Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean the anti-theocrats aren't out to get me

In First Things, Ross Douthat has an excellent essay/book review, responding to and dissecting the charges of theocracy and "Christianism" that have been leveled against the "religious right" and the G.O.P. in recent books and articles.

Here's the conclusion:

So the 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.

The tragedy is that so many religious people have gone along with this revisionism—out of sympathy for the lifestyle liberalism of the secular Left, or out of disdain for the crudity and anti-intellectualism of some religious conservatives, or out of embarrassment in the face of a culture that sneers at anyone who takes their faith too seriously. In the process, they have become everything they claim to oppose: bigoted and hysterical, apocalyptic and self-righteous. What’s worse, they have corrupted themselves for the sake of a politics that cares nothing for their faith—that would tame it to suit the needs of secular society or do away with it entirely.

Garry Wills is half-right: There is no single Christian politics, and no movement can claim to have arrived at the perfect marriage of religious faith and political action. Christianity is too otherworldly for that, and the world too fallen. But this doesn’t free believers from the obligation to strive in political affairs, as they strive in all things, to do what God would have them do. And the moments when God’s will is inscrutable, or glimpsed only through a glass, darkly, are the moments when good-faith arguments between believers ought to bear the greatest fruit.

In today’s America, these arguments are constantly taking place—over issues ranging from abortion to foreign policy; over the potential, and potential limits, of interfaith cooperation; over the past and future of the Religious Right. But they are increasingly drowned out by cries of “theocracy, theocracy, theocracy” and by a zeal, among ostensibly religious intellectuals, to read their fellow believers out of public life and sell their birthright for the blessing of the New York Times.

There is a lot more. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Here's an article, originally published in The Public Interest, that amplifies one of Douthat's points -- that the so-called "hijacking" of the G. O. P. by religious traditionalists arose in response to an anti-traditionalist putsch within the Democratic party before and during the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Since then, the Democrats have grown increasingly secularist and hostile to expressions of religious belief in the public square. But somehow the issue never gets framed as one of rabid secularists hijacking the Democratic party.

(Hat tip: Rod Dreher)