Politics & Power Quote by Hans Kung

Kung is doing something subtler than bashing religion: he is narrowing its job description. The line reads like an institutional disclaimer, but its intent is reformist. A theologian who spent his career prodding Catholicism toward modernity, he refuses the comforting fantasy that piety can substitute for policy. Economic inequality, state violence, bureaucratic failure, ecological collapse: these are not puzzles solved by better hymns or purer doctrine. They demand structures, laws, incentives, expertise, and the unglamorous grind of governance.

The subtext is a rebuke aimed inward. When religion promises total solutions, it turns into ideology or magic, and believers become easy prey for demagogues who wrap power in sacred language. Kung’s “we are conscious” is doing political work: it marks maturity, a collective coming-of-age, and it protects faith from the hubris that makes it brittle. By conceding limits, religion can keep its credibility and focus on what it can uniquely contribute: moral imagination, the formation of conscience, solidarity across tribes, a vocabulary for human dignity that markets and states often flatten.

Context matters. Kung wrote in a Europe haunted by the 20th century’s collisions between church, nation, and totalitarian politics, and he lived through Vatican II’s attempt to retool Catholic engagement with the modern world. His realism is also strategic ecumenism: if religions can’t “solve” these problems, they can still cooperate on the ethics that shape solutions. It’s a line that cuts against both theocracy and secular caricature, insisting on a harder, more honest partnership between faith and the public square.