How U.S. Politics Became Religion

I remember the moment I felt it.

Not the moment it began, that was long before any of us noticed. But the moment I felt something shift inside me that I didn't recognize. It was during the 2015 campaign season, watching a man I had never encountered in politics say things from a podium that I had been taught, since childhood, that decent people simply did not say. And millions of people were cheering.

I felt something I had never quite felt before. Something hot and certain and righteous.

I felt hate.

Not toward his supporters. Toward him. And the hate scared me more than he did, because I knew what it meant. It meant it had gotten inside me. It meant I had become, in my own small way, exactly what I was reacting against. Certain. Tribal. Closed.

That recognition is where the book The Whisper Before the Wave began. And it is where this post begins too.

The Drops That Carved the Canyon

Politics did not become religion overnight. People did not start viewing someone with an opposing political view as a sinner overnight. Canyons are not curved overnight.

Look at a river cutting through stone and you see something that took ten thousand years of pressure, patiently persisting. A drop is nothing. A million drops, over time, reshape the landscape entirely. What we are living inside today is the canyon. But the drops have been falling for a long time.

The first drop most historians point to landed in the late 1970s, when Jerry Falwell Sr. and the Moral Majority began organizing evangelical Christians as a political bloc. Faith and political identity began to fuse. To be a good Christian started to mean voting a certain way. The personal and the political began their long marriage.

The second drop fell in the 1990s. The Speaker of the House of Representatives at the time, Newt Gingrich, systematically introduced the language of warfare into political discourse. Opponents became enemies. Compromise became betrayal. Priorities shifted from governing to winning, and winning required a villain. The culture of contempt that now defines Washington did not arrive fully formed. It was taught deliberately over time, as strategy.

Then came September 11, 2001. Fear does something specific to the human brain. In fight or flight fashion, it looks for shortcuts. It reaches for the comfort of certainty and the safety of the group. In the years that followed, the American identity hardened around an axis of us and them in ways that never fully softened. Security became the organizing principle of public life, and security, by definition, requires a threat.

And then the phone arrived in everyone's pocket. Social media did not create division. But it gave it a microphone, a scoreboard, and a financial incentive. Algorithms learned that outrage travels faster than nuance. That threat activates faster than hope. That the most profitable version of you is the most frightened version of you. The drops became a flood.

The People Inside the Canyon

Here is what I want to say carefully, because it matters more than anything else in this post.

The people on both sides of this divide are not, at their core, villains.

They are anxious, fearful.

A retired factory worker in Pennsylvania who feels the world he built his identity around has been taken from him without his consent is not a monster. He is a human being whose sense of belonging and purpose is under threat. And a threatened brain reaches for familiar stories and accustomed enemies because that is what threatened brains have always done. While it kept our ancestors alive on the savanna, it is tearing us apart in the digital age.

This does not excuse what fear produces. It explains it. And explanation is where the possibility of repair begins.

“Sit with almost anyone long enough, past the labels and the defenses, and something else emerges. Fear. Longing. Old wounds. Love for their children. Confusion about a world that keeps changing.” —Excerpt from: The Whisper before the Wave

Growth Is Not a Straight Line

I want to be honest about something. There is a version of this post that ends in a well thought out observation, a five step path back to civic health. But I am not going to write that post. Because straight lines are exceedingly rare in nature and the path back from where we are will not be straight either.

A seed does not grow upward without first pushing through darkness. A bone heals stronger at the fracture point, but only after the pain of breaking. The river does not carve the canyon in a single purposeful rush. It meanders. It doubles back. It finds the path of least resistance and follows it until the landscape is transformed.

We will have days that feel like regression. Moments when the wave crashes harder than the one before it. Elections that feel like steps backward, regardless of your political persuasion. They are part of the process, not evidence that the process has failed.

What matters is the direction of the collective drops. Are they flowing towards common good, in a direction that benefits our shared humanity? Or, in a different direction?

The Whisper Available to You

In The Whisper Before the Wave, there is a dying man sitting by a fire, finally still enough to hear what has been underneath the noise his whole life. Clarity. A quality of attention. The willingness to sit with what is true rather than what is comfortable.

That quality of attention is what politics as religion forfeits. Religion, at its worst, does not ask questions. It depicts certainty. It offers belonging in exchange for compliance. It makes doubt a form of disloyalty. Religion at its best is a collective expression of grace, compassion, acceptance. Two sides of the same coin.

Presence transcends the duality of religion and politics. It asks you to hold complexity without resolving it on the spot. To see the anxious human being inside the political enemy. To notice when your own certainty is fear in disguise. To ask, honestly, what whispers you are walking past because examining them might impinge upon your beliefs.

My kryptonite taught me what I was capable of becoming. And not in a good way. The book is my answer to that lesson. My small drop in a very large body of water. My nudge of the pendulum back toward something better.

I no longer feel hatred towards that man on the podium in 2015. I feel understanding...for how far outside social mores one can exist when operating out of ego. And I feel empathy…for I know one can never know inner peace when operating out of ego.

You have a drop too. A conversation you could have differently. A story you could examine before you share it. A neighbor you could see as a normal human being rather than a sinner of opposing beliefs. A moment of genuine open-mindedness where contempt would have been easier.

Drops become rivers. Rivers carve canyons. And canyons, eventually, become the landscape everyone lives inside.

Be mindful of where your drops land.

“Water does not resist its becoming. It rises from sea to sky, not by force, by warmth. It forms clouds, not to dominate, to rise above. It falls as rain, not in punishment, in offering. When it touches the earth, it nourishes. And when it is still, it reflects.” – Excerpt from: The Whisper Before the Wave

Let's Do Human Better. :)