Hedges claims that those who have placed blind faith in the morally neutral disciplines of reason and science create idols in their own image — a sin for either side of the spectrum. He makes an impassioned, intelligent case against religious and secular fundamentalism, which seeks to divide the world into those worthy of moral and intellectual consideration and those who should be condemned, silenced and eradicated. Hedges shatters the new atheists’ assault against religion in America, and in doing so, makes way for new, moderate voices to join the debate. This is a book that must be read to understand the state of the battle about faith.

http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Believe-Atheists-Chris-Hedges/dp/141656795X

(Chris Hedges… who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School)…observes that there are two radical, polarized and dangerous sides to the debate on faith and religion in America: the fundamentalists who see religious faith as their prerogative, and the new atheists who brand all religious belief as irrational and dangerous. Both sides use faith to promote a radical agenda, while the religious majority, those with a commitment to tolerance and compassion as well as to their faith, are caught in the middle.

Perhaps the most interesting evolution of all has been Christopher Hitchens. To think he started out selling Trotskyist newspapers on a London street corner.

A for your “man,” to the extent there is such a thing, it’s not really the movement conservative but rather what Rush calls the country-club blue-blood Republican, the small-town patriarch Sinclair Lewis was depicting in Babbitt, the kind of guy who encourages civic boosterism so as to keep the rabble from getting any cosmopolitan fancy-pants ideas about changing the status quo or really doing anything of substance. Rush says that they regularly come up to him at his personal appearances and whisper to him, “Can’t you do anything about keeping these anti-abortion zealots from detracting from our economic issues?” The kind of person whose vision is so narrow that their foreign policy consists of “Hey, just so long as I have a market for my widgets I don’t care who blows who up.”
Heaven forfend that somebody might really have deep convictions and a seamless worldview!

So, as I say, if there is a “man,” that’s him, broadly characterized.