I HAVEN’T READ KEVIN PHILLIPS’ American Theocracy, which I saw piled up at my local bookstore the other day, but to paraphrase Tom Wolfe it seems that although theocracy is always descending on America, somehow it always lands in the Middle East. Even the Publisher’s Weekly review (follow the link to read it) says that Phillips overstates his case, but then adds something that is surely true: “Expect him to make some provocative appearances on chat shows.” And, to be fair, I’ve made a much milder version of this critique myself.

Rather than theocracy, however, I think that much of what’s often identified by pundits as religious sentiment in American politics has more to do with reaction against smug moralizing. As Mickey Kaus notes in response to a new poll on American attitudes toward gay marriage: “Americans may or may not like gay marriage, but they really hate having gay marriage crammed down their throat by self-righteous, unelected liberal judges! What the poll shows is that the gay marriage cause is only now finally recovering from the damage done to it by Anthony Lewis’ wife.”

There’s a book to be written on that phenomenon, I’m sure. Mickey?