I don't like to advocate for specific products, but the most recent issue of Harpers (May 2005) is essential for anyone striving to understand the growing divide between liberal and conservative Christians. Harpers is the legendary American publication that has grown into an effective voice of intellectual dissent over the last decade. Included in this issue:

"Inside America's Most Powerful Megachurch" by Jeff Sharlet:

"New Lifers", Pastor Ted writes with evident pride, "like the benefits, risks, and maybe above all, the excitement of a free-market society." They like the stimulation of a new brand. "Have you ever switched your toothpaste brand, just for the fun of it?" Pastor Ted asks. Admit it, he insists. Al the way home, you felt a "secret little thrill," as excited questions ran through your mind: "Will it make my teeth whiter? My breath fresher?" This is the sensation Ted wants pastors to bring to the Christian experience. He believes it is time "to harness the forces of free-market capitalism in our ministry."

"Feeling the Hate with the National Religious Broadcasters" by Chris Hedges:

But fascism, (James Luther) Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.

...too many liberals failed to understand the power and allure of evil, and when the radical Christians came, these people (the liberals) would undoubtedly play by the old, polite rules of democracy long after those in power had begun to dismantle the democratic state. Adams had watched German academics fall silent or conform (during the 1930s). He knew how desperately people want to believe the comfortable lies told by totatlitarian movements, how easily those lies lull moderates into passivity.

Adams told us to watch closely the Christian right's persecution of homosexuals and lesbians. Hitler, he reminded us, promised to restore moral values not long after he too power in 1933 ... Homosexuals and lesbians, Adams said, would be the first "deviants" singled out by the Christian right. We would be the next.

Also of note in this issue:

"Let there be Markets (Evangelical roots of economics) by Gordon Bigelow

"The Wrath of the Lamb" by Lewis Lapham