The Age of Incomplete Religions

Beware the copula “and.” Politics and religion. Church and state. What does it mean to bring these into relationship? Are they immiscible? Soluble? In certain respects, but not others? At certain times, but not others? A host of questions to be considered anew. How did conservatives get here? What prompts them today to wonder aloud if they need to rethink the relationship between church and state, between politics and religion?

First, conservatives have witnessed the appallingly rapid takeover of nearly every American institution by that constellation of phenomena called CRT, wokeness, DEI, cancel culture, and what has been called virtue-signaling, but which is better understood as innocence-signaling. Unable to name the genus to which these species belong, unable to see the underlying logic that gathers all of these phenomena together, they have been unable to fight back against them, save for a minor victory here or there. To win the war, conservatives must first name the enemy. That enemy is identity politics.

Second, conservatives have been unwilling to abandon terms for the enemy that have brought coherence to the conservative movement since the 1950s. The terms “cultural Marxism” and “progressivism” are hopelessly out of date and analytically inadequate to the current crisis, yet they are invoked at every like-minded gathering or convention. We are engaged in a monstrous twenty-first-century struggle. The Cold War is over. We must jettison terms that were fitting seventy years ago. 

Regarding cultural Marxism, the “long slow march through the institutions” never happened. Instead, we have witnessed the breathtakingly rapid sprint of identity politics through our institutions. Bernie Sanders is a Marxist; his thinking has been thrown into the dustbin of history by the identitarians who now rule the left. What about progressivism—the belief that the “expert competence” of elites who have been trained in our best universities can redeem the American regime from the founders’ illusions that citizen competence is enough? That movement has been terminated by the left itself. Today, our best colleges and universities do not teach “expert competence.” Students there are taught identity politics instead. They are taught to think in terms of innocent victimhood and transgressive stain. Why do conservatives acquiesce to the “progressive” self-description coming from the left today, which seeks to link a new and destructive movement to a tradition of thought that, even if mistaken, sought to strengthen America? The left today is not progressive; it is identitarian. It does not want experts to rule; it wants innocent victims to rule. It does not wish to strengthen America; it wishes to destroy it.

Conservatives dare to raise questions about church and state because identity politics has so completely overrun our institutions that they now wonder if the constitutional regime set up by the founders was either faulty from the beginning, or is unfixable now even if initially well-established—hence the emergence of serious thinking about Christian nationalism, a post-liberal order, and pre-modern integralism. Conservatives dare think down these paths because they intimate that America is on the verge of a regime change—the new regime being based on innocent victimhood rather than citizen competence, as the one established by the founders was. We should be under no illusion: that is the project of the left today. 

Here, let us wrestle with our problem not by developing any institutional claims about church and state, or any category claims about politics and religion, but rather by clearing the decks for a moment, and talking about three kinds of debt, and three kinds of economies. Afterward, I will offer some observations about the debilitated state of our regime, and why conservatives have been so impotent in the trench warfare that is upon us.

In the beginning was debt. That’s not the biblical formulation, but debt has been a central consideration from the very beginning of human civilization, so this claim is not far off the mark. Among the oldest written civilizational records is the Code of Hammurabi, which stipulates what payments—debts—are due for what transgressions. No agreed understanding of debt, no civilization. The most important work by mortal hands in Western civilization—Plato’s Republic—begins with the seemingly random claim by Cephalus that justice involves “paying our debts,” and ends with the mysterious claim that “justice is beyond price.” Does Plato introduce this idea of justice at the very beginning of the Republic because he understands that debt is the most primordial experience of man, and that the primitive way of understanding it—every debt must be repaid—does not grasp the deeper mystery of justice? I think he does. What of the great breakthrough of the Hebrews and Christians? Genesis 3 does indeed make a claim about the primordiality of debt. Christians since Paul and Athanasius have understood this chapter to have established that man cannot pay the price to liberate himself from his slavery to sin—hence the “divine ransom” Christ paid, to adopt fallen man and bring him, as an adopted son, into the household of God. 

The left in America today is consumed by the primordiality of debt in human life, while conservatives have little to say about it. Or, rather, conservatives have had little to say about the deeper, more mysterious understanding of debt toward which Plato seems to be pointing, or the understanding of debt that underwrites the central Christian claim about unpayable debt. Since the 1950s, American conservatives have, of course, focused on two more immediately obvious kinds of debt: economic debt, the commercial balance sheet of costs and benefit; and tradition, the debt we owe our fathers. Indeed, it could be said that these have been the two pillars of conservatism, aligned in some measure but never exactly pointing in the same direction.  

