Democrats need to get religion

Contrary to the ardent wishes of Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Co., America’s secular life and secular imagination is often more irrational than the lives of everyday Christians. Why? In the absence of the forbearance, humility, and presence to grace that living theologically fosters, our super-rational longings for a perfection, purity, and wholeness beyond what nature achieves get plowed into politics. Identity politics might strike its critics as inherently fragmentary and divisive, but it channels exactly the opposite sort of vision, to a fault. Many secular liberals believe the most important thing about being human is demanding a radical kind of mastery over all differences, to know the due of each and withhold it from none. This vision of perfect justice that animates identity politics asserts and demands a totality of influence over public and private life that would make many moralists blush — or tremble.

That’s why it’s so important that Democrats trying to advance through Trump trauma open themselves to consider how religion offers more than a fat moldering Bible to bludgeon or brandish at people you hate.

Religion could help Democrats struggling with identity politics. It could help relieve the impossible burden of perfect justice (without licensing injustice), and lift the impossible burden of determining for ourselves who we and everyone else “really” is (without eradicating our identities). The truth obscured by the identitarian vision of politics, and revealed by living theologically at its best, is that the most important thing about being human is that we’re all human, and that how we are in light of that reality is more important than who we are.