the New Pantagruel

Theocracy as a Parlor Game

by Patrick O'Hannigan

sychological literature is chockablock with case histories of people who suffer from irrational fears, and the run-up to midterm elections in a lame-duck presidency is a fine time to add another one to that collection. Some people fear George W. Bush not because his policies keep them up at night, but because the Christianity he brings without guile or apology to an under-dressed public square marks him as the chief scout for what they imagine is a theocracy coming soon to the United States. Anyone trying to confront this fear must come at it on two fronts, the personal and the political.

When a dear friend described this malady to me, my initial reaction was perhaps more sarcastic than it should have been: if George W. Bush is the harbinger of a theocracy, then the American Christian bench isn’t as deep as we sometimes like to think it is. Whatever his merits as president, everything that the current occupant of the Oval Office has said publicly about his faith suggests that it gives him comfort and strength rather than the kind of paint-by-numbers direction his detractors would prefer to be scandalized by. On the evidence available, one may speculate that the unremarkable religious pedigree bequeathed to George W. from his father was revivified some years ago by a recovering alcoholic’s confidence in a Higher Power. One may also suppose that the evangelical Protestant theology of his loving wife helped the president recognize Jesus as that higher power. The point of these speculations is that nothing in the character of this president’s faith implies the kind of fondness for ecclesiastical authority that ought to mark a proper harbinger of theocracy.

Detail of Justice
“Frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland” (1987)
(Das Bauernkriegspanorama)
by Werner Tübke

George W. Bush has been refreshingly blunt about naming evil when he sees it, but he joins past presidents in standing foursquare for religious freedom, and his penchant for “reading people’s hearts” (as he said he’d done with erstwhile Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers) suggests that his administration’s policies are informed more by liberal pabulum than by rigid orthodoxy, even of the so-called “compassionate conservative” variety. Moreover, the president belongs to a Christian denomination that stresses personal rather than communal aspects of worship. Apart from these uniquely Bushian checks on megalomania, the idea of an American Christian theocracy must also be dismissed for political reasons, because American Christians are a fractious bunch. We can and do find common ground on many issues, but we might also thank the Founders for having spared us the drudgery of parliamentary forms that put a premium on coalition-building.

Were America to renounce secular mores in favor of some kind of constitutional theocracy, we Christians would have more work to do than linking hands to sing “what a friend we have in Jesus.” And a sizable number of us would warn anyone who cared to listen about the arrogance of trying to build the kingdom of heaven on earth. In other words, if hippies gave therapy a jump start by growing old enough to sell out to “the Man” and feel guilty about it, wait’ll you see what happens when people who belong to Christ realize that Uncle Sam demands more of their time.

Kenneth Craycraft, Jr., described this conflict in some detail. Writing about what he calls “the myth of religious freedom,” Craycraft put a libertarian gloss on ancient history to explain why Christianity must forever be in the world but not of it. In Craycraft’s reading of late-Roman politics, a coldly calculating Emperor Constantine realized that imperial tolerance for and, indeed, encouragement of Christianity was a more effective way of domesticating the new faith into irrelevance than persecution had been or could be. The emperor’s graciousness was born, Craycraft asserted in a 1999 essay for New Oxford Review, of a Machiavellian need to “subvert [Christian] witness against the violence of his regime.” Applying that lesson to modern America, Craycraft quoted approvingly from philosopher Stanley Hauerwas, who was then making news for having concluded that we might have to leave the problem of church and state “profoundly unresolved.” As Caleb Stegall has quipped in The New Pantagruel, from a Christian perspective, “neither rear-guard actions nor seats at Liberalism’s table are attractive.” Such principled ambivalence is, I submit, more widespread than non-Christians tend to realize, and the reason is theological. Per the gospel according to John, the testimony of Christians through the ages, and the first encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI, “God is love.”

Government, on the other hand, is force.

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