The American Spectator

At some future date, an intrepid scientist will announce that he has made a discovery: there is a correlation between heroin and liberal outrage. Apparently, when a leftist goes off on a tirade against conservatives, religion, or Evil America, it triggers an opiate release in the brain that causes a blissed-out high. Thus, as the addict must hunt down smack, the liberal must have a constant supply of outrages to feed his jones. If none are available — if, indeed, our modern age is criminally short of witch hunts, McCarthyism, religious intolerance and racism — then one must be made out of smaller things. Thus the almost ardent obsession with George Bush. Thus the depiction of the Catholic Church as a tsunami of fascism. Thus Cindy Sheehan. Of course, as is the case with addicts, truth is often a casualty.

p>Which brings me to Damon Linker. Linker was once an editor at First Things , the neoconservative journal edited by Father Richard John Neuhaus. Linker recently left First Things , and has landed a book deal with Random House, and a cover spot on the New Republic . Linker’s book, called The Theocons , is about “secular America under siege” by people like, well, Richard Neuhaus. According to Linker in the New Republic , br> /p>

In Neuhaus’s view, what was happening in the United States could only be described as “the displacement of a constitutional order by a regime that does not have, will not obtain, and cannot command the consent of the people.” Hence the stark and radical options confronting the country, ranging “from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution.”

That is the America toward which Richard John Neuhaus wishes to lead us — an America in which eschatological panic is deliberately channeled into public life, in which moral and theological absolutists demonize the country’s political institutions and make nonnegotiable public demands under the threat of sacralized revolutionary violence, in which citizens flee from the inner obligations of freedom and long to subordinate themselves to ecclesiastical authority, and in which traditionalist Christianity thoroughly dominates the nation’s public life. All of which should serve as a potent reminder — as if, in an age marked by the bloody rise of theologically inspired politics in the Islamic world, we needed a reminder — that the strict separation of politics and religion is a rare, precious, and fragile achievement, one of America’s most sublime achievements, and we should do everything in our power to preserve it. It is a large part of what makes America worth living in.