Apparently, this Sunday was something called Pulpit Freedom Sunday, in which various reactionary god-botherers engaged in an act of organized civil disobedience against a 58-year-old IRS regulation banning specific endorsements of specific candidates by ministers of any church otherwise claiming tax-exempt status. The whole thing was organized by a preposterous front operation on behalf of the wingnut god-enfeebled generally, organized to benefit the Republican Party specifically, and the presidential campaign of Willard Romney even more specifically. The front group is something called the Alliance Defending Freedom — and once again, in the Potemkin Village of the conservative grassroots, we are reminded of Bogart in The Maltese Falcon: the cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter. The ADF is not shy at all about giving the game away:

When CNN asked to be put in touch with a church that plans to endorse the president, representatives from the organization said they don't screen who the churches plan to endorse. The two pastors that the Alliance Defending Freedom put CNN in touch with plan to either criticize the president or endorse Romney.

The plan is simple. Break the law. Hope the IRS cracks down. Wail and rend your polyester about the heinous assault on your religious liberties for the time it takes for your case to work its way through the Supreme Court. And hope that, either because all the justices are now 100 years old, or because Romney has gotten elected, the Court is then populated entirely by simpletons waiting for Jesus to come with the car service to take them all to glory. Scoreboard!

(Yes, I know that "the heinous assault on your religious liberties" is completely bogus. Nobody has a First Amendment right to an automatic tax break. Nobody's prevented from shilling from the pulpit now. You just don't get the tax exemption if you do. Not that any of that will matter, as we know from the Roman Catholic Church's ongoing effort to keep its Presbyterian janitors from obtaining certain ladyparts medicine, which is an assault on the Gospels that even Vespasian never thought of.)

Conservatism in this country has abandoned forever the effort — nay, the fight — to build a viable democratic political commonwealth in this country. It is the fundamental expression of conservatism's underlying dementia. It accounts for conservatism's current implacable assault on empiricism, on mathematics, on reason, on science, and on reality itself. For a number of reasons, some of them political and some of them economic and many of them a result of retrograde theology that should have been buried with William Jennings Bryan, conservatism has decided to make war not only on the lands and the institiutions that the political commonwealth has produced — for me, the high point of the debate last week was when the president... actually mentioned land-grant universities! — but also on the ideas we hold in common, the knowledge we have gained through the hard, ceaseless — and, on a number of occasions, very bloody — work over the 200 years it took to build that commonwealth. Simply put, there are things that we are. They are not the idiotic America-fk-yeah platitudes that have sickened us over the last year — Rick Santorum, yapping about how pioneer families carved out their existence on their own, without ever mentioning, say, the Grange, or even the U.S. Army; Paul Ryan, a man who got decently educated on my dime, and you're fking welcome, dude, crowing about self-reliance, or Willard Romney, who was born in the dugout, up four runs already, with the bases loaded and nobody out. Rather, it is about the things we have determined that we own in common, and most especially, the ideas.

They are imperfect guides, and they have spent the last two years having their philosophy, and their writings, and even their very personalities hijacked by crazy people, but the Founders did see some of this coming. After the failure of the Articles of Confederation, they sought, as a people, to build a nation. They tried, as best they could, and taking into account all the foul and indecent prejudices of their age, to create a single people as well as a structure within which that single people could govern themselves, freely. They also realized that the primary threat to that freedom came as much from an organized faction of the people as it did from any instrument of the government.

There's a reason why we try to close every day on the blog with something from Mr. Madison. It is because he could see what was coming more clearly than most of them and, unlike, say, Thomas Jefferson, who was forever diagnosing without prescribing, Madison could tinker with his own work so that it might head off the dangers that might arise in the future. In 1785, Madison wrote and published one of the most important, and least celebrated, documents of the founding period: The Memorial And Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. It was a closely reasoned and deadly serious argument, which is not surprising since, in it, Madison was taking on no less than Patrick Henry. It made the point better than anything ever written that the entanglement of religion in politics, and of politics in religion, was not only destructive of both, but also that it was deadly to the development and maintenance of the internal peace that a democratic political commonwealth requires. He was a quiet fellow, Mr. Madison was, but he minced no words here:

Because experience witnesseth that eccelsiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation. During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.

It will be argued that what Madison is arguing for here is the disestablishment of religion, and not the eviction of religion from "the public square." (And anyway, as we noted above, telling churches that they can either endorse candidates or keep their tax exemption is hardly removing religion from the public sphere. It's merely telling it that, if it chooses to involve itself that deeply in the public sphere, it can pay part of the freight.) However, he was doing more than that. He was sending a warning that a religion that involves itself deeply in the secular politics of the day will work, inexorably, to create a faction within that state and, as a result, the vigorous (and occasionally, fiery) enthusiasms of the public debate will be charged from within by the demonstrably more explosive emotions engaged and loosed by religious conflict.

That is what Pulpit Freedom Day is really all about: to apply to our already volatile political divisions what the folks on the arson squad would call the "accelerant" of religious fervor. This is something that you do when you have abandoned the notion of your fellow citizens as partners in a democratic political commonwealth. This is something that you do when you have calculated — coldly, and with an almost sociopathic amorality — that there is more to be gained from the wreckage of it than from its continued existence. More money. More power. More self-regard. When the president mentioned the land-grant colleges the other night, almost nobody mentioned it after the debate was over. Big Bird got more run. But it was in those places where were developed so many of the ideas that are the true measure of the commonwealth's viability. The institutions are under attack. So are the ideas. That should tell us all something.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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