COMMENT.

This article comments on the paper by Louis Bolce and Gerald DeMaio, Religious Outlook, Culture War Politics and Antipathy toward Christian Fundamentalists, in the Spring 1999 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly. The evidence itself seems fairly straightforward which include the claims that Christian fundamentalists are rated more negatively than other religious groups they are rated as negatively as political groups on both sides of the ideological spectrum, factor analysis of the feeling thermometer scores for 20 different groups shows that the public associated Christian fundamentalists with cultural and political rather than religious groups or categories in all 3 years analyzed liberal religious, cultural and political attitudes are negatively correlated with positive attitudes toward Christian fundamentalists. But the conclusion that negative feelings toward Christian fundamentalists represent religious intolerance or prejudice, is based on the assumption that the public defines this category in the same way the authors do, namely, as consisting of certain religious denominations characterized by particular religious beliefs. In fact, the factor analysis results suggest that the public defines fundamentalists in terms of their cultural and political, not religious, positions. And nowhere in the article do the authors attend to what people actually have in mind when they answer the feeling thermometer question about Christian fundamentalists.