Are We Headed Toward a Theocracy?

Of course not, but you'd never know that by reading the mainstream media. Based on the current meme in the media, James Dobson, Chuck Colson and other evanglicals are trying to take over the country and make this into some type of Taliban-like religious theocracy. Michael Barone has some thoughts on the matter:

Alarmists note that George W. Bush invokes his religious faith in many speeches and that his positions on abortion, embryonic-stem-cell research and faith-based charities are informed by it. They decry the law Congress passed to provide federal judicial review in the Terri Schiavo case. Vocal American Catholics bewail the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI.

Blogger Andrew Sullivan called it "a full-scale assault" on liberal Catholics. One of his correspondents called the new pope "this headstrong, self-assured, anti-democratic and egotistical little man." We all look abroad at the violence done by Islamist fanatics and wonder, without any clear way of being sure, how far such doctrines have taken hold among the world's 1.2 billion Muslims. We note, more reassuringly but perhaps with some wariness, that most Iraqi voters seem to have followed the lead of the country's most powerful cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani.

But whether the United States is on its way to becoming a theocracy is actually a silly question. No religion is going to impose laws on an unwilling Congress or the people of this country. And we have long lived comfortably with a few trappings of religion in the public space, such as "In God We Trust" or "God save this honorable court."

If anything, religion is being driven out of public life and people of faith are being deemed unworthy to serve because of religious bias. What's really likely to happen in the future:

Who inherits the future? In free societies, each generation makes its own religious choices, but people tend to follow the faith of their parents. Secular Europe, with below-replacement birthrates among non-Muslims, could be headed for a Muslim future, as historian Niall Ferguson suggests.

In the United States, as pointed out by Phillip Longman in "The Empty Cradle" and Ben Wattenberg in "Fewer," birth rates are above replacement level largely because of immigrants. But, as Longman notes, religious people have more children than seculars. Those who believe in "family values" are more likely to have families.

This doesn't mean we're headed to a theocracy: America is too diverse and freedom-loving for that. But it does mean that we're probably not headed to the predominantly secular society that liberals predicted half a century ago and that Europe has now embraced.