Politics & Power Quote by Andrew Sullivan

There’s a trap hidden in Sullivan’s question: it invites you to feel smug about other people’s fanaticism while quietly asking whether you’re already inside it. The line works because it’s diagnostic, not declarative. He doesn’t say an ideology is a religion; he asks how you’d recognize the moment it crosses the line. That framing matters. It shifts the burden from debating policies to examining behavior: the rituals, taboos, heresies, and excommunications that turn political affiliation into a moral identity.

Sullivan, a journalist who’s spent decades moving between conservative and liberal worlds, is allergic to tribal certainty. The subtext is his signature warning: when politics becomes a totalizing faith, it stops being a tool for negotiating pluralism and becomes a theater for purity. The “equivalent of a religion” isn’t a cheap jab at believers so much as a critique of how secular movements can mimic the psychology of the sacred. You don’t need gods; you need a narrative of salvation, a demonology, and an authorized priesthood of experts or influencers who tell you what must be believed.

Contextually, Sullivan is writing in an era when ideology is increasingly lived online, where platforms reward maximalism and punishment travels faster than persuasion. In that environment, the religious metaphor lands because it names something many people feel but struggle to articulate: the way politics has swallowed social life, turning disagreement into sin and compromise into apostasy. The question is less about identifying “them” than noticing the moment any side starts treating doubt as treason.