Politics & Power Quote by Andrew Greeley

Greeley is doing something sly: he names “American religion” as the patient, then points to a “minority” as the disease. That framing matters. It grants mainstream believers a kind of moral majority without the swagger, while isolating the loudest actors as an aberration rather than the core. For a clergyman who lived through the rise of the Religious Right, it’s a defensive move and a pastoral one: protect faith from becoming a party apparatus, and protect ordinary parishioners from being conscripted into culture-war armies.

The key phrase is “identify political policies with religion.” Greeley isn’t merely complaining about religious people having politics; he’s warning about a rhetorical fusion, the moment when a tax plan, a foreign policy doctrine, or a school-board crusade gets stamped as God’s own preference. That move doesn’t just argue; it sanctifies. It turns disagreement into heresy and compromise into sin, which is poison for both democracy (because it narrows the space for pluralism) and religion (because it reduces transcendence to a legislative agenda).

Calling fundamentalists a “minority” is also a tactical rebuke. He’s stripping them of the claim to represent “real” Christianity, suggesting their power comes less from numbers than from intensity, media amplification, and the convenience politicians find in ready-made moral certainty. The subtext is blunt: when faith becomes a shortcut to policy legitimacy, it’s no longer religion speaking to public life; it’s politics wearing a clerical collar.