I once started a sloppy college essay on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas with a line suggesting something like "no reader has ever questioned" the effectiveness of Douglass' voice or something or other. My professor strongly suggested that I consider starting the essay with something other than a point that couldn't be proven, was likely false, and wasn't that meaningful even if true. That's what came into my head today when I saw the archbishop of Denver, in an op-ed on the role of faith in politics, asserting that "no one in mainstream American politics wants a theocracy." While, to be fair, it can be somewhat hard to really nail down the specifics of a theocracy, I think it can be said that some people, even some "mainstream" people, do want something along the general lines. If you think of it as a situation where the leaders of the dominant religion and the government are one and the same, the no, that's not what we have here nor want anyone seems to really want. But if you think of it as where politicians see themselves as recipients of divine guidance, or where others see them as such, then I think not only do a lot of people want that but that's what we've got going on right now. And if you look at it as where the beliefs of the dominant religion function as the law of the land, it's hard to see what else the Republican party of Texas had in mind when they recently inserted "the United States of America is a Christian nation" as a plank in their party platform.
5:12 PM
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