Erin, I think you are really onto something with your comparison of American evangelical Christianity and the American New Left. I am a graduate student recently arrived from Europe to the USA and I must say that I noticed the parallel almost immediately. The message may be different, but the rhetoric is similarly Utopian and in their most severe strains, both operate with the same strategies: adherence to a single party line, singing love while preaching fire, building activist communities, advocating global and total revolution as the only acceptable mechanism of change, disdaining liberal democracy and other state institutions as either the product of the devil or the victims of that supposed mass hypnosis which is false consciousness.

This is strikingly different to Europe. While European universities have plenty of post-structuralists and folk of similar ilk, they tend to be more aware of their own limitations and their own ideological bias. They also tend to be much more skeptical of the possibility of achieving real change through activities such as 'consciousness-building'. European postmodernism is a more pessimistic, yet more intellectually grounded and less crudely political than its American counterpart.

Ironically, to Europeans, Americans never sound so American as when they bash their own country ruthlessly, rave about how much better everywhere else and talk of constructing a new society. What an peculiarly American dream. ;)