Theocracy v Democracy

The new political divide that will decide the US election

This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024).

ARE WE ENTERING a new dark age of religious hysteria?

Or are we descending into a modern Sodom of secular depravity?

Those questions underlie the political debate of the early twenty-first century. They identify the religious divide as the point of rupture in the democratic experiment.

They summon a new dialectic of theocratic versus democratic ways of seeing the world, which seems as pertinent a description of twenty-first-century politics as those weary old binaries of Right versus Left, Capitalist versus Socialist, Republican versus Democrat, etc.

The struggle between religious and non-religious people has always been with us. What has changed in recent decades is the deep intrusion of this conflict on politics.

Theocrats wish to live under a religious (or quasi-religious) state, ruled a…