If either Perry or Bachmann is the Republican nominee, the Obama campaign will likely pour part of its reported billion-dollar war chest into painting them as wild-eyed theocrats.

Fifty-seven years ago the postwar “Red Scare” reached its height in the McCarthy Senate hearings, prototype of all witch hunts and icon of ideology run amuck. To this day, “McCarthyism” raises the specter of harmless nonconformists forced into the spotlight at the risk of reputation and career.

It’s a prime example of what Richard J. Hofstadter, in a famous 1964 essay, called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in which irrational fear trumps reasoned analysis. He applied it to the Goldwater campaign, but “behind this, I believe, there is a style of mind that is far from new, and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style, simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

Fast-forward to last month, when a widely circulated and much-commented-on New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza explored the religious influences on GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. Lizza’s prose knotted with concern as he described the influence on the conservative Christian of the worldviews of Francis Schaeffer and Nancy Pearcey—both of whom, apparently, dared to believe that a Christian’s faith in Christ should affect every area of life and thought.

That’s weird enough, but Lizza also finds a connection between Schaeffer and “dominionism”—the belief that Christians should rule the world. Or something like that. Supposedly Schaeffer advocated the violent overthrow of an ungodly government and had close ties with R.J. Rushdoony and Christian Reconstructionism, too. Should we be alarmed?

Less than a week after Lizza’s article appeared, The New Republic ran “Rick Perry: The God-Fearing, No-Nothing, Pistol-Packing Embodiment of Liberals’ Worst Nightmare,” by Walter Shapiro. Second on Shapiro’s list of reasons to be very afraid of Perry is “The God Card,” meaning the governor’s public embrace of “the living Christ” and “the salvation agenda.”

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