Shadi Hamid:
Welcome back, dear listeners. This is the second episode of the new season. In our first episode, we talked about the post-religious right. Now we’re going to talk about the post-religious left. And this is a dear topic to me because I consider myself to be of the left on the left. I see myself as a progressive, even though I’m quite critical of what progressivism has become, and I’m a Democrat who’s quite critical of a Democratic Party, but still in some ways it’s my team. I usually vote for it. I’ve actually never voted for a Republican. So that’s kind of where I’m at.
But something really fascinating has happened in the Democratic Party over the last several decades. It’s become increasingly secular. There used to be a time where a big chunk of a Democratic Party was made up of white Christians and specifically white Evangelicals. In fact, in 1990, so not too long ago, 40% of white Evangelicals were Democrats. 40%. Now that number is closer to 15%. In other words, over the past three decades, there’s been a massive exodus of Evangelicals and Christians more broadly from the Democratic Party. So what that means is the more that religious people leave the party, the more you’re going to be left with people who are secular. And the Democratic Party has become the home of the so-called nones, people who are no particular religious affiliation or agnostic or atheists.
And that’s obviously going to shape the nature of our country’s politics, because what that means is that the Republican Party is seen as the religious party, the Democrats are seen as the non-religious party, and that exacerbates polarization across that particular divide. So now if you come across a white person who talks about religion passionately, you almost automatically assume they’re going to be a Republican because on average, they are more likely to be a Republican. And that’s a very unfortunate thing.
There was a time when even think back to Obama’s landmark speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, where he talked about how in red America, but also blue America, we all worship the same God. That was the kind of language he was using, this language of a shared religiosity that wasn’t particular to one partisan affiliation or another. And we’ve lost that. So that’s kind of where we’re at.
Now the question is, what replaces religion for Democrats and for liberals and progressives? They no longer have religion, most of them at least, no longer have religion as their north star. And as we talked about in our previous episode, everyone needs a kind of worldview, a kind of faith. We’re all oriented towards something larger than ourselves. So what that means is something else is going to have to replace religion. And my view is be careful what you wish for because what you might get instead of religion might actually be worse.
I think what we’ve seen on the left, although it’s dissipated a little bit in the last year or two, but I think it’s still strong, is what might be called wokeness or wokeism. And we can kind of unpack what exactly that means. When I hear the word “woke”, I think about an obsessive focus on white supremacy, on systemic racism. Systemic racism is real, but when you see everything, all of the ills of society as a product of systemic racism, you’re giving up on the role of the individual. You’re saying that there are forces beyond us that we have no control over, and I just don’t think that’s a healthy way for us to orient our politics. There’s also the obsession with language policing that you have to say the right thing about the right minority at the right time. And if you don’t, you might actually get canceled because you’re being insensitive or you’re doing cultural appropriation.
I think wokeness has largely been defeated in our public culture because of the rise of Donald Trump and his reelection in 2024, but it still is animating us to some extent on the left. It still is there. And I think it’s worth really analyzing, what is wokeness? Is it a kind of replacement for religion? One way that I’ve described it is it’s almost religion without religion. Or you might say, Matt-
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, no, I mean, I think on that, I think it’s not actually helpful to say that the left is secular. I think it’s actually more helpful to think of it as a secular form of spirituality in the sense that it really does behave a lot like a religion would. So, I mean, you think about just the kind of behavior on the woke left, there is a ton of sort of demand for purity on the left, ideological purity. You have to buy the correct brands. You have to use the correct language. You have to avoid specific companies and specific practices. You have certain dietary restrictions. Things like reparations can be a way of atoning oneself of past sins. You can do indigenous land acknowledgements as a way of doing a ritual to make sure you’re about to do a pure event. It’s very common for those on the left to engage in excommunication through cancel culture.
Shadi Hamid:
Cancel culture. Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Right? And so I think that any scholar of religion when observing this behavior of the purity, the demands for purity, would say this subculture is behaving in many ways like a religious tribe and they’re holding one another to account. Even the phrase, “You have to do the work.” When you hear that phrase, “Do the work,” what does that mean to you? What do you think they’re talking about?
