I’m fairly sure the reaction to Hume — at least from what I’ve seen, and I looked at quite a bit of it Monday — has much more to do with the “pompous jerk” part than with the mere mention of Christianity. But maybe Hume believes the opposite; even if he doesn’t, it certainly plays with O’Reilly’s audience. And for Hume to say he wasn’t proselytizing is absurd — as Steve Benen points out, what he did is the dictionary definition of the word.

The reaction to Hume’s comments has been largely negative.

“I do not understand and can’t begin to comprehend the arrogance it takes to publicly anoint yourself someone’s spiritual adviser, and to then lecture them about their faith and its alleged inadequacies,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jay Bookman wrote. ” A person’s faith is a private matter between that person and God, and is not a matter to be judged by some pompous TV anchor.”

The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan was similarly critical, writing:

The pure sectarianism of this comment — its adoption of the once-secular stage of political journalism to insert a call for apostasy — is striking … But it has long been established that non-evangelical Christians have at best an auxiliary role in today’s religiously defined GOP, and the slow morphing of Fox News into the 700 Club is not exactly new … Once you have abolished the distinction between secular and religious discourse, as they routinely insist on doing, their politics is their religion and their religion is their politics. And both are corrupted.

And Steve Benen chimed in to make a few good points, “It’s hard to even know where to start with something like this. How many high-profile Christians have had damaging sex scandals of late? Why is Buddhism deemed inadequate for those with family problems? Why is a senior political analyst for a so-called ‘news’ network proselytizing, on the air, during one of the network’s ‘news’ programs?”

As of this post, a spokeswoman for Fox News hadn’t yet responded to a voice mail Salon left seeking comment. But there were some conservatives in the blogosphere who came to Hume’s defense.

“Leftists in the state-run media are lambasting Brit Hume for promoting Christianity on a Sunday morning talk show,” the Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft, complained, before going on to make a somewhat nonsensical argument in response to Benen: “It used to be that liberals didn’t want you to mention Christ in schools. Then they banned Christ from Christmas concerts and public squares. Now they are demanding that we not talk about Christianity in public. We should have seen this coming.”

“Nava — who is a Mormon — wrote in the student newspaper that a school campaign to distribute free condoms on campus was a ‘tacit sponsorship of hookup sex.’ Three other members of the morally conservative Anscombe Society also received the threats, along with a conservative professor.”

But there was a good reason for the lack of outrage. Nava — who had a history of faking threats, having done so while in high school — made the whole thing up. By Monday afternoon (we put it at no later than 1:50 p.m. Eastern, based on the time stamps at blogs covering the story), hours before Hume went on the air at 6 p.m., the campus newspaper and the conservative New York Sun were reporting that Nava had confessed to local authorities that he had faked the attack and was responsible for sending the threats.

We caught the rebroadcast of Hume’s program, which ran at 2 a.m. Eastern. The segment remained. Tuesday morning, Fox’s Web site carried an update to the print version. “Here’s a quick update on our Grapevine about The New York Sun story concerning the Princeton student who alleged he had been beaten — after coming out against the school distribution of condoms,” the update reads. “The Daily Princetonian says Francisco Nava has admitted he made up the story and fabricated e-mails threatening his life and those of other students and one professor.

“Nava reportedly confessed to police on Monday. He has been released with no charges so far. The school says its investigation is ongoing.”

As of this post, however, Fox’s Web site still listed the segment as its top video, with the description: “Questions at Princeton University about why more people aren’t defending a student who was beaten.”

Update: In comments, reader johnnydollar points out something we hadn’t noticed in reading the transcript originally posted to Fox’s Web site or in watching the rebroadcast, which is that Hume corrected the story on-air shortly after initially reporting it. Our apologies.

Well, we were wrong. Indeed, the hour could not even fairly be described as an interview. It was an advertisement, an opportunity for Petraeus and Crocker to reprise their testimony unchallenged.

Hume started the hour fairly enough, asking Petraeus just to give a synopsis of what he told Congress earlier Monday. But then it was a solid 15 minutes before Hume actually asked his next question. So, based on a transcript of the interview provided by CQ Transcripts Wire, we did a quick bit of figuring. In those 15 minutes, 2,600 words were spoken. Of those 2,600 words, Hume got in seven prompts — calling them questions would be silly; they were just attempts to clarify for the audience what Petraeus was talking about, or nudge Petraeus in directions more favorable to his own position — and spoke a total of just 55 words.

After a commercial break, Crocker got similar treatment for 10 minutes of his own. In fact, it wasn’t until after the second commercial break (and by now we were halfway through the hour) that Hume got ready to ask his first truly penetrating question.

“Gentlemen, in both your testimony today, you indicated that there had been this bottom-up reconciliation which was sort of unpredicted and much welcomed, but it seemed to be mostly in Sunni areas. And the situation with the Shia seem — and the possible misbehavior, difficulty, problems with Shia militias, and so on,” Hume began.

And when, with the end of Hume’s question still hanging, the camera panned to the faces of Crocker and Petraeus, both looked to be bracing themselves for the blow surely coming. Would Hume ask whether the Sunni reconciliation had come solely because of fear of the majority Shiites? Or whether Shiite partisans dominate the Iraqi army and police force, turning them into sectarian militias and leading to the conclusions of the Jones report, which said that the national Iraqi police force should be disbanded altogether?

Not quite.

Instead, Hume wanted to talk about the new boogeyman of the right and Fox News: Iran. He blamed the Iranians for the aforementioned Shiite “misbehavior” and problems with Shiite militias, saying, “With Iranian influence [that's] always something you worry about when it comes to the Shiites,” then going on to ask,

“You indicated that Iran would be a big winner, in its own eyes at least, if this all went badly in Iraq. Why should we not believe that as progress is made with the Sunni, that progress is made militarily, that Iran could simply rachet up its interference in Iraq to the point where it would in the end spoil whatever progress is being made?”

At one point, Hume went so far in presenting pro-war propaganda that Petraeus actually had to walk the anchor’s statements back. In fact, the general actually looked shocked when Hume said to him, “You’ve suppressed the insurgency by al-Qaida to a considerable extent.”

“Well, we still have concerns about sectarian violence on either side, some still carried out by al-Qaida when they can,” Petraeus responded. “They are less active. They are off balance is the way I think we’d like to describe it, but still dangerous.”

Even that couldn’t slow Hume down. He’d just been handed an opportunity to further an administration talking point, that the war in Iraq is an inextricable part of the war on terror and specifically on the perpetrators of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“Would you — you — you said today — I think the phrase you used, correct me if I’m wrong, about al-Qaida was — when I guess you were asked the question about who is the principal enemy there — you said al-Qaida was — I think you called it the wolf closest to the sled,” Hume asked.

Then it was:

“Would you say that we wouldn’t be in the situation we are in today, in terms of sectarian violence in Iraq, generally, had not al-Qaida been present and active there?”

And then:

Has “this, in an ultimate sense, turned out to be, more than anything else, a war with al-Qaida?”

In a courtroom, they’d call that leading the witness. At Fox, though, it’s just “fair and balanced.”