"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" -- so begins our nation's Bill of Rights, the basic principles of individual liberty that have served our country as the fundamental values which unite us and make us a model to the world. Those words are as controversial today as when they were written, but they were not ratified by accident. They built into our government a "wall of separation between church and state," as Thomas Jefferson put it, so that the church could not control the government nor the government control the church. Over the last two hundred years this principle of separation has given us the most successful government and one of the most thriving religious populations in the world.

But, judging from hysterical talking heads of the religious right and their 'round-the-clock coverage on Fox News, not everyone agrees.

The religious right should have been quite pleased with the results of the first term of their president, George W. Bush. His devotion to the political philosopher Jesus gave way to a messianic staging of a grand battle between good and evil (reminiscent of their other president, Reagan) and to a "faith-based" way of knowing that privileged instinct and prejudice over science and fact. The president also gave them a special gift by proposing an amendment to the Constitution outlawing same-sex marriage, an amendment which will never pass but gave enormous steam to their political movement. But they are not content. Despite the Republicans' near-absolute control over each branch of government, the persecution complex of the religious right must march on.

Preemptive Strike

In the weeks since the narrow re-election of George Bush, the religious right has ratcheted up the volume of their menacing rhetoric, tilting at windmills on television talk shows on Fox and elsewhere. They were buoyed by the post-election myth that their "moral values" were somehow the subject of the election -- despite a campaign focused on terror, Iraq, and Vietnam a distant third. (In fact, people cited "moral values," whatever that means, as much as or less than in previous elections.) Dubious spokesmen such as James Dobson and Jerry Falwell immediately seized the opportunity by barnstorming the talk-show circuit, providing pat and false answers to a clueless "press" wondering how to spin the bitterly divided vote.

First came the humiliation of Arlen Specter. The merest hint of reality-based thinking from the Republican senator, fresh from a difficult re-election fight on his right, caused the "family values" lobby to pounce on him until he groveled and pleaded for two weeks that he would stop at nothing to push through only the most Bible-thumping, abortionist-executing jurists to the high court.

Tilting at Windmills

Now, having no real foils to their designs, the right has taken to pulling crises out of their paranoid imagination. Their first windmill is the imaginary school that banned the Declaration of Independence. Republican PR flack Sean Hannity rode his fiery chariot into Blue America and descended upon Cupertino, California, where he accused the high school of treason against American history. The reality, of course, is another matter entirely: a teacher was admonished for outright pulpiteering in the classroom, subjecting his students to a barrage of "historical documents" of decontextualized quotes about Christianity, to the exclusion of any real learning of history.

Their second windmill, timed perfectly for the holidays, is the so-called "Christmas under siege." It is predicated on the the word public, which in real court cases means prohibiting religious endorsement by the government, but in their sleight-of-hand comes out as an attack on religious expression in the open. Jerry Falwell led the way, with his recent jeremiad "The Impending Death of Christmas?" (Parts I and II):

The spiritual Grinches in our nation are accelerating their war against Christmas as never before. And they are tragically convincing growing numbers of our fellow citizens ­ primarily those in our nation's public schools and public administration ­ that Christmas should be publicly shunned, replaced by nebulous substitutes designed to avoid offending those who are all-so-easily outraged.

The touchy author of "The Impending Death of Christmas" is calling others "easily outraged"? Amazing, and it's all because some people are saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." A group of folks which includes, by the way, our president. (Why does he hate Jesus so?)

According to Bill O'Reilly, this is all part of a conspiracy by "secular progressives" and Canadians:

O'REILLY: Secular progressives realize that America as it is now will never approve of gay marriage, partial birth abortion, euthanasia, legalized drugs, income redistribution through taxation, and many other progressive visions because of religious opposition.

But if the secularists can destroy religion in the public arena, the brave new progressive world is a possibility. That's what happened in Canada.

Really, I had no idea that taxing the poor was a Biblical teaching -- is it not written, "sell all that you have and distribute to the poor ... for it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God"? -- but there you have it: religious correctness. This is the result of making religion political and making politics religious.

The Party of Jesus

What would happen if Jerry Falwell, Bill O'Reilly, Pat Buchanan, and the rest of the religious right had their way? What if their Christmas wish came true, and the religious mind dominated all facets of American political life?

