During his recent discussion with Mike Jacobs, David Barton made a bizarre assertion that fear that the Religious Right seeks to implement a theocracy in America is “stupidity” because “as long as you have elections, you’ll never have a theocracy.”

Barton asserted that “this far left stuff that says if Christians get involved, they’re trying to make a theocracy” is nonsense and is just something that “wackos on the left and secularists and progressives try to use to keep us intimidated, to make us ashamed of our faith and our values.”

“As long as we’re having elections,” he declared, “there is no possibility of a theocracy”:

Well, Iran has elections, so apparently that means it is not a theocracy.

But let’s take a moment to examine Barton’s logic on this issue. You’ll notice that in the middle of his argument, Barton specifically cited Exodus 18 as proof that God wants America to have elections. Ignoring Barton’s intentional misrepresentation of this passage, if we take the statement at face value, we have to point out that passage he cites comes as the Israelites are wandering in the desert at a time when they are literally being governed by God. God was physically present among them and all of the laws that Moses set out in Exodus and Leviticus came straight from God, with whom Moses was directly communicating.

This is the literal definition of a theocracy but, according to Barton, it was not a theocracy at all because the Israelites were allowed to have elections.