John Inazu (Washington University; Google Scholar), The Bad News About Politics Without Religion:
In early 2016, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat tweeted, “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” Later that year, with Donald Trump having emerged as the Republican presidential candidate, Douthat followed up with a column titled “In Defense of the Religious Right.” In that column, he offered what he described as a “limited” defense of “the beleaguered, battered, all-but-broken religious right.”
Douthat’s basic claim was that a political right without religion would produce a “politics that cares less about marriage and abortion, just as some liberals would wish, but one that’s ultimately far more divisive.” He implored the rebuilding of some sort of religious conservatism because “without the pull of transcendence, the future of the right promises to be tribal, cruel, and very dark indeed.”
Nine years later, and on the verge of another presidential election season, it’s worth asking whether Douthat was correct in his prediction that the political right without religion would be worse than the religious right.
Earlier this month, Daniel K. Williams wrote an Atlantic piece titled “What Really Happens When Americans Stop Going to Church.” … Williams suggested that “people hold onto their politics when they stop attending church” and “bring whatever moral and social values they acquired from their church experience and then apply those values in the political sphere with an evangelical zeal.” … Williams offered a gloomy prediction:
The exodus of millions of Americans from churches will have a profound influence on the nation’s politics, and not in the way that many advocates of secularism might expect. Rather than ending the culture wars, the battle between a rural Christian nationalism without denominational moorings and a northern urban Social Gospel without an explicitly Christian framework will become more intense.
The dire warnings of Douthat and, more recently, Williams, seem quite plausible to me. Whatever one thinks of Christianity, two empirical observations are unassailable: first, some version of Christian moral norms have anchored middle class America (for good and for bad) for most of our country’s history; and second, those norms generally included appeals to “the fruits of the spirit,” identified by the Apostle Paul in the letter to the Galatians as love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. …
[A]s people become less rooted in religion and more anchored in politics, they place upon politics a transcendent weight that it cannot possibly bear. If all that matters is this earthly life, if there is no plausible appeal to transcendent values or purpose, then it should be unsurprising that the practical implication is to win at all costs. We have already seen examples of this posture from both left and right.
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Other faith posts by John Inazu:
- Reflections On Mortality: Does Christianity Matter? (July 9, 2023)
- DEI Needs Religious Diversity Too (Apr. 16, 2023)
- Kicking Off The Legal Vocation Fellowship For Early-Career Christian Attorneys (Feb. 26, 2023)
- What The Left And The Right Get Wrong About The 'He Gets Us' Super Bowl Jesus Ads (Feb. 19, 2023)
- How Can Christian Faculty Be Interfaith Leaders? (Dec. 18, 2022)
- The Respect For Marriage Act, Christianity, And Pluralism (Dec. 4, 2022)
- Tim Keller On Forgiveness (Nov. 20, 2022)
- The Incomprehensible Witness Of Forgiveness (Nov. 13, 2022)
- Pandemic Forgiveness (Nov. 6, 2022)
- The Life We're Looking For (Sept. 25, 2022)
- On The 21-Year Anniversary Of 9/11, What Unites Us? (Sept. 11, 2022)
- Interfaith Doesn't Mean Compromise (Aug. 28, 2022)
