Religion By Other Means: Politics and Ultimate Meaning

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.