"Christianity is not what you see on television or hear from moral pundits."

My main advice, then, for those several posters in a row complaining (in a strikingly similar way) about the tone of Gabler's article is to get off your duffs and start doing everything possible so that you're not constantly being represented in the media by the likes of Falwell, Robertson, and Dobson. True, there's an awful lot of good Christian people out there who aren't hateful, raving bigots, but I've never understood why, exactly, those many good Christians (and particularly many good Christian leaders) don't make enough noise or protest enough so that their views ARE more widely represented in the broadcast and print media. If the views of those leaders like Falwell (who must appear on CNN about 8,000 times a month) disgust you and don't represent you, then make an uproar of protest. Silence equals tacit support. (The same goes for non-religious pundits like Ann Coulter. If you can find a progressive pundit who gets anywhere near the airtime or coverage she does, while being allowed the leeway to use anywhere near as extreme rhetoric-- i.e., calling people "fags," "jokingly" advocating murder, etc.-- please let me know. If you don't want the tone of "GW Bush's America" to be seen as "hateful," step number 1, part A, would be showing your good faith and decisively helping to drive people like her off the airwaves in favor of your own presumably more rational representatives).

I've noticed that groups representing minorities like Latinos and gays/lesbians often launch major campaigns when they feel they're being narrowly represented. So why in the world can't Christian interests with a sizeable majority do the same, if they truly feel they're being ill-represented in the media? Christianity is by no conceivable means a minority in this country, no matter how much the victimhood that sometimes goes along with minority status greatly appeals to some of its members. Is it really Neal Gabler of Salon you need to be worrying so much about and writing letters to, or the likes of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox? You don't get to cede the airwaves to the extremes of the Religious Right and then simultaneously get to complain when that's how you're perceived.

<<I've noticed that groups representing minorities like Latinos and gays/lesbians often launch major campaigns when they feel they're being narrowly represented. So why in the world can't Christian interests with a sizeable majority do the same, if they truly feel they're being ill-represented in the media? Christianity is by no conceivable means a minority in this country, no matter how much the victimhood that sometimes goes along with minority status greatly appeals to some of its members.>>

I think this is precisely why those with "Christian interests" don't launch a major campaign to represent their beliefs. Because they are a majority, and Christians are a large, diverse group. I say this as someone who was raised in a small town in a big blue state. When I was growing up, there was 1 Jewish person and a handful of atheists in my town. The rest were Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Church of Christ, etc. You lump them all together as Christians, but they don't group themselves together. In my town, a Baptist marrying a Catholic was a mixed marriage.

He is an extremely conservative Roman Catholic. There are vast differences between evangelical Christians as Mr. Gabler and most letter writers describe them and devout Roman Catholics. Naturally, in his hurry to spew bile over 'evangelical' right-wing Christians, Mr. Gabler misses this important point, which doesn't stop him from spouting a series of non sequiters with no real coherence I can detect. Mel Gibson's brand of Roman Catholicism has very little to do with the evangelical Christianity of, say, Pat Robertson or George W; but you wouldn't know it from this claptrap, and the reason is, I doubt very much that Mr. Gabler knows it.

This profound ignorance is as typical of left-wing paranoiacs as it is right-wing nutjobs, and makes commentary from either so highly dubious as to be little more than (barely) passable entertainment. One of the reasons I am letting my subscription to Salon dribble out is the increasing amount of space they are giving cant of this type. Salon, you used to do better than this. What happened?

Poor Mel Gibson - lurching from Mad Max to Kooky Christian to Cartoon Drunk. But how can anyone be shocked by his latest alcoholic outburst? His anti-semiticism, like his homophobia, has been evident for years and merits only mockery. (Which is why the best review of "The Passion" is Betty Butterfield's addled Quicktime clip - a treasure still out there on the internet somewhere.)

The evangelical betrayal of Christianity is a much sorrier tale. When I was a church-going teenager, I'd laugh at the crude comic books of Jack T. Chick, with titles like "The Gay Blade" and "Big Daddy" (illustrating the horrors of homosexuality and evolution, respectively). Now Christianity has devolved into its own parody. Evangelical Christians have assiduously embraced the right-wing politics of GWB, identifying themselves with an administration that champions the rich against the poor, destroys the environment, kidnaps, tortures, and discriminates, flouts international law and parades its scientific ignorance, all while wrapping itself in the flag and the Bible. In the process, they've twisted the traditional long-suffering face of Jesus into a mask of hatred. Gabler's right to take a hatchet to their hypocrisy.

Even so, it's stretching things a bit to crucify Mel for their sins. Let him groan and grumble in his own golgotha. We need the laughs.

Thank God Mel Gibson blew his ass out on PCH the other night! It led to the writing of this article which is brilliant, insightful, incisive and utterly right on in every respect. As a conservative Republican and trinitarian Christian I can say, from the inside, that the house I live in is rotten. This society, swayed as it is by neconservative right-wing hate-filled "Christians" who put "The Passon of the Christ" over the top with their prurient desire to watch a vivid and nauseating depiction of the story of the mortification of the man Jesus (pardon, that's Son O' God) is coming apart like no time in my memory (which is morbidly accurate over the period from 1948 through about 1994, before and after which everything is just a big blur).

Those who take offense at the article's depiction of hate-filled professing "Christians" need to tak a look in the mirror. Those who continue to defend our descent into a western version of Tehran spread across a continent need but to look around themselves at the idiots cruising along like lemings toward the edge of our re-flattened Earth.

It is a sad day when being a Christian (even if only of the Moorish Orthodox Church and so not taken seriously by many "proper" Christians), a Republican, a conservative and, yes, an American are all reasons to feel a trifle embarrassed. There's something terribly wrong with this picture and my only hope is that the one thing Gabler got wrong was his belief that Gibson was wrong in believing he's "fucked." I hope to God he is. It wouldn't be a moment too soon for Mel to get laid in a meaningful way, by the American public. The rest of the article is beyond doubt correct.