Faith & Spirit Quote by George Will

A conservative journalist borrowing the moral gravitas of religion to make a provocative demand of politics is a neat rhetorical judo move, and George Will knows it. The line sounds reconciliatory - politics and religion, two arenas often treated as rivals for authority, suddenly “share one purpose.” But the real hook is the phrase “education of his passions,” an old-school, almost aristocratic way of talking about self-government. Will isn’t praising passion; he’s insisting it be trained, disciplined, redirected. Freedom, in this framing, isn’t the liberation to feel whatever you feel. It’s emancipation from being ruled by raw appetite.

The subtext is a critique of modern political culture that flatters impulses rather than refines them. When politics becomes pure consumer service - promising maximum satisfaction with minimum restraint - it stops being civic formation and becomes emotional vending. Will’s sentence quietly rebukes that: politics should cultivate citizens, not just aggregate preferences. By pairing politics with religion, he’s also suggesting that a society needs institutions that teach limits, patience, duty, even taste; in other words, a moral ecology that makes liberty sustainable.

Context matters: Will came of age in the postwar conservative revival, where “ordered liberty” and virtue talk were meant to answer both utopian ideologies and the era’s rising therapeutic individualism. The slightly dated “his” only sharpens the point: this is a classical, not trendy, vision of emancipation - freedom as self-mastery, not self-expression.