He is helped in the task by the remarkable extent to which fundamentalist and evangelical Christians have developed warm and fuzzy feelings toward Jews.
Political scientists have developed a polling tool called a feeling thermometer, which asks respondents to rate social groups and political leaders on a scale ranging from 0 degrees to 100 degrees. Anything below 35 degrees (the average score whites express toward illegal aliens) reflects pretty fierce antipathy; scores above 50 degrees suggest varying degrees of warmth.
In 2000, the average white Christian fundamentalist rated Jews a warm 66 degrees, basically the same rating that Catholics and mainline Protestants gave to Jews.
Have we reached a nirvana of religious tolerance? Well, almost. There is one religion that it is still acceptable to openly hate in America. In fact, "One has to reach back to pre-New Deal America," write Bolce and De Maio, "... to find a period when voting behavior was influenced by this degree of antipathy toward a religious group."
Which group? Fundamentalist Christians, of course.
In 2000, about a quarter of white respondents rated fundamentalists 35 degrees or below, compared to just 1 percent who felt this antagonistic toward Jews and about 2.5 percent who expressed this much hostility toward blacks and Catholics. Among Democratic elites, the hatred is more intense: The majority of delegates to the 1992 Democratic convention gave Christian fundamentalists the absolute minimum score: 0 degrees.
The Party of Unbelief believes in tolerating all points of view, unless they you happen to have one they find really irritating, in which case all bets are off.