When Politics Becomes Religion: The Idolatry of Nation and Progress

Modern politics has become a kind of worship. The flags, slogans, and speeches all carry the tone of liturgy. Each side has its own saints and martyrs, its own rituals and feast days. And like every false religion, it offers salvation through human power. We were never meant to live this way. When a society forgets truth and virtue, ideology rushes in to take their place.

The Enlightenment’s False Promise

The Enlightenment promised that reason alone could sustain moral order. Revelation was unnecessary; the light of human intellect would suffice. For a time, it seemed to work. The American Founders, brilliant and conflicted men, forged a system that borrowed the moral vocabulary of Christianity while trusting Enlightenment optimism about human nature.

But reason detached from its source can describe how the world works, not why it should. It can organize and legislate, but it cannot tell us what is good. The result was a society efficient at producing comfort yet hollow at its core: brilliant in means, impoverished in ends. In this vacuum, politics took on theological weight.

The Left: Progress as Salvation

On the modern left, the myth of inevitable progress replaces the Christian story of redemption. History becomes a kind of moral escalator carrying humanity toward justice and equality. “The right side of history” stands in for heaven itself.

But without a transcendent good, progress has no direction. Change is celebrated simply because it is change. Diversity, equality, and inclusion, worthy aims in themselves, become incoherent when detached from truth. We exalt freedom while suppressing dissent, praise inclusion while silencing disagreement. Progress, unmoored from truth, devours itself.

The Right: Heritage as Salvation

The right, meanwhile, has its own piety. The Founding Fathers are canonized; the Constitution becomes sacred text. This civil religion preaches liberty as the highest good, forgetting that liberty without virtue collapses into license.

Ironically, it was the Enlightenment’s rationalism, so distrusted by conservatives today, that many on the right still defend as holy writ. They venerate the system even as its moral foundations erode beneath them. No parchment, however wise, can preserve virtue if a people no longer love what is true.

Worship Without God

Both left and right are grasping at the same spiritual hunger. The slogans differ, but the structure is identical: each side promises redemption through power. Each imagines that if only our side wins, the world will be saved. In reality, both have replaced God with an idol, whether of progress or of heritage.

When faith retreats, politics becomes theology by other means. The result is endless crusades without mercy. The state cannot forgive sins; it can only punish them.

The Path Back: Ordered Liberty

True freedom is not the power to do whatever one pleases but the capacity to live according to what is good. Political order exists to protect and encourage that pursuit. Its purpose is not salvation but stewardship.

A society grounded in truth and virtue can welcome diversity because it knows what unites it. When unity in God is lost, diversity becomes mere noise. It is a clash of competing desires. As Saint Paul wrote, “God is not a God of confusion but of peace” (1 Cor 14:33). Only when we recover a shared telos can freedom serve rather than destroy us.

The Only True Kingdom

Every civilization must worship something. If it refuses to worship God, it will worship itself. The modern world has chosen politics as its altar, and the sacrifice is always the same: peace, reason, and the human soul.

Christ alone can free us from this idolatry. His kingdom is not of this world, yet it is the only one that can order this world rightly. Law must again serve morality, morality serve truth, and truth serve God; otherwise, we will keep building towers of Babel, impressive in height but hollow at the foundation.