Shadi Hamid:
It sounds almost religious, or at least the way that I sometimes view religion is, “I got to do the work and do my five daily prayers. I got to make sure that I’m putting in the effort and then God will reward me for that effort.” There’s a sense of you just got to just get down and do certain things. And it takes time, it takes attention, it takes money, it takes effort.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. I mean, a similar phrase is “check your privilege”. So the phrase “check your privilege” is you need to go into a period of self-examination. And for a Christian, when I hear that, I think, “Oh, I need to actually think about my sins. I need to stop and sort of meditate on the kind of work that I need to do.” There is a sense in which this sort of left-wing wokeism is kind of a parody of religious rituals in really important ways. And the dangerous part is they don’t see it.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. That’s the worst thing is when you’re mimicking a religion, but you don’t actually realize what you’re doing. It’s almost the worst of both worlds because you have the certainty of religion, but without the kind of aspects of forgiveness that are in the traditional Abrahamic faiths, for example, so something to temper it.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Totally. So, I mean, take the famous yard sign. It’s in rainbow colors that says, “In this house, we believe Black lives matter. Women’s rights are human rights. No human is illegal. Science is real. Love is love. Kindness is everything.” I mean, this is a creed. This is what we believe. And the sign, it makes no attempt to prove itself. It is a statement of faith, right?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. It’s like passed down from God and you have to believe in it regardless.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. Science is real, period. End of discussion. It’s quite dogmatic. It’s quite sermonic. It’s preachy. But those who would put this sign in their yard don’t see it as part of a religious community. They don’t see it as, “I’m committing myself to a worldview and a community,” in that kind of way. And I think that’s particularly dangerous.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, I think it is. And that’s why it is good that there has been a kind of self-correction on the left to push back against these excesses. But I think they’re still going to be there because there is something appealing about it. It speaks to something that we desire. It gives people ritual, it gives people atonement, it gives people purity. But I think we should never want people to feel too morally pure. This desire for moral superiority is really a bane in our politics because the more that we think that we’re perfect, it means that the people on the other side of the political or ideological spectrum are not. We’re righteous over them. We’re superior over them. They’re the ones who are the enemies of progress.
And this is why I think even when we think about the word “progressives” when we’re describing this movement, there’s something that makes me nervous about that because if you really believe that you’re in line with progress and you represent progress, it means that your opponents, they’re not just enemies of your political position, they’re enemies to progress itself and therefore they have to be stopped. So it kind of elevates the stakes of politics and it makes politics much more like spiritual warfare.
And I think that one thing that both you and I have talked about and written about a lot is we have to find ways to bring politics down to the mundane. Politics should not be operating at this high level of maximal stakes. And that’s why I think it’s always a point of concern when I hear people say things like, “This is the most important election of our lifetime,” because that really means that you’re carrying a burden. A lot is weighing on this one particular outcome. Also, factually, not every election can be the most important election of your lifetime. Only one of them can be, if you think about it in the kind of broader sweep of time. So the question then becomes, how do we bring politics down?
Matthew Kaemingk:
And I think on top of that, what you were talking about earlier, a sense of hierarchy, that the term “woke” itself, what it assumes is essentially that the world is filled with two different kinds of people, people who are awake and people who are asleep. So if you walk around imagining that you’re awake and all these other people are asleep, you’ve created a hierarchy where you can see you are a person of the light and they are still asleep in the darkness. And so once again, there is sort of a parody of religion going on. I have the truth, I have the light, I have the true message, and I need to awake you from your slumber.
And as an Evangelical, one of the things that Evangelicals love to do is talk about their conversion story and about how they met Jesus and how their life changed dramatically. When I listen to people talk about their woke story, there is a certain parody of it, of, “I used to be all of these terrible conservative things, and then I awoke, I checked my privilege, and now I’m an ally.” You can narrate a story of your own left wing salvation in that kind of way.
And that’s the danger of woke language in general, is that it divides humanity between the awake and the sleep, and it creates a hierarchy. I have done the work, and so now it’s my job to teach you and help you do the work as well. And it all has to do with, I mean, that term progress, that I am a progressive, I am on the right side of history, and you are on the wrong side of history, and history is going to sort of roll over you.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. The idea that history has some kind of internal logic of its own, that it’s always going in one particular direction, and then you become the one who decides what history is and what direction history is going in, that can give you a real sense, again, that you are pure and that you are superior to others. So that’s why I think all of us have to find ways, whether it’s on the left or right, to say that we don’t have any monopoly on history or progress. Progress is not necessarily a linear thing. It can go up and down. And we also have to have the humility to say that we don’t know always what is progress and what is not.
