The Republican National Convention last month was teeming with God talk. Much of it was what we have come to expect from a party that cloaks itself in faith, even while worshipping its standard-bearer as a false idol. Tim Scott, speaking on the first night of the convention, described the attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life like so: “Our God still saves. He still delivers, and He still sets free. Because on Saturday, the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle. But an American lion got back up on his feet, and he roared.” U.S. Senate candidate Leora Levy offered a Jewish prayer for Trump, yet as she deployed Jewish language, a wall of screens behind her projected images of American flags flying next to Christian crosses and churches. The awkward marriage between the RNC’s performance of what’s known as civil religion—a 1960s notion that fuses a symbolic and emotional commitment to the nation-state that mirrors traditional religious devotion—tends to increasingly reflect a sectarian, white, Christian worldview that holds itself out as secular.
On Monday night at the DNC, Sen. Raphael Warnock, senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, embraced faith from the political left in a way that was dramatically different. Warnock called out Trump for weaponizing religious symbols and speech in ways that violate core religious values and leveled blame at certain churches for a willingness to endorse Trumpism at all costs. Warnock is hardly the first Democrat to refuse to cede the language of religious faith to the GOP and to root progressive values in faith values. But these efforts still seem unfamiliar on the left. I spoke to Ilyse Hogue, a senior fellow at New America, the author of The Lie That Binds—a history of the religious right’s authoritarian crusade against abortion—and the first person to, in 2016, tell her own story of elective abortion for the stage at the DNC, about what a robust progressive embrace of a thick civic religion could look like. Our conversation, which took place over email, has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dahlia Lithwick: You have long said that it is a tactical mistake to simply allow the GOP to occupy the faith field for decades. How is it that this came about, and why is any effort to root progressive values in religion seen as inherently divisive and counterproductive?
Ilyse Hogue: The 1980 election was a defining moment for the role of religion in party politics. Through the ’70s, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority teamed up with Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum to wrest power from the more dominant Rockefeller Republicans who had advanced a socially liberal, fiscally conservative framework for the GOP. This new “religious right” coalition was joined in common cause to reverse the significant advancements of the Civil Rights, gay rights, and women’s rights movements of the ’60s and ’70s. Their cynical ploy was to use the candidacy of Ronald Reagan—a divorced actor cum politician—as a stalking horse to advance their radical vision for a white patriarchy to retain hegemonic power in America. When Reagan’s long-shot bid successfully ousted the overtly devout incumbent Jimmy Carter, it sent both sides reeling. That equation—embedding a racist and misogynistic view of social order in a religious ideology—is recognizable as the playbook followed by Falwell’s descendants and disciples in the 2016 election of Donald Trump.
The subsequent political reorganization was predictable, even if ultimately limited. Liberals across the spectrum became wary of religious doctrine as a potential tool to be weaponized and faith as specifically fraught when applied to a vision of a more pluralistic union. In searching for a counterargument to the new right’s religious fundamentalism, Democrats sought to strike a balance: Recognize that many embrace religion, while neutralizing the potential risk of it to fracture their coalition. This required a delicate dance of preaching individual tolerance with an orthodox adherence to the constitutional commitment to separate church and state.
I file all this under “well-intentioned and legally expedient,” but it was too antiseptic to satiate a growing need for collective frameworks to make sense and seek purpose in an increasingly complicated world. The right’s flattened narrative was often cruel but always clear. The GOP easily framed all Dems as godless, waging war on the religious. While many responded defensively—and in fact the party and coalition does include many religious people—these were individual declarations of faith that failed to meet the need for a collective investment in a new vision. Democrats fell short of a road map to a more perfect union and relied on a chaotic hodgepodge of issues, bills, and elections, which are piecemeal at best in a country where so many people, and indeed so many liberals, seek greater purpose.
More importantly, we ceded the idea that effective politics are a vehicle for connecting people to one another in service of actualizing a higher ideal of our lives and our surroundings.
Warnock told the Atlanta Voice that he was attempting to recapture the moral seriousness of Martin Luther King Jr., who was so comfortable connecting liberal political goals to faith values. I think progressives tend to forget how much religion animated the civil rights battles of the past two centuries. What would reembracing that language look like?
I see it a little differently. Broadly speaking, I think there is a high awareness among progressives of the role of faith in the traditional Civil Rights Movement. I just think it’s viewed as a discrete outlier that fails to scale when applied to the diversity of a multifaith coalition.
