The chief impediment to religious liberty in our generation is the renewed effort to make of the United States a theocracy rather than the constitutional democracy the founders set in place. With increasing frequency the founders' church-state views have come under attack, particularly Thomas Jefferson's conception of separation of church and state. The views of Jefferson and James Madison, father of the Constitution, are now labeled by some of the leaders of the so-called Religious Right as aberrations and the notion is advanced that the founders actually sought to establish a kind of holy commonwealth in which, while government would not dominate the church, the church could well dominate the state.

Closely connected to this historical revisionism is the view that America occupies a special role in God's plan for the ages, that the United States is the successor to the covenant people Israel, that she is God's own possession among the nations of the world. Although this kind of nationalistic messianism is not new to the contemporary Religious Right, it remains as morally bankrupt today as ever, amounting really to a form of national idolatry.