And it will also depend on your religious conviction. I mean, if you’re an Evangelical, then the Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage may not be seen as an example of progress. But of course, if you’re on the left, if you’re woke, that would be seen as a major sign of progress. So you have two competing narratives of progress. So I think what we have to do is say, “I think I’m right, but I’m open to the possibility that you might …” There’s still a small percentage chance that the other side could be right, even if you’re almost certain that your side is the good one.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So I think this optimistic view of the future, this progress, the moral arc of the universe as Obama [inaudible 00:16:05]-
Shadi Hamid:
Bends towards justice.
Matthew Kaemingk:
It bends towards justice. There’s something deeply hopeful about progressivism and that we are on the right side of history, and if we just work hard enough, America will continue to progress. I mean, I have a sense that, frankly, this is why those on the left really do struggle with losing elections. I think when I think about despair after elections, I think in large part, those on the left are much more dramatic when they lose an election.
Shadi Hamid:
They’re always crying. They’re always crying for an election. Yeah. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, I cried in 2016 when Trump won for the first time. And I think that probably in retrospect, we were justified to be very distraught about the future of our nation. But at the same time, I don’t think that one should cry over an election.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. I have this image of after the election, of course, many of us turn to Saturday Night Live, and famously, Tina Fey, Tina Fey got on and was processing later on the loss to Donald Trump, and she’s trying to minister to her fellow liberals who are weeping and crying. And so she pulls out a huge sheet cake and she just starts to stuff it in her mouth.
Shadi Hamid:
I remember that one. Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
And she’s sort of therapizing herself by eating in this way. And I have to say that I think that one of the reasons why losing elections is particularly dramatic or traumatic for those on the left has to do with their view of history, of if we work hard, if we organize, if we educate, that ultimately progress is on our side, history is on our side. If we make good arguments, ultimately the universe is going to bend towards us because we are on the right side of history.
Shadi Hamid:
Which sounds very religious-
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah.
Shadi Hamid:
… going back to that.
Matthew Kaemingk:
And so then it does become quite traumatic when you lose, when your side is not justified. And it is, once again, because we are increasingly looking to politics to provide us with meaning and value and direction. And as we said, that’s true for those on the right, and it’s true for those on the left. So that’s why I don’t like talking about the political left as a secular movement, because it behaves so religiously in so many ways when you think about it.
Shadi Hamid:
But there is one interest, when I think about the phrase, “doing the work,” I think there’s something very interesting about it that distinguishes it from religion. So when you do the work, it’s almost like that’s all you have to do and then naturally you’ll get the result that you’re looking for. So if only everyone did the work, we’d have progress. Where I think from an Islamic perspective, there’s this sense that you as an individual do your part, you live up to God’s commandments and you try to be a better Muslim, but then the outcome of that is out of your hands. The world won’t necessarily become a better place just because you’ve become a better Muslim. And there’s a kind of separation between intent and outcome.
And we have a prophetic hadith, which people mention all the time because I think it’s a good way to live one’s life, which is, “Actions are judged based on their intentions.” And that’s a way of separating and saying, “Hey, the intention was good. I tried my best, but that doesn’t mean I’m necessarily going to succeed.” Where I think when you look at the left or progressives, there’s a direct link between doing the work and success. And so when they don’t get success, they don’t know how to make sense of the world around them. Something has gone fundamentally wrong in the universe because they should be rewarded for their work.
And that’s why I think Donald Trump’s reelection was so devastating because the first time around it could be justified or understood as an aberration. He shouldn’t have won, he didn’t deserve to win. And if we didn’t have electoral college, he wouldn’t have won. But the second time around, he won by a clear margin, and then that just punctures the whole progressive worldview. How could people, knowing what they knew from the first term, how could people who are aware of the world around them … because there’s a sense that if you give people the right information and the right education, and you tell them what the right way is, then they’ll vote correctly too. But this time they didn’t vote correctly. They voted wrongly. And that, I think, has made people so despairing and so distraught because you can’t make sense of progress with that kind of outcome. He shouldn’t have won, but he did. The world is falling apart. The universe no longer makes sense.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. I think that’s really well said. I mean, I think, honestly, it is everywhere you look within the left wing movement, these forms of spiritual behavior. This morning, I was making some notes on this, and I was also looking at the practice of tearing down statues and celebrating the tearing down of statues. And you and I come from two monotheistic faiths that have engaged in iconoclasm, that we tear down idols as an important part of our faith, that idols need to be destroyed, and then through that, the community can be healed. And I think about the tearing down of statues in the American South and the slavery, which actually I am in favor of taking down those statues, but there is almost this sort of spiritual belief that when we take down these images, that that’s an important aspect of how the community is healed.
