"Politics in America is the binding secular religion"
About this Quote
America likes to imagine itself as post-ideological: practical, market-minded, allergic to old-world passions. White punctures that self-image by naming the real faith of the republic. Calling politics a "binding secular religion" isn’t just a clever metaphor; it’s an accusation about how meaning gets manufactured in a nation that distrusts inherited authority yet craves collective purpose.
"Binding" does the heavy lifting. White is pointing to politics not as policy, but as social glue: the ritual that turns strangers into "us". Elections become liturgy, conventions become revivals, the Constitution a set of scripture verses everyone quotes and few read in full. You don’t need a priesthood when you have pundits, party operatives, and campaign mythmakers. Belonging is affirmed by signals: yard signs, slogans, the right outrage at the right time. Doubt, as in religion, is tolerated until it threatens the tribe.
White wrote out of the mid-century world where mass media scaled these rituals. As the chronicler of presidential campaigns, he saw how television and a growing national press didn’t merely report politics; they consecrated it, turning candidates into vessels for narrative: hope, fear, redemption, betrayal. In a pluralistic country with thinning civic institutions, politics becomes the arena where moral arguments get smuggled in under the cover of "issues."
The subtext is darker: when politics takes the place of religion, compromise starts to look like heresy. If your opponents aren’t wrong but sinful, the point stops being governance and becomes excommunication. White is describing the hunger that keeps American democracy loud, participatory, and permanently on the edge of fanaticism.
"Binding" does the heavy lifting. White is pointing to politics not as policy, but as social glue: the ritual that turns strangers into "us". Elections become liturgy, conventions become revivals, the Constitution a set of scripture verses everyone quotes and few read in full. You don’t need a priesthood when you have pundits, party operatives, and campaign mythmakers. Belonging is affirmed by signals: yard signs, slogans, the right outrage at the right time. Doubt, as in religion, is tolerated until it threatens the tribe.
White wrote out of the mid-century world where mass media scaled these rituals. As the chronicler of presidential campaigns, he saw how television and a growing national press didn’t merely report politics; they consecrated it, turning candidates into vessels for narrative: hope, fear, redemption, betrayal. In a pluralistic country with thinning civic institutions, politics becomes the arena where moral arguments get smuggled in under the cover of "issues."
The subtext is darker: when politics takes the place of religion, compromise starts to look like heresy. If your opponents aren’t wrong but sinful, the point stops being governance and becomes excommunication. White is describing the hunger that keeps American democracy loud, participatory, and permanently on the edge of fanaticism.
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