Throughout this session of "Meet the Press," which included Matalin's Clintonite husband James Carville, Matalin doggedly established the term "secular Left" as a synonym for "the Democratic Party." At first, I thought Matalin had just suffered a slip of the tongue. Or maybe she was just being cute. But, she kept saying "secular Left" -- more often than "Democrats." Never once did she describe her ideological foes as either "liberal" or "progressive."

This emergence of "secular Left" as the Right's preferred pejorative for both Democrats and liberals is remarkable, if only because it suggests that Republicans and conservatives appear to have absorbed themselves, willingly, into the narrow faction of the "religious Right." After all, if everyone west of the political center is now the "secular Left," then everyone right of center must be the "religious Right."

I hesitated at so radical a corollary, until I considered the source. Matalin has never been closely linked to the born-again extremists in her party, such as Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell and Elmer Gantry. Indeed, she has gone so far as to marry out of her "faith," to a prominent secular Leftist.

But if Mary Matalin -- among the most secular conservatives -- now sees America as divided between a secular Left and the religious Right, she has clearly accepted Christianism as the guiding light of Republicanism.

Now, everyone agrees that Republicans make the rules today in U.S. politics. Ergo, the Matalin Rule must be this: The U.S. is split between those who believe, with the secular Left, in separation of church and state, and those who would repeal this separation in favor of a far more theocratic state. This churchified state, based on the tendencies of the religious Right, would be stridently Christian, evangelical and not very tolerant. The implications for Jews, Muslims, agnostics, scientists -- to name several non-Christian minorities -- are less than cheery.

Democrats and progressives are sure to insist that the term "secular Left" just won’t stick, as soon as rank-and-file Americans grasp the significance of a nation divided between the Bill of Rights and the Holy Bible. History, after all, tells us that the Puritans, who were religious refugees, sailed west to found a community built on secular principles because they had been persecuted by an Anglican theocracy in England. Although the Puritans themselves faltered in the secular ideal -- the witch-burning business, for example -- their principles inspired America's Founding Fathers, among whom were Christians and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, agnostics and clerics. All were fiercely true to the idea that no faith can be allowed to dominate a free people, and that the best defense against theocracy is to ban all faiths from a role in the government of the United States.

The historical record is clear and incontrovertible. As Casey Stengel -- another of our Founding Fathers -- said, "You could look it up." One problem, though. Historical literacy is at an all-time low right now in the U.S. Not only do most Americans not know the history of church/state separation, they have no idea where to look it up.

And Casey Stengel is dead.

A bigger problem is that conservatives -- er, the religious Right -- are the undisputed arbiters of political language. Consider, for instance, the right-wing campaign to discredit the word "liberal." The. U.S. was founded as a liberal republic, but nowadays, a "liberal" risks being stoned to death in the public square by admitting to "liberalism." "Liberal" has become "the L-word," like some four-letter vulgarity unutterable in front of the children.

Likewise, the great right-wing machine of semantic revision -- with often unwitting and uncritical assistance from TV news -- has turned a progressive tax on extreme inherited wealth into a "death tax" that -- mythically -- robs middle-class Americans of their mom-and-pop candy stores and family farms. Among other pejoratives and euphemisms of the American vernacular generated by G.O.P. semanticists, each as misleading as it is universal, are these: "Axis of Evil," "Evil Empire," "evildoers," "clear skies," "compassionate conservatism," "culture of life," "faith-based," "flip-flopper," "free speech zone," "homosexual agenda," "judicial activist," "liberal bias," "liberal media," "ownership society," "partial-birth abortion," "pro-life," "racial quotas," "regime change," "shock and awe," "Social Security crisis," "tort reform," "war of choice," "welfare queen," and, of course, Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth."

"Civil liberties," a term that embraces such basic American prerogatives as privacy, consumer rights, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and, yes, freedom of religion, are seen today as the purchased privileges of a "liberal elite." This distortion is the linguistic legacy of the same American right wing that now cubbyholes its foes as the "secular Left," and seems happy to gather at the river under the big (revival) tent of the religious Right.

"Secular Left." Yeah, maybe it's just a couple of words. But it's coming from the people who today, in American politics, get to make up all the words, and then make everybody else repeat them endlessly, like "Hallelujah," and "Praise the Lord." And the only opposition is a tongue-tied cluster of Democrat/ liberal/ progressives whose only articulate utterance in the political and semantic struggle of the last decade has been a strangled bleat that sounds a lot like "Uncle!"

Sticks and stones, indeed!

David Benjamin, a novelist and journalist originally from Wisconsin, now lives in Paris. His latest book is The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked.

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