I also think of the ways excommunication is working. And the term, one very ancient religious term has come up in America again, which I never thought would come up again, which is original sin.
Shadi Hamid:
Slavery.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Specifically, those on the left use the term “original sin” quite often, which I never would’ve imagined they would do. It’s a lovely little doctrine, I highly recommend it, but what they’ve done is they reorient it around racism. So they would say, “Racism is America’s original sin.” And this doctrine of original sin essentially is sort of the root of all evil, the beginning of the fall. And so the assumption is if we just root out racism, then everything will be okay because racism is the core that explains every other ill in American society. Or others will say, “No, the original sin of America was capitalist greed.”
But it’s this belief that sin can be located in one thing. And if you just do the work, you can root it out and you can have a new future, a new day. But of course for Islam and for Christianity, we don’t believe that we can actually perfect ourselves in this life through our own work, at least I would say within Christianity, I would expect that.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. Perfection’s not possible, but that said, we as Muslims don’t have a doctrine of original sin.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I highly recommend it. You should try it out. But I think one of the reasons why I recommend it to people is it gives you a more realistic understanding of human beings that you pull up one weed in your garden and another one’s going to pop up over here. So yeah, you might work on race, but then over here is greed or over here is lust or over here is vanity. And for those on the left who think, “No, there’s just one weed, there’s just one original sin, and if we get rid of that, we will have no more weeds.” Well, that’s not the case. That’s not actually how sin works. It’s much more complicated than that. And so-
Shadi Hamid:
Something else will take its place.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Something else will take its place.
Shadi Hamid:
For my own edification, just because I love talking about theological concepts, can you maybe give a short, condensed explanation of original sin from a Christian perspective or from your perspective, just so our listeners can make some of the analogies.
Matthew Kaemingk:
For original sin, the doctrine of original sin is this belief that when humanity broke from God, when it tried to be God itself, that rupture between human beings and God spread throughout the world like a virus, so weeds, thistles, and thorns. So now we can see human pain and rebellion and poor behavior in our politics, in our economics, in our families, in our business, in the arts and culture and race, that sin like a virus has spread throughout the world, creating destruction. And it all comes from that original break that we made with God. That’s the root of it. And so it will never be fully solved until we are brought back into union with God. And so the lie is that, oh, all you need to do is fix your relationship with money, or all you need to do is fix your relationship with other races, or all you need to do is fix your relationship, whatever it is.
The lie is that you can pull up one of these weeds and it will solve all of the others. So Marxism is a good example of this, right? Marxism sees the original sin as private property. So every human problem-
Shadi Hamid:
Can be reduced to that.
Matthew Kaemingk:
… can be reduced to economic inequality. So poverty is the reason for terrorism. Poverty is the reason for patriarchal whatever. It explains everything else. Whereas the Christian doctrine of original sin says, “Don’t do that.” So anyways, back to the politics of the left.
Shadi Hamid:
Oh, yeah. Sure.
Matthew Kaemingk:
What this means is during that season of peak wokeism, the belief was it was racism, that racism explains America’s problems and so we need to do the work on that.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. One other thing I wanted to raise was the question of excommunication because certainly in our respective religions, there is excommunication, maybe less so since … To what extent would you say there is that in the Evangelical tradition? What role does excommunication play? I would say that from an Islamic perspective, excommunication has historically been quite rare. You have to meet a very high threshold for that charge to even have any legitimacy. Where I think if you look at how excommunicating was approached during peak woke era around 2020 post-George Floyd, there was an ease to it that anyone who violated something relatively minor about how to describe something having to do with racism or minorities or whatever it might be, they could be beyond the pale. They could be pushed out. And there wasn’t any kind of authority that could determine it. It was up to the mob.
