Jeremy Lott (defender of hypocrisy) and Patrick Hynes (defender of the Religious Right) have a good article in USA Today calling the left on the double standard of their approving of progressive Christians’ importing religion into politics while denouncing Christian conservatives for doing basically the same thing.  It is a point that could stand to be emphasised a bit more often, though it will presumably provoke the predictable, “But progressive Christians make appeals to universal ideas of equality and justice!  That’s nothing like the growling of the snaggle-toothed fanatics from Nacogdoches!”   Damon Linker has already presented us with a foretaste of this kind of argument in his dispute with Ross Douthat:

Still, the abolitionists and Martin Luther King Jr. were not theocons, out to increase public religiosity as an end in itself. They were, instead, lovers of justice whose piety motivated them to fight for the civic equality of black Americans–an equality at once promised and denied them in the nation’s (secular) Founding documents. The abolitionists and King may have been inspired by their faith, but the goals for which they worked–the emancipation of the slaves, the right to vote, economic opportunity for all citizens–were perfectly defensible in secular-civic terms.

Bingo. You see, progressive Christians aren’t mixing their religion and politics unduly, as their piety motivates them to love justice and hate social evils, which is different from the theocons and religious conservatives because the former don’t really do it for their religion. They do it for some good already defined outside of their religion.  Justice!  Equality!  The Rights of Man!  Anything But Christ, I suppose, must be the key phrase.  In other words, you can be inspired and motivated by religion, as long as you don’t take it all too seriously. 

Even though the progressive Christians’ very conception of what justice is only exists in the framework of their religious teachings, you cannot frame your arguments in explicitly and primarily religious terms or advance an ideal of public religiosity (even if, let us say, you believe that increased public religiosity would better guarantee social justice!) because, well, that would be all together too religious, which Linker has already determined is unacceptable.  Having appropriated progressive Christians of the past as models of socially-engaged Christians who did not push their religion among those who do not accept it (since that Christian religion was more or less universal, if often informal, and the appeals to the language of the Bible a lingua franca of American culture that cut across all boundaries), he can pretend that religion is an ointment that you generally keep separate from public affairs but can occasionally daub on a wound when necessary. 

In all this he does, of course, conveniently ignore those populist and reformist religious impulses that yielded temperance laws and later came back in the big way with Prohibition.  There is an argument to be made, and it has been made, that the temperance movement produced a real social benefit in reducing the astonishingly excessive consumption of alcohol in the first half of the 19th century, but the temperance folks did it absolutely with appeals to a mix of respectability and piety and channeled the revivalist enthusiasms of the time to stamping out the impact of Demon Rum.  This kind of moral reformation through legislation and public religiosity is exactly the sort of thing that a secularist such as Linker cannot stand, which may be why he never acknowledged it as an episode in the religious history of this country.  To acknowledge any precedent of highly religious reform movements focused so intently on personal behaviour and public morality would not help the cause of the secularists at all.  Indeed, it is odd that Blue Laws haven’t come up more often in the course of this debate, since they are in many cases a clear example of laws being passed to endorse religious commitments.   

In Linker’s world, we know temperance laws and Prohibition to be excessive applications of religion to public affairs because, well, progressives don’t like the results.  That is what finally determines whether a progressive Christian or a secularist would acknowledge the legitimacy of religion in politics: whether or not they can use it to advance their political agenda, or whether it advances a contrary agenda.  If the former, the saints are marching in, and there’s gonna be some stomping out of the grapes of wrath; if the latter, theocracy is coming!