“Intensely political seasons spawn reveries of a different immediacy. People imagine alternative environments where authenticity trumps ideology, truths cannot be concealed, and communication feels intimate, face-to-face.”
—Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism
When utopian ideals circulate, they are often accompanied by the shadow of nostalgia. Nowhere is this more apparent in contemporary American politics than it is on the religious right. A peculiar notion of pre-modern religious (almost exclusively Christian or otherwise “Judeo-Christian”) values, and a return to the lifeways of the time periods in which such values are understood to have been hegemonic, dominates images of political futurity. While this idea appears in many different forms depending on the figures advocating for it, it almost always operates under the assumption that pre-modern Christianity is a singular, coherent, and portable reference point for a kind of prelapsarian state of undifferentiated immanence. According to these characterizations, whatever else one can say about the shortcomings of the pre-modern era, at least a universal immersion in Christian values meant that people were suffused with meaning and purpose in their lives.
The political and cultural purpose of this notion of utopia-cum-nostalgia, and the important position that the image of pre-modern religion holds within it, is apparent in many corners of our culture, but it is most clearly discernible in the published writings of politicians and intellectuals. Texts like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s The Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation (2022), psychology professor Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine (2024), and Vice President J.D. Vance’s Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith (2026) all identify secularity in public and private life as the origin of modernity’s ills, and identify the reversal of its influence as their political aim for the future. The return of pre-modern hierarchies supposedly endorsed by Christianity and eroded by the decline of its influence in public life is thought to restore a kind of political and social order. But importantly, it will also supposedly bring people a sense of felt meaning in life. We, too, like J.D. Vance after his conversion to Catholicism, will be able to experience the feeling of coming “home” to how things were always supposed to be.
While the deployment of this notion of pre-modern Christianity is widespread in right-wing politics, a kind of mirror image of this way of conceptualizing our political future has been appearing more and more often in mainstream left-wing politics. It has not generally drawn on the discourse of religion as such—James Talarico remaining enough of an outsider in this regard to attract media attention for his exotic status as both a vocal Christian and a Democrat—but it has accepted the right’s implicit diagnosis that the recovery of an affective senseof meaning and purpose is crucial for the future of American politics. Post-mortems of Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign were littered with assessments that she (and the Democratic party writ large) had failed to offer the American public a sufficiently thick sense of belonging, meaning, and purpose.
Language of this type has only developed since then, and drawn more explicitly on religion and spirituality. In a recent episode of his eponymous podcast, for example, the New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein attributes the popular and political appeal of the New Right to “a failure of the mainstream [left] to have a vision of human flourishing and self-improvement that feels vital to people.” His guest, the British journalist Helen Lewis, agrees, and attributes her sense of the unavailability of such a discourse of flourishing to the decline in the prevalence and influence of religious belief and practice: “There are rituals within [religious life] that are probably deeply helpful to people as anchors within their lives. And while I can’t say I have personal faith anymore, I think that it is a shame to have lost those structures in life.”
Another example can be found in the public posture of Chris Murphy, the junior senator from Connecticut and supposed 2028 presidential hopeful, who has frequently used the language of spirituality and sacrality in articulating his ideals for the future of Democratic politics. He has argued that the left needs a “spiritual renaissance,” that the problem of burnout among American workers is best described as a “spiritual crisis,” and that “spiritual unspooling” in America can be addressed by a left-right realignment on economic issues.
While none of these left-wing perspectives partake of the same kind of direct valorization of pre-modern Christianity to be found on the political right, nevertheless they seem to have internalized its characterization of the origins of our malaise. In premodern Europe people might have been materially deprived, socially stratified, and oppressed, they imply, but at least their hegemonic Christianity gave them a sense of the meaning of “flourishing” in which they could believe, and a concomitant sense of purpose in which they could be immersed. Klein, Lewis, and Murphy (unlike Vance, Hegseth, and Peterson) do not consider a return to premodern social hierarchies desirable; nevertheless, something like the pre-conscious sense of embeddedness and purpose that they attribute to pre-modern religion emerges as an object of political aspiration.
In other words, what these left and right thinkers have in common is this: a shared understanding of what religion was and what it could do for people before the advent of modernity, the recovery of which forms the horizon for their notions of political futurity. Thus, the primary valence of this utopian political thinking is affective: operating from a shared premise that the old conditions of belief enabled people to feel a certain sense of undifferentiated immanence and purpose, they all gesture in their different ways towards the recreation of that condition. And the idea of religion as something that used to provide this affective immanence, but now cannot, catalyzes this utopian discourse as it emerges from both ends of the political spectrum.