To begin to understand the place of this deeper, third kind of debt and economy, which we must grasp if we are to understand the sort of debt that identity politics has in mind, consider Tocqueville’s thinking about religion and its deformation. In 1835, in Democracy in America, he had written the following: “Eighteenth century thinkers believed that religion would die out as enlightenment and freedom spread. It is tiresome that the facts do not fit the theory.” The age of enlightenment would not blot out Christianity. In 1851, in The Old Regime, he added a new twist to his theory: The French Revolution, he wrote, was an “incomplete religion.” Christianity would weaken, and into its place would step one incomplete religion after another. After Christendom would not come “secularism,” but rather the age of incomplete religions. 

What is an incomplete religion? Consider these two characteristics: 

1. In Christianity, man is universally stained and, through a vertical irruption into history, he is saved from his stain and transgression. But in an incomplete religion, the vertical relation between man and God is reconceived as a horizontal relation between pure, mortal, innocent victim groups and impure, mortal transgressor groups. God does not “save” the world, man does, by expunging the impure groups (and the filthy things they have done, like invent capitalism and fuel industry with “dirty” petro-chemicals), so that the body-social may be cleansed. The impure groups have a debt they cannot repay, and so must be eliminated from the body-social.

2. Second, an idea that follows from the first: The innocent victim is justified (to use not irrelevant theological terms), so that his revolutionary acts—say, guillotining landed aristocrats and churchmen during The Terror; slaughtering whole classes of citizens during the blood sacrifice that was communism; butchering Israelis on October 7; rioting, burning neighborhoods, and destroying livelihoods during the “mostly peaceful protests” in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death; or cheering on a would-be presidential assassin—are “covered over,” to use Christian language to explain the “pass” given to the parishioners of the incomplete religions that have befallen us since 1789. The legal status of what the incomplete religionists do may be criminal, but the legal debt they might owe is discounted or canceled because their act is justified in the third, higher, trans-legal economy of debt within which incomplete religions operate. Whether we are considering the French Revolution, communism, the ghastly simplifications of “post-colonial studies,” or the raging fire of identity politics in America and Western Europe today, the so-called innocent victim is never guilty, no matter how many laws he or she breaks. The stained transgressors, on the other hand, are forever under indictment, and need to vindicate themselves—hence the never-ending acts of performative justice we witness, say, by guilty white liberals, who several years ago painted “Black Lives Matter” on streets across America, did nothing to actually heal wounds and make the lives of the least among us any better, and quivered in the hope that social death would pass them over. More recently, “White Men for Kamala” videos on X display the same sick fawning, in the hope that the debt owed by those with “white privilege” might be eased.

The incomplete religions that have overshadowed the so-called secular enlightened West for two-and-a-half centuries operate, like Christianity, in a third economy, in which the moneyed economy that conservatives know so well counts as nothing. Judas, the Apostle, received his silver coins for his betrayal, yet took his life because his betrayal could not be atoned for in the moneyed economy. The money of the landed aristocracy and the priests could not buy their pardon during The Terror. The richest members of the bourgeoisie could not cleanse their ledger with gold, and so they were extinguished. Concertgoers pleaded for their lives on October 7. No matter. They carried no guns, but were guilty of being “colonizers,” as our wise young people have declared on elite college campuses across America this past year. And of reparations in the identity politics world, even if Americans reach a consensus on the size of the check, we all know that the debt would continue to be called in.  

Like Christianity, all of the incomplete religions operate within a third, spiritual economy, and assert that the transgressor has an unpayable debt. In Christianity, the transgressor is every member of mankind—and his unpayable debt is canceled by the divine innocent victim, Christ. In all the incomplete religions, the transgressors, too, have an unpayable debt, which they can discharge only by being purged—hence the ongoing cancellation, traceable to the French Revolution, of all those who believe, not in cosmopolitan man and globalism, but their particular nation; hence the hatred of our bourgeois institutions of family and church by the Frankfurt School in the mid-twentieth century, and the project of destroying them; hence the current hatred of Israel because it is simply and unequivocally a “colonizer” who must be eradicated “from the river to the sea”; hence the hatred of “whiteness,” and the language of “toxicity,” applied especially to young white men who have dutifully stayed in the lane afforded them within the identity politics regime—drugs, online gaming, pornography, effeminacy, and so forth.

