Judgment Day is nigh.

Well, God bless America. And here's hoping the rest of us get a little of that divine pixie dust because we'll need it if the American political class continues its descent into flaky, Bible-waving irrationality.

It is a truism that only a devout Christian who prays for miracles, believes that God's will is done on earth, and gabbles about the wonders of his faith can become president of the United States of America and, as Americans like to say, leader of the free world.

But someone who believes that every word of the Bible is literally true, someone who believes all who disagree will be cast into fire to be tortured forever, someone who believes the actions of the United States must be guided by scripture and prophecy, someone who believes the end of the world could come any day now and who hopes and dreams and prays it does -- someone like that can be president of the United States of America, commander-in-chief of the mightiest military in human history, and the person on whose judgment the fate of the world most depends.

Oh, and someone like that can have the launch codes.

God bless us, indeed.

Now, whenever I write one of these little missives about the dangerous malignancy of religion, I hear from decent and rational Christians who say that they personally don't believe the world is 6,000 years old, or that angels guide footballs into the hands of wide receivers, or that the loving Jesus will return to smite infidels and launch a thousand-year Reich. This is a caricature of my faith, they say. And they are right.

But I am not responsible for that caricature. I am merely describing what tens of millions of Americans -- hundreds of millions worldwide -- have made of Christianity. It is they who are responsible for embracing and promoting a system of belief that increasingly resembles a primitive, irrational, millennial death cult.

A 2002 CNN/Time poll found that 59 per cent of all Christians and 77 per cent of those described as born-again, fundamentalist or evangelical agreed that the events portrayed in the Book of Revelation would happen at some time in the future. A 1999 Newsweek poll that asked a more specific question -- "Will the world end in an Armageddon battle between Jesus Christ and the Antichrist?" -- found that almost half of all Christians and three-quarters of evangelicals believed human history was nothing but a round or two of midget wrestling before Jesus puts the smackdown on Satan. (That image of Jesus is actually common in much of devout America: One popular illustration portrays the Son of God as a professional wrestler.)
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And what a smackdown it will be.

Jesus returned to the world with "conviction like a flame of fire" in his eyes, write Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins in the "Left Behind" series of Christian novels. The very words of the Lord caused the blood of infidels to boil and "burst through their veins and skin. ... Even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated."

Forget the hippy Jesus. This is Jesus as totalitarian maniac. The carnage of the final battle will be so awesome, LaHaye and Jenkins write, that Christians will have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses."

More than 60 million copies of the Left Behind books have been sold. Although it's technically fiction, LaHaye is widely respected as a biblical scholar by evangelicals, and the authors insist their books are a literal rendering of the Revelation prophecies that will inevitably come true. And that's how their audience reads them. "Many people have asked me," a Christian bookstore owner told the New York Times before the final installment in the series had been published, "do you think they'll finish the series before Christ comes?'" (Happily, they did.)

All infidels should be nervous about this stuff, but Jews have a more immediate reason to be concerned. The Armageddonists believe a mass conversion of Jews is a critical event in the chronology. Not all will see the light, of course, and Jews who insist on remaining Jewish will be filleted and splayed with the rest of us. But get enough Jews to turn in their menorahs and the End Times are on -- which helps explain why so many evangelicals have a creepy interest in all things Jewish.

And that, in turn, leads to scenes like this one: A couple of Sundays ago, David Brickner, the executive director of "Jews for Jesus" -- a group that proselytizes among Jews -- told Pentecostals at the Wasilla Bible Church that bad things happen to people because God is punishing them.

"Judgment is very real and we see it played out on the pages of the newspapers and on the television," Brickner said. Just look at the terrorism that plagues Israel. That's God's judgment. And Jews will continue to suffer it until they see the light.

As religious flakiness goes, this was modest stuff. It only came to light because, sitting in the pews that Sunday morning, was one Sarah Palin -- long-time member of the Wasilla Bible Church, governor of Alaska, and Republican nominee for vice-president of the United States.

But what really makes this incident interesting is that so few Americans found it interesting. No one seems to much care that Ms. Palin belongs to the sort of church that wants to hear from "Jews for Jesus." And the fact that her church declares the Bible "the inspired, inerrant word of God" -- a conclusion presumably shared by the woman who may be the next vice-president -- was apparently of no interest at all. Even the revelation that Palin herself had described both the invasion of Iraq and the construction of an oil pipeline as part of "God's plan" garnered only a fraction of the attention lavished on the irrelevant story of her pregnant daughter and the dazed boyfriend-cum-fiancé who stood on the stage of the Republican convention Wednesday night.
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In a sense, this indifference is understandable. So someone with a good shot at the White House sat quietly and listened to a religious nut spout flaming nonsense. It's hardly news, at least not in the sense of being novel. Quite literally everyone with a shot at the White House does the same. Routinely.

John McCain -- who began his second attempt at the presidential nomination by kissing the ring of Jerry Falwell -- attends a church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. Among its doctrines, the SBC declares the Bible "has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy."

All scripture. No exceptions. God's sanction for slavery and genocide? The subordination of women? The ringing declaration in Leviticus that all homosexuals must be put to death? The eternal waterboarding that awaits anyone who disagrees? Word for word, it's all "true and trustworthy." The demonstrably false description of the universe and its origins in Genesis? Bang on. The technicolour lunacy in the Book of Revelation? More factual than On The Origin of Species.

The SBC is by far the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, and, not surprisingly, a whole lot of Americans see things its way. One-third of respondents told Gallup they believe the Bible "is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally word for word." Almost two-thirds said the Bible's account of Noah's ark is literally true. The same proportion said it is true that God created the world in six days and Moses parted the Red Sea.

And don't think this is only a Republican thing. In 2000, it was Al Gore, not George W. Bush, who said he decides policy by asking "what would Jesus do?" and today every leading Democrat is only too happy to blather on about his very special relationship with Jesus. How much is sincere and how much calculation is impossible to say but it is astonishing that Barack Obama agreed to make his first joint appearance with John McCain a few weeks ago at the cavernous Southern Baptist church of Rick Warren -- a superstar evangelical whose message is more positive than many of his kind but whose substitution of fantasy for reason is every bit as total.

Or rather, it should be astonishing. But it doesn't seem that many of us are astonished.

And even fewer are prepared to call these beliefs what they are. Or to do whatever they can to ensure that the most powerful office on the planet is not handed to anyone who eagerly awaits the destruction of that planet.

As certainly as Thomas Jefferson would be unelectable today, the great man would be disgusted.

You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

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