WASHINGTON After writing about the fervor of the late Terri Schiavo's "Christianist 'supporters,"' Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker last month described Representative Tom Delay as a "Christianist crusader." Obviously there is a difference in meaning between the adjectives Christian and Christianist. Thanks to Jon Goldman, an editor at Webster's New World Dictionaries, I have the modern coinage of the latter with its pejorative connotation. "I have a new term for those on the fringes of the religious right," wrote the blogging Andrew Sullivan on June 1, 2003, "who have used the Gospels to perpetuate their own aspirations for power, control and oppression: Christianists. They are as anathema to true Christians as the Islamists are to true Islam." Not such a new term. In 1883, W.H. Wynn wrote a homily that said "Christianism - if I may invent that term - is but making a sun-picture of the love of God." He didn't invent the term, either. In the early 1800s, the painter Henry Fuseli wrote scornfully that "Christianism was inimical to the progress of arts." And John Milton used it in 1649. Adding ist or ism to a word usually colors it negatively. Therapists (a neutral term - indeed, masseurs like to upgrade their job description to massage therapist) won't like therapism, which is intended to be disparaging. Another suffix is being used in counterattack to derogate those who denounce church influence in politics. "The Catholic scholar George Weigel calls this phenomenon 'Christophobia,"' the columnist Anne Applebaum wrote in The Washington Post. Today's negative connotation of the suffix -phobia (the ailment) or -phobe (the person) comes from the political-social accusation of homophobia. Let the listener or reader beware: -ist and -phobe, more often than not these days, are suffixes tacked on to words to turn them into fierce derogations. If this is alarmist, then I'm a lexiphobe.