Attack of the killer Christianists...

This, to me, is the critical distinction between a Christianist and a mere Christian. One wants to infuse politics with religion; the other wants to respect both, separately, and to keep religion private. I should add I do not want to banish the word "God" from the public square. But I do want that invocation to be as thin and as empty and as formal as the Founders intended. The current Republican party has reinvented itself as a force on opposite grounds. The party of Huckabee and Romney, the party of Hewitt and Dobson, the party of Ponnuru and Neuhaus is emphatically not a secular party.

Torture was not even up for debate in the United States when America was much more religious, and religion had a hand in influencing public policy. In fact, one need only compare the more religious 19th century, to the secular 20th century to realize that the fruit of a secular society that has eschewed a traditional, reasonable role for the predominant religion in politics, has been a government that is wildly out of control. The level of state intrusion into the lives of and violence against private citizens today would have been unthinkable back then. Think I'm being shrill? Imagine how well received militarized police forces and domestic spying would have been taken back within one or two generations of the end of the War for Independence.

What I think Sullivan fails to see here is that deep down inside, many Americans know that things are not going well for our country spiritually and culturally. Secularism has whittled away at the church, which used to be one of the three major balancing institutions in society. It used to be the church, free market and the state, now the church is a minor force by comparison because most of its real ability to work today, constrained by ingrained secular values, is only through the state. What was once a shark, has been reduced to a remora. The very fact that Huckabee is winning by effectively campaigning as part preacher, part president is because of the fact that the church has no effective power in society today, and the state has stepped firmly into much of the church's old responsibilities ranging social welfare to providing a spiritual guide to the majority of the public.

It's not apparent to most people because they haven't thought too long and hard about it, but most Americans, even staunch evangelicals, don't know what it means to live in an actual Christian community. That would naturally include such things as the church actually having a major influence, on par with the state and businesses. Most evangelicals want religious authority in their lives, but won't submit to it, which is why they turn to the state out of secular cultural habit. That is the real problem in America today. The whole focus in modern, secular, pluralistic America is on the state. There is virtually nothing outside of the state's reach today. Nothing too sacred for a bureaucrat to regulate, and naturally that will have consequences like bringing religion into politics. When the church is annexed by the state, you really cannot complain when it acts like it has a say on the matters that it used to handle.