News and Notes: Threats of Theocracy
By George Francis Kane
Early this year, an AP poll reported that 67 percent of likely voters believe that the outcome of the presidential election will be very important for the future of democracy. Voters were fearful for democracy regardless of their political affiliation. Republicans and Democrats alike believe that our democratic form of government could be doomed if the other party wins the presidential election, although their reasons are different. More than 60% of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen, while Democrats believe that Republicans are trying to suppress the racial minority vote.
I am not going to both-sides this issue, as the integrity of the vote in the 2020 election has been thoroughly investigated and verified. As a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, Minnesota Atheists is not permitted to advocate for candidates in elections. We are allowed to advocate for issues in support of our expressive mission, but democracy is not generally considered to be an atheist issue. A person can be a consistent atheist and support republican democracy, a fascist dictatorship or even a monarchy. But, looking concretely at the plans of the political campaigns, it is clear that democracy will be critical in the battle over the separation of state and church.
Atheists are politically defined by their commitment to secular government. The greatest threat to secular government at the present time is posed by Christian nationalism. The United States is such a religiously diverse nation that most Americans will realize that government defining this narrow form of conservative Christianity as a national religious orthodoxy would violate their own religious freedom. That is why democracy is the strongest defense against attempts to impose religious dogma in laws. Secular government protects the religious liberty of most Americans from evangelizing by Christian nationalists, who are following a game plan to undermine democracy that is expounded in Project 2025.
Presidential candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly made an ominous promise when courting Christian voters to dispense with democracy. Here’s exactly what Trump says to Christian audiences on the campaign trail:
I don’t care how, but you have to get out and vote. And again Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years you know what, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. …. (Y)ou gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.
Analysts leapt to differing interpretations of Trump’s meaning here. Probably no other presidential candidate ever made this promise before! To secularists it sounds as if he is assuring supporters that if he is elected, he will manipulate future elections so that the vote count will not matter. Supporters interpreted his promise to be that his MAGA program will be so successful that it will unify the nation, so there will be no serious challenges in future elections. When Laura Ingram asked him a few days
later to clarify his meaning, he just doubled down, leaving the mystery unresolved. Probably he intended both these meanings, and more. His goal was just to attract attention to the outlandish claim, while allowing himself wiggle room to deny any inferred intent.
Secular voters are concentrated in cities, while conservative Christians predominate in sparsely populated rural areas. A new electoral strategy among Christian nationalists is to base the result of statewide elections not on the popular vote, but instead on winning the majority of counties. In states like Texas this would almost ensure a Republican governor in perpetuity, no matter how great a majority of votes the Democratic candidate receives.
Democracy may not be an “atheist issue,” but it is an important secular value. The consequences of actions in the quality of peoples’ lives are the only non-theistic basis for objectivity in ethics. Ethical evaluation of government actions must take into account their effects on all of the people. The only way to get everyone’s input into government decisions is through some form of democracy.
