Is author and pundit Ann Coulter on her way to becoming the new leader of the religious right?

Well, maybe not exactly.  Not yet anyway.  But if her new book is any indication, she wants to be a contender. Godless: the Church of Liberalism, is a vintage screed that like many a tome before it, riffs off of the central frame of the religious right for the past generation or so.

Her main argument is that liberalism is a religion. This is, of course, an indefensible conceit. But it  does help her to be able to say that liberals are busy chasing people of faith out of the public square. Her baseless claim is a variant on the frame that "secular humanists" are in a battle against Christianity, and of course, chasing them out of "the public square." This has been The Central Frame of the religious right for a generation. Christian right groups once went so far as to argue in federal court that Alabama school books advanced the alleged religion of "secular humanism" and therefore violated the establishment clause of the constitution.  The courts found that argument silly, and found for Mobile Alabama school board on that one.

Coulter's title also blatantly echoes a refrain from the McCarthy era as rightwing preachers and pols alike railed against "godless communism."

Claiming that liberals are godless is a silly old canard and easily debunked. But fortunately for Coulter, liberals and democrats are not very good at answering the charge. (I have discussed this point, among other places, here and here, so I will not belabor it at the moment.) So let's look for a promising place to start.

You can tell a great deal about an organization by it's leader. That person is, after all, the person who was hired to carry out the agenda of the board of directors. That person is normally the principal spokesperson; the person who gives the speech; the person whom the reporter asks for even when he sometimes has to settle for someone else.  And whenever an organization goes through a transition after the departure of a longtime leader, who the next leader is often signals the organization's direction.

Thus, the announcement of the new president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a Washington, DC-based organization with a 20 year history of seeking to undermine mainline Christian churches deemed "too liberal" -- is a bellwether moment.