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. ...