I’ve been thinking about this today, as to why the godless secularists in our midst continually refer to the Religious Right as some sort of imminent danger when a) a large percentage of the Religious Right is contemptuous of politics; and b) the historical Religious Right showed little inclination to impose its beliefs on anyone.
The key to their thinking can be found in their common comparison of the Christian Right to the Taliban and other Islamic theocracies. There is no question that these Church-State marriages are oppressive, anti-liberty and more than willing to commit violence against the insufficiently obedient citizen. The flaw in the secularist thinking is to place the blame for this on the Church half of the equation, instead of the State.
Consider, if you will, those nations which are/were fervently secular, but where the State wielded the same degree of power as the aforementioned theocracies. Every Socialist country, from Albania to Zimbabwe, has seen more oppression, less liberty and more violence against the people than in even the worst theocratic state with the possible exception of the Sudan. Even if one leaves aside the obvious differences between Christian and Islamic culture, it is clear that it is placing too much power in the hands of the State that is the heart of the problem, not the religion professed by those in whose hands that power is placed.
Christianity, from the beginning, found itself in fundamental opposition to the State. The first Christians were persecuted for their unwillingness to bow before Caesar while the American revolutionaries fought under the slogan “No king but King Jesus.” Compromise with the State has always weakened Christianity, as the history of the Papal States and the Anglican Church clearly shows.
Secularists who turn to the State to protect themselves from Christian cultural domination are playing a fool’s game similar to that played by Cambodian intellectuals in the early 1970’s, who found themselves being executed for the crime of being able to read. Iormungandr is circular; the dialectic always turns around to devour those who give it birth.