If someone on Twitter caught something you were saying, it would spread like wildfire, and then you had no recourse. There was no avenue for redress. Where religions have traditions, they have some kind of authority structure, so it’s not completely arbitrary, it’s not just about the mob. There is something more grounded going on, even in a process of excommunication. So I think in that way, religion actually offers something better in that respect. It gives us a structure to say who is in and who is out, and it makes it very difficult to leave. It’s very difficult for a Muslim to stop being a Muslim. And I would say it seems relatively difficult for a Christian to stop being a Christian.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So within Christianity, so while Jesus did not provide us with an economic system or a political system, Jesus does provide us with a process to either excommunicate or reconcile someone who’s misbehaving. So Jesus specifically speaks to this issue, and it is a very slow, methodical, and relational process compared to the Twitter process, which is instant, it’s done by strangers, and so on and so forth. So for Jesus, what Jesus says is if someone’s misbehaving in some way within your church, within your religious community, Jesus says, “Well, first you need to just go privately to that person and you need to confront them. And then if they don’t listen, then you take a couple people with you and you confront them. And if they listen, then you’re commanded to forgive them and reconcile them. And if they still don’t listen, then you bring them before the whole community and you confront them.” And the hope is always, we’re going to find any way to get a path back for you. We want to keep the bridge open so you can come back into the community and be reconciled and restored. And only then, if you still refuse to confess, then you are excommunicated. It is a very sad moment. It’s not a moment-
Shadi Hamid:
One should not take any pleasure …
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, there should be no pleasure. There’s no joy. There’s no glory. The hope is to provide as many opportunities as possible for the person to come back. And so we had a guest on, it was a couple years ago, Elizabeth Bruenig, who got us onto this originally. So we have to give her credit was she said, I forget the exact wording, but it had something to do with essentially on Twitter, there is a desire for incredible moral purity and holding people to account, which is a very religious thing. Muslims and Christians really want moral purity. We want to be righteous. We care about saying and doing the right things. So she says, essentially, Twitter has this demand for moral purity, but it offers no path for atonement and reconciliation. And that’s the terror of it, is, as you would say, it’s religion without religion. So you get all of the wrath and judgment of religion, but you don’t get the mercy and the grace of religion. And that’s the terror of it.
Shadi Hamid:
And it’s worth noting that it is actually relatively easy, at least in Islam, to be forgiven for a sin. You just have to go to God, talk to him and ask for forgiveness with sincerity and with a good faith intention to not repeat the sin. So there’s always that avenue to go back, even after you’ve done something that would be considered morally repugnant.
And there isn’t that clear path. If you look at it from a secular perspective with wokeness, for example, it was never clear how you could be brought back into the community after committing a sin. It seemed sometimes like once you were out, you were out and there was no way back. And I think what our religions do is they give people a way back. I think there’s also a sociological reason for this. Both Islam and Christianity are missionary universalist religions, so they have an incentive to grow their ranks. If you made it easy to excommunicate people, there would be a risk then that you wouldn’t grow as quickly or as broadly as a religion. You want to keep your numbers high. You want the religion to spread. So you want to keep people in the faith even if they go astray.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So we’ve actually had two different Elizabeths on this podcast. We had Bruenig, but another Elizabeth spoke to this, Elizabeth Oldfield. And she said, “One of the things that happens to those on the left who get canceled,” she says, “you watch, once they get canceled because they said something wrong, out of line with purity, wait three months and they pop up on the hard right. They’ve been called to account for saying something wrong. And it’s essentially either you have to grovel your way back to reconciliation on the left or you have to double down and you go far over to the hard right. And that’s sort of the unintended consequence of left wing cancel culture, is it forces people to either grovel or to just double down.”
But I’d like to actually return to a point we talked about earlier because I think it’s really important. I think we’ve got to unpack it a little bit, the fact that those on the left wing do not recognize that they themselves have a faith because I think this is really critically important and it makes interfaith and inter-ideology conversation difficult because for those of us who are very explicit about our faith, we are very much aware that we stand by faith and that other people don’t accept it. When you walk down the street, you don’t expect other people to be Muslims or to accept what you have to say. Similarly, for me as a Christian, I don