Now that a Republican is back in the presidency, the “theocracy” machine is cranking up again.
You might remember theocracy-mania from George W. Bush’s terms in the White House, when every other week someone would point out that the president . . . prayed a lot. Kevin Phillips’s hysterical 2006 tome American Theocracy, with its cover photo of—OMG!—a megachurch with an American flag on display was the tip of an iceberg of panic literature produced by the literati of that decade. There was Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2006), Chris Hedges’s American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War Against America (2006), and Jeff Sharlet’s The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (2007).
The feared “theocracy” in question was always linked in some way to Christianity, because Christianity is always what secular liberals mean by religion. It was never, say, an actual theocracy such as Iran, or Saudi Arabia, where a Koran-derived religious legal system is exactly the same thing as the civil legal system. There was an eight-year hiatus in which a Democratic president made militant secularism a top priority, to the point of launching litigation against Catholic nuns with religious objections to paying for birth control under Obamacare. But we’re now seeing articles such as this one, by the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell:
The “White House.” That means President Trump. It’s fascinating to think of the notoriously profane Trump, who jokingly “prayed” at the National Prayer Breakfast for better ratings for his Apprentice successor Arnold Schwarzenegger, as a promoter of some Christian “sharia law.”
One of the pieces of evidence that Rampell trotted out to support this proposition was Trump’s Jan. 28 entry-restricting executive order (its enforcement is halted for now by a federal judge in Seattle) that Rampell, along with most of the mainstream press in recent days, characterized as the imposition of “a religious test upon refugees so that Christians would be given priority.” The executive order says nothing of the kind. It merely authorizes relevant federal authorities to “prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality.” Trump did say in a Jan. 30 interview that Christians would be among those given priority—but maybe that’s because, according to a Pew study, Christians are currently the most persecuted religious group in the world, especially in the countries (some of which are on Trump’s refugee-limitation list) where radical Islam dominates. A 2015 article in the New York Times Magazine asked, “Is This the End of Christianity in the Middle East?” But the terms of the order would also prioritize the claims of Yazidi, Bahai’s, and other minority faiths in the lands of Islamic extremism.
Rampell also cited a promise by Trump to work to repeal the Johnson Amendment, a 1954 law that forbids churches from endorsing or opposing specific political candidates if they want to retain their tax exemptions. Of course the tax exemption for churches, period, is something that liberal secularists have beating the drums to get rid of for years. “Americans are leaving religion. Why are we still subsidizing it?” asked David Niose in the Washington Post in 2015. And then there’s this:
Mmm, let’s force those Catholic nuns to pay for birth control again.
Why do complaints about the rise of “sharia law” in America never refer to the actual sharia law that not only prevails in many parts of the world but, informally, in enclaves of the West where forced marriages and honor killings are tolerated? And why do alarums about American “theocracy” always seem to consist, actually, of calls to clamp down on American Christians and on persecuted Christians seeking safe havens in America?
