For most of my fourscore years, I took democracy for granted. Looking back now, I realize that was a naïve and narrow tendency to look at reality through the lens of my own limited life experience.  I should have known better. The evidence was available.

My parents, who grew up in Poland between two world wars and barely survived the Shoah, had certainly not seen a world where democracy reigned until they and I arrived as “Displaced Persons” in 1950’s America where I grew up. I should have realized why they always repeated the mantra, “God Bless America,” especially after telling one of their endless horror stories of the what they experienced in the years before my birth a year after their liberation from a slave-labor camp.

The democracy they experienced in America that for probably all of my forbears was at best an unimaginable or even a utopian concept but never a lived experience.  Even in the span of my own existence, the eastern half of Europe and for a long time the Iberian Peninsula and half of Germany, all of what was then the USSR, mainland China, practically all colonial Africa, the Middle East and large parts of Asia were not experiencing democracy.

But where I lived, democracy was the governing ideal, and growing up in it, I looked at it as inevitable, and just a matter of time before the rest of the world joined. Although for certain racial and ethnic minorities it was imperfectly applied in America, the fact that in Germany, Spain and Portugal dictators fell and gave way to democracy, to say nothing of the fall of the USSR seemed to support my democratic optimism. Many in my post-WW II baby-boom generation tried to perfect it, not always successfully. But in my life, it seemed the road to the future was to be increasingly headed toward democracy.

But in the 1970’s the rise of the religious right and the culture wars it spawned, there was a backlash, more powerful than the fundamentalism that peaked in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America and receded after the 1925 Scopes trial. This late twentieth century fundamentalism built a powerful political movement, in some cases calling itself a “silent” or “moral” majority that sought to take over government and turn America away from secular democracy by using the electoral process to bring power to those who wanted the country to be governed above all else by religious beliefs. They were overwhelmingly Christian evangelicals, but their initial aims were shared by conservative Catholics as well Orthodox Jews.

They found a political home in the precincts of conservative Republican groups and candidates who enlisted their political blocs for votes and promised to steer government to turn their causes into the law of the land. Democracy was for them an instrument but not a goal.  They wanted it to put into power the God-directed commandments – as they understood them, mostly in fundamentalist terms – and if that might limit the range of democracy, so be it.  God was not a democrat.

While Jimmy Carter was a devout, church-going, Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)