Op Ed from Court Lewis: Is Politics the New Religion?

Hey Mike,

Thanks for the post. I’m still working through these ideas, so I hope the following is a fair representation of the ideas that I’m processing in my head.

I think you touched on what I fear most: that for many, religious and political beliefs aren’t open to rational debate. My post, though not expressly stated, was an indictment of both religious and political individuals’ willingness to be close-minded and exclusivist in their engagement with others. An implication of my argument, and the one I’m most interested in, is that all religions (including politics) should occupy their own spheres and not engage with each other. I don’t think such an outcome is positive, but I think it would be a more honest approach. Let me explain.

First, let me make a distinction between politics-as-religion and politics-as-practice. Politics-as-religion is meant to describe the act of being politically active in the promotion of one’s agenda and the destruction of opposing agendas. This type of politics is exemplified by anyone who close-mindedly accepts and promotes a political position that is not well-informed, critically analyzed, and is not open to amendment. This is the type of politics that populates mass-media and seems to be the basis of the majority of political debates. Politics-as-practice is simply the practice of participating in the political process. I want to focus on politics-as-religion.

To return to my explanation, take for example, the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam): each one of these has a fundamental belief (at least to some degree) that one should be set apart from worldly things. This exclusivism doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t engage with non-believers, but it does have certain implications for the relationships one has with non-believers (one’s interpretation of holy texts will inform the specific implications that are drawn). Just look at the Cult of Baal, which is mentioned in all of the holy texts of the Abrahamic religions. Believers could live with them in a society, but they were not to worship their gods or become involved in their fertility practices. It’s my contention that politics, for many, has become a modern day cult of Baal, and if religious people are truly believers (assuming they’ve read and understood their holy texts), then they should avoid politics-as-religion. One can not worship Clinton or Regan and, at the same time, worship the God of Abraham. So, if one is “truly” religious, then I want to suggest (and I could be completely wrong) that one shouldn’t participate in politics-as-religion.

I could go on, but I’m going to stop here.

I agree with you fully!

There’s two sentences that jump out at me from this exchange, and one from the initial post:

“In other words, politics is now the edifice in which people devote their lives to service; it is the new religion.”

An ‘edifice’ in which people “devote their lives to service” struck me as your most vivid formulation of what a religion is. Your problem, as if I can try to rephrase it, is that if a person with traditional religious convictions independent of the “new” politics-as-religion is concerned about society and wants to ensure a just society, then they could not act on those concerns and desires without betraying their traditional religious convictions.

But I don’t accept the idea that participating in the rituals of politics (and there are many) is equivalent to abandoning a religious tradition. Politics doesn’t go that deep. It takes place in a public sphere that everyone engages in as citizens, and the respective cosmological and religious beliefs of those citizens are private or parochial in a very meaningful sense. When people try to thrust their particular religion into political discourse, like various Abrahamic fundamentalists (or some other orthodoxy), they force a category of belief on other people that shouldn’t be imposed through the public sphere in a society with religious diversity.

And trying to derive a fundamental sense of identity and purpose from politics, I submit, is equally inappropriate and ultimately unworkable. Politics doesn’t provide a sense of identity or purpose; it can’t be used as an edifice in which to devote one’s life to service. People bring their own moral values to politics, and participate in the rituals of the political process in order to further those pre-political values. A Catholic person can be politically active in order to make abortion illegal, and a Mormon person can be politically active to make polygamy legal. They aren’t betraying their religious convictions by voting for candidates who promise to carry out that agenda; they’re just doing what they think is right.

A few more thoughts that occurred to me as I read through the comments here…

“I’d say that perhaps the difference between religions (at least in the general sense) and politics (assuming that they are different) is that political things and philosophical things are open to rational discussion, examination and change.”

I don’t agree with this distinction. There’s a clear value-judgment here putting religions below political philosophies, where people who adhere to fixed ideas are just hidebound mouthpieces. From this and your other comments, it seems like someone with no fixed beliefs is better, perhaps more epistemically responsible, than someone who refuses to listen to reason. But the idea that religious beliefs are not “open to rational discussion, examination and change” flies in the face of the long history of theological debates, movements, paradigms, and schools of thought that have developed since the beginnings of symbolic culture. Any kind of intellectual persuasion is based on appeals to beliefs already held by the nonbeliever, to walk them from the beliefs they have to the belief you’re trying to persuade them of. I’ve seen people gradually come to believe that Christ did in fact miraculously rise from the dead, and gradually come to believe that souls do not really exist. They’re deep-seated beliefs, but there’s not a bright line between political positions that are subject to reason and religious convictions that are absolute. “Open to rational discussion” seems like a problematic place-holder concept that doesn’t easily map onto politics and religion.

“This type of politics is exemplified by anyone who close-mindedly accepts and promotes a political position that is not well-informed, critically analyzed, and is not open to amendment.”

The same problem comes up here. We all have a mix of beliefs that fall on a gradient of susceptibility to different levels of persuasion, but as long as we can identify common beliefs with the other party we can build from those broader appeals to more specific political and religious beliefs. Our beliefs about the details of a religious narrative or our beliefs about the particulars of a policy issue can both be changed, and set in stone and pried back up again, by new interpretations and extrapolations of more basic beliefs, and it goes all the way down.

One last general thought that would start a different thread, I noticed a lot of temporal language in your first post: “it is no longer legitimate to discuss the separation of church and state” — “Politics has usurped the role of religion” — “politics is now the edifice” — “it is the new religion” — and you say this is based on your observations, and that you’ve “become increasingly disturbed” by this trend. I want to ask what the historical forces generating this trend are. Statistically, it seems like religious attendance and flight from the corrupt public sphere or commercial sphere has become much greater. Religious fundamentalism is on the rise here and around the globe. My generation attends church more and describes itself as conservative and traditional moreso than my parents’ generation (I am 23). So just as an empirical, sociological matter, I wouldn’t say that in recent memory politics has “usurped” religion in the sense of occupying the cultural role of religion. In many ways, politics has usurped the institutional role of religion, such as in the distribution of property, but that can hardly be called a recent trend.

I understand how some people may make a kind of false idol out of politics, the way people would make a false idol out of shopping. But I wouldn’t say that politics or shopping has usurped the role of religion in the majority of people’s lives, or that it is a genuine alternative to the customs of religion (“genuine” in the sense of entitled to the deference that religious beliefs and customs receive in a pluralistic society, like an actual new religious community would be). But again, you can participate in politics without making a false idol of it, just as you can go shopping once in a while as a means to a private end without necessarily becoming a Ba’al-worshipping consumer pod person.