A theocrat behind every tree

One of the sillier phenomena in contemporary American life is the bizarre inclination of radical secularists- people who can't seem to understand that the official institutionalization of their personal views of ultimate matters is as much a violation of the First Amendment as the institutionalization of any other sectarian viewpoint- to see a theocrat behind every tree.

This will become a remote danger only when a particular religious viewpoint is sufficiently dominant to make its theology stick at the polls. Ain't gonna happen- as even a rudimentary bit of rational reflection about the diversity of this nation would quickly make clear.

In any case, Ross Douhat of the Atlantic Monthly herein examines some of the more recent exhibitions of irrational "theocracyphobia" by Kevin Phillips and several other authors who- while demonstrably ignorant and transparently naive about both Christianity in general and "Evangelical" Christianity in particular- are for the most part really too bright to have written the things they have written on the subject.

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