When Religion Becomes Obsolete, Politics Tries to Save Us
In downtown Des Moines stands a historic Masonic Temple, a beautiful building from another era. Its stonework still commands attention. Its architecture still suggests weight, seriousness, and a world in which its inhabitants once sought meaning. Yet today it sits mostly empty. No young people drive past it and wonder whether they should go inside to look for purpose in life.
Sometimes we wonder whether that is how many Americans now experience the Church: not necessarily as false, but as an impressive structure that no longer feels socially required. And yet the need that once drew people inside has not disappeared. Instead, it has been redirected into politics.
American politics today is marked by an unmistakable and unstable moral intensity. Public disagreements no longer feel like contests over prudential judgment or policy design. Increasingly, they resemble struggles over identity, virtue, and ultimate meaning. Elections become existential dramas. Political movements promise not merely reform, but redemption.
Why has politics come to feel so absolute?
A recently released book by sociologist Christian Smith offers a clarifying account. In Why Religion Went Obsolete, Smith argues that religion in America has not vanished; it has become culturally optional. Churches remain, worship continues, and spiritual interest persists. Yet religion no longer functions as the assumed framework through which ordinary life is interpreted. It is no longer socially necessary, but one possible avenue for meaning, fulfillment, and moral orientation among many others in a crowded marketplace of identities and commitments.
Smith’s account is not one of sudden atheism. Religion did not lose because it was disproven or forcibly suppressed. Instead, modern conditions such as mobility, pluralism, technological change, and therapeutic culture have rendered alternative sources of meaning increasingly plausible. What once felt indispensable now appears elective.
But human longing does not become elective so easily.
The consequences extend far beyond church attendance. The desires religion once ordered—moral clarity, belonging, hope, transcendence—have not disappeared. When religion loses its cultural centrality, these longings do not evaporate. They migrate. In contemporary America, when the church becomes obsolete, politics becomes absolute.
Politics as a Substitute Faith
Politics is uniquely positioned to absorb religious expectation. It offers comprehensive narratives of good and evil, communal rituals of participation, and promises of national restoration or social deliverance. In a culture where religion becomes optional, politics begins to carry a moral and emotional weight it cannot sustain.
This helps explain why political disagreement now feels existential. Debates are no longer primarily about institutional design, competing interests, or limited tradeoffs; they become struggles over destiny. Compromise starts to feel like betrayal. Opponents are cast not as fellow citizens, but as enemies whose views appear morally insurmountable.
In other words, politics is asked to do what religion once did: tell us who we are and what ultimately matters.
One can see this even in unlikely places. Consider the Super Bowl halftime shows, both official and unofficial. What should be entertainment increasingly functions as a kind of cultural liturgy that presents competing ideologies, moral signaling, outrage, celebration, and belonging. These are not simply disputes of taste. They are rituals of identity, moments in which Americans rehearse salvation and damnation. The result is a kind of political messianism across the ideological spectrum. On the right, nationalist movements promise salvation through cultural restoration. On the left, liberationist movements promise redemption through social transformation. These projects differ sharply in substance, but they share a common assumption: that politics can bear the weight of our deepest longings for justice and mercy.
Yet politics cannot do this. Politics is a penultimate reality; necessary and meaningful, but never ultimate. It can pursue justice, restrain evil, and order common life. But it cannot reconcile sinners, heal the deepest fractures of the human heart, or bear the weight of final hope. When politics is invested with salvific expectation, disappointment hardens into resentment, and resentment into anger.
The Public Square and the Question of Ultimacy
Smith’s analysis also illuminates why politics was invited into this role. Over time, American religion increasingly justified itself in terms of usefulness—its ability to stabilize communities, provide moral guidance, and offer psychological support. Once framed instrumentally, religion entered a competitive marketplace where therapy, activism, lifestyle communities, and political movements offered similar benefits with fewer demands.
But the deeper issue is theological before it is sociological. Human societies cannot function without some appeal to ultimacy, whether God, the nation, the people, or the self. In The Naked Public Square, Richard John Neuhaus famously argued that the public square is never truly naked; every political order requires some final sanction, some account of why duty matters and why sacrifice is justified.
Modern secular societies often imagine they have escaped theology. They have merely displaced it.
Augustine understood this long ago: the heart is restless, and when it does not rest in God, it will rest in something else. The religious impulse does not disappear; it reemerges in political myth, ideological ritual, and civil religion. And this displacement comes at a cost.
Estrangement Beyond Politics
One of the clearest signs that politics has taken on a weight it cannot bear is the way it now appears to divide not only nations, but families. In previous generations, familial rupture most often followed religious lines. Parents cut off children for marrying outside the faith. Children distanced themselves from parents over doctrine or devotion. The schisms were theological. Today, by contrast, the fractures often appear political. Yet appearances can mislead.
Politics is rarely the true cause of these estrangements. More often it serves as the vocabulary through which deeper conflicts are expressed: conflicts over meaning, authority, identity, and moral trust. When religion no longer provides a shared horizon against which to work out differences, political identity rushes in to serve that purpose. Disputes that might once have been endured now feel intolerable. Difference is no longer merely frustrating; it becomes existential.
I (Russell) was reminded of this recently while leading a service known as the Longest Night of the Year—sometimes called Blue Christmas. It is held for those who find the holidays heavy rather than bright. The lights are dimmed. The music is sparse. People arrive carrying grief that has learned how to stay quiet in public.
I have led these services for many years, and there is usually a familiar rhythm: after a litany of remembrance, people are invited forward for individual prayer. Typically, perhaps a third of those present come forward. The requests are familiar: for healing, peace, and the strength to endure another year without someone they love.
This year, that rhythm broke. Nearly everyone came forward. And again and again, parents spoke of estranged adult children. The words were simple and nearly identical: I do not even speak to my children anymore.
What struck me was not anger. These parents did not pray for vindication. They did not rehearse arguments or demand moral victory. They prayed instead for patience, for reconciliation, for the courage to reach out again. Politics was not named as a cause of the wound, but the language through which the rupture had been justified.
The tragedy here is not political disagreement as such. Families have always disagreed. The tragedy is that the household has become another casualty of political ultimacy. When there is no longer a shared moral or spiritual grammar capable of holding difference, even blood ties strain and break. A society cannot remain whole when its homes are no longer places of refuge, for when reconciliation disappears from family life, it soon disappears from public life as well.
The Limits of Politics
The danger here is not political engagement itself. Democratic life depends on participation, debate, and moral conviction. The danger arises when politics is asked to save us. At that point, politics becomes a false gospel. The Christian tradition, at its best, resists this temptation. It insists on a distinction between ultimate and penultimate things. Faith cannot be reduced to a moral program or political strategy. The Gospel is not a blueprint for Utopia, but a promise of mercy. Politics matters deeply. But it is not ultimate.
In City of God, St. Augustine reminded the Church that even the best earthly city remains incomplete, marked by sin and longing. Christians are called to seek justice, but never to confuse any political project with the Kingdom of God.
Religion may indeed become optional in modern America. But the longings it once shaped remain. The question is whether Americans will continue leaning on politics to save them, will recover a renewed sense of proportion, remembering that politics is necessary, important, and limited. A healthier political culture may begin not with greater ideological fervor, but with deeper humility about what can and cannot redeem. For when politics becomes our highest love, it will also become our cruelest disappointment, leaving our homes colder, our holidays lonelier, and our common life harder to sustain.
And only when our hopes are rightly ordered can our shared life endure without demanding from Caesar what belongs only to God.