Theocracy and the Religious Right

I listened to Randall Balmer today on the Michael Medved Show talking about his book Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament. The religious right, he complained, is turning the United States into a theocracy.

What about back in the 1950s, asked Medved? Was the US a theocracy then? Almost, replied Balmer.

Leaving aside the idea that the term “religious right” is a political pejorative, let us think about what this man is saying. Can he really suggest that religious people associated with the Republican Party are any more influential in the public square than religious people on the left are in influencing the Democratic Party?

Georges Lemaitre, the great twentieth century physicist who invented the Big Bang theory, once noted that psychology is the closest science to religion. Given that practitioners of modern psychology are employed by the government in every school in the land, is not the closeness of their science to religion a greater threat to the separation of church and state than the political influence of conservative Christians?