MICHAEL BARONE LOOKS AT religion and politics in America:

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.”

The real question is whether strong religious belief is on the rise in America and the world. Fifty years ago, secular liberals were confident that education, urbanization and science would lead people to renounce religion. That seems to have happened, if you confine your gaze to Europe, Canada and American university faculty clubs. . . .

America has not moved in the expected direction. In fact, just the opposite. Economist Robert Fogel’s “The Fourth Great Awakening” argues that we’ve been in the midst of a religious revival since the 1950s, in which, as in previous revivals, “the evangelical churches represented the leading edge of an ideological and political response to accumulated technological and social changes that undermined the received culture.”

My thoughts on the subject can be found here.

UPDATE: Jon Henke thinks we’re far from theocracy:

I’m simply not persuaded by the argument that there is a burgeoning “Theocracy” in the United States. You can tell the Social Conservatives are losing by the very battles they are fighting. Almost without exception, they are doing rear-guard duty. I mean, we’ve got partial nudity on prime-time television, and gay marriage on the radar.

That’s one hell of a long way from the 1940s-50s, where even married TV characters had separate beds, and the question was not whether homosexuals deserved marriage, but whether they deserved a lobotomy. We may feel strongly about arguments like the 10 Commandments statue, Intelligent Design in schools, and Janet Jackson’s nipple, but the fact that we’re arguing about these should indicate just how secular our government has become. 50 years ago, we were putting God into the Pledge of Allegiance.

Indeed.