Politics Is Not Religion

Will Wilkinson offers some telling criticisms of Charles Morris' recent New York Times op-ed.

Morris writes that the economy has a "spiritual dimension" that is lacking in contemporary America. He implies that an active and expansive government should supply a "conviction of fairness, a feeling of not being totally on one’s own, a sense of reasonable stability and predictability."

The state, then, should be in the business of providing spiritual goods.

Morris' essay reminded me of what one of the founders of neo-conservatism, Irving Kristol, once wrote: "A nation whose politics turn on the cost of false teeth is a nation whose politics are squalid.”

So politics is apparently about more than mere material matters; it has a higher dimension. In our time, that higher dimension has become the politics of national greatness that in turn became a crusade to bring democracy to others.

Both Kristol and Morris are confusing politics for religion. They expect more from politics than it can or should give. Or at least, they expect more than a politics consistent with liberty can give.