Addendum on U.S. Theocracy

As a postscript to my previous post on the possibility of the U.S. becoming anything close to a theocracy, I would like to expand on the strangely confident prediction I made that, in twenty years,

social conservatives will have even less influence than they do in the Republican party today, as this last bastion of Christendom, tottering at it already is, collapses for lack of foundations.

Non-Christians, and many liberal Christians, do a lot of hand-wringing over the influence of Christianity in modern U.S. politics. In specific, concrete instances where conservative Christians want to impose their vision of society on the populace as a whole, I agree that action must be taken. However, from my perspective, conservative Christianity has already lost and we are well on to becoming a post-Christian state, just as has happened in Europe.

If you read the news, you see conservative Christians constantly making a lot of noise on their own behalf and attempting to influence the Republican party. I, on the other hand, read conservative intellectual Christian blogs for several years and saw nothing but a kind of despair that Christendom was falling away in the U.S., in the same way that it had across the pond. The almost constant refrain was that Christians would once again become a small, perhaps even persecuted, minority, as they had been in the first few centuries AD. These people had accepted that the number of Christians in the U.S. drops every year and that there was no reason whatsoever to believe this demographic decline is about to reverse itself.

In the decades to come, some of the remaining conservative Christians will become more vocal exactly as their power continues to wane. No doubt there will be the occasional election where their influence will increase for a time, but the average extent of that influence will progressively decline, until they become largely irrelevant, either silent in a society whose values they despise, or attached to bizarre fringe groups.