It's another book, this one more mind-blowing than the last, a history of America seen through the politics of sin: Hellfire Nation by James A. Morone.

The author, a well-known professor of political science at Brown University, turns schoolroom platitudes on their heads. The Puritans came here because of religious intolerance? Nonsense. The Puritans thought the English church too tolerant, too "papist," not sternly Calvinist enough. These zealots crossed the Atlantic Ocean in November to establish a purer Anglican faith (they eventually split away from the English church when it continued to accept everyone into the congregation and would not, as the Puritans did, sort out the saved and bar the damned.) The Puritans set themselves up as Christianity's corrective, a "community of saints" in a "city on a hill" where "the eyes of all people will be upon us."

Two generations later and the good saints of the Bay Colony were hanging women as witches and driving hot spikes through the tongues of Quakers, a renegade sect that liked to rend their clothes and run through the streets naked, howling jeremiads at the neighbors. With devils glimpsed in every shadow on the wall, is it any wonder that this same native mania to root out demons comes howling after us today? "Sexuality," writes Morone, "challenges the fundamental Puritan precept: control thyself." H. L. Mencken put it better: "Puritanism -- the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

As Morone tells it, America's story is not the one we learned in civics class, of a steady, enlightening climb from theocracy to democracy. Our history "is tangled up in a very different story: the search for God, the moral urge. The trajectory of this alternate story does not run from religious to secular. Rather American politics developed from revival to revival."

He charts this uniquely evangelical course through slavery (where both Northern and Southern divines pounded the Bible for distinctly opposite effects), female suffrage (suffragettes being either "free lovers" or angels, depending on which side of the rhetoric you made your bed), the "white slavery" panic (in which big-city immigrants waylaid farm girls -- Kansas, again! -- and imprisoned them in "Chinese laundries". . . except when the rescuers came to tear down the brothels, the girls, who have been totally un-coerced, laughed in their face.) Onward through Prohibition, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Act, the Reagan Revolution (owed in part to the right-wing invention of "the welfare queen," a supposedly lazy, crafty woman of color with -- the killer attribute -- those loose-limbed sexual habits.) Right down to the current flap over unashamed gay people in the movies, on TV, and in the streets of towns big and small.

In all that was to come, the Salem Village panic set the standard. "The distinctive feature about witch-hunts," writes the professor, "is the search for invisible enemies within the community . . . In the panic, everybody becomes a potential suspect; friends dissolve lifelong ties, husbands testify against wives . . . Many readers will recall the great wave of AIDS hysteria, when frightened Americans dreamed up all sorts of ways to keep unidentified homosexuals from slipping 'their' disease into mainstream culture. Like the Salem Village original, each [panic] involves widespread fear, uncertain (often invisible) enemies, lapses in due process, and a frightening sexuality running just under the official text."

To this day we remain a "redeemer nation," currently spreading the gospel of liberal democracy in a part of the world where, to quote the president, "they hate us for our freedom." We are on a -- we don't dare say "crusade" -- mission, and we carry a wondrous gem, this highly polished summation from the Age of Enlightenment, our Constitution, our Bill of Rights. At least that's the official story, much rewritten from the original.

And what do we get for these good works? Blood and bombs from mosque to Arab street. Our gift is rejected. Our Age of Enlightenment is sacrilege to them. We are in, we note, a profoundly theocratic part of the world --- just the sort of cleric-run, God-centric "paradise" that the evangelicals are striving to pull off -- with a few deity-name changes -- in this country.

Thus, when the president speaks of the "sanctity" of marriage, he is using religious language, consonant with the same rhetoric that calls homosexuality a "sin." It is, in fact, its unspoken yet widely perceived echo. Both terms come from the Christian Right, and enshrining the purported sanctity of any civil institution in the Constitution, as the president and his base desire, is a direct violation of the separation of church and state.

At the moment, that is.

As we have seen in 13 states, when voters are given a chance to engage a popular prejudice against an unpopular minority, neither the Constitution nor God will intervene.

Who knows where we'll be in four years? On that Great Gettin'-Up Morning when the Bible rules the courts, witches will again burn in public squares. Church and state will fuse. And "they" won't hate us for our freedom anymore.

One other thing.

The terrorists? Rocking away in their madrassas, ranting out the Koran, hailing the return of the 9th Century -- the terrorists will have won.

But enough of this! In the words of the great Myra Breckinridge, self-pity is not box-office! Nothing is determined; everything is equally possible.

So get up out of those chairs, kids, and stand tall. Everybody needs to stay awake. Everybody needs to man their battle stations. In the next four years America will again struggle for her soul and we -- holding our own in this tug of war -- will just have to be the better angels of her nature.

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John Calendo is a frequent contributor to Nightcharm and our Pop Critic @ Large. His work has appeared in Playboy, Blueboy and boy oh boy everything in between. 

© 2004 Nightcharm, Inc. and John Caliendo.