The right’s effective instrumentalization of religion as a tool to dominate and oppress has embedded an unease among liberal political activists about the intermingling of both. And the sheer number of religions, and belief systems—not to mention the doctrinal rejection of both—housed under the big tent makes organizing exponentially more complicated for Democrats than for their GOP counterpart, with its handful of more homogenous religious factions. The mental gymnastics of attempting to unify so many constituencies while engaging in transactional politics is exhausting. Once you add in the authoritarian right’s often-successful attempts to wedge the Democratic coalition by pitting factions against one another, the impulse to forfeit rather than contest the faith ground is understandable even if ill-advised.
And then there’s the practical matter that some of these religious doctrines are actually in tension with one another. Look at the issue of the day. While some progressive Christian denominations acknowledge legal abortion as a human right, others maintain that it is a sin. Jewish theology has a different take on when life begins. Afraid of inflaming differences, the party took this powerful issue off the table entirely for a long time, instead opting to affirm the legal right in as few words as possible. Unlocking the now-undisputed power of this issue required accepting those internal theological differences as innate to democracy and then, instead of letting them divide, asserting the higher-order value that was universal, the value of freedom.
To build durable movements for pluralistic democracy, we first need to distinguish between “religion,” which is defined by distinctions and differences, and “faith, ” which is a universal component of the human experience. Simply being alive requires faith to make sense of a chaotic and often cruel world. Faith acknowledges common value in connecting disparate communities and cultures. Faith sustains individuals who often reflect on a life that struggles to measure up by individual metrics. Faith addresses primal needs for meaning and spiritual sustenance that transcend any specific religion or belief system.
Warnock’s speech on Monday night stepped into that breach. When he acknowledged his 2020 victory as an advancement for Black Georgians and in the next breath honored the victory of his friend and colleague Sen. Jon Ossoff as a first for Jewish Georgians, he bound our fates and our joys in one. He modeled that we can be proud of our distinctions while celebrating our universal humanity. He showed a refusal to yield an inch to the divide-and-conquer tactics of the right.
Ultimately, he took two separate and individual elections—pivotal, yes, but elections nonetheless—and recast them as interconnected and significant milestones made possible by the collective action of a broad movement of people willing to have faith that they could advance “the best in the American covenant.” People don’t want a thank-you for voting, but they do want that vote to amount to more than the sum of its parts. With that line, Warnock made visible the people who were investing in something larger than him. We need more of that.
One of the sections so many of us found most arresting in Warnock’s speech was his conclusion, which also sounded a key of deep spirituality: “I need my neighbor’s children to be OK so that my children will be OK. I need all of my neighbors’ children to be OK. Poor inner-city children in Atlanta and poor children of Appalachia. I need the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza. I need Israelis and Palestinians. I need those in the Congo, those in Haiti, those in Ukraine. I need American children on both sides of the track to be OK because we are all God’s children.”
I think this passage was so resonant because it breathed life into the liberal belief system underlying so many of our principles and policies. And we too often take for granted that voters can see that notion for themselves.
The GOP vision is a clear version of Christian doctrine that pits individuals against each other in a zero-sum race for survival. Every day on earth is Daniel in the lions’ den, where the winner takes all and success is a mark of God’s approval no matter how it’s achieved. Being on edge and ready to strike is not a cruelty but a necessity in this worldview. The view that God has graced America with the cunning Donald Trump is the walking manifestation of this vision. The fact that Donald Trump has achieved wealth and power through coercion and corruption is a testament to the fact that God graced him with the cunning necessary to win in a brutal world. Any transgressions against God’s other commandments can be dispensed with through pantomimed atonement and performative prayer. It’s a worldview as neat as it is twisted.
That passage was Warnock’s way of modeling that to win, we need to offer more than competing policy platforms. We need to model a compelling and clear belief system that sharply contrasts the right. One that illuminates the understanding of our interdependence as an asset and makes the application of universal rights, freedoms, and opportunities more than a feel-good aspiration or tagline. It’s a mission that binds us in our collective destiny. Working for that transcends politics and becomes a spiritual act.
All of this requires faith that this nation of ours can be healed. A faith that Warnock acknowledged has been profoundly shaken. But Democrats and liberals should take heed that restoring faith in our nation requires a willingness for the party and the movements that undergird it to invest in a framework that respects our individual identities and ladders up to our common humanity.
Then our votes will be the kind of prayer the reverend speaks of, one “for the world we desire for ourselves and our children.”
