On Tuesday night, commissioners in Palm Beach County, Florida unanimously passed an ordinance required face masks in public spaces. That’s the good news. What’s frightening are some of the people who delivered public comments denouncing the decision as an attack on their freedom. A couple of the speakers — I’m not printing their names here — cited God in defense of their ignorance. They also pushed a string of wild conspiracy theories.

One lady is frightened about how the masks will block oxygen from entering our bodies — that’s not true — before accusing officials of trying to “throw God’s wonderful breathing system out the door.” Spoiler: You can still breathe while wearing a face mask.

The other speaker says the masks are killing people (a lie), and that citizen’s arrests are already underway (no), and that the commissioners are obeying “the Devil’s laws” (not even close), and that they’ll be “punished by God” (ha), and that “the 5G” are coming after the people (wut), and that the commissioners should “be in a psych ward”(sure), and Bill Gates needs to be in jail (huh?), and Hillary Clinton too (seriously?), and something about pedophiles (how…?)

Inside the State Department, the definition of human rights is up for debate.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an evangelical Christian, created a commission last July to provide a new vision for human rights policy that would more closely align with the “nation’s founding principles” and uphold religious freedom as America’s most fundamental value.

Human rights scholars have criticized the panel, saying it is filled with conservatives intent on promoting views against abortion and marriage equality. Critics also warn the commission sidesteps the State Department’s internal bureau tasked with promoting human rights abroad.

And former agency officials caution that elevating the importance of religion could reverse the country’s longstanding belief that “all rights are created equal” — and embolden countries that persecute same-sex couples or deny women access to reproductive health services for religious reasons.

“There are those who would have preferred I didn’t do it, and are concerned about the answers that our foundational documents will provide,” Mr. Pompeo said of the commission last fall to a conservative women’s group at the Trump International Hotel in Washington. “I know where those rights came from. They came from our Lord.”

(...) The pecuniary motives of some of this obscurantism are clear, as many churches and mosques depend on contributions from congregants at services for the livelihood of imams and pastors. Their willingness to prey on the gullibility of their followers in a bid to keep up their income stream should be considered the height of hypocrisy and speaks to the importance of people never surrendering their capacity for independent, critical reasoning.

Though you might not have noticed it on Donald Trump’s and Ali Khameini’s planet, religion seems to be in the process of collapsing, at least in the industrialized world. A third of the French say that they have no religion at all and just 45% consider themselves Catholic (with perhaps only half of those being relatively committed to the faith), while only 5% attend church regularly. A majority of young people in 12 European countries claim that they now have no religion, pointing to a secular future for much of the continent. Even in peculiarly religious America, self-identification as Christian has plunged to 65% of the population, down 12% in the past decade, while 26% of the population now disavows having a religion at all.

In post-pandemic Iran, don’t be surprised if similar feelings spread, given how the religious leadership functionally encouraged the devastation of Covid-19. In this way, despite military threats, economic sanctions, and everything else, Donald Trump’s America and Ali Khameini’s Iran truly have something in common. In the U.S., where it’s easier to measure what’s happening, evangelicals, more than a fifth of the population when George W. Bush was first elected president in 2000, are 16% of it two decades later.

Given the unpredictable nature of our world (as the emergence of Covid-19 has made all too clear), nothing, secularization included, is a one-way street. Religion is perfectly capable of experiencing revivals. Still, there is no surer way to tip the balance toward an Omar Khayyam-style skepticism than for prominent religious leaders to guide their faithful, and all those in contact with them, into a new wave of the pandemic.

OVPM’s stated goal is “to unite the Body of Christ to pray for God’s values to be expressed through government and the nation.” At the time of OVPM’s launch, the Christian Broadcasting Network described it as an initiative “launched to fight against spells, sorcery and those who would employ witchcraft against the President and as an effort to address the current prayer needs for the White House.”

Pence is such a sort of representative figure in this sense, because, while a sort of fairly undistinguished uncharismatic figure himself, he serves more as yet another convergence point. To understand the role of the religious right in America, I think most people sort of see the pulpit pounders, the Bible thumpers — you know, the southern guys in too-tight suits sort of shouting, and all this kind of thing. That’s the populist front. That’s the populist front. But there’s always been this Christian right elite, sometimes financial, as through the Princes and the DeVoses, sometimes like Chuck Colson, an intellectual elite, an elite of ideas. And there has been some tension.

And what I think is interesting is the populist front has always cared most about social issues: abortion, homosexuality, and so on. The elite fundamentalism has always seen the economy itself as a religious issue, a kind of free-market fundamentalism, the idea that we have to take the chains off those whom God has selected for wealth and success and let them build greater success, which will trickle down to the rest of us. And they’re not without concern for the poor. The rest of us will be taken care of through this kind of trickle-down fundamentalism. And I think Mike Pence is a guy who has really neatly positioned himself to be able to speak to and for both those strands of the religious right. And I think that’s why Trump as a deal-maker is overstated but that’s a deal he got right. He understood that Pence was the deal, and it’s paid off for him so brilliantly, from his point of view.