The Consequences of Elevating Politics to a Religion

We’ve had so many post-mortems on the election that a wave of post-mortems on the post-mortems is now coming in. But if we zoom out—way out—and look at the larger picture, what we most urgently need to examine is not only why we are so polarized and divided, but also why we are so lacking in compassion, empathy, and understanding for those we disagree with.

The seeds of this decline were sown long before the 2024 campaign. Decades ago, as our mainstream culture began rejecting organized religion, with all its flaws, we also began rejecting life’s spiritual dimension along with it. We threw out the baby with the bathwater. And we’ve filled the vacuum with deeply inadequate substitutes—first and foremost among them being politics.

Politics is certainly important. People’s livelihoods, rights, and freedom to live their lives in a way that allows them to thrive are in the balance. Political engagement is critical, especially when it comes to protecting the most vulnerable. But as the saying goes, everything is political but politics isn’t everything. And we can only maximize our effectiveness by not asking something of politics that politics can’t give us.

The consequences of elevating politics to a religion are all around us. A central element to all fundamentalist religions is dogma. The point of dogma is to define and defend the borders of acceptable opinion, and brand anyone who goes outside them as quite simply a heretic. And heretics, even if they’re not burned at the stake, are dehumanized, ostracized and denied any empathy and understanding. This is the poisonous fruit of asking politics to be the central or only source of meaning in our lives—the answer to our fundamental need to connect to something larger than ourselves.

As Jungian psychoanalyst Marion Woodman wrote, “Without an understanding of myth or religion… the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone.” That’s a good description of our current moment—the result of turning politics into our lives’ only organizing force.

It’s terrible both for the body politic and for our actual bodies. Studies have shown that politics can take a serious toll, making us more stressed, costing us sleep, and damaging our mental and physical health. “There is a considerable and growing amount of evidence that politics is having a negative effect on a broad range of health outcomes,” said Kevin B. Smith, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. “This is coming from different scholars using different data, approaches and measures, and it all triangulates on the same inference: Politics isn’t very good for us.”

In fact, one 2019 study found that political events can increase the emotional reactivity of daily stressors, which is the exact opposite of spiritual practices that help us become less reactive to daily stressors.

The other costly stand-in for our neglected spiritual dimension is “scientism.” Which is not to be confused with science. Scientism, or scientific materialism, is the dogmatic belief that science and its methods for gathering information are the only valid sources for true knowledge.

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Of course, science is critical and the invaluable primary driver of material progress. What separates scientism from science is the dogmatic certainty that science can provide all encompassing answers to every question that matters on every aspect of life and that there is only one answer to all of these questions. In his prescient 1992 book Technopoly, Neil Postman writes about scientism as “the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief” that science can answer questions like “What is life, and when, and why?” “Why is death, and suffering?” “What is right and wrong to do?” “What are good and evil ends?” “How ought we to think and feel and behave?”

And there are plenty of critics of scientism to be found among scientists. In his book Monopolizing Knowledge, Ian Hutchinson, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, makes the case for the limits of scientism. “There are many other important beliefs, secular as well as religious, which are justified and rational, but not scientific, and therefore marginalized by scientism,” Hutchinson writes, “and if that is so, then scientism is a ghastly intellectual mistake.” And many experiences—like “the beauty of a sunset” or “the drama of a play”—are outside the realm of science. As Lawrence Principe, a professor of chemistry and the history of science at Johns Hopkins, notes, scientism could “be turned against the insights that are offered and expressed by poetry, by art, by music, by aesthetics.” And no amount of randomized, double-blind trials can prove the ultimate importance of love, compassion, and forgiveness. Those are spiritual tenets, not scientific ones.

Scientism, Postman writes, involves “the misapplication of techniques such as quantification to questions where numbers have nothing to say.” The famous adage that you can’t manage what you can’t measure is useful in business. But it’s less useful for other key aspects of our lives. Quantification is good for sales but irrelevant for souls, which can be explored but neither managed nor measured.

In a recent paper in The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, C. Thi Nguyen, a philosophy professor at the University of Utah, wrote about the concept of “value capture” — replacing our deepest goals with measurable ones, which technology makes so easy to do. Many aspects of our physical health can be measured and tracked, for example, but our spiritual health can’t be put into a daily number.

Since the Enlightenment, science has often been seen as being in a fundamental conflict with religion and spirituality. But many of our greatest scientists bluntly rejected this simplistic conflict. “I believe in Spinoza’s God,” said Albert Einstein, referring to the 17th century philosopher who believed that God reveals himself in the orderly harmony of nature. And Einstein uttered the ultimate rebuke of scientism: “The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe.”  

When we stop thinking of them as two opponents in a zero-sum contest, science and spirituality—“the twin offspring of human yearning for answers,” as Hutchinson describes them—can co-exist in harmony, each giving us their unique benefits. The celebrated biologist Stephen Jay Gould described this beautifully as part of his concept of NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria): “Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings and values—subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve.”

It’s the dogmatists on both sides that drive the conflict. The growth of fundamentalism in science has taken place at the same time as the growth of fundamentalism in politics and religion. And as with so many other conflicts, the extremes—ostensibly in opposition—feed off each other. The loser is always the public good, as we saw in the ostracizing of scientists and experts who questioned the extent or duration of the lockdowns, or in the squelching of any debate about whether the COVID-19 virus may have originated in a lab. And on the other side, many public health officials urging people to take the COVID-19 vaccine were targeted with personal threats.

It’s no surprise that this scientific fundamentalism substitutes technology for religion. In his book, Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, Greg Epstein argues that technology has rituals and rites that we all devoutly perform every day. It connects us with a community of like-minded people, it has its own priestly class, it can be transformative, and we have faith it will lead to a happier future. Some even think it might bestow immortality. “In other words,” writes Epstein, “technology has become religion.”

In an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Summit, Sam Altman used the word “magic” to describe AI. He corrected himself by adding, “not magic,” but rather “an incredible piece of science.” But in fact, Altman was right. AI does seem like magic. And even the tech leaders creating it, aren’t entirely sure how it works. But it’s worth pointing out that while we regularly talk about technology as magic, we balk at the idea of exploring the magic of our humanity. We look at technological innovations with awe and wonder but neglect the mysteries that are neither created nor explained by technology.

When we close off our spiritual selves, when we treat those who we disagree with as heretics, we also close off pathways for forgiveness, grace, and redemption — all in short supply in our culture today. And yet we all need the forgiveness and understanding that we often find it hard to grant to others.

So, yes, we should engage in politics. We should celebrate scientific discoveries and new technologies. But we should also remember to render unto Caesar the things—and only the things—that are Caesar’s.