Quite a few bloggers have noticed a piece by Paul Sheehan, explicitly comparing Christianity in the Third World to radical Islamism and presented with the alarming headline Christian reactionaries leading a new crusade. This seems plausible in many ways, and is worth another reminder that ‘crusade’ and ‘jihad’ are exact synonyms in both their literal meaning and their metaphorical uses (favorable and hostile),

Numerically, though Sheehan’s argument relies heavily on the 480 million Catholics in Latin America (he doesn’t mention the rise of evalengical Protestantism there, which is notable, but not numerically important). With the exception of the ‘liberation theology’ associated with the radical left and now largely obsolete, he’s probably right that Latin American Catholicism is relatively tradtionalist and conservative. But I don’t get the impression that it’s characterised by crusading zeal. Are there any readers with first-hand experience who’d like to comment?