The Secular Left here has lately gotten a lot of mileage in the media out of warning us of the threat of a home grown American version of Islamic theocracy, such theocracy to be perpetrated against the nation by the dreaded Religious Right. Some just muse darkly about the potentialities of too many evangelicals in government. Others, with less restraint and far less reason, go so far as to brand the Bush administration and its supporters as the "American Taliban". What these secularists do not realize is that an overwhelming majority of evangelicals in this country really have no love for the idea of the church and the state becoming one either. Our reasons for not wanting such a change in the nature of American government are quite different from theirs but the fact remains that, outside of a few individuals on the extreme fringe, we mostly like our system the way it is.

A strong argument can be made that true Christianity functions better in a pluralistic society with guaranteed religious freedoms and a significant separation of church and state than in perhaps any other political construct in human history. That such a society took root in America is a result of the founding fathers of our nation knowing much about government-backed religious intolerance from their immediate ancestor’s experience in Europe. Because of this they wanted to create a society in which freedom of conscience was safeguarded by the government, not eliminated by it. The Establishment Clause in the U.S. Constitution was more designed to protect the church from the state than vice-versa, something that is often forgotten by both sides in the current debate.

One of the reasons Christianity remains an important part of the life of contemporary America is because all of its branches have, in a sense, been watered by a political system that does not try to promote one branch at the expense of another. When a government and a particular church become fused into something resembling a theocracy the result is the suppression of all the other churches. This is not desirable for Christians who agree on theological essentials but not particulars, and that is most of us under the evangelical banner.

Beyond that, history shows that when one church becomes a "state church" it usually dies. Look at the official churches of countries all over Western Europe. Confessing Christians are today a very small minority in most of these nations. The Church is inevitably compromised when it becomes intertwined with the state. This has actually been evident ever since the adoption of Christianity as the state religion of the late Roman Empire by Constantine in the Third Century. It is not unreasonable to propose that much of the remaining purity of the early church then proceeded to die along with Rome.

Christians in the United States do not want to live under the politically correct thumb of radical Secularism. But in addition most of us have no desire to have one denomination tell us how to live out an authentic Christian life with the sword of government providing that denomination with the power to do so. Such an arrangement would indeed smack of the reality of life under Islamic fundamentalism, a reality evangelicals want to avoid just as much as secularists do, though again for different reasons.

Hysterical pronouncements from the Left about "Christianists" wanting to make America into some kind of religious dictatorship do not hold up under any kind of serious scrutiny of real followers of Christ in this country. That such scrutiny of the facts is not a priority for those who have already made up their minds about evangelicals should not come as a big surprise. Those who have made a god out of the self and declared fallen man the measure of all things tend to instinctively dislike those who hold to a biblical worldview and generally despise the idea of people with such personal convictions having any kind of power whatsoever. We are, by nature, offensive to them.

But perhaps a few on the Left will pursue the truth with the "open mind" they so often accuse Christians of being bereft of and learn that they have far more to fear today from Islam then from us.