What are we to make of this? Is it an accurate representation of the felt conditions of being that pre-modern Christianity provided for its adherents? Like all historical generalizations, it is impossible to empirically verify the truth or falsehood of this claim. There may very well have been individuals for whom the premodern conditions of belief did, in fact, create this psychological experience of immanence. But the intellectual-historical record of early and medieval Christianity (let alone other forms of religious belief and practice) offers several counterexamples to the assumption that this was a widespread or general phenomenon.
St. Augustine (354-430) is famous for his neo-Platonic characterization of this world as one of illusion and shadow, and of the condition of our existence here as one of fundamental alienation. The writings of medieval Christian mystics interested in self-emptying or kenosis—e.g., Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) and Marguerite Porete (1258-1310)—offer compelling examples of preoccupation with the vicissitudes of egoistic selfhood, and the struggle entailed in the attempt to shake off its anxieties and illusions. And St. John of the Cross’s (1542-1591) poem “Dark Night”is one of the tradition’s most famous articulations of the existential uncertainty entailed in grappling with God’s apparent absence. These writers’ perspectives offer a strong case that a sense of existential alienation has always been with us—even before what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “breach of naïveté” that characterizes the conditions of modern belief.
But even if this perception of the premodern conditions of religious belief is untrue, the question remains: is the affective sense of meaning, purpose, and immanence a useful political horizon? In other words, is this discourse of utopia something that we should seek to synthesize in religious or secular political contexts, even if its nostalgic historical reality is not born out in factual analysis?
The work of the late literary scholar Lauren Berlant offers an important set of insights into the function of this kind of desire for sentimental immanence in political culture. Berlant initiated their writing on sentimentalism in American political culture with their 1997 monograph The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. In this book, they focus primarily on the Reaganite and post-Reaganite right, explicating its effort to privatize U.S. citizenship by replacing left-wing, critical public discourse with the sentimental politics of the nuclear family. In The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008), Berlant goes on to identify how this cultural trend influences left-wing feminism: by constructing fantasies of felt belonging as the telos of the movement for women’s rights, held back only by specific flawed men and their misogynistic ideologies, the sentimental branch of feminism obscures the experience of ambivalence as an inevitable condition of personal and political life. And in Cruel Optimism (2011), Berlant delineates how political desire for a particular affective state actually comes with an opportunity cost: when political energy is channeled into the goal of creating or sustaining positive collective affect, we lose our ability to negotiate the real conflicts of interest that inevitably emerge in any political or cultural entity.
These insights of Berlant’s have clear implications for our thinking about how the imagined function of religion is coming to be used as a horizon of political utopia in contemporary American politics. That hegemonic Christianity offered most people a sense of affective immanence and unquestioned meaning and purpose is historically questionable, but Berlant helps us see that constructing a return to religion imagined as affective undifferentiation or a politics modeled on this idea of religion is counterproductive because it constructs the inevitable contradictions and difficulties of democratic public life as a problem to be eradicated rather than as a dynamic to be encountered, negotiated, and managed. Personal ambivalence, interpersonal and inter-group difficulties, and uncertainty of purpose or meaning are and always have been inevitable features of individual and collective life. To make the aim of politics eliminating these difficulties creates the exact category of opportunity cost that Berlant identifies in Cruel Optimism: it erodes public and collective willingness to accept and our general tools for managing and negotiating the categorical ambivalence found in all genuinely pluralistic and democratic societies.
The fact that a questionable idea of pre-modern religion as the model and inspiration for this political horizon should make this issue of interest to all people concerned with the study of religion and political theology. Our collective interest is now tied up with a clearer understanding of the realities of pre-modern religious life.
Bringing to the fore another term from the Christian lexicon may offer a viable alternative to this sentimental and nostalgic politics of pre-modern Christianity: pilgrimage. St. Augustine exhorted his readers to see the human life as a pilgrimage toward our final rest in God. This metaphor provides a positive orientation towards futurity without making claims or guarantees about what we may be able to experience here in our earthly lives. Christians seeking to integrate their faith with their politics would, I think, do well to consider it.
