We Actually Do Have an Established Religion, and That’s Not Good

America has no established religion, which is undeniably true and a peculiar stroke of genius of the Founding Fathers in preventing the hegemony of one religious system over the others. Yet even without an established religion, the United States has always stood for certain values, notably for its own republican form of government. And today, we have an entirely different kind of established religion, which, while unofficial, is most definitely established.

President Woodrow Wilson was among the first to see this as practically a religious crusade of its own. In April 1917, as he called for a declaration of war against Germany that got the U.S. into World War I, Wilson sounded much like a Christian missionary without the Christianity: “The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.”

A century after the Wilson administration, the U.S. is exporting not democracy, but the Left’s ideology. Our established religion in the United States as we approach the second quarter of the twenty-first century is Leftism’s contemporary sexual obsession and confusion, contempt for masculinity, erasure of femininity, obsession with racism real and imagined (mostly the latter), and all the rest. Today LGBT pride flags are proudly (of course) displayed at U.S. embassies around the world, there are openly “gender fluid” and transgender government officials, and officials at the highest levels, including the president of the United States himself, heap fulsome praise upon Leftist societal and sexual fads.

It has become clear during the feckless and sinister epiphenomenon of Joe Biden’s presidency, if it had not been clear already, that establishment of a state religion, like religion itself, is inescapable, whether that established religion is de facto or official recognized. Just as individuals who insist that they are atheists have some central focus and guiding force and principle in their lives, that is, something that takes the place and serves the purpose of a religion, so governments will endorse and even impose certain values.

One notorious example of this came on May 5, 2022, when the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) announced that it was planning to “interpret the prohibition on discrimination based on sex found in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and in the Food and Nutrition Act of 2008, as amended, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly the Food Stamp Program (7 USC § 2011 et seq.), to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”

This new interpretation would mean that “state and local agencies, program operators and sponsors that receive funds from FNS must investigate allegations of discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. Those organizations must also update their non-discrimination policies and signage to include prohibitions against discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.”

This new policy required schools that received federal funding for lunch programs to endorse and promote transgenderism, including allowing biological men to use women’s bathrooms. If any school refused to comply, it would be denied federal funds.

This Agriculture Department decree was just one example of a myriad of ways in which the Biden regime is pushing the woke agenda upon the American people. Not long after that decree, Biden signed what his administration called a “historic executive order” that was designed to aid in “advancing LGTBQI+ equality during Pride Month.” The White House press office announced plans to end “conversion therapy,” that is, efforts to convince young people not to be homosexual or even to convince those suffering gender confusion that they should not seek to alter themselves through surgery and pharmaceuticals so that they could pretend to be a member of the opposite sex.

The Biden regime was establishing a religion for his people in exactly the same way that the Roman Emperor Theodosius was when he made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in the year 380: as Empire of God: How the Byzantines Saved Civilization details, he was rewarding the orthodox and punishing the heretical and their institutions in ways that would make the heresy less appealing and put it on the road to extinction.

Biden’s leftism isn’t generally recognized as a religion, but it very much is one, as can be seen all over, for instance in the transgender pronoun fantasies and hunt for heretics who dare to “misgender” a particular fantasist, and the fervor with which supporters of abortion vowed to fight against all restrictions to the practice after Roe v. Wade was overturned. But since this secular ideology is not understood to be a religion, it is not seen as an established creed in violation of the First Amendment, as it would be in a sane polity. If it were, then the solution to it would also be found in the First Amendment, in the prohibition of such an establishment, and provisions such as school lunch money being withheld from schools that refused to indulge insane gender faddism would be seen as establishing a religion and accordingly ended.

America today, however, is a long way from being a sane polity.