Two weeks after writing about the fervor of the late Terri Schiavo's "Christianist `supporters,'" Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker last month described Representative Tom Delay as a "hard-right Christianist crusader." A few months before, soon after US President George W. Bush was re-elected, the conservative Weekly Standard reported that an Ohio cartoonist had sent out a communication deploring "militant Christianist Republicans."
Obviously there is a difference in meaning between the adjectives Christian and Christianist. Thanks to Jon Goldman, an editor at Webster's New World Dictionaries, I have the modern coinage of the latter with its pejorative connotation. "I have a new term for those on the fringes of the religious right," wrote the blogging Andrew Sullivan on June 1, 2003, "who have used the Gospels to perpetuate their own aspirations for power, control and oppression: Christianists. They are as anathema to true Christians as the Islamists are to true Islam."
Not such a new term. You have to be careful about claiming coinage, as I learned to my rue (my 1970s baby, workfare, turned out to have been coined earlier; same with neuroethics). In 1883, W. H. Wynn wrote a homily that said "Christianism -- if I may invent that term -- is but making a sun-picture of the love of God." He didn't invent the term, either. In the early 1800s, the painter Henry Fuseli wrote scornfully that "Christianism was inimical to the progress of arts." And John Milton used it in 1649.
Adding -ist or -ism to a word usually colors it negatively, as can be seen in secularist. In One Nation Under Therapy, Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel coined therapism to mean "the revolutionary idea that psychology can take the place of ethics and religion," which they believe undermines the American creed of "self-reliance, stoicism, courage in the face of adversity and the valorization of excellence." Therapists (a neutral term -- indeed, masseurs like to upgrade their job description to massage therapist) won't like therapism, which is intended to be disparaging.
As Christianist, with its evocation of Islamist, gains wider usage as an attack word on what used to be called the religious right, another suffix is being used in counterattack to derogate those who denounce church influence in politics. "The Catholic scholar George Weigel calls this phenomenon `Christophobia,'" the columnist Anne Applebaum wrote in the Washington Post. She noted that he borrowed the word from the American legal scholar, J. H. H. Weiler. The word was used by Weigel "after being struck by the European Union's fierce resistance to any mention of the continent's Christian origins in the draft versions of the new, and still unratified, European constitution."
Phobia, which means "fear of," was doing fine as a medical term until recently. "Phobias are irrational fears," says Elaine Rodino, a psychologist in Santa Monica, California. "They are not just `sort of fears;' they are full and intense and uncontrollable." An anxiety psychologist in Chicago, David Carbonell, says that "the clinical term phobia is not doing well. Often it's appended to another word to indicate a wide range of dislikes that may have nothing to do with the core meaning of avoidance as a response to powerful fear. I just fielded a request for an interview on `nudophobia.'"
These range from Islamophobe to Christophobe, both of which were used in the Oct. 23, 1997, edition of the Independent in London. They include Dean-o-phobe in a 2003 New Republic article, when Jonathan Chait confessed, "It's not entirely clear to me why I've taken such an intense dislike to Howard Dean."
Today's negative connotation of the suffix -phobia (the ailment) or -phobe (the person) comes from the political-social accusation of homophobia. The original meaning, according to the OED, is "fear of men, or aversion towards the male sex." Chambers' Journal in 1920 wrote of a woman whose "salient characteristic was a contempt for the male sex represented in the human biped ... The seeds of homophobia had been sown early."
Many doctors take umbrage at the general use of their suffix in words like Francophobe for "one who calls French fries `freedom fries;'" they don't like the way it dilutes the scientific seriousness of the term about an irrational fear. But professions don't own their words. Mathematicians also gripe about the theft of their beloved parameters, to no avail; common usage has a way of snatching a specific word or suffix to do more general semantic work.
Let the listener or reader beware: -ist and -phobe, more often than not these days, are suffixes tacked on to words to turn them into fierce derogations. If this is alarmist, then I'm a lexiphobe.
EXUBERANCE
When Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, sagely warned rabid stock touts and gullible investors about irrational exuberance in 1996, he used an adjective to cast a pall over a beautiful noun. Ever since, the word exuberance -- rooted in "fruitful, fertile," related to a cow's uber, "udder" -- has picked up an old sense of excess.
Comes now one of the world's best-known psychiatrists to the word's rescue. Professor Kay Redfield Jamison of Johns Hopkins, author of the best seller An Unquiet Mind and co-author of a doorstop-size classic medical text on manic depressive illness, has given us an uplifting reading experience: Exuberance: The Passion for Life.
"Words for desolation come apace," Jamison notes, "those for exuberance less so ... In part this is because the language for melancholy is such a rich and nuanced one." She's right: It's enough to make us a pack of dispirited, despondent, Gloomy Guses.
But what of the synonymy of cheer? Sprightliness, enthusiasm, exultation, spiritedness, buoyancy, elan, ebullience -- all these upbeat, elated words are there to back up exuberance.
This is probably apocryphal, but I once heard a literary legend about Robert Louis Stevenson, a man of wide mood swings. In an early draft of A Child's Garden of Verses, he supposedly had a line that read, "The world is so big and I am so small, I do not like it at all, at all." Rather than depress youthful readers with that unhappy thought, he changed it to the memorable expression of exuberance: "The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."
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