This summer, as the race for the Republican presidential nomination began to gain steam, RD Director Gary Laderman wrote a pair of essays, coining the term "Republicanity" and offering an analysis of the current political landscape that made religion an explicit and overarching theoretical concern. The extensive discussion they've generated has been fascinating to read and instructive to ponder.

In the first, he described the ways in which "Republicanity" now seems to operate as a religion, with its own myths, rituals, theologies, and ethics. In the second, he identified an important "teaching moment" that this discussion and debate have created.

What this summer's debate over the debt ceiling and the straw polls have made clear is that the Republican Party is now involved in a difficult battle over its own orthodoxy. Strange as the comparison may seem, what we're seeing today is highly reminiscent of the shifting landscape of the Christian world in the second and third centuries, and concerns a truism of Christian history: orthodoxy does not appear at the beginning of a movement, it's the result of a long, and painful, and drawn-out argument that was, as often as not, a violent one.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/5221/what_will orthodox`republicanity'_look_like/