Yesterday I mentioned the First Things piece on "theocrats" by Ross Douthat. Joe Knippenberg is on the prowl and lifts a more illustrative quote from Douthat than did I. This Douthat passage ably captures the intellectual slight of hand by those who shout "Theocracy!" from the roof tops.
[T]he rise of the Religious Right, and the growing “religion gap” that Phillips describes but fails to understand, aren’t new things in American history but a reaction to a new thing: to an old political party newly dependent on a bloc of voters who reject the role that religion has traditionally played in American political life. The hysteria over theocracy, in turn, represents an attempt to rewrite the history of the United States to suit these voters’ prejudices, by setting a year zero somewhere around 1970 and casting everything that’s happened since as a battle between progress and atavism, reason and fundamentalism, the Enlightenment and the medieval dark.
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