• It "follows" only in an extremely bogus sense of "follow," meaning "ignoring history and what we know about human beings, concentrating solely on propositional logic relying on my interpretation of documents subject to multiple interpretations, it could be said that ...." This is a poor basis for the construction of a thesis that will suffer from extreme vulnerability and tendentiousness on account of its parentage. You could say with more basis that "it follows that some individuals will be very concerned, and that some individuals will be not only unconcerned, but fully engaged in grinding the faces of the poor." Christians "attempting to follow the teachings of Jesus" have included Franciscans of great holiness as well as Franciscans of immense greed, slaveowners, slumlords, Bavarian and Rwandan practitioners of genocide, socialists, anarchists, George Bernard Shaw, Dorothy Day, Angelo Roncalli, Rodrigo Borgia, Teresa de Avila, and Benito Mussolini. We have no reason in history or psychology to suppose that a sincere attachment to the teachings of Yehoshua of Nazareth, whatever they were, or to the teachings of the Gospels, whatever they are and whatever relation they bear to those of "Jesus," is incompatible with any social attitude expressed today, however repugnant.

• What does this sentence mean?

This conservatism has been shaped by the concerns of social and fiscal conservatives, among others.

• What could this sentence mean, if anything?

In the 20th and 21st centuries political conservatives have opposed equal rights for minorities and women, affordable healthcare, expansion of welfare benefits, increases in the minimum wage, expansion of education and desegregation of schools, and tax cuts benefiting the poor.

• Tax cuts benefiting the poor? Surely you mean tax increases benefiting the poor? Surely no one is insane enough to believe that the political program of the poor is tax cuts?

Within the past thirty years, many of these conservative positions, and others in the same vein, have been strongly supported by the Republican Party and have been used to their benefit in elections.

• Is this the same as saying that the Republican Party is the more conservative of our two conservative parties?

• I don't know whether people's records are conservative: that sort of talk is usually bullshit. You mean that evangelicals have voted heavily for candidates of both parties who have said they opposed abortion and non-heterosexual marriages, and were in favor of permitting state-sanctioned Christian prayers in public schools. This made sense, because those people were voting for candidates (by no means only Republicans) who promised them changes in public policy that they considered desirable and godly.

The Republican Party's lack of concern for the plight of the poor and their desire to solidify the hold of large companies and elites on America is hard to square with the statements of Jesus in the Gospels.

• But not impossible. Every government's program is both hard and not hard to square with the Gospels, the Gitas, the Qu'ran, and the United States Constitution. Why say something so outstandingly, thumpingly, preposterously naive?

The policies advocated by Bush and the Republican party have largely been politically conservative. Bush's tax cut plan primarily benefits the wealthy (by 2010 fully 53% of the Bush tax cuts will have benefited only the top 1% of the population, while the lowest 20% will have only received 1.2% of the cuts). Further, under Bush's guidance the number of Americans without health insurance has steadily climbed. Bush has also advocated the slashing of Medicare and educational programs aimed at disadvantaged students. Although projected as a Christian administration, Bush's presidency has been marked by a shocking and callous disregard for the needs of America's disadvantaged.

• The entire essay, and particularly this last preposterous note, proceeds on the basis that your reading of the Gospels is the reading of the Gospels, and that your idea of the social, ecclesiological and political consequences that flow from it will naturally be those of Christians whose intellectual approaches to the Bible (however "literal" you may think them) are at least as sophisticated as the one you present. But you don't show any sign of having learned anything about how Evangelicals in America have traditionally understood their relation to politics, or indeed of having tried to learn. What did you read before writing this? And how did you convince yourself that you could argue on the basis of your view of Christian doctrine? For George Bernard Shaw, in--say--the preface to Androcles and the Lion, Christian Socialism is presented as a provocation. "Liberation theology" is a view of doctrine, presenting itself to the Catholic Church as the views of the Spiritual Franciscans were presented, but I would remind you that the Catholic Church holds heretical the doctrine of the poverty of Jesus. To present yourself as having "the" view of the Gospels against which supposedly Christian political doctrine can be measured is simply bizarre.