"In the Pentagon today," he says, "there is active proselytizing by Christian groups that is allowed by the chain of command. When your superior expects you to show up at his prayer breakfast, you may not feel free to say no. It's not at all clear what will happen to your career. He writes your efficiency report. And the next thing you know, you have, in the culture of the Pentagon, more and more active religious outreach."

Continues Carroll, "Imagine, then, a military motivated by an explicit Christian, missionizing impulse at the worst possible moment in our history, because we're confronting an enemy - and yes, we do have an enemy: fringe, fascist, nihilist extremists coming out of the Islamic world - who define the conflict entirely in religious terms. They, too, want to see this as a new `crusade.' That's the language that Osama bin Laden uses. For the United States of America at this moment to allow its military to begin to wear the badges of a religious movement is a disaster!"

A former Roman Catholic priest, Carroll also warns about rising tide of Christian fundamentalism around the world.

"My own conviction is that a crucial twenty-first century problem is going to be Christian fundamentalism," he says. "Its global growth is an unnoticed story in the United States. Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia are now absolutely on fire with zealous belief in the saving power of Jesus, in the most intolerant of ways. A religious ideology that affirms the salvific power of violence is taking hold. It denigrates people who are not part of the saved community, permitting discrimination, and ultimately violence. Hundreds of millions of people are embracing this kind of Christianity."

While the interview veers into some other areas, such as the war in Iraq, Carroll's warning on the dangers of politicized fundamentalism is well worth heeding. Fundamentalism's main fault, as Carroll points out, is that is often impervious to facts and stubborn. Its adherents admit no new information and insist on looking to their interpretation of religious texts as a sole guide for governance.

The problem is, those ancient books were never intended to fill that role. The Bible may have a lot to say on how to worship God or get to Heaven, but it can be made to speak on issues like stem-cell research, cloning, in vitro fertilization and other modern controversies only through the interpretation of a human agent.

We have no shortage of fundamentalist "guides" who would claim to interpret the text and tell the government how it ought to respond in the "biblically correct" way. Interestingly, what the Bible mandates the government do and what various fundamentalist leaders would have the government do just happen to always be one in the same. (Just a coincidence, I am sure.)

There is a better way, as Carroll remind us: "America is also a secular nation, of course. The separation of church and state was a critical innovation, giving us this special standing as a people. The separation's purpose was to protect the conscientious freedom of every individual by making the state neutral on questions of religious conscience. An absolutely ingenious insight."