Our Hunger for the Right Things

The historian Henry Adams once described politics as “the systematic organization of hatreds,” and that’s often where we seem to be in these last days before our nation’s 250^th birthday.  As a Wall Street Journal column noted earlier this week, chronic Democratic hatred of Donald Trump, along with Trump’s own many “genuine sins and imagined ones, handed the left permission to come unglued,” with the result that “radical, dangerous, and merely stupid [ideas] are not only permissible but mandatory” on the growing port side of the Democratic party.

Our need to escape from today’s constant political hysteria is one of the reasons we bury ourselves in entertainment.  We’d all like to find a safe and quiet place to live, even if its name is Fantasyland.

Alas, as Christians we can’t simply ignore politics.  We’re supposed to be leaven in the world.  So we can’t just retreat to the hills as St. Benedict did.  Living our faith in the real world means that we need to help build a better society.  And in 2026, that’s harder than ever.  What a Christian means by the “common good” and “human dignity,” and what a non-believer means by exactly the same words, can be very different.  The abortion issue is far from the only relevant example.

Three simple principles guide Christian political thinking.  First, we need to serve the common good – the real common good, which is not the same as providing “the most stuff for the most people.”  Second, we need to defend the dignity of the individual person.  And third, we need to do these things in the right order of priority.  

For example, individuals can’t demand respect for their desires and behaviors if these things cripple the general welfare.  Likewise, we can’t serve the common good by demeaning each other or exploiting individuals, especially the weak, the poor, and the innocent.  

And while lots of social issues need our attention – things like hunger, health care, and just immigration policies – no issue is more fundamental to human dignity than the right to life.  Without the right to life, all other human rights are simply pious sentiments dressed up in idealistic language.

These principles should be obvious.  But in the span of my adult life, the entire landscape of American culture has changed drastically.  Americans who self-identify as atheist, agnostic, or having no religious affiliation at all went from 16 percent of the population in 2007 to 29 percent in 2026.  

And that has serious implications, because religious freedom – one of the cornerstones of the American Founding we celebrate this week – can’t be a concern for people who have no religious faith.  In fact, outright hatred of Christian believers is on the rise in this country.

My point is this.  The nation we think we live in isn’t the one we now actually live in.  Our civic institutions and vocabulary may seem the same, but the realities of power are different.  

Without God, man always ends up in some form of idolatry.  When God leaves the stage, the state expands to fill his place.  And God has been exiting the stage of our public life – or, too often, been pushed off the stage – for decades.

To borrow some thoughts from Philadelphia’s archbishop emeritus, we might profit from reading two things:

Neither one is the Declaration of Independence.  Neither one is the Constitution.  Neither one has anything obviously to do with politics.  The first is John Bunyan’s novel, The Pilgrim’s Progress.  And the second is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “The Celestial Railroad.” 

Bunyan’s book was written in 1678, and it’s one of the world’s great religious allegories.  More copies have been printed of Pilgrim’s Progress than any book in history except the Bible.  It embodies the early Puritan hunger for God that inspired America’s first colonists and shaped the roots of our country.  

Hawthorne’s short story, written in 1843, is a very different piece.  It’s one of the great satires in American literature.  Hawthorne was a descendant of Puritans himself, and he takes Bunyan’s pious allegory – man’s journey on the road home to Heaven – and retells it through the lens of America’s worst flaws: our appetite for comfort, easy answers, short cuts, quick fixes, material success, and phony religious piety.

One could argue that this is where we find ourselves now.  Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said that “prosperity breeds idiots,” and it’s hard to argue with his logic when today’s Lavazza coffee commercials (to take just one of many examples) claim that “pleasure makes us human.”   

We live in a profoundly materialist, consumer-driven culture.  I love my country.  I love its extraordinary achievements and best ideals. But as America turns 250, we could all use some humility, austerity, and personal repentance along with the bombast and celebration.

Happily, we do have good reasons for hope.

Despite the turmoil that too often seems to fill our headlines, human beings want and need to love.  Anger eats the heart out of the world, and ultimately, we can’t bear it.  God made us for better things.  That’s why we all have a longing for beauty.  It’s why we all have a hunger for intimacy, friendship with others, and the fertility of new life.  

The love we show in our choices and actions matters because our personal witness shapes others, and through others, God reshapes the world.  Benedict XVI described the work of Christian political engagement as an expression of charity and justice – in other words, as an expression of love for our nation, our community, and the persons around us.  And so it is.

So here’s the lesson:  The most powerful “political” act we can make in this or any year, election or otherwise, is to live as if we really mean what we claim to believe as Christians.  If we do that simple, radical thing, then the world will begin to change – not quickly, not dramatically, but deeply, one soul and one community at a time.  And in the end, that’s what we’ll be judged on.