Spirit and Story Archive

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The Spirituality of Politics

By Michael Gottsegen

We live in an era of compartmentalization. Life’s many spheres are separated from one another: home from work, economics from politics, public from private. It is not only that these spheres are separated, but that they are also understood to be operating according to different rules -- according to rules that are unique to each sphere and without application to any other. Growing up is about learning the rules of each sphere and about learning not to make the mistake of applying rules that belong to one sphere to another.

The separation of life into different spheres is itself not new. Since antiquity, we have carved life up into different sectors. What is new to modernity, however, is the notion that each sphere is largely autonomous, and that there are no master rules that apply across the board. In an earlier era, such an assertion would have been blasphemous. The categories of good and evil, of vice and virtue, were regarded as coextensive with the whole of life.

In the Middle Ages, the Catholic church took the view that every sector of life fell within its orbit of concern. This same expansive definition of the extent of religion’s proper reach is found in the Talmud. The rabbis’ legislative competence encompasses not only the synagogue and the social relations of the household, but extends to the marketplace, the judge’s chambers and the Privy Council. To argue that religion had no business speaking to such issues would have seemed ridiculous. Does God’s concern with the goodness of human action know any borders or limitations? Of course not! Nor then should the moral authority of the church or synagogue. The furor that greeted the publication of Machiavelli’s Prince in 1513 – which asserted that political life should be governed by its own autonomous nature and not by Christian morality -- gives clear evidence of just how entrenched these assumptions were at the time.

What Machiavelli did for the autonomy of politics, Adam Smith – and capitalism more generally -- did for the autonomy of the market. Where once the church had regulated commodity prices, working conditions and the market itself in order to more closely approach the Christian vision of the good society, by the mid-19th century the church had largely given up the field before free market ideology.

Modernity, then, not only brought into being the autonomy of life’s various orders. Additionally, by so doing, it shrank the sacred canopy that religion had once cast over the whole of life. No longer aspiring to shape the social order as a whole in the image of the City of God, religion more and more came to be identified with the hearth and the home, and with the sphere of family life. There alone would old-fashioned virtue have its place. It is generally understood that when the Jews gained entry to society in the 19th century, they were required to give up their public religion and to create instead a religion that centered around the home and hearth, and spoke no more to the concerns of the public square and the marketplace. And while this is true, it is important to understand that this shrinking of the religious domain was imposed upon Christianity as well in its passage to modernity.

As Stephen Carter points out in his most recent book, God’s Name in Vain, while modernity has sought to circumscribe the religious domain, the religions have not been content to accept their reduced position. Nor have the religions been willing to accept without question the notion that the economy and the polity fall outside the domain of its proper concern. Time and again, in fact, the religions have broken free from their narrow confines to launch holy crusades on behalf of economic and political justice. In effect, they were calling into question the autonomy of these spheres and insisting that the forms of injustice being perpetrated within them were issues of the greatest moral and religious importance. The Abolitionist Movement, for example, was a religious movement that unfolded in the political domain and challenged the economic definition of black men and women as property. The Suffrage Movement was also largely religious in its inspiration, as were the movements for Prohibition and Civil Rights. In each case, the autonomy of the political and economic realms was called into question by a religious movement that insisted on the rightful supremacy of the ethical dimension.

During the period of high modernity, these passing moments of religious engagement in the world beyond religion’s “proper” domain of home and hearth have been important not only in themselves but for their consequences upon the quality of our public life. They are also important for calling into question the very compartmentalization of domains – and of the norms appropriate to them -- that is synonymous with modernity.

In many ways, this compartmentalization has been a boon to our collective life. The market, unshackled by external restraints of religion and ethics, has become a powerhouse creating economic abundance and material well-being. At the same time, our unsanctified polity and secular society have been spared the noxious effects of religious intolerance and have enjoyed the benefits that flow from the personal freedoms of thought, association and expression that many religions have typically been unwilling to allow.

In recent decades, however, the downside of compartmentalization has become more manifest. Both religion and political life have been vitiated, in large part, as a consequence of the division of labor that reigns between them. Religion, restricted to the private domain, lacks scope and becomes narcissistic and self-absorbed. Political life, left to its own autonomous logic of power and dominated by special interests, ceases to enlist the democratic energies that the system requires if the common good is to prevail in the long run.

At the same time, the dynamism of the market increasingly undercuts the autonomy of state and religion, and calls into question whether they are masters of their own domains anymore. Machiavelli, even as he argued for the autonomy of politics, worried that the purity of political life might be corrupted by concentrations of private economic power that used politics to pursue their own particular good rather than the common weal. The growing influence of economic special interests in political life illustrates just how well placed this anxiety happens to be. Is it any surprise that the public turns away in disgust from a political process that looks more and more like a spoils system, and in which the public good is almost entirely forgotten?

When religion was first expelled from the public square, many believed that religion would be strengthened in the process and, in effect, purified of the “contamination” brought on by its “unholy” involvement in the mundane business of political life. What few foresaw at the time was that once religion was consigned to the private sphere, it would cease to perform the important social function of conveying to all individuals a sense of their place in the social and cosmic whole. Those who did foresee that religion would no longer perform this function believed that participation in political life would perform it instead.

Today, however, neither religion nor politics performs this function. Religion has become increasingly sectarian and the churches have become increasingly self-absorbed. While the intimate face-to-face community of the congregation remains important for individuals as a site for fellow-feeling and solidarity, religious communities are increasingly likely to draw the circle of their neighborly concern rather narrowly, encompassing only the immediate fellowship group while excluding the wider civic community. Were another social institution performing this function of conveying a vivid conception of the social whole to every member of the community and of imparting to the citizen an activist commitment to community service, then the fact that religion is not doing this would be of far less significance. But when neither the political process nor religious institutions can impart this sense, the community is at risk, for surely this communitarian spirit will not come from a marketplace that imparts an ethos that is essentially antithetical to it. (This point should not be understood as a criticism of capitalism or its ethos; rather, its purpose is to indicate its inherent limitations and the deleterious consequences that will follow where there is no countervailing social ethos or institutions.)

We are living on the cusp of a new era. Multinational corporations and global financial flows have transformed not only the marketplace, but the political sphere as well. In high modernity, the state was the dominant actor nationally and internationally, and politics enjoyed an unrivaled primacy for both good and ill. In the era of GATT and of the WTO, however, the state has been eclipsed while global capitalism and finance set the agenda, subordinating political life to market forces and market discipline.

The market is a harsh taskmaster, but it need not call the tune forevermore. However, the question that forces itself upon us is: from what quarter might redemption spring? From what quarter might a social force arise powerful enough to counter the coercive logic of economic necessity? The political sphere has no resources of its own that it can muster on behalf of the common good. Politics has become a transparent medium reflecting the parallelogram of forces (mostly economic) that are arrayed in society as a whole. Maybe, once upon a time, political life was capable of engendering civic virtue and zeal for the common weal out of its own interstices. But if this was ever true, it is true no more. Civic virtue must arise from elsewhere. Might it come from the religious sphere?

What we do know is that at their best the churches, synagogues and mosques nurture the fellow-feeling, the solicitude for the other and the basic solidarity that are the elementary building blocks upon which a more encompassing civic community and body politic can be constructed. What we do not know is whether these nuclei of community, which are at once attracted and repelled by politics and by one another, have the capacity and the will to do for America today what they have done for America at critical moments in the past -- to go beyond the limits of their particularity to frame, and to act on behalf of, a wider conception of the civic community and of the common good. Can the religious sector generate such energies and commitment today? Only time, and our best efforts, will tell.

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