Even the Islamic State, which does engage in sex slavery, otherwise diverges from the model of Gilead’s Christian fundamentalists. Gilead’s biblical judgments often seem laughably arbitrary and primitive (noncompliance is punished with eye-gouging, for example). ISIS is similarly comfortable with performative brutality, but it set up fairly complex and elaborate judicial and legal structures, including detailed tax codes and counterfeit statutes. The group’s interlocking sharia courts, binding fatwas, and economic regulations amount to what Yale University’s Andrew March and Mara Revkin term “scrupulous legality.”

A comparison to pre-modern Christian states may be more apt. In places like John Calvin’s Geneva, efforts to enforce moral discipline ranged from the obvious (punishing sexual deviance) to the odd (making Bibles available at pubs to encourage spiritual reflection). In the early 16th century, the Protestant reformer Ulrich Zwingli likened Christian life to “a battle so sharp and full of danger that effort can nowhere be relaxed without loss.” But pre-modern states, due to their lack of technology, surveillance powers, modern armies, and massive bureaucracies, were fundamentally different. Even when they wanted to be, they couldn’t be all-encompassing. They couldn’t be total.

Some liberals have managed to draw parallels closer to home, which has led to some absurdly mismatched comparisons. The New Republic’s Sarah Jones writes that “Texas is Gilead and Indiana is Gilead and now that Mike Pence is our vice president, the entire country will look more like Gilead, too.” No, Texas is not Gilead; it’s a state where people are peacefully and democratically expressing social conservatism. And as for the nation, Americans did just elect the most secular president perhaps in the country’s history.

As someone who wrote last year in The Atlantic that “it” could happen here, running through a number of worst-cases scenarios under a then-hypothetical President Trump, I believe it is sometimes just as important to argue that it can’t happen here. It is, of course, possible that the United States could experience a religious awakening, particularly if partisan polarization and Trump-style ethno-nationalism exhaust enough people. But the fact that Christian intellectuals like Rod Dreher and Russell Moore have resigned themselves for now to a “post-Christian” society—the idea being that Christians are an embattled minority that has lost the culture wars and that would be better off making a “strategic retreat” from America’s increasingly secularized public life—suggests that the time horizon for any such change is quite long.

But even if the United States did experience some kind of transformation of Christian consciousness, it wouldn’t—very likely couldn’t—be anything like the society described in Atwood’s novel. To suggest that this is a scenario worth taking seriously because it’s in the realm of possibility is to assume that expressions of public religiosity, regardless of how they are expressed, are automatically negative and something to be opposed. It’s to imply that conservative Christians are basically akin to totalitarians—or could theoretically become totalitarians—simply because they believe their faith has something important to say about public life and politics.