Sanctimony: A Political Vice from Which We Must Escape

“Watching this quasi-religious mentality migrate leftward and displace more rational, humanistic values has been painful.”

I spent my youth attending evangelical Christian schools during the presidency of George W. Bush, arguably what will come to be seen as the peak of the Christian Right’s influence on American politics. For the most part, it was not pleasant. Among other things, the experience instilled in me a lasting hostility toward conservative priorities and religious faith. But the years since then have suggested that this hostility is rooted in something deeper and is not necessarily reserved for religion or even the Right. I have recognized that I have a profound, visceral hatred for sanctimony.

Sanctimony implies pretensions of moral superiority. To some extent, sanctimony is, therefore, unavoidable wherever moral ideals are at issue and the orthodoxies they buttress feel insecure. When I was a teenager, the loudest moralists were clearly on the Right, and their moralism was deep-fried in religious fundamentalism. Conservative Christians obsessed over abortion, gay marriage, and—possibly the silliest culture war ever fought on American soil—creationism. The neoconservative wing of the Republican Party represented another prominent source of sanctimony, with particularly disastrous results abroad. Every era has its pieties, and pieties naturally tend to generate more fanatics and conformists than heretics.

It may be that every brand of politics has its own pieties as well. Liberal sanctimony may have reached its boiling point during the presidency of Donald Trump, but it had been brewing well before. The millennium opened with a liberalism that differed very little from conservatism. Clintonian triangulation had neutered whatever vestiges of progressivism remained in the Democratic Party, while also shifting the entire American political spectrum toward the Right. Under President Barack Obama, Democrats compensated for this lack of substantive difference by embracing the most nauseatingly trite rhetoric imaginable. President Obama’s invocations of “the arc of history” as a source of long-term hope evoked a mix of Martin Luther King Jr. and Francis Fukuyama. However inspiring at first, the metaphor sounded increasingly saccharine as the culture war mutated and views of both history and the future darkened.