[+/-] Zealots on the Mount

Pierre Tristam nails it:

Iran has its mullahs. Afghanistan has its Taliban. Saudi Arabia has its Wahhabites. We have evangelicals, whose world view is different from those doctrinaire brigades in dress only.

What they all have in common is the subordination of private and public conduct to God's law as they understand it and the rejection of the secular values of the Enlightenment on which America's constitutional principles were founded, what historian Garry Wills sums up as "critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences."'

Quashing those principles may not be what we want as a society. But, for now, it's what we're headed toward.