Some 20 years ago, a guy giving us a lecture asked if anyone knew the fastest growing religion in the world at the time. None of us raised our hands. So he told us—nationalism.

I’d forgotten that comment until recently. It certainly helps explain today’s political climate. Let’s see:

You can claim the president was born in Kenya, practices Islam, and sports a Hitler mustache. But when you question his sending thousands of heavily-armed Marines to do nothing in Haiti, you’re a “leftist” and “isolationist.”

You can kvetch all you want about government spending, as long as the government is spending money on the taxpayers who finance it. But the moment you oppose spending that money on frivolous wars and handouts to dysfunctional foreign countries, you “hate America.”

When the government wants to limit how many guns you own or tells you to buckle up, that’s communism. But when the government stops you from buying medicine from Canada or traveling to Cuba, it’s “protecting you.”

The government shouldn’t regulate the businesses you subsidize with your taxes. That’s the nanny state. Instead the government should regulate which leaders the people of Guatemala, Panama, and Haiti can vote for. That’s “our national interest.”

The comment by that guy in 1990 helps explain today’s political correctness. Your rights as citizen to criticize your government and hold it accountable for its behavior ends at our borders. The rest is nationalism, a religion that persecutes its “infidels” by accusing them of “hating America,” “endangering our national security,” “blaming America first,” and being “ a leftist isolationist.”

In recent years, I’ve seen some fellow Catholics try to maneuver their way around the scandals involving priests who molest kids and bishops who hide the crimes. The defensive measures I’ve seen include blaming homosexuals (while ignoring the heterosexual child molesters) and accusing anyone referring to the scandals as “enemies” of the Catholic Church. Such Catholics appear to have trouble with the idea that the leaders of their church can be criminals. One such Catholic once told me flat out the church cannot sin. That person did not specify how she defined “church”—the people, the bureaucrats or the institution.

I notice similar reactions to criticism of the behavior of our government. Now, Americans are quick to condemn politicians who cheat on their wives, keep homosexual lovers, or take bribes. But I find little criticism of those who invade other countries, remove their leaders by force, or even resort to terrorism to impose their wills on weak third-world countries which pose zero threat to our national security. Those who mention such crimes are accused of “blaming America first,” hating America, or even “Catholic guilt.” The fact that someone tied religion to criticizing a secular entity, the state, suggests a worship of the state. The syllogism implied, I think, goes something like this:

God cannot sin.
The state is God.
Therefore, the state cannot sin.

But some concede the government can make “mistakes.” Not crimes, mind you, but errors in judgment. I wonder if Nazis in May, 1945, Emperor Hirohito in August, 1945 or Saddam Hussein awaiting hanging considered their actions “mistakes” after “20/20 hindsight.”

Another aspect of religion is faith. Muslims consider the Qur’an the inspired word of God. Hebrews consider the Old Testament the inspired word of God. Christians consider both the Old and New Testaments the inspired word of God. The faithful of all three religious traditions believe whatever their holy books say must be true.

The faithful of the nationalist religion cite the School of the Americas/WHINSEC website and the titles of the school’s curricula to “prove” that outfit doesn’t train terrorists, the government panel that concluded the attack on the USS Liberty was accidental, and the Israeli government conclusion that Rachel Corrie’s death was accidental. For me that’s as credible as an investigation by a Catholic bishop that he did not engage in a coverup of priest child molesters or testimony by Bill Clinton that he did not have sexual relations with that woman. I guess if you believe in the divinity of the state you can conclude that it’s free from the conflicts of interest that plague us mere mortals. If a mere mortal like Joshua Wade told authorities that the independent investigation he conducted proved that the allegations against him were false, I wonder how many jurors would be convinced.

A couple of weeks ago I pointed out my experiences with the “Billionaires for Bush” folks whose hatred of the former president became a religion that resorted to excommunicating those it considered heretics.

Those followers of the nationalist religion act pretty much the same way. They’re free to practice their religion. That’s okay with me. But it’s not okay when they try to make it a national religion.

Thanks, but no thanks. If I wanted to live in a theocracy, I’d move to China or Saudi Arabia.

Next time, another secular "religion," statism.