The Delusion and the Danger: On Theocrats

I want to make two claims, and I want to keep them apart, because collapsing them is how this argument usually fails. Theocrats are delusional. Theocrats are dangerous. Those are not two ways of saying the same thing, and each needs its own evidence.

Let me define the term first, because I am using it more broadly than a dictionary will. A theocrat, as I mean it, is not only someone who wants a formal church-run state. It is anyone who claims a divine warrant for the use of state power: the man who says God requires the law to read one way, and equally the man who says America is a Christian nation and its law should reflect that. The American figures I discuss below mostly take the second position rather than the first, and the most careful of them meet the theocracy charge head-on rather than dodging it. Reno, whose essay I engage in full, raises the worry himself and answers it with Pilate. I apply the word anyway, because the thing that makes this politics dangerous is not the constitutional form its adherents prefer. It is the warrant they claim, and that claim is the same in both cases.

“Delusional” is not a diagnosis and not an insult. I am using it as a structural claim about a kind of politics: a system that grounds law in a divine warrant cannot be corrected, because the only authority that could falsify the claim is the claim itself. That is not a flaw in a particular believer. It is what the form does. And “dangerous” is not a prediction. It is a description of a track record that is written down, going back four centuries, plus a live docket that has already reached the Supreme Court.

Start with the harder claim, because it is the one that sounds like name-calling until you see the machinery.

I. Unfalsifiable by construction

The theocratic claim is that God’s law is the standard for civil law. R.J. Rushdoony, whose Christian Reconstruction movement is the intellectual ancestor of a good deal of what is now called Christian nationalism, put the program in a sentence his own foundation still publishes: “For Christians, theocracy must be the normal pattern of all government, in every sphere of government, because God alone is Lord or sovereign.”¹

Notice the word must. That is the whole problem in one syllable. It is not offered as a policy argument that could lose to a better one. It is a necessity, derived from an authority that is stipulated rather than demonstrated.

The movement’s own epistemology says so out loud. Presuppositional apologetics, the school that shaped a large part of American evangelical intellectual life, holds that there is no neutral ground on which a believer and a non-believer can reason together, and that every argument, including the non-believer’s, is circular. As John Frame explains it in his own textbook entry, quoting Cornelius Van Til: “all reasoning is, in the nature of the case, circular reasoning. The starting-point, the method, and the conclusion are always involved in one another.”²

So the standard of proof is inside the system. And the movement does not merely fail to provide a way out; it treats the failure as a virtue. This is not my characterization. It is how the belief is designed.

And its content is not speculative. Look at the questions the pollsters had to write to measure it. PRRI’s battery asks respondents whether “U.S. laws should be based on Christian values,” whether “the U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation,” whether “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society,” and whether “if the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.”³ The Whitehead and Perry scale asks the same kind of question: whether the federal government “should declare the United States a Christian nation,” whether it “should advocate Christian values,” whether “the success of the United States is part of God’s plan.”⁴

Read those as a set. The fifth PRRI item is the hinge. Dominion over all areas is not the hope that Christians will be influential; it is a claim of jurisdiction. And a claim of jurisdiction cannot be submitted to a vote, because the claim is that the vote is already decided.

A word about what I am not saying. I am not saying every theocrat is stupid, or that religious people are delusional, or that faith disqualifies anyone from public life. Most Americans who go to church do not hold these views, and the survey data says so plainly, which I will get to. I am saying something narrower: a politics whose standard of truth is stipulated as divine has no error-correction mechanism. It cannot lose an argument to evidence, because it has ruled evidence out as the criterion. That is what “delusional” means here, and it is a statement about the structure, not the soul.

II. What the movement denies, and why I still say delusional

Fairness requires that I put the best version of the case on the table, and the best version has an answer to exactly what I just said.

R.R. Reno, the editor of First Things, made the argument at length. “America’s best hope is Christian nationalism,” he wrote, and when asked why Christian, “Because it’s the best kind.”⁵ His central defensive move is what he calls self-limiting: “Christian nationalism is self-limiting. All political projects have extremist tendencies… What’s needed is a braking mechanism. This is what Christianity provides.” On the theocracy charge he raises the objection in his own words (“Are the Bible-thumpers looking to establish a theocracy?”) and answers with Pilate: Christ told the Roman governor, “My kingship is not of this world.” But he does not stop there, and this is the part worth noticing. He concedes that “not of this world” might “reassure those who fear theocracy,” then reads it the other way: Jesus is “a revolutionary contesting for power,” and his kingdom is a claim of jurisdiction over the hearts of everyone who holds office. He goes further: “Christianity invented secular politics,” the doctrine of the two swords that created room for a this-worldly concept of governance.

