“America,” writes Washington-based columnist Jonah Goldberg, “is today in the midst of an obscene moral panic over the role of Christians in public life.”
The panicked Americans Goldberg has in view in making this observation are not typical middle Americans — who themselves are Christians. Rather, the Americans who are in a panic over Christians in public life are the secular elite who dominate the university-media complex, where a kind of functional atheism has firmly established itself as the official orthodoxy.
Those who uphold this orthodoxy now curiously regard themselves as the only true guardians of the American way, the embattled defenders of American democracy. Emboldened by historical amnesia, this secular-minded elite would prefer that Americans simply take their word for it when they assert that this nation’s political foundations rest firmly on Enlightenment rationality and not on religious conviction.
