On pursuing horrendous monsters, most of them imaginary............

     Aside from noting the formal similarities between Christianity and democracy, Mencken also used Christianity to explain the appeal of popular sovereignty.  Democracy relied upon the premise that human beings were created in the image of God.  This contention placed democracy on the same footing as the Genesis accounts of human origins and with the same leverage that the "sacred faculty" used to argue that without a divine aspect to human nature men and women would be no better than brutes.  Democracy, then, was a form of theology, and the antidemocratic was 'not merely mistaken; he [was] also wicked."  Modern defenders of democracy were "full of Christian juices," fundamentalists "by instinct."  The specific human instincts that fueled democracy were fear and envy.  Human beings entered life with a collective sense of fear - "Make a loud noise behind an infant just born, and it will shake like a Sunday-school superintendent taken in adultery."  Properly executed, an education would rid many humans of such native or "phylogenic" fears.  The trouble was that all men were not equal.  Intelligence, for Mencken, was largely responsible for sorting the superior out from the inferior.  This inequality made democracy inherently susceptible to demagoguery.  Such Christian politicians as Wilson and Bryan obtained office by alarming the mob against their superiors.  Instead of Christian statesmen, they became merely "witch-hunters,"  politicians who promoted "melodramatic pursuits of horrendous monsters, most of them imaginary."  This concoction of fear and envy led Mencken inevitably back to his main point that democracy thrived on the inferior man's jealousy of his superiors, which was remarkably similar to his view of Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.  "In precisely the same way democratic man hates the fellow who is having a better time of it in this world," he wrote, "Such, indeed, is the origin of democracy," and "such is the origin of its twin, Puritanism."

-D. G. Ward,  Damning Words:  the life and religious times of H. L. Mencken

Some context:  this paragraph was taken from a chapter largely dealing with Mencken and Prohibition, a slice of Americana to which he was greatly opposed.