Politics as a Branch of Theology

What if Grover Norquist got his wish and the welfare state disappeared tomorrow? What would replace it? Since welfare is essentially public charity, it would have to be replaced with private charity. While there are great private secular organizations, for most people charitable giving means giving to a church. In a sense, God and the government are fulfilling the same need. And it's not just in welfare. People use government as a means of casting moral judgement on other people. Listen to the arguments against gay marriage. They are either fingers-in-the-ear arguments of definitions, something I was excellent at in the fourth grade, or they seem to come from wanting to cast moral judgement on gay people. They may not directly say that gay people are bad, they just imply that if there values spread through society we face some horrible disaster. Or read the arguments of priests and lawyers sometime. To me, an outsider to both groups, they look the same. Mostly arguments over definitions combined with a few crazy hypotheticals. Certainly nothing testable in a scientific environment.* As these arguments continue they seem to talk less about actual human beings on Earth, and more about fantasy people in a theoretical universe. Without keeping a firm foot in reality you can lose sight of what you are talking about really quickly with these two subjects.

This theory of politics and religion lends itself to a beautiful hypothesis about the shriveling away of religious belief. You can test how much the government impacts the daily life of its citizens. You couldn't just look at spending, because that would include all kinds of things people never see. You would have to measure how many people are on government payrolls, received a check from the government, or used a government service on a regular basis. Then you could try to correlate this level of government involvement in daily lives to religious beliefs. The hypothesis would state that as government involvement went up, religiosity went down. I wonder how I could test that?

* Incidentally, I felt the same way about physics for years. The most far out theories seem like they get tested and thrown away on paper rather than in an experiment. How do they know they are still talking about reality? But I'll give the physicists a pass, because they've discovered so many crazy things in the last 110 years that they deserve a few centuries to sort it out before we start asking them for more.