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FUSION

No Escape from Politics

January 24, 2025

By Miles Smith IV


In an important essay at Fusion last week, John G. Grove addresses religious politics or perhaps more accurately, the potential politicization of religion in the United States. Evangelical author Nancy Pearcey, Grove notes, “tweeted out an appeal for pastors to be more political. Those who do not preach politics, she argued, offer ‘a privatized Christianity.’” At a major conservative intellectual conference, Gove heard “a panelist make the flip side of the same argument: that if the state is not actively enforcing certain values, those values are being ‘relegated to the private sphere.’” The debate leads Grove to ask whether there is any space left “for something to be public, and yet not political.”

In their attempt to fight the left, Grove laments, conservatives have capitulated to the tendency of the left to politicize every aspect of human society. The notion “that anyone who does not engage in politics is retreating into ‘private life,’ or that, in order to have public influence, ideas and values must attain political clout, would be some of the most pernicious beliefs a conservative could propagate if he aims at cultivating a stable and healthy social order.”

I found myself cheering Grove’s essay, and I agree with its spirit. Every aspect of American political life has become, it would seem, political. And yet I found myself wondering whether—in a democratic society—there is something inevitable about human existence becoming more “political” than it might be in a monarchy or in authoritarian societies. To be sure, I agree with Grove that ideas and values do not need the affirmation of the state to have clout. But I am not sure that makes those ideas and values any less political. To the contrary, defending proper relationships between religion and politics, civil life and the state requires political thought, expression, and activity.  

There’s never been a time in the what became the United States when the sphere of religion and politics could be neatly separated. From the outset of Anglo-American society’s formation in the seventeenth century, English-speaking Protestants, particularly those in New England, sought to create and enforce broad popular participation in government and society. John Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay colony could simultaneously be surprisingly democratic and egalitarian (by the 17th Century standards) while also limiting basic civil liberties. “The care of the public,” Winthrop exclaimed, “must oversway all private interests, by which, not only conscience, but mere civil policy, does bind us.” New England could be equal and relatively democratic, but it couldn’t be free for individuals or apolitical.

Late 17th Century Virginians sought an alternative to Puritan New England; their society would be free, democratic, and not require the sort of mass religious-political participation that fueled New England’s theocracy. Yet it could not, and would not, be egalitarian. It would be the very antithesis of an egalitarian society, planted firmly on the foundation of human bondage and racial caste. Edmund Morgan famously explored this paradox in his Pulitzer-winning book American Slavery, American Freedom. The same people who “developed the dedication to human liberty and dignity exhibited by the leaders of the American Revolution…at the same time have developed and maintained a system of labor that denied human liberty and dignity every hour of the day.”

What is haunting is the extent to which white Americans before and after the American Revolution saw Virginia’s ostensibly non-ideological and apolitical order as an enduring idea. In his seminal study of the Confederacy, George Rable noted that “antiparty (and, more broadly speaking, anti-political) ideology” was what bound together slaveholders.” Yet Southern slaveholders’ anti-political ideology was, of course, entirely political. By claiming to set certain areas of life free of the state, it imposed a particular vision of what the state was for. In doing so, it licensed much larger claims of private and familiar authority than were acceptable in New England or the Northern frontiers. The clash between these visions was unavoidably political and led eventually to civil war.

No figure looms larger in the democratization of American society than Andrew Jackson, and no figure exemplifies the paradox of societal politicization to the same degree. Jackson, for example, disliked political religion, a fact noted by Evangelical Protestants in his own era as well as Jon Meacham in his Pulitzer-winning American Lion. Jackson, perhaps even more than Jefferson, really was committed to the separation of church and state. For Jackson, church and state were separate to the point that American politicos could, and perhaps should, ignore churchmen’s arguments about the socio-moral order entirely.

Yet the results of Jackson’s opposition to the politicization of religion was the opposite of what he expected or hoped. Separated from the state more than it ever had been in Europe or colonial America, Evangelical Protestantism was democratized and subsequently politicized. The Benevolent Empire of religious charities and the great moral and social reform movements had their provenance in the Jacksonian Era. Even removed from the politics of the federal state, American religion was unavoidably political.

The democratic genie cannot be put back in to the bottle, but Grove’s admonition to prudence is important. Tocqueville likewise warned that “in the present democratic age,” friends of liberty and “human grandeur must remain constantly vigilant and ready to prevent the social power from lightly sacrificing the particular rights of a few individuals to the general execution of its designs.” In Tocqueville’s era, and in our own, “there is no citizen so obscure that it is not very dangerous to allow him to be oppressed, and there are no individual rights so unimportant that they can be sacrificed to arbitrariness with impunity.” We should guard against making everything too political—the defense of our constitutional order demands it.

 

Miles Smith IV is an assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College.

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