When 'Christianists' Don't Attack

They still scare people unreasonably. [Link]

For decades now, shocked lefty journalists have gingerly ventured into the dark American interior, emerging with terrifying tales of “Christianist” plots to hijack American democracy and install theocratic rule.  There’s an endless appetite for these stories on the secular left, and the fact that none of these Christianists dictatorships ever appear doesn’t seem to diminish the credulity with which each new “revelation” is greeted by the easily spooked.

And here's why:

In any case, if anybody in America ever establishes a theocracy, it is unlikely to be evangelicals.  Almost all American evangelicals come out of religious traditions that were persecuted in either Europe or the US or both by “established” churches tied to the government.  It became an article of faith for the persecuted evangelicals that church and state should be kept at arms length.  Even in apocalyptic fiction like the Left Behind series, the merger of church and state is one of the signs of the approach of Antichrist and signals the start of a great persecution.  For the most part, American evangelicals viscerally loathe the idea that church and state should act together to enforce religious orthodoxy.

That is still the overwhelmingly dominant position among the roughly one fourth of Americans who consider themselves evangelicals (and their cousins the Pentecostals).  That hasn’t changed in 200 years and is very unlikely to change in the next 25.