People who support democracy stand up for the value of diversity, build community, seek higher education, think freely, speak freely, teach freely, and protect our natural resources for future generations. That's what democracy is for; that's what theocracy is against. Being for democracy means reclaiming our American citizenship, our individual stories, our cultural legacies, and our shared history, and renewing the parts of us that call us to higher purpose -- you may call that your faith, your spirituality, your reason for being. Nurture your God-given talents, see the divine spark in others, and welcome everyone as someone who can teach you something positive, something of value.

But what North advocates is theocracy -- predicated on the demolition of democracy. He wants theonomy -- the notion that Old Testament laws should still be binding today -- and to him, that implies an absence of self-governance, self-reliance, self-determination. He wants revelation -- and he commits a logical fallacy by implying that one cannot seek both divine revelation and also sharpen one's God-given faculties of reason. He wants school children to learn creationism -- not along side of, or in addition to, but instead of, a study of evolution.

He wants his vision, his version of Jesus only; and he falsely posits that anyone else's vision of Jesus is not only false, but Satanic. He posits that anyone else's sense of purpose -- whether rooted in humanitarianism, spirituality, or rooted in any religion but his own, is Satanic. Demon-possessed. Evil to the core. Subject to total elimination. Because, as North implies, there can be no "halfway house between democracy and theocracy."

What he advocates is complete intolerance, complete religious bigotry, complete Christian supremacy. This is black-and-white thinking that refuses to see that there are distinctions to be made, or that there is value in recognizing different viewpoints, including perspectives and beliefs that challenge our own.

North's world is comfortably simple. Yet North is wrong that there is no halfway house between democracy and theocracy. Here is one: the Republican Party.

North writes, "Leader by leader, issue by issue, the Christian Right turns to political alliances with humanists in the Republican Party. They are now facing the situation that Blacks face in the Democratic Party: 'When you are in a political Party's hip pocket, you will be sat on.' "

It remains to be seen who is in whose pocket -- whether the Christian Right is in the hip pocket of the Republican Party, or whether the Republican Party is in the hip pocket of the Christian Right.

North concludes that the Christian Right cannot continue to cooperate with humanists in the Republican Party:

"We see the outworking of two rival Christian covenants: two rival strategies. The Christian Reconstructionists want replacement, not capture, of tax-supported institutions. The Christian Right wants capture, but with shared power as the price -- shared power with Republican Party humanists who hate the idea of Christian civilization far more than they hate the Democrats. Then the Christian Right seems amazed when power is not shared.

"The Christian Right is terminally naive."

If the Republican Party is now a halfway house, then North is leading conservative Christians farther and farther from the dream of democracy, from religious freedom, from respect for different cultures and creeds -- farther, and inevitably away from, the America that we love, where we live, which we hope to pass along to future generations.

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