If the religious right converts the majority of Christians to their narrow political philosophy, it would be the end of the American experiment. If every political question has a religious answer, then there is no politics -- how could you vote against dogma? How could you vote for a John Kerry or a Jimmy Carter if it would be a sin, and you would go to hell for it?

The notion that God might favor one earthly candidate over another is creative. The notion that you or I could ever know which it is is hubris, it is heresy, and it is dangerous. Woe to those such as Bill O'Reilly who dare tell us what kind of tax code Jesus ordains, and woe to us if we listen.

In their polemic on the debate over religious freedom in the founding era, The Godless Constitution, Isaac Kramnick and Larry Moore call this strict code of public Christianness "religious correctness." It is a tendency that marginalizes any real values expressed, substituting for them rote, meaningless incantation. Worse, it stifles inquiry, openness, debate, and progress -- the hallmarks of government in America.

Just a Theory

The culture war, if it exists, is getting old. As Thomas Frank noted in What's the Matter with Kansas?, while social conservatives promise much to their constituents, they rarely deliver, thanks to still-strong legal protections of individual rights and liberties. That is why the most important battles in the coming years are in the courts, where conservatives hope to overturn history, and in the schools, where they wish to breed the next generation of the 60s backlash.

In the second debate, President Bush made a curious remark about his criteria for selecting nominees for the high court:

Another example [of criteria for choosing Justices] would be the Dred Scott case, which is where judges years ago said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights. That's personal opinion. That's not what the Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we're all--you know, it doesn't say that. It doesn't speak to the equality of America. And so I would pick people that would be strict constructionists.

Of course, the 1857 Dred Scott opinion was, in fact, a strict interpretation of the Constitution before the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865. It is difficult to perceive what he was getting at. As it turns out, it was a coded reference to Roe v. Wade [*] -- a message to the religious right that the rest of us were not meant to hear. In their analogy, a fetus should have the same rights under law as an African-American. The president, who promised "no litmus test," dared not say this out loud.

Using terms like "strict constructionist" versus "activist judges," the agenda of the radical right is hidden behind a curtain as if it were some kind of debate over legal philosophy. In fact, it is an "activist" agenda, promulgated by those who would strip away not only women's rights and religious freedom, but also (in another Frankian coincidence) by those who would dismantle the capacity for government to check industry and help society. With several justices seemingly at death's door, the next Supreme Court may be the grandest regression of the Bush era. The purging of the moderates and the skirting of procedure are just the warning shots.

The next shot could have a familiar ring. Eighty years ago the Scopes "monkey" trial marked the beginning of the era of science in public education; today, in Dover, PA, it is as if time has not passed at all. The local school board has mandated the teaching of so-called "Intelligent Design Theory" as an alternative to evolution. They call it a "theory," as evolution is a theory. But evolution is a scientific theory, i.e., it makes limited claims about the physical world, it is supported by evidence, and it is the consensus of nearly all professional scientists, and has been for many years. Criticism and improvements to evolution have been incorporated over the years since Darwin through research, experimentation and peer review.

"Intelligent Design," on the other hand, is just a theory. Its premise -- that life is so perfect that it must have been created by an "intelligence" -- is impossible to support in any scientific way, because its claim goes beyond the physical world; it is metaphysical. In other words, it is creationism disguised in phony scientific language. Instead of teaching such doctrine in the church, the religious right would have it supplant genuine science education in our schools, at a time when our country is in desperate need of young scientists.

End Times

The watering-down of science. A "faith-based" way of knowing and going to war. A quasi-postmodernist denial of the notion of truth in reporting. A strict code of religious correctness. The decimation of individual rights and positive government. The supplanting of political debate with religious belief in more and more areas of policy.

Many fundamentalists, like Jerry Falwell and his friend Tim LaHaye, author of the mega-bestseller Left Behind, believe we are approaching the end times of life on earth, as they read it in the Book of Revelations.

With the growing assault of narrow religious views on public life, are we approaching the end times of politics?

It is not so dire. As Kramnick and Moore write:

We argue with some confidence because over the long years of American history the party of religious correctness has lost most of the major wars. It lost because it was wrong, not because Americans despise religion.

No matter if we are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or anything else, or none of the above, we are all Americans. We value liberty, justice, compassion, tolerance, knowledge. We will keep our country.

Happy holidays.