During this year’s odd primary cycle I have been moved many
times to refer to the “movement” that has accreted around Vermont senator
Bernie Sanders as something of a “cult.”
When I have made this criticism, it has usually stemmed from the vitriol
of Sen. Sanders’ supporters whenever any criticism is launched at him. This has been especially true when he has
engaged in the naked sort of politicking that he and his supporters have
criticized rival Hillary Clinton for.
Whenever the foibles of the leader are pointed out, supporters can be
counted on to reply that it’s different for Bernie, that when he does the
things that other politicians do, he’s not really doing the things that other
politicians do. Such rationalization
seems like the adoration cult followers give to their leaders, who are so
self-evidently right that, when we see them doing wrong, the fault is not in
them but ourselves.
Yet the more I thought about it, the less surprised I was,
because I am increasingly convinced that politics, at least in the United
States, is simply religion by other means.
I think it may be argued that every political movement in the United
States and Western Europe is a Christian heresy of sorts, a point I am not
prepared to press here. But I am
prepared to offer a provisional argument on the issue of politics as religion, and to offer some
preliminary thoughts of the place of groups like those supporting Sanders in
it.
It is a truism on the left that religion and politics should
forever be separate, just as it is a truism on the right that they should
not. On the left (and it is here that I
place myself) the argument is that religion should have no part in the
governance of a pluralistic nation and that secularism, government neutrality
on issues of religion, should be the rule.
The right argues that we have become too
secular, that we have fallen away from our religious underpinnings and that
only by returning to them can we, to steal a phrase, make America great again.
I think both of these miss the point.
I’d like to suggest that, for many people, politics is religion. This is not to argue that it has supplanted,
for instance, the Christianity that so many Americans profess. Rather, one runs alongside the other. On the left, the tracks are skewed apart; on
the right, they move towards an intersection.
Most Americans are members, to varying degrees of both
sects. Such a situation is not
unprecedented—it was faced by Rome as it expanded throughout the Mediterranean
world and incorporated diverse peoples. Conquered people saw their pantheons
assimilated to the Roman pantheon, becoming part of the larger Roman civil
religion. At the top was the imperial
cult, centered on the living god in Rome and his divine predecessors. As long as one did not commit the sin of
atheism, the denial of any god, one
could get along fairly well, and in day-to-day life follow the practices of
their forebears (this was a positive thing; abandoning the religion of one’s
forefathers was an act of impiety).*
Compare this to the civil religion of the United
States. Its gods are the Founding
Fathers, agents of a supreme but ultimately unknowable and generic God, who
bestows blessings on this country as long as we acknowledge divine providence
in some non-specific fashion. Its
rituals are the Pledge of Allegiance, the national anthem at sporting events,
and the ritual invocation of God at the end of every political speech. America’s God is so non-specific that the
gods of immigrants can be assimilated to it, much as the Roman pantheon absorbed
the pantheons of conquered people.
Politics is the church of the American civil religion, and
politicians are the clergy of it. I
don’t simply mean this metaphorically. Since
the eighteenth century we have increasingly used government to answer the sorts
of questions traditionally answered by religion. Not questions about the origin of the world
or our place in the cosmos, but the questions of how our society should
function and how we ought to relate to one another. These are, in their way, questions of
ultimate meaning, as they define the world we will live in. Political language is the language we use to
pose and answer these questions.
Founding documents, especially the Constitution, and the writings of the
founding generation are its sacred texts, the texts we resort to and quote (or misquote) to make a particular point.
Our own political church has two main denominations,
Democratic and Republican. Like
different Christian denominations there is a core dogma: professed belief in
republicanism, some adherence to the notion of American exceptionalism,
reverence for the Founding Fathers.
There are also differences, mostly centering around the interpretation
of the sacred texts and the amount of lay participation that should be
permissible. Small wonder, then, that
political fights can be so vitriolic; we are dealing with fundamental
matters. Each denomination views itself
as the guardian of an unchanging orthodoxy that continues on in the tradition
of the Republic’s founders, and denounces the other as heterodox.
Yet each major denomination is large enough that the other’s
denunciations are largely irrelevant, just as a Catholic accusation of
heterodoxy against, say, the Baptists would be.
Each can continue to compete for the votes of the laity, with elections
deciding the result. However, there are
minority factions within each party for whom the charge of heresy bears some
weight and the major denominations are left with the quandary of what to do
with them. In the tried and true fashion
of Christianity, the parties generally try to co-opt their heretics, taking the
best ideas and pushing those who will not be reconciled farther and farther to
the margins.
This is where the libertarian wing of the Republican party
was four years ago, before it morphed into the Tea Party movement and threatens
to foment another schism in American politics through the nomination of Donald
Trump. It is also where the Bernie
Sanders movement, if it can yet be called that, is now. Guardians of Republican orthodoxy fought the
Tea Party until they needed it. Something
similar might happen to the Democrats.
It’s not an accident, I think, that these two movements are
so readily paired. Both are
characterized by their receptivity to a message of economic grievance, to a sense
that the elites have sold them out and left them behind. We might in this see the cry of late medieval
parishioners who felt their soteriological needs were not met by absentee or
illiterate clergy. Grievance is surely
the seedbed of revolutions.
Trump’s challenge to the Republican orthodoxy is the challenge
that truly threatens a schism. It is
analogous to the Arian controversy that threatened to destroy attempts at
Christian unity in the fourth century.
Paul Ryan, representing the orthodox party, has met with Trump in an
attempt to restore unity. How that ends
we’ll have to wait to see.
Sanders’ challenge is different. Drawing from a great many independents, it
seems unlikely that he will create a schism among Democrats. Going back to questions about cults earlier,
I think that Sanders and his supporters are political Gnostics. Gnosticism is a term used to describe a
variety of ancient religious systems that emphasized a strict duality consisting
of the material world and the spiritual world.
Christian Gnostics argued that an evil god, referred to as the Demiurge,
created the world and the spiritual Jesus came to redeem it. By embracing the secret knowledge of Jesus,
adherents could escape the clutches of the Demiurge and be redeemed.
It’s hard not to see this in parts of the Sanders movement. Those of us who find ourselves at odds with
it are told that we must not clearly understand Bernie, for to understand is to
believe. And belief, we are told, will
free us all as more and more people learn the truth. Nebulous “elites” and “one percenters” are
the forces of the Demiurge working in concert to keep our divine sparks
shackled to the world of toil. The DNC represents
the party orthodoxy, interested in maintaining its monopoly on “truth” to keep
itself in power.
One can see vestiges of this in Trump supporters as well,
which should be no surprise since the Tea Party emerged from another Gnostic
sect, this one comprising Republican libertarians. Like some latter-day Augustine, I can speak
personally of this. My time as a
libertarian showed me many who again saw themselves as possessed of a special
knowledge that would liberate the world, fighting the Demiurge (the Federal
Reserve, the United Nations…take your pick) that sought to drag us all back in
the muck. If only, we were convinced,
people would take the time to listen and
think, they would come around. It by no means characterized all
libertarians, any more than it characterizes all Sanders supporters, but it was
a prevalent strain in my interactions.
None of which should, by this point, be surprising. If we are to take seriously the notions of
politics as religion by other means, we should expect nothing less. The battle is not over votes or over power,
the players seem assured, but over the soul of America itself.
*Christianity in the
Roman world ran into trouble because it refused to play along, committing all
three cardinal sins: it refused to participate in the imperial cult, it denied
the gods of others and, at least in early generations, Christians abandoned the
faith of their forefathers as they converted.
