Rich Lowry has a good column on “theo-panic” — the exaggeration of the power of radical Christians (or, as Andrew Sullivan might have it, “Christianists”) in American political life.

While my own book makes a case for a less heavy-handedly religious GOP, I definitely don’t count myself in the ranks of the theo-panic-ers. If anything, the “theocons” feel constantly exploited and let down by the GOP. And as for the influence of truly radical Christian teachings, even within the mainstream Evangelical movement — well, I’ll let Lowry tell it:

Purveyors of the theo-panic love to exaggerate the influence of the bizarre Christian Reconstructionists who actually want an American theocracy. As New York Times religion writer Peter Steinfels notes in a review of the spate of new books, Christian Reconstructionists play “a greater role in the writings of the religious right’s critics than they ever have in the wider evangelical world.” He notes that the flagship evangelical journal, Christianity Today, almost never shows up in these books, because, inconveniently, it is “moderate, reflective and self-questioning.”

National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru has pointed out that you can take all Christian conservative positions — including far-fetched ones like banning sodomy and contraception — and if they happened overnight they “would merely turn the clock back to the late 1950s. That may be a very bad idea, but the America of the 1950s was not a theocracy.”

I think that a lot of things that the Religious Right wants are bad. I think some of them, with regard to homosexuality, are outright bigoted. And I think that many people on the Religious Right have a backward view on the role religion should play in public, political life. But “theoconservative” is an inflammatory term, and it doesn’t tend to do much to move forward the debate.

Big-government conservatism — whether that government intrusion is fiscal or moral — is much more the sickness of today’s Republican Party. It just doesn’t get liberals as riled up.