January 29, 2024

Re: Trump vs. Biden, “Politization,” and Our (Un)Happy Holidays

In his Lectures on Nature (Φυσικὴ ἀκρόασις), often simply referred to as “the Physics,” the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) suggests that voids are not found in the created order. Though disputed by contemporaries and moderns alike, Aristotle’s principle has been summed up by an oft-quoted maxim: “nature abhors a vacuum.” In other words, if one thing is taken away, it is inevitable that something else will replace it.

This idea was originally meant to describe physical reality, but it may actually be more applicative to culture. Consider, for example, the evolving roles of religion and politics in American society. On the one hand, there is overwhelming evidence that Western culture in general, and the United States in particular, have become increasingly secularized and, indeed, indifferent to religious life. In December 2021, as the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant wreaked havoc on expert analysis and reignited societal lockdowns, the Pew Research Center reported that 30% of Americans now consider themselves religiously unaffiliated. Unsurprisingly, there were other related trends: the number of people who identify as “Christian” or who pray on a regular basis has declined by double digits since the late 2000s. The data has not changed in the last couple of years either. According to a May 2023 study done by the Public Religion Research Institute, the number of “whites” who profess Christianity is in a veritable free fall—from 72% in 1990 to 54% in 2006 to 42% today. Indeed, the PRRI concludes that religion is simply “less important” for Americans than it once was, even in recent memory:

Religion is less important for Americans today than it was a decade ago. Today, 16% of Americans say that religion is the most important thing in their life, 36% say religion is one among many important things, 18% say religion is not as important as other things, and 29% say religion is not important to them. In 2013, Americans were more likely to say that religion was either the most important thing in their life (20%) or one among many important things (43%), while 15% said that religion was not as important as other things and 19% said religion was not important.

Now, compare this situation to that of politics. First, it is important to note that the rise of the Internet and of social media has become intertwined with politics. For example, over two billion people use Facebook on a daily basis, and nearly 250 million people use Twitter/X everyday. These are staggering numbers, made even more impressive by the fact that a sizable portion of the content on these platforms is political. The Pew Research Center has determined that 1/3 of all “tweets” on Twitter/X are political in nature—thus over 80 million political tweets per day. The rate is significantly lower on Facebook—6% of all content involves politics—but the totals remain stupefying: roughly 120 million people encounter political messaging on Facebook every single day. By way of contrast, about 130 million Americans attend a religious worship service each week—and that figure is almost certainly inflated. According to a 2005 survey, church attendance is actually closer to 50 million people per week. In the end, now matter how one slices and dices it, the basic point is clear: there are far more people encountering political messaging each and every day than are attending divine worship services each and every week.

Predictably, this discrepancy has been felt at the ballot box. Not only has the number of Americans who vote in presidential elections markedly increased since 1996,¹ but the percentage of eligible voters who cast ballots has equally surged. In 1996, 52% of the voting-eligible population turned out to vote for president; in 2020, that number swelled to 67%. If one pans out further, it’s clear that the last few election cycles are anomalous in American social life. Of the last 11 presidential elections, dating back to 1980, only three of them have witnessed a voting-eligible turnout of greater than 60%. All came since the advent of Facebook—2004, 2008, 2020.

In short, as American religious life has diminished, American political life has grown. “Nature abhors a vacuum.” This tectonic shift is being experienced in a number of ways, both direct and indirect. Here it makes sense to distinguish between evident symptoms and their underlying condition. The former are manifestations of the latter: if a person urinates too often or experiences an abnormal amount of infections (“symptoms”), her physician will likely check for diabetes mellitus (“underlying condition”). So it is with the relationship between religion and politics. As the latter comes to replace the former, certain symptoms should present themselves. We should, in other words, be able to witness signs of this transition.