Brad Littlejohn, reviewing Stephen Wolfe’s book from inside the same tradition, is more candid about where the danger actually sits, and he is the more useful witness because he is not an opponent. Wolfe’s scholarly case is mostly sober, Littlejohn writes, and it would be “a mistake” to dismiss it as “crypto-fascism wrapped in a thin Christian cloak.” But then the objection: Wolfe “explicitly argues that a Christian minority can revolt against a surrounding society that hates them and ‘after successfully revolting, establish over all of the population a Christian commonwealth.’” The tradition’s own counsel, Littlejohn notes, was to distinguish “the legitimate attempt to maintain a Christian commonwealth by law” from “the foolhardy attempt to create one by force.”⁶

So the defenders have two arguments: the brake, and the two swords. I take both seriously, and I still say delusional. Here is why.

The brake is not a mechanism. “Christianity provides” it in the same way that “the Constitution provides” restraint to a faction that has decided the Constitution means what it wants; it is a claim about what ought to constrain, not a structure that does constrain. A braking mechanism that consists of the actor’s own theology, and that no outside body can apply, is the definition of the problem rather than its solution.

And the two swords is a claim about what Christianity taught, not about what theocrats want. Reno’s own essay contains the tell. Having argued that Christian nationalism is self-limiting and that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, he writes that “our nihilistic society needs to be jolted awake,” and that “the Ten Commandments provide a handy summation of the moral order.” Then the operative sentence, further down the same essay: “A Christian nationalist recognizes that the first task of the magistrate is to restrain sin and punish wrongdoers.”⁵ That is the brake releasing. “Restrain sin and punish wrongdoers” is a description of the coercive power of the state, exercised on a moral criterion, and it appears in the same essay that promises the project is self-limiting. A brake that ends at “punish wrongdoers” is not a brake. It is the accelerator with a theological cover story.

The proof of the difference between doctrine and desire is in the one text where the tradition says it most plainly. Wolfe’s book asks the crux question directly, and answers it in a sentence that ought to be quoted in every discussion of this subject: whether a Christian magistrate “may punish (with civil power) false teachers, heretics, blasphemers, and idolaters for their external expression of such things,” and then, “Modern religious liberty advocates deny this and I affirm it.”⁷

I affirm it. That is the doctrine, from a scholar of the tradition, in the affirmative. The two swords, meanwhile, are claimed by the same movement in a different register: the Chalcedon Foundation, Rushdoony’s own institution, states on its beliefs page that “all things are to be ‘reconstructed’ according to God’s revealed will in Scripture.”⁸ Reconstructed, not persuaded. When your founding document is a command to reconstruct everything and your scholar of the tradition affirms the magistrate’s power to punish heretics, the two-swords defense is describing a Christianity that some Christians believe and not the one on offer.

There is a final, colder reason the form is delusional, and it is empirical. Perry, Whitehead and Grubbs tested it. Using panel data, they found that “Christian nationalism is the strongest predictor that Americans fail to affirm factually correct answers” about religion’s place in America’s founding documents, policies, and court decisions.⁹ The belief does not merely coexist with false beliefs about American history. It is the strongest predictor of them. A worldview whose most attached adherents cannot pass a factual quiz about the thing they are most attached to is not a theory of governance. It is a story that has replaced one.

III. The dangerous part, which is older than the country

Now the second claim. Danger is not a prediction when the experiment has been run. It has been run repeatedly, and the mechanism is the same every time: when the magistrate owns the soul, dissent stops being disagreement and becomes a crime.

