I always enjoy Mr Kamiya's contributions on Salon.com (including his recent personal essay, "I'm Younger..."), and "Are We Rome?" is no exception. I wish he'd found a way to mention Gore Vidal, however, in this review, since Vidal's career to no small extent has been based--for decades before Cullen Murphy's book--on pointing out America's imperial nature, and on finding both echoes of Rome's history and differences from Rome's history in our own. Vidal's historical novel about the rise of Teddy Roosevelt and newspaper mogul Hearst (written in 1987) is entitled, "Empire." His novel about the last non-Christian emperor, "Julian," was written in 1964. It looks at the rise of both supernaturalism/mysticism and Christians' political might in the Romam empire (written in 1964), and his book "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace" (written in 2002, before our invasion of Iraq) highlights America's decades of wars of conquest and intervention, and notes our web of military bases, one topic of Chalmers Johnson's history published in 2007, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic."

There is also the increasing supernaturalism and Christian religiosity on the rise in America that might be seen as a striking parallel of the embracing of mystery cults and things "Oriental" in the days of Roman empire. Our New Agers have their crystals and pyramids, our Christians--buying 100,000's of copies of the Left Behind series--have had for decades their notions of demonic and angelic forces at work in our daily lives and foreign and domestic affairs. Christianized Rome turned her back on Greek skeptical rationalism only after mystical Orientalism began to chip away first at the influence of ancient thinkers like Epicurus and Democritus, and the earlier Roman republic's own Lucretius. In our own age, fairly stoic-like rationalists from Vidal to Sam Harris point out the danger of the irrational belief that supernatural forces favor America's special world status, while our nation wallows in reckless pre-emptive wars, obsessive watching of the likes of American Idol, tabloid news in lieu of substantive journalism, "documentaries" concerning things like alien abductions, crypto-Creationism taught in public schools, and quixotic, fear-based, irrational legislation like gay marriage bans to put one in mind of the later Christianized Roman Emperor, Justinian, who stated that homosexuality was the cause of earthquakes.

Zbigniew Brezinski, a national security advisor to President Carter, in his recent book, "Second Chance," posits that the most powerful image of America is no longer the Statue of Liberty but the prison camps of Guantanamo Bay.

The religious right is a significant factor in the decline of America's standing in the world. With the religious right's influence on the Republican Party--beginning in the 1970's, growing over a course of years, and still strong today--anti-intellectualism, provincialism, biblical and even messianic rhetoric, and American exceptionalism all grew stronger within the GOP, and with the election of George W. Bush, became to much of the rest of the globe all but synonymous with American values.

The Bush administration's foreign policy has been marked by not just arrogance and mismanagement, but specifically by a pro-Israel-right-or-wrong stance, numerous rejections of international agreements and courts, a distain for science, including medical science (as demonstrated by the administration's resistance to condom distribution and the funding of safe-sex education in the developing world). All of these things directly reflect the emphases and obsessions of the religious right since the late 1970's and early 1980's--emphases and obsessions usually justified by specific interpretations of biblical passages about "End Times"--including notions such as (to name just one of them) the Antichrist using multi-national organizations, like the United Nations or even a united Europe, to dominate a world eager and ready (thanks to secularism, of course).

On the domestic front, the rolling back of women's reproductive rights, the resurgence of advocacy for forms of Creationism, the attempts to halt or rollback gay civil rights, and outpouring of federal funds to faith-based organizations and "services," also reflect obsessions of the religious right--not just those mentioned above, but also obsessions with the myth of the republic's Founding Fathers being effectively evangelical Christians desiring an officially Christian state. (Hence the acceptability of faith-based, gov't-funded services.)

In not only the rhetoric of many Republicans, but in their policies, especially those of the Republicans of the Bush administration, there have been for several years and continue to be both words and deeds enough--many reflecting the agenda of the religious right--to alienate a wide range of differing nations and cultures.

We cannot let the horrible legacy of the post-2000 United State be pinned to George W. Bush alone, as if he was a suddenly-arriving aberration, isolated on a timeline; we must also make clear the role of the religious right in creating the modern Republican Party and helping bring about this disastrous administration.

Congratulations! What a fantastic accomplishment.

I regret I didn't discover until recently your book or your columns on Salon. I may be parading my ignorance to write this, but I hope that in your book, which I look forward to reading, you examine the influence of the religious right on the Bush administration.

I think that the religious right is in general under-estimated as a cultural and political force by most journalists, some of whom have repeatedly over the years (decades even) incorrectly announced the demise of the religious right. Recently, you've written about the decline of America's standing abroad. An important factor in that overall narrative is the religious right. I suspect you must at least touch on this in your book, since its title cites the Bush administration's "good vs. evil" mentality that springs at least in large part from the worldview of the religious right.