Response to Greenwood and McConnell

I am writing this response in Jerusalem, where I am spending a half-year sabbatical, and where the question of politics and religion has an urgency that makes the American debate look tame. Here there are religiously based political parties, involved in every electoral campaign, pursuing narrow sectarian interests-and the critical issue isn't the right of their leaders and spokesmen (the gendered term is appropriate) to join in the democratic deliberations; they have the same right as anyone else; no one contests it. The issue is their willingness to join, since they mostly don't believe in democracy, and they don't want their followers exposed to the give and take of political argument. They aim simultaneously, and with considerable success, at the isolation of a sect and the power of an establishment.