When Religion Becomes Obsolete, Politics Tries to Save Us  – Public Discourse

• Christianity, Politics, Religion

When Religion Becomes Obsolete, Politics Tries to Save Us 

By Russell L. Lackey and Mark Mattes, March 23, 2026

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. 

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. 

Source: When Religion Becomes Obsolete, Politics Tries to Save Us  – Public Discourse