"The introduction of religious passion into politics is the end of honest politics, and the introduction of politics into religion is the prostitution of true religion"
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Lord Hailsham’s line is less a pious plea for “civility” than a hard-nosed warning about what happens when two powerful engines of loyalty start sharing fuel. Religious passion, he implies, is categorically different from political conviction: it deals in absolutes, sacred duty, and moral urgency. Once that heat enters politics, compromise stops looking like prudence and starts reading as betrayal. “Honest politics” isn’t romantic idealism here; it’s the gritty practice of bargaining in public, admitting trade-offs, and accepting partial wins. Passion that claims divine sanction makes those moves impossible to defend without seeming corrupt.
The second clause flips the indictment. If religion absorbs politics, it doesn’t become “relevant”; it becomes transactional. “Prostitution” is deliberately harsh, invoking the sale of something intimate and supposedly inviolable. Hailsham’s subtext is that religious institutions lose their moral leverage the moment they become just another interest group, laundering partisan aims in sacred language. The faithful become a voting bloc; doctrine becomes a press release.
Context matters: Hailsham was a prominent Conservative statesman in a Britain whose established church was culturally significant but politically constrained, and whose postwar consensus prized pragmatic governance over ideological crusade. His statement reads like a defense of liberal democracy’s boundary lines: keep ultimate meaning separate from the machinery of power, not because either sphere is trivial, but because each is dangerously persuasive. The quote works by treating contamination as a two-way street, insisting that both politics and religion are degraded when they seek each other’s shortcuts.
The second clause flips the indictment. If religion absorbs politics, it doesn’t become “relevant”; it becomes transactional. “Prostitution” is deliberately harsh, invoking the sale of something intimate and supposedly inviolable. Hailsham’s subtext is that religious institutions lose their moral leverage the moment they become just another interest group, laundering partisan aims in sacred language. The faithful become a voting bloc; doctrine becomes a press release.
Context matters: Hailsham was a prominent Conservative statesman in a Britain whose established church was culturally significant but politically constrained, and whose postwar consensus prized pragmatic governance over ideological crusade. His statement reads like a defense of liberal democracy’s boundary lines: keep ultimate meaning separate from the machinery of power, not because either sphere is trivial, but because each is dangerously persuasive. The quote works by treating contamination as a two-way street, insisting that both politics and religion are degraded when they seek each other’s shortcuts.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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