Last month, I wrote about how tired I was that so much of this year’s election coverage has been about which of our two leading American presidential candidates loves Jesus more. This remains the case-I still don’t care whether Barack Obama’s old reverend subscribes to liberation theology or not, I still don’t care whose version of Christianity John McCain claims to believe, and I really, genuinely, honest-to-whoever do not care whether or not Joe Biden is a practicing Catholic. In fact, the thing that I love most about Joe Biden is that he is actually about policy and not oblique piety; his is a refreshing turn from political rhetoric that has large devolved into a contest of conservative Christian buzzwords (”values voter” and “culture of life” are my favorites) and infantile political gimmicks designed with the religious in mind.

That being said, what does interest and concern me is the fact that just about everybody else in the country does seem to care about this stuff.

It is simply an unavoidable truth of our political circumstances (and a rather unpleasant truth at that for secular voters) that strong religious beliefs form the perspective through which a great many Americans view their prospective leaders. The normative American cultural assumption is that the Bible is the obvious foundational source of goodness (note its most popular colloquial appellation: “the Good Book”), and so candidates’ political stances are vetted as much by their congruence with Biblical values as they are with their actually being a good or a bad idea. In fact, on this pattern of “reasoning,” several very bad policies have persevered exclusively by their religious appeal, such as the so-called “Mexico City policy” and abstinence-only sex “education.”

And yet these policies persist, despite the fact that both examples above appear so brutally stupid that one most wonder whether they were designed with failure as an objective. This leads one to wonder: what is it about our political discourse that permits stupidity to be tolerable, even virtuous, to many American voters? Why is it that three candidates for helmsman of the world’s most powerful battleship-of-state would be permitted to publicly admit to being evolution deniers and not simply laughed out of our discourse?

I think that the answer to this question is what may sound like a contradiction: that the United States can be said to be in the softcore stages of a democratic theocracy. By this term I do not just mean any theocracy that permits voting (since even Iran allows its citizens to choose a President, though the Supreme Leader is appointed), but rather, a democratic theocracy would be any state where certain religious values are so endemic in a society’s values and customs that little to no legal framework whatsoever is even necessary. To be more specific, I think that a modern democratic theocracy has three relevant, salient features:

• A de facto state religion is already in place, so no overt de jure state religion is necessary. One of the principles of a true democratic theocracy is that there need not be any legal strictures requiring high officials to be of a particular religious persuasion, as is the case in totalitarian states like Iran and Vatican City, because the voting popular electorate does all of the enforcing on its own. It would be wildly paranoiac of me to say that this is exactly the case in the United States in every instance, but even the most optimistic observer must concede that this is the case in many instances. The religious demographics of the United States Congress, for example, help to draw this picture: somewhere from 12-16% of Americans call themselves “not affiliated” with any religion, but only about 2% of Congresspeople decline to declare a religious affiliation (even atheist Peter Stark calls himself a Unitarian). The Presidential demographics are even more appalling; only one non-Protestant Christian has ever been elected President, both of the current likely candidates are fighting furiously for the votes of the devout, and who among us would doubt that both candidacies could be imperiled by even a very minor slight of religion-based public policy? Why does Obama feel the need to quote the Bible when advocating the elimination of poverty, which any half-witted humanist knows is a good idea without particularly caring whether or not the Bible approves?
• “Religious police” are not necessary because the religious body politic is fiercely self-policing. Again, nobody in the United States is going around killing their neighbors for picking up sticks on Sabbath, but we do have our own, peculiarly American ways of enforcing extremist religious values. Public criticism of any religion’s favorite metaphysics is obviously strictly off-limits for elected officials (even if such metaphysics are absolutely, demonstrably loony- note that the few politicians who do oppose teaching creationism in schools often do so on grounds of “keeping religion out of the classroom” rather than the factually appropriate “creationism is unscientific gobbledygook”), but this rule is more appropriately applied on the social level. People with sexual inclinations towards the same gender are essentially terrified into hiding the truth about themselves because they have good reason to fear such things as expulsion from their families, the obliteration of their good standing in certain communities, lifelong subjection to vitriol and venom from near and afar by the religious, and of course alienation from many religious communities. Where does this peculiar hatred of the homosexual come from? What logical reasons would we have for hating the gay, the secular, and the science teacher if not for our fellow citizens who place metaphysics above reason?
• A nation’s values, especially the value of its electorate, are inextricably congruent with explicitly religious values. Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, the ACLJ, the aggregate of American bishoprics, and their counterparts across the spectrum of American Christianity do such a fine job of telling voters how to vote, who to vote for, and why the Bible says you should vote this way for this person, that official regulations forbidding formal religious tests for high office are useless. Creationist think tanks like the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, and Creation Science Evangelism are so good at deceiving the public into thinking that there is some kind of “controversy” about evolution within the scientific community that the United States (one of the most savagely anti-evolution nations in the world) can maintain a majority popular stance in favor of young-earth Creationism despite having public schools that are required to teach the exact opposite. This is particularly effective where lax homeschooling standards permit parents to feed whatever garbage pseudoscience they desire to their children because there is often little to no real accountability for students who never learn how to think differently from their parents. Also unlike nearly every other wealthy liberal democracy in the world, the United States is afflicted with a massively revisionist historical complex wherein the Puritans, a cult of totalitarians who left Europe only because they weren’t permitted to brutally oppress their children in the manner they desired, can be portrayed as devout victims of injustice who went on to found an (explicitly Christian) nation with the help of a loving creator-god named Jesus. No other national history so ruthlessly corrupts reality as to build what could only be called an official founding-mythology plagiarized unabashedly from another theocracy’s playbook.

I do not for a moment believe that the United States is at risk of becoming the next Iran. I do not entertain even an inkling that formal oppression of the non-Christian is around the corner (which is to say that I am nowhere near as paranoid as many of the religious are!) and I have never, ever feared that my open secularism would ever threaten my personal well-being. What I do fear, however, is that the socially normative Christian sense of entitlement is growing- we have always seen it in our politics, and far more scarily, in our military. Our government, at least by the letter, is formally intolerant of theocracy, but our society seems to thirst for it. The majority opinion wants God and his Creation Week taught in our schools, the majority opinion wants God on our money and on the lips of our children and politicians day and night, the majority thinks that I will be on fire forever after I die.

If I could ever be accused of paranoia, it would be for the opinion that society appears to me to be becoming more tolerant of hatred, prejudice, and bigotry than the ongoing liberalization of formal government policy in respect to religion would suggest. With the economy turning sour and the evangelicals letting their old frustrations about government fester at the prospect of a Democrat sweep this fall, I can only wonder what the next step in our social development will be. Will we finally permit our values to be congruent with the values of our secular republic’s government? Or will the religious majority let its anger and its devotion mix and grow until things become even worse for those whom it is already bad? Do we really want to let the best-armed members of our population (our military) be the most uniformly convinced that Jesus is the only one to build either a life or a state? I do not.

I worry about my country. Even as you and I get to watch the meteoric rise of a unified, highly-motivated secular movement in the United States, we also get to watch its backlash use our success as rallying cry. Perhaps I worry needlessly, but I wouldn’t be slinging words like “theocracy” and “religious police” around if I didn’t think that we were in a real danger of having to fear some of our religious neighbors far more than we will ever have to fear our religious leaders.