Gary Hart says we are moving towards theocracy.

America risks becoming a theocracy because of the religious right's sway over politics, former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart warned Thursday in a talk in Denver.

At a lunch at the Oxford Hotel sponsored by the Denver Forum, the Democrat touched on his faith journey, took a few jabs at the Bush administration's foreign policy and reassured the audience that it's all right to be a liberal.

Hart, the author of some 15 books, was touting a slim new volume, "God and Caesar in America: An Essay on Religion and Politics."

"The language of politics in the last 10 years has more heavily gravitated toward faith and values," Hart said. "He who controls the definition controls the debate."

To illustrate the shift in religion's role in politics, Hart told of how conservative Protestants worried in the 1960s that President Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, would let the Vatican call the shots. In 2005, the Bush White House sought to reassure evangelicals that Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers was one of them.

Imagine, Hart said, the reaction if the Kennedy White House had sounded out the pope about a high-court nominee.

"Guess who would have gone up in orbit?" he said. "The religious right in America."

Well, there is an itty-bitty difference here. The pope is a foreigner and the head of state of a foreign country. The evangelicals in question are American citizens and voters. Is its hart’s contention that religious voters – at least one who are part of the so-called “religious right” – have no place being involved in the American political system?

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