It’s fine to believe that there should be “Christian participation in politics,” not so fine to believe “that there should be Christian primacy in politics and law.” And there is indeed a movement that has this theocratic agenda, which calls itself Christian Nationalism, or Dominionism.

Ross Douthat, in the same paper, agrees that the term is slippery, and that religious idealism about the nation has been basic to liberalism as well as conservatism, as in the case of Martin Luther King. So today’s liberals are wrong to depict “even banal forms of religious conservatism as theocratic. This requires a pretense that any kind of politics motivated by conservative evangelicalism or Catholicism is a threat to the First Amendment, that the Republic of Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale is a plausible dystopia and that references to natural law and God-given rights are somehow an alien and illiberal ideology impinging on our secular tradition… Today’s religious conservatives are mostly just normal American Christians doing normal American Christian politics, not foot soldiers of incipient theocracy.”

On the other hand, Douthat agrees that there has, in recent years, been an increase “of writers and pastors, often either Calvinist or Pentecostalist, who openly identify as Christian nationalists, who call for a confessional if not a theocratic America and who present themselves as religious revolutionaries seeking not just reform but dominion.”