Geneva, under Calvin. The Consistory was created in 1541 and met weekly, summoning Genevans for “adultery, illicit marriages, cursing, unauthorized luxury, dis-respectfulness in church… blasphemy, or gambling.” The historian Jeffrey Watt, whose monograph on it is the standard treatment, describes it as “a far more intrusive institution than the Catholic Inquisition,” and notes that from 1556 to 1569 about three percent of the population was suspended from the Lord’s Supper at some point.¹⁰

Then Michael Servetus, who came through Geneva in August 1553 and was recognized. The Meeter Center’s chronology at Calvin University is dry and complete: “at Calvin’s request was imprisoned by the city magistrates”; “condemned to death by Council of Geneva” on October 26; and on October 27, “informed about condemnation and burned at the stake.”¹¹ Philip Schaff gives the sentence itself: “We condemn thee, Michael Servetus, to be bound, and led to the place of Champel, there to be fastened to a stake and burnt alive, together with thy book.”¹²

And here is the detail that shows the machinery rather than the mood. Servetus was not a citizen of Geneva, so by Geneva’s own law the maximum penalty was banishment. To get around that, the Council consulted the Reformed churches of Zürich, Bern, Basel and Schaffhausen for cover. Calvin’s own defense, later, was not that the execution was legal but that it was required: “Whoever shall now contend that it is unjust to put heretics and blasphemers to death will knowingly and willingly incur their very guilt. This is not laid down on human authority; it is God who speaks and prescribes a perpetual rule for his Church.”¹²

Read that last clause again, because it is the thesis of this whole essay, stated by a founder of a major Protestant tradition. God who speaks. The rule is not derived; it is declared. And when Servetus’s own copy of his book went to the stake with him, that was the system working correctly. There was no error-correction mechanism, because the error had been defined as the crime.

Massachusetts Bay, a century later, ran the same program with the same results. Winthrop’s “citty upon a hill” was not a metaphor for representative government; it was a covenant, and the covenant had enforcement clauses.¹³ The 1641 Body of Liberties made the framework explicit: no man’s life could be taken “unlesse it be by vertue or equitie of some expresse law of the Country… or in case of the defect of a law in any parteculer case by the word of God.” And then the capital laws, with the Mosaic citations printed beside them: “If any man after legall conviction shall have or worship any other god, but the lord god, he shall be put to death” (Deut. 13:6, 10); “If any person shall Blaspheme the name of god… he shall be put to death” (Lev. 24:15, 16); “If any man or woeman be a witch… they shall be put to death” (Ex. 22:18).¹⁴

The franchise went with it. Full political rights were extended only to men approved as members of their local Puritan church.¹⁵ That is the whole design in one line: a religious test on the vote, and the word of God as the criminal code. Not “influence.” Jurisdiction.

What happened to dissenters is the record I keep coming back to. Roger Williams was ordered out of the jurisdiction in 1635, and one of the four charges against him was, in the Court’s own words, that he held “that the civil magistrate’s power extends only to the bodies and goods, and outward state of men.”¹⁶ That was the intolerable proposition. Claiming the magistrate had no jurisdiction over the soul was itself the crime.

Anne Hutchinson challenged her sentence in 1637 and asked, “I desire to know wherefore I am banished.” Governor Winthrop’s answer is the entire theory of theocratic authority in six words: “The court knows wherefore and is satisfied.”¹⁷ She was condemned “as being a woman not fit for our society.”

And then the Quakers, where the law finally says what it always meant. In October 1658 Massachusetts made Quakerism itself a capital offense, banishment on pain of death. Four were hanged: Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson in October 1659, Mary Dyer on June 1, 1660, and William Leddra in March 1661.¹⁸ Mary Dyer’s words at the gallows were that she “came to keep bloodguiltiness from you, desiring you to repeal the unrighteous and unjust law of banishment upon pain of death, made against the innocent servants of the Lord.” One of her judges wrote afterward, “Mary Dyer did hang as a flag for others to take example by.” It took a royal order from Charles II, in 1661, to stop it.

None of this is exotic. It is the same mechanism each time, and it is not confined to one religion or one century, which is the point I need to make carefully because the argument is about a form of government, not about a faith.

