Joseph Sobran is a conservative columnist in line with the Christian Right and its social agenda.

In the column excerpted below, Sobran defends the idea of Theocracy in America.

All this talk about Theocracy is coming out of the woodwork under George W. Bush. In the blog post just prior to this one today, I talked about how a Republican Congressman, Shays, thinks the recent Save Schiavo law is a Theocracy” action.

Liberals have been talking about theocracy coming for a long time.

The difference now is that Republicans have stopped ignoring the theocracy talk, and are talking about it openly, and, as Sobran does, actually are defending theocracy.

Maybe our thinking is being “conditioned”. That’s a Karl Rove political strategy, one that George Bush accidentally talked about in answering a question recently, where he started his answer by saying something like “Let me condition your thinking on that point …..”.

If we are being conditioned, what are we being conditioned for?

Sobran Column — The Fear of “Theocracy”

This is why it always sounds quaint to me when liberals warn us obsessively against one particular form of government: theocracy. They see the threat of theocracy in every Christmas creche, in legal restrictions on abortion, in public school prayer, in the rise of the Religious Right, in the Pledge of Allegiance, in any official reference to the Almighty (“In God we trust”).

But just what are we being warned against? What is theocracy, anyway? Its vigilant enemies never bother to define it. If the danger signs they cite are any indication, Western man has lived under theocracy for most of his history — and in some respects, he still does.

How bad is it? Judging by, say, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, not too bad. His pious pilgrims seem quite content in a religious society. And judging by, say, the tavern scenes in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, even people who were none too pious didn’t feel oppressed by life under an official state religion.