Politics & Power Quote by Christopher Lasch

Lasch skewers the Religious Right with a historian’s favorite weapon: the contrast between what a movement claims to restore and what it actually delivers. The line turns on a quiet asymmetry. He doesn’t merely argue that these activists blur church and state; he suggests they fail even on their own stated premise. If you’re going to drag religion into politics, the least you could do is import the religion part: moral imagination, humility, a concern for the stranger, an awareness of human limits. Instead, Lasch implies, what arrives is politics dressed in religious costume.

The intent is diagnostic, not just denunciatory. “Reject the separation” isn’t framed as a constitutional dispute but as a cultural posture: a refusal to let faith critique power, including one’s own side. The subtext is that religion, at its best, is inconvenient - it demands standards that can’t be reduced to party platforms. When Lasch says they bring “no spiritual insights,” he’s accusing them of instrumentalizing belief, treating it as a mobilizing tool rather than a source of ethical restraint. Religion becomes branding; politics remains the product.

Context matters. Writing in the late Cold War and Reagan era, Lasch watched public life tilt toward spectacle, moral panic, and consumerist selfhood. The “new religious right” promised a return to order, but Lasch hears something thinner: grievance and discipline without transcendence, certainty without charity. The sting is that the fusion of religion and politics isn’t condemned because it’s too sacred for government; it’s condemned because it isn’t sacred enough to resist government’s temptations.