By Russell L. Lackey and Mark Mattes, Public Discourse.
When politics becomes our highest love, it will also become our cruelest disappointment, leaving our homes colder, our holidays lonelier, and our common life harder to sustain.
In downtown Des Moines stands a historic Masonic Temple, a beautiful building from another era. Its stonework still commands attention. Its architecture still suggests weight, seriousness, and a world in which its inhabitants once sought meaning. Yet today it sits mostly empty. No young people drive past it and wonder whether they should go inside to look for purpose in life.
Sometimes we wonder whether that is how many Americans now experience the Church: not necessarily as false, but as an impressive structure that no longer feels socially required. And yet the need that once drew people inside has not disappeared. Instead, it has been redirected into politics.
American politics today is marked by an unmistakable and unstable moral intensity. Public disagreements no longer feel like contests over prudential judgment or policy design. Increasingly, they resemble struggles over identity, virtue, and ultimate meaning. Elections become existential dramas. Political movements promise not merely reform, but redemption.
Why has politics come to feel so absolute?
A recently released book by sociologist Christian Smith offers a clarifying account. In Why Religion Went Obsolete, Smith argues that religion in America has not vanished; it has become culturally optional. Churches remain, worship continues, and spiritual interest persists. Yet religion no longer functions as the assumed framework through which ordinary life is interpreted. It is no longer socially necessary, but one possible avenue for meaning, fulfillment, and moral orientation among many others in a crowded marketplace of identities and commitments.
Smith’s account is not one of sudden atheism. Religion did not lose because it was disproven or forcibly suppressed. Instead, modern conditions such as mobility, pluralism, technological change, and therapeutic culture have rendered alternative sources of meaning increasingly plausible. What once felt indispensable now appears elective.