Politics & Power Quote by David E. Price

There’s a careful double move in David E. Price’s line: it sounds like an observation, but it functions as a warning. “I am struck” frames the claim as reluctant discovery rather than partisan attack, a politician’s way of saying: don’t shoot the messenger. Yet the sentence is calibrated to land with urgency. “Intertwined” is doing the heavy lifting, suggesting a knot that can’t be easily untied - not a momentary alliance, but a structural entanglement where identity, morality, and power become mutually reinforcing.

Price, a longtime Democratic congressman and a scholar by training, is speaking from inside an institution that once depended on tacit boundaries: faith as a personal compass; politics as a negotiable space. The subtext is that those boundaries are collapsing, and the consequences are procedural as much as cultural. When faith becomes agenda, compromise starts to look like sin. When agenda adopts the language of faith, disagreement gets recast as heresy. That’s not just polarization; it’s moral escalation.

“More closely now than at any other time in recent history” is a strategic historical claim - broad enough to feel true, provocative enough to invite debate. It nods to the rise of the Religious Right, culture-war mobilization, and the post-9/11 era’s increased appetite for absolutist narratives. Price isn’t arguing against religion; he’s pointing at what happens when political legitimacy borrows the certainty of the sacred: it becomes harder to govern, easier to vilify, and nearly impossible to retreat without looking like you’ve betrayed something holy.