Iran’s constitution is the modern laboratory. Article 4 requires that all laws “must be based on Islamic criteria,” and adds that “the fuqaha’ of the Guardian Council are judges in this matter.” Article 96 then names who decides: “the determination of compatibility of the legislation… with the laws of Islam rests with the majority vote of the fuqaha’ on the Guardian Council.”¹⁹ Six unselected clerics hold an absolute veto on the legislation of an elected parliament, on a criterion no one else is competent to assess. In 2009, 476 people applied to stand for president; four were approved. Ahead of the 2004 parliamentary elections, more than 3,600 reformist and independent candidates were disqualified. All female candidates were disqualified for the 2006 Assembly of Experts election. The Guardian Council repeatedly vetoes bills on women’s rights, electoral reform, and the prohibition of torture.²⁰

That is the same structure as Geneva’s consulted churches and Massachusetts’s church-membership franchise, at constitutional scale: the veto on legitimacy sits with an unelected religious body, and there is no appeal, because the appeal would have to be made to the body itself.

Afghanistan under the Taliban shows what the form does when it holds full power. More than 100 decrees restrict women and girls, including one leaving 2.4 million girls excluded from secondary education. As UNESCO put it, in a statement carried by UN News, Afghanistan is “the only country in the world to formally prohibit access to education for girls and women beyond the primary level.”²¹ Human Rights Watch reports that girls and women are “banned from secondary and university education,” face “significant barriers to employment and freedom of movement,” are prohibited from traveling without a male guardian, and that a UN rapporteur described “an institutionalized system of discrimination, segregation, disrespect for human dignity, and exclusion of women and girls.”²²

And the Taliban’s own defense is the doctrine itself, stated without embarrassment: “Decisions are based on the advice of the Amir-ul Momineen. For us, consultation is not necessary. We believe that this is in line with the Sharia. We abide by the Amir’s view even if he alone takes this view.”²³ Even if he alone takes this view. There is the error-correction mechanism again, in the negative.

I want to be exact about what this evidence does and does not show, because overclaiming here would be its own kind of bad faith. It does not show that theocracy is always worse than every alternative on every measure, and it certainly does not establish that the Taliban speak for Islam. It does not: Muslim governments and clerics in and outside Afghanistan have condemned those edicts as having no basis in Islam,²² and the historical record is not uniform in severity across traditions. What the record does show is narrower and harder to dispute. These polities all had a religious test on political membership, civil penalties for doctrinal offenses up to death, dissent reclassified as heresy and prosecuted by the magistrate, and, in the modern cases, a religious body with an unchallengeable veto. Four features, four centuries, two religions. That is a form of government, and its signature is that it cannot be corrected.

Where the pattern is measured across many countries rather than argued from cases, it holds. Pew’s research on state religion found that “in countries with an official state religion, the median GRI score was 4.8 in 2015, compared with 2.8 in countries with preferred or favored religions and 1.8 in countries with no official or preferred religion,” and that the relationship persists after controlling for population, democracy level, and social hostilities: states with an official religion “still score, on average, 1.8 points higher on the Government Restrictions Index.”²⁴ Pew is careful that this is a correlation and not a causal estimate, and so am I. It is also the largest sample anyone has, and it points the same way as Geneva.

IV. It is not a thought experiment

Here is what makes this urgent rather than historical, and it is why I separated the two claims at the top.

The statutes are real and they are moving. Louisiana’s HB 71, enacted as Act 676 in 2024, requires that “each public school governing authority shall display the Ten Commandments in each classroom,” at a minimum size of eleven by fourteen inches, and specifies that “the text of the Ten Commandments shall be the central focus of the poster or framed document.” It reaches public colleges too.²⁵ Texas SB 10 requires a poster or framed copy “in each classroom” at least 16 by 20 inches, and directs the attorney general to defend any school that complies.²⁶ Arkansas’s Act 573 of 2025 required them in every classroom and library, in every public institution of higher education, and in every public building “maintained or operated by taxpayer funds.”²⁷ These are not nudges or invitations. They are display mandates, written to make the Commandments the center of the room.

