On politics and religion

It has been some time since I last posted an entry of interest. Hopefully this atom bomb of a post-combining two taboo topics in one- will not come as too much of a shock.

Why have I chosen to touch on this right now? Well, it is an election year, and a particularly volatile one at that. For weeks I have heard so much spoken about politics and religion side-by-side along with varying viewpoints on this relationship- some flawed, some spot-on, others distorted. I address this mostly to my fellow Catholic brethren in the hopes of enlightening them about this essential relationship.

The question of politics, religion, and their relationship to each other has been the defining question of my academic career as a political science student thus far. How do I reconcile my firm religious convictions with the necessity of engaging others who hold conflicting beliefs in varying systems and approaches? This is a FUNDAMENTAL question which we should all ask. Many Catholics, sensing the futility of political pursuits, simply shrug it off in frustration- my original temptation. This comes, perhaps, from a misunderstanding of what exactly the "political" is.

Hannah Arendt, one of my favorite philosophers, said that while philosophy is the study of Man, political theory is the study of Men, which is why the latter interested her much more. We live in the world not in isolation, but amongst others. All the same, we have moral decisions and choices to make each and every day for which we ourselves are held to account. How do we as individuals situate these obligations? Since the dawn of time, and I believe until the end of time, people will situate their existence in the framework of faith, faith in God, who is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, in a word, the summation of all things. To flesh it out just a bit, we could say that while philosophy and political theory exist relatively independently of one another, strictly speaking, religion is a unification (an essential unification) of the two.

The great tragedy of modernity, particularly of secularism, is the fatally flawed view that we can look at humanity through a lens that estranges, and ultimately discards, religion as a fundamental aspect of our existence. The same goes for the belief that religion must be divorced from our politics.

Every major political philosopher from Plato to Arendt has had to grapple, in some way or another, with the question of religion vis-á-vis the political. For Plato, the purpose of the political was to give mankind access, in some way, to the Good, which Christians later called "God". Augustine saw the world as divided and in tension between two "cities"- the city of God and the city of Man, out of which the former would ultimately triumph. Machiavelli and Rousseau proposed the idea of a "civil religion", the earliest ideas of state religion as legitimizing the governing order. Burke, the father of modern political conservatism, saw religion and the state as coinciding, with the state defending the church and the church sanctifying the state. Marx saw religion as "ideology" born of the fetters of man that sought to anesthetize man to the conditions of his existence. And so on.

So why must we not fear to let our religion guide us in the realm of the political? The word "politics" is derived from the Greek word polis meaning "city". The political is that which deals with the affairs of the city, of the people. How do people influence one another? How do they interact and make decisions that buttress their social order and manage their limited resources? That is the realm of politics. As you can see, everything that we do is to some extent political, and what we hold in faith through our religion is the source (hopefully) of our political impetus. In an age where religion is increasingly pushed to the side, we must engage our national polis all the more and assert the force of moral authority where it is severely lacking. We must not fear allowing God to guide us in our politics, that is, in our dealings with our fellow men. In a democratic society, the need for religion as a guide for our political decisions becomes all the more essential. Where once politics was reserved for the elite and far-off rulers, now the commonplace is political. As such we can not help but make our religion an integral part of our political decision-making, in large part because of the need for moral responsibility as individuals and as a society.

St. Augustine warned Christians to avoid over-involvement in public affairs as detrimental to the spiritual life. All the same, to sustain our democratic society as a righteous and morally-guided one, we must not fear to assert our faith in Christ and His Church and cherish the guidance that faith gives to our lives and to our dealings with others.