Politics as America’s religion

These new religions lack only one thing: something transcendent that makes the failure in our lives redemptive, and that sees politics merely as the necessary art of attending to the imperfect and the transient. It took centuries for Christianity to begin to model that kind of grace, and to reject earthly power as a distraction from what really matters, what really lasts. It would be a terrible shame if America threw that shimmering inheritance away.