Playing with Fire.

I suspect that Rod Dreher still reads our humble blog. If he doesn't, I hope one of his crunchy friends checks in on us and considers conducting an intervention -- for Rod's sake, not ours.

I've noticed that the Crunchy Con is very, very sensitive to anti-Catholic bigotry, whether it be a stunt at Baylor that would hardly be out of place in a Monty Python skit or that moronic DaVinci Code movie and its apparent anti-Catholic bigotry.

That's all well and good, but Rod continues to toy with the idea he mentioned a few weeks back, namely that there is a tension between evangelicalism and conservatism.

Perhaps he's reacting to Jonah Goldberg's writing that Rod is at times "simply begging" to be read out of conservatism. What is reading one man out of conservatism when you can banish an entire branch of Christianity and -- since Bush is an evangelical -- simultaneously take another left-ish swipe at the President for being a religious fanatic?

I would like to warn Rod that he's playing with fire.

No, we evangelicals aren't going to lash out at him, though his emerging bias might make some of us think twice about buying his book. I just think he ought to be careful about criticizing faiths other than his own.

After all, since he's already jumped from the Methodist church to Roman Catholicism, and since he's joined an Eastern rite parish, and since he's considering a move to Eastern Orthodoxy, just who can say where he'll be next Easter Sunday?

(Or next Sunday? To say nothing of this Friday night, since he could concievably switch to Judaism and back in the span of a single weekend.)

In brief, Rod shouldn't burn bridges he might end up wanting to cross.