The categories of these incomplete religions—universalist vs. particularist, oppressed vs. oppressor, colonized vs. colonizer, innocent victim vs. “white straight man”— establish a sharp line of demarcation between the pure and the damned, as does Christianity. But in the case of incomplete religions, there is no repentance, atonement, or forgiveness. The debt accumulates and can only be discharged via violence against the stained transgressor. The innocent victim does not, as in Christianity, “take away the sins of the world.” Rather, only by purging the impure group can the world be made pure again. The purportedly pure innocent victim assures himself that his very survival depends on purging the toxicity he beholds, which is “out there,” but never “in here.” Regarding the upcoming election, identitarians declare that we must “save our democracy” from the deplorables. So goes this dangerous line of thinking, which can be satisfied only with the shedding of blood. Never a thought about the poison that lies within them.

Let me conclude with a number of succinct points:

1. Identity politics is an incomplete religion, a spiritual economy, according to which pure innocent victim groups must ascend, and the impure groups must be purged.

2. Identity politics bears a resemblance to the incomplete religion of Marxism that came before it, but is different.

3. Progressivism is dead; the left today is identitarian; it fixes on innocent victimhood, not expert competence. We must ring this bell, Paul Revere-style, and announce the name of the enemy that wishes to replace the founders’ regime of competence.

4. The conservative movement has failed to understand and address identity politics because it understands economic debt, and the debt we owe our fathers (tradition), but not the spiritual economy in which the incomplete religion of identity politics operates, which is akin to a Great Awakening unto transgression and stain, though without God and without forgiveness.

5. The spiritual economy is the economy of stain and redemption. The left knows this, but only offers ghastly incomplete religions through which to work out the salvation of man. Hesitant conservatives are proud of the two lesser economies of money and of tradition, and they talk confidently of “religious values” and “Christian principles.” But because they are, dare I say it, afraid to publicly defend the spiritual economy that Christianity authors, and through which they have historically taken on and defeated all heresies and apostasies, they are unlikely to emerge victoriously. In a word, the scandal of the Cross, that place where the unpayable debt that inheres in man is paid off, is an embarrassment that conservatives dare not defend. Religious values, Christian principles, even natural law—the invocation of these cannot neutralize identity politics. The scandal of the Cross offers the only antidote to the poison that is now destroying the American regime. Embrace the embarrassment and live; reject it and die.

6. Regarding the question “what lies ahead,” there are three possible futures:

1. The civilization-formerly-known-as-Christendom endures wave after wave of incomplete religion in the so-called secular age, until it collapses. First the French Revolution, then Marxism, then post-colonial analysis, and now identity politics. Next comes trans-humanism, according to which the impure group is the carbon-footprint-bearing, virus-carrying creature, man himself. Already we are receiving gentle guidance that prepares the way.

2. The West follows Nietzsche, who proclaimed that to reestablish its vitality, the West must renounce Christian guilt altogether and “have a tomorrow,” to use his term, by forgetting—slavery in America, colonialism, two world wars, and the Holocaust in Europe. Here is the real alt-right, stripped of its bizarre accretions.

3. The civilization-formerly-known-as-Christendom is reborn anew unto Christianity. I have no competence or ill-informed preference to offer about how to rename this rebirth, or any coherent institutional insights about church and state or about the categorical relationship between politics and religion such a rebirth might configure. I am certain, however, that the necessary condition for this renewal is chronicled in the staggering account of which the whole of the Bible is testimony, of two apex creatures, Adam and Eve, whose insistence that they are innocent victims is supplanted by the subsequent agonizing understanding that their own sin runs so deep that only a divine ransom, by the only Innocent Victim that creation will ever know, will save them. 

7. Finally, conservatives who dream of Christian nationalism for America are too late. We have an established church, and our elite educational institutions provide its clergy, as they did long ago in America. The spiritual economy of identity politics suffuses all of our institutions. What was once an ecclesiastical matter—how may man lift the burden of his unpayable debt and be redeemed—has now become a political matter. Politics and religion have become one. Identity politics is that unity.

Joshua Mitchell is professor of political theory at Georgetown University and a fellow of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. This essay is adapted from a speech delivered at the 2024 National Conservatism Conference.

First Things depends on its subscribers and supporters. Join the conversation and make a contribution today.

Click here to make a donation.

Click here to subscribe to First Things.

Image by Nicolas-Antoine Taunay, provided by Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain. Image cropped.