He’s a walking contradiction,
Partly truth and partly fiction,
Taking every wrong direction,
On his lonely way back home.
—Kris Kristofferson
Andrew Sullivan never tires of reminding readers that he is a Catholic, yet he is the rather odd sort of Catholic who proclaims the “spirituality”—I’m not kidding, the word is his—of sexual encounters between strangers who don’t even bother to reveal to each other their names (what Sullivan calls “anonymous sex”). He also advertises himself as a conservative, but in this, too, he is a walking contradiction. His new book, The Conservative Soul, mixes some important truths about what it means to be a conservative with some outrageous and even zany fictions. At some level, he really does seem to want to be a faithful member of his Church and a true conservative, but he is managing to take just about every possible wrong direction on his lonely way back home.
Andrew Sullivan is, if nothing else, a passionate writer. He forcefully asserts strong opinions—mostly liberal ones—on a range of hotly contested moral and political issues. Expressions of doubt are rare in his writings. And woe betide those who have the temerity to express opposing views! They are consigned to the category of “fundamentalists”—twisted and dangerous people who are psychologically incapable of dealing with ambiguity or uncertainty and are bent on tyrannically imposing their beliefs on others. Much of The Conservative Soulis devoted to demonizing Evangelical Protestants and traditional Catholics who have, he insists,
