Michael Barone responds to the alarm raised by liberal Chicken Littles that the U.S. is headed for a theocracy. He dismisses this bit of paranoia as silliness. Several of his key points follow:
[W]hether the United States is on its way to becoming a theocracy is actually a silly question. No religion is going to impose laws on an unwilling Congress or the people of this country. And we have long lived comfortably with a few trappings of religion in the public space, such as "In God We Trust" or "God save this honorable court."
The real question is whether strong religious belief is on the rise in America and the world. Fifty years ago secular liberals were confident that education, urbanization, and science would lead people to renounce religion. That seems to have happened, if you confine your gaze to Europe, Canada, and American university faculty clubs. But this movement has not been as benign as expected: The secular faiths of fascism and communism destroyed millions of lives before they were extinguished.
America has not moved in the expected direction. In fact, just the opposite.
[T]he religions and sects that have grown are those that make serious demands on members; those that accommodate to secular critics and make few demands decline in numbers. The Roman Catholic Church continues to grow in America; the Assemblies of God and the Mormon Church grow even faster. But mainline Protestant denominations, which spend much effort ordaining gay bishops or urging disinvestment in Israel, lose members.
Who inherits the future? In free societies each generation makes its own religious choices, but people tend to follow the faith of their parents. Secular Europe, with below-replacement birthrates among non-Muslims, could be headed for a Muslim future, as historian Niall Ferguson suggests. In the United States, as pointed out by Phillip Longman in The Empty Cradle and Ben Wattenberg in Fewer, birthrates are above replacement level largely because of immigrants. But, as Longman notes, religious people have more children than seculars. Those who believe in "family values" are more likely to have families.
This doesn't mean we're headed toward a theocracy: America is too diverse and freedom loving for that. But it does mean that we're probably not headed to the predominantly secular society that liberals predicted half a century ago and that Europe has now embraced.
When listening to liberal caterwauling about the insurgency of the evangelical Ayatollahs it must be born in mind that, in their pinched view of the world, anyone who takes religious faith seriously is a threat to freedom, and anything other than a completely secular society is a theocracy. Liberals fear religious belief because people whose allegiance is to their God and their Church often feel quite independent of government and tend to see government as a usurper of their freedoms. This is why the left, whether in its extreme forms like communism or in its more moderate forms like democratic socialism, always seeks to banish religion from public life.
Any sign that religion may be experiencing a reinvigoration among the masses motivates the left to do and say whatever it can to discredit it. If there were only one person remaining who still believed in God the left would nevertheless consider him a portent of an impending theocracy that threatens us all.
