More of the same?

Much of the backlash against
critics of Governor Rick Perry's religious beliefs has focused on the idea that
the charges are essentially "more of the same": more of the same secularist
paranoia about religion in public life, more of the same elitist disdain for
the "evangelical vote," more of the same fear-mongering over tangential
connections to Christian theocrats.

But these dismissals are
themselves more of the same: the same ignorance of the influence of Pentecostal
and charismatic movements on American Christianity. According to one leading
critic of Perry's views--researcher and writer Rachel Tabachnik, who spoke
to Terry Gross last week--the New Apostolic Reformation movement is not
simply the same old thing with a new name:

[The NAR] is quite radically different than the evangelicalism
of my youth. The things that we've been talking about are not representative of
evangelicalism. They're not representative of conservative evangelicalism. . .
This is a movement that's growing in popularity, and one of the ways they've
been able to do that [is that]...they're just presented as nondenominational or
just Christian--but it is an identifiable movement now with an identifiable
ideology."