Christian political correctness

Red-State PC: Why you can't call them "the Christian right." by Timothy Noah:

John Green, a political scientist and director of the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron...assured me that the term "Christian right" has, indeed, been shed by the group it's meant to describe. Why? Partly because liberals, after years of hard work, have finally managed to attach extremist associations to the phrase "the right," in much the same way that conservatives many decades ago established that anything "left" was beyond the pale.

...the Christian right has been renaming itself with a frequency that would make Jesse Jackson blush. In the late 1970s, it was the "religious right." Jerry Falwell favored that term, and the media picked it up. Pretty soon, though, members of the movement perceived that the label had, for some mysterious reason, become pejorative, so the "religious right" was renamed the "Christian right." Now the movement is shedding "Christian right," because that term, mysteriously, has become pejorative, too. The new favored term is "the pro-family movement," but that's so overtly propagandistic—secularists are anti-family?—that it hasn't gotten much pickup. Hence "conservative Christian" or "evangelical Christian."

The trouble with "conservative Christian" is that it confuses the question of whether an individual is conservative in his religious practice with the question of whether that person is conservative politically. (Much of the black church, for example, is conservative in the religious but not the political sense.) Similarly, there are politically liberal "evangelical Christians," and there used to be quite a lot more of them....Even fundamentalists (an evangelical subgroup whom Jennings, incidentally, conflated with the broader Christian right) have some political liberals among them. In ditching the term, "Christian right," Green summed up, the Christian right chose to associate itself with the pool of Christians from which it hopes to draw, not the folks who already belong.