream: here's Hendrik Hertzberg in the lead Talk of
the Town entry in the latest New Yorker (9/11/06):

Nine months into his Presidency, an economic policy of transferring
the budget surplus to the wealthy, a social policy hewing to the
demands of the Christianist far right, and a foreign policy marked by
contempt for international instruments...

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