The litigation is at the Supreme Court right now, as of this week. In Roake v. Brumley, an en banc Fifth Circuit vacated the injunction against Louisiana’s law, not because the law is constitutional but because the challenge was unripe: “The question before us, however, is not whether H.B. 71 is constitutional, but whether that issue is fit for judicial resolution at this time.” The court added that nothing in the holding “prevents future as-applied challenges once the statute is implemented and a concrete factual record exists.”²⁸ On the Texas law, a different en banc panel went to the merits and upheld it 9–8, on the reasoning that “with Lemon extracted, there is nothing left of Stone,” and that the Texas law “does not violate either the Establishment Clause or the Free Exercise Clause.”²⁹ Both cases now sit on the Supreme Court’s docket: cert was filed in Brumley v. Roake and the petition was “DISTRIBUTED for Conference of 9/28/2026,” four days from now, with the response deadline extended twice to October 19; the Texas petition was docketed and its response deadline extended to October 28.³⁰

That last paragraph is the reason this is not an abstraction. Stone v. Graham, which invalidated a Kentucky Ten Commandments law in 1980, is the holding the Fifth Circuit has now said has nothing left of it. If that reasoning is affirmed, a display mandate that reached every classroom in three states, and that was written to make the Commandments the “central focus,” becomes lawful. The federal government has already built its apparatus: the White House Faith Office, and a Department of Justice “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias” created by executive order and chaired by the Attorney General, which published a report in April 2026 whose executive summary states that “Our Nation’s origin and system of government bear the imprint of a Christian worldview and ethic.”³¹

And the base is not small. PRRI’s 2025 American Values Atlas, a survey of 22,111 adults, finds that “one-third of Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents (11%) or Sympathizers (21%),” and that “a majority of Republicans qualify as either Christian nationalism Adherents (21%) or Sympathizers (35%).”³ On the extremism question, Adherents (30%) and Sympathizers (23%) agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country,” against 14% of Skeptics and 11% of Rejecters. Seventy-nine percent of Adherents “score high or very high” on the Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale. And in the January 6 committee’s record, Perry and Whitehead’s testimony stated that “at the highest levels of Christian nationalist ideology, roughly half of white Americans believe that ‘Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to physical violence in order to save our country.’”⁴

Half. At the highest levels of the belief. That is the danger, and it is not a prediction either. It is a measurement.

And they say the quiet part in public, in their own words. Senator Josh Hawley, on the record, at the National Conservatism conference: “And some will say now that I am calling America a Christian nation. And so I am. And some will say I am advocating Christian nationalism. And so I do. Is there any other kind worth having?”³² There is no misreading that. It is not a dog whistle, not a coded phrase, not a slip. It is the thesis, stated by a sitting United States senator, as a boast.

V. The honest conclusion, which is worse than the headline

Let me state the thesis in its narrowest, most defensible form, because the loud version of this argument is weaker than the quiet one.

The claim is not that theocrats are bad people. Many are sincere, and sincerity is exactly what makes the structure dangerous: a person who believes he holds a warrant from God does not experience his certainty as a choice, and therefore cannot be talked out of it by evidence, because evidence has already been ruled inadmissible. The claim is not that all religion is theocratic, and the survey data is the best refutation of that: two-thirds of Americans are Skeptics or Rejecters of this ideology, and most religious Americans are not in the Adherents or Sympathizers columns.

The claim is this. A polity that grounds its law in a divine claim has no ordinary mechanism for correcting the interpreters of that claim. That is not a risk that attends theocracy. It is what theocracy is. Geneva had no such mechanism, and burned a man for a book. Massachusetts had none, and hanged four Quakers, until a king intervened. Iran has none by constitutional design, and disqualifies 472 of 476 presidential applicants. Afghanistan has none, and has excluded 2.4 million girls from school, and the Taliban’s own spokesman says consultation is not necessary and they will abide by the leader’s view “even if he alone takes this view.”

And the machinery is now operating in the richest, most heavily armed democracy in history, with three state statutes standing, two of them before the Supreme Court this month, a federal task force in place, and a third of the country, and a majority of one party, holding the underlying belief.

The reason the two claims are separate is that people will grant one and not the other. Many will accept that a theocratic epistemology is closed and unfalsifiable and still say it is harmless, because they picture it as private conviction rather than public power. That is the mistake. The epistemology and the danger are the same fact viewed from two angles: a system that cannot be corrected will not be corrected, and when it holds the magistrate’s power, the person who needs correcting is the one who dies.

Theocrats are delusional. That is a statement about a closed system of proof. Theocrats are dangerous. That is a statement about what closed systems of proof do when they hold the sword. Neither claim requires me to doubt anyone’s sincerity, and neither one requires me to be wrong about the record. The record is public, it is old, and this week it is on a docket.