In a brief exercise such as this one, I will limit myself to an obvious case in point—namely, the “holiday tweets” of former U.S. President Donald J. Trump and current U.S. President Joseph R. Biden. On Truth Social—Trump’s social media platform, which is generally patterned after Twitter/X—Trump offered a message of “season’s greetings” on Christmas Day:

It’s hard to know where to begin analyzing this “truth.” Given Trump’s tone, not to mention the vitriolic expression “MAY THEY ROT IN HELL,” it’s clear that Trump’s intent was not to spread Yuletide cheer. On the contrary, he used Christmas Day as an occasion to denigrate his political opponents and, indirectly, to promote his preferred policy initiatives. And why not? Christmas remains a day of leisure for most Americans. Increasingly, then, it is a day of media consumption—football games, movies, news coverage, and social-media scrolling. Trump understood that such a captive audience must not go to waste, and he used his “Christmas message” as an opportunity to galvanize his base and to garner attention-grabbing headlines from a variety of news outlets.

Yet, if you’re not a Trump fan, don’t fret: President Biden’s PR team was not to be outdone. On January 1, 2024–the celebratory first day of the year according to the Gregorian calendar and, for Roman Catholics such as Biden, the feast day of the “Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God”—the President saw fit to issue a statement suitable for the occasion. He did not “tweet” a greeting of humble gratitude or divine thanksgiving, nor did he offer a “New Year’s resolution” promising, say, to pray a novena for America or to eat better in 2024. On the contrary, even amid an ongoing war in Eastern Europe and a still raw outbreak of war between Israel and the politico-military organization known as Hamas, Biden doubled down on his commitment to “fight back” against his own constituents—that is to say, against Americans who support Trump and his (ostensibly) conservative movement to “Make America Great Again” (MAGA).

While Trump’s splenetic phrase “MAY THEY ROT IN HELL” engendered headlines, Biden’s concluding “let’s finish the job” is arguably nastier and more violent. After all, Trump’s invective was directed, in auxiliary fashion, against his opponents within the domain of politics (“Deranged JACK SMITH and the “SWAMP” in Washington, D.C.”). But Biden’s tweet subjunctively directs a euphemism for murder at roughly 40% of the Republican Party—a number that is in the vicinity of 17 million people, in case anyone is wondering.

And yet, the point here is not that Trump is a raving madman or that Biden is a genocidal autocrat. On the contrary, what is distinctive about their respective “holiday greetings” is how shrewdly calculating they are. Both men and their consultatory teams understand well, all too well, that politics has become our new religion. On this reading, there is nothing sacred per se about Christmas Day or the Solemnity of Mary; these are just potent occasions for political one-upsmanship. Propaganda is more important than piety. Of course, one might object that, however curious their timing, the holiday opinions expressed by Trump and Biden are at least sincere. This would be a charitable thought, but, alas, it is highly dubious. After all, both December 25 and January 1 have been identified by retailers as two of the most important “marketing holidays” of the calendar year. In all likelihood, the Trump and Biden teams were motivated more by algorithms than principles. Neither man is an ideological purist. In point of fact, both are notorious for flip-flopping on issues, whether it’s Trump’s former identification as a Democrat or Biden’s 2006 criticism of laws supporting gay marriage. If Trump or Biden stand for anything, it’s the priority of political expediency over faithful conviction, of the coercive power of the state over everything else.

Yet, while it’s tempting to view the Trump-Biden phenomenon as an unpredictable outcome of various historical accidents (e.g., 9/11, the rise of social media, the COVID-19 pandemic), it was by no means impossible to foresee. In 1965, the French thinker Jacques Ellul (1912-94) published The Political Illusion (L'illusion politique)—a lengthy and, at times, convoluted work that nevertheless presciently anticipates our current political era. Indeed, now almost 60 years old, The Political Illusion describes a global culture in which politics has invaded all walks of life and captured all types of persons, whether they are socialists or capitalists, “sentimental democrats” or “idealistic Christians.” Political positions vary, after all, but what remains constant is the supremacy of politics writ large and the techno-bureaucratic management of the state.

Of course, I will not have time or space here to unfold Ellul’s argument in full. Instead, I will highlight a couple of points that bear on the recent holiday venom spewed by Trump and Biden. How did we get to this point? According to Ellul, that people would become preoccupied with politics in the wake of two world wars is ironic but not surprising. The tragedies of the twentieth century shattered the grand narratives that animated the early revolutions of modernity. First, the ancien régime was swept away, and now “the political notions treasured as truths in the nineteenth century are but faded myths.” What comes next? Ellul suggests that the nonstop media coverage of politics—which, in turn, prompts nonstop appearances, briefings, rallies, and tweets on the part of political leaders—is revealing:

Like some Christians who constantly speak of God, Christianity, and their faith because they would find themselves confronted with an immense void if they stopped talking, we talk endlessly of politics in an unconscious effort to hide the void in our actual situation. The word is compensation for an absence, evocation of a fleeting presence, a magic incantation, an illusory presence of what man thinks he can capture with the help of his language. There is auto-suggestion in it: I say it and repeat it; it therefore exists.

If people hear enough times that they are “free,” or if they hear enough times of the success (or failure) of a given leader or government, they will come to believe what they are told. There is incentive, then, to keep political figures, discussions, and problems at the forefront of people’s minds—even, or especially, if the motives for doing so are morally dubious. “A regime that talks most of some value,” Ellul contends, “is a regime that consciously or inconsciously denies that value and prevents it from existing.”

The upshot of this process is “politization,” which Ellul defines as a “total phenomenon” marked by “the tendency to treat all social problems in the world” as political problems. Though it has many aspects and characteristics, politization has been driven by “the growth of the state itself,” whose methods, personnel, and responsibilities have continued to expand: “[State growth] goes hand in hand with inevitable centralization and with the total organization of society in the hands of the state.”

Here Ellul’s analysis presupposes Soviet-era geopolitical tension between East and West. Yet, it also eerily anticipates the twenty-first century—the era of 9/11, Trump, “wokism,” and the COVID-19 pandemic. What Ellul detects amid Cold War propaganda has reached a fever pitch with the advent of the Internet, smartphones, and social media: the modern state’s techno-bureaucratic expansion has engendered an unparalleled rate of public participation in politics. People engage with political content and decisions in every walk of life. So panoptic is this engagement that Ellul likens it to captivity: “The individual’s seizure by the political powers is much graver and more decisive than economic alienation. The substitution of political slavery for economic slavery is the current fraudulent exchange.”

Thus politization has three essential features:

1. The buildup and diversification of state power.

2. The technological capacity, both on the side of the state and of its citizens., to remain occupied with political questions at all times.

3. The popular assumption that the masses should actively participate in state politics.

According to Ellul, we have forgotten how peculiar and radical this social arrangement is. In no previous historical era—whether Greco-Roman antiquity, the feudal Middle Ages, or the postmedieval age of absolutism—were the masses occupied with political affairs. It is the modern state that has legitimized mass participation in politics, and it is the modern state that has profited from this innovation: “The myth [of politization] reveals itself in beliefs and, as a result, easily elicits almost religious fervor. We cannot conceive of society except as directed by a central omnipresent and omnipotent state.” This presupposition creeps into our very idea of authority. The state, not the church or the family, has become the criterion by which claims to law and truth are measured and understood. As a result, the church, the family, and all other social institutions are viewed as parts of an unavoidable “political process,” by which “we are led to render all questions political.” This turn “is not only fixed in the minds of the masses but is stated to be so—and justified—by the intellectuals.”

As it happens, this is precisely why we are now bombarded with political messaging even on Christmas Day. On the logic of politization, a holiday or a philosophical concept or an artistic work is only important insofar as it maps onto a political issue: “A poet restricting himself to being a poet without signing petitions or manifestos would immediately be accused of retiring to his ivory tower.” Similarly, values such as “freedom” and “justice” must be viewed against the backdrop of the state, lest they be seen as “simplistic, ridiculous, and adolescent.” In a particularly prophetic passage, Ellul observes that the concept of “justice” has been thoroughly politicized:

Justice no longer exists as a personal virtue or as the more or less attained result of the law. When we take it seriously, justice unfortunately must be endowed with some adjective, particularly the adjective “social,” i.e., it is ultimately regarded as political. It is up to the State to make justice prevail: there is only collective justice, and the difficult questions by legal philosophers of past centuries make no more sense to us now than does the Christian affirmation that justice is the individual’s miraculous transformation by the grace of God.

Indeed, along the lines of a Kierkegaard or a Nietzsche, Ellul points out that politics has usurped the place of God in modern life. The ideals and the values of the past have been rendered trivial in relation to the only thing that matters: “A person without the right (in reality magical) to place a paper ballot in a box is nothing, not even a person. To progress is to receive this power, this mythical share in a theoretical sovereignty that consists in surrendering one’s decisions for the benefit of someone else who will make them in one’s place.” It is as if politics alone can imbue life with worth and meaning. Ellul quotes the French ethnologist and liberal activist Paul Rivet (1876-1958), who, commenting on the plight of people in Africa, notably professed, “A man who cannot read a newspaper to be informed is not a man.” Just as Christianity conceives of God as a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, so does politization elevate its own triune deity: “‘Information—Participation—Action.’ That is now the order of the day and the nature of progress.”

Of course, one might concede that Ellul identifies a legitimate problem in authoritarian states such as China or Russia yet nevertheless deny that he is right about the modern state as such. Ellul, however, would reframe such a conclusion. Yes, one government may allow a wider range of information than another, or one political party may conceive of “action” in a different way than another, but either way the state has a stranglehold on contemporary affairs. Individuals have certain rights, and lobbyists are granted certain latitudes, yet these “are never anything but innocuous concessions, mere powers to endorse what is good for the state—the latter being the sum of all the social good.” For that reason, the only remaining “heresy” is to question the centrality of politics: the one who does so “is regarded as a pessimist, a stupid fellow (for he fails to see the very deep and secret mores in the political game), a defeatist who bows his head to fate, a bad citizen.”

Sensu stricto, a “heretic” is someone who deviates from an established orthodoxy, particularly in the domain of religion. A contemporary heretic, then, deviates from the orthodoxy of modernity’s most deep-seated religion—that of state power and political discourse. This is why “politization” transcends party platforms and individual politicians: it is not a sociological concept but a comprehensive Weltanschauung, which “exists by virtue of our loyalties and our passions.” If, famously, Jesus warned his disciples not to “lay up for yourselves treasures upon earth” (Matt. 6:19), for “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matt. 6:21), Ellul implies that politics has complicated Jesus’ message. Just as Søren Kierkegaard foresaw in works such as The Single Individual, written during the First Schleswig War (1848-52), politics has converted the eternal goals of religious life into an earthly program. “Man,” Ellul writes, “now experiences faith and religious conversion thanks to his participation in politics.”

All of which brings us back to where this essay began—namely, the holiday “tweets” of Trump and Biden. So desensitized have we become to such political messaging that it now seems normal. At the very least, Ellul’s The Political Illusion would have us question this assumption. And yet, I would argue that the book’s findings have implications well beyond the halls of power in places such as Beijing and Washington, D.C. Indeed, the next time a clergyperson centers his or her homily on a political question, or a parish council notes that church attendance and giving continue to decline, it should be no wonder. For, as has been seen, there is an inverse relationship between state power and religious life. And if you think this “holiday season” was bad, just wait till next year.

1. The only exception to this trend was the 2012 presidential election, which saw a minor dip from 2008. Doubtless this slight and temporary downturn (about 2 million fewer voters total for the entire country) had to do with the relative ease with which Democratic President Barack Obama defeated his Republican challenger Mitt Romney.