Leadership Quote by Mark Hatfield

Hatfield’s line lands like a rebuke delivered from inside the sanctuary, not shouted from the street. By opening with “As a Christian,” he claims the authority the New Right liked to monopolize in late-20th-century politics, then uses it against them. It’s a rhetorical judo move: he refuses the easy partisan frame (“left vs. right”) and instead draws a boundary between faith as moral discipline and faith as political instrument.

The phrase “no other part... concerns me more” signals triage, not casual disagreement. Hatfield isn’t nitpicking policy; he’s naming a corruption of motive. “Self-serving misuse” is the dagger. It suggests that the problem isn’t religion in public life, but religion deployed as branding, as a loyalty test, as a way to launder power grabs into moral crusades. He’s accusing the New Right of treating belief less like a set of obligations and more like a weaponized identity.

Context matters: Hatfield was a Republican senator, an evangelical, and a consistent critic of militarism and cynical culture-war politics. In the era when the Moral Majority and allied groups were helping fuse conservative politics with overt religious messaging, his warning reads as an internal alarm bell. The subtext is stark: when faith is bent into ideology, it stops being a check on ambition and becomes ambition’s most convenient cover. Hatfield isn’t defending secularism so much as defending Christianity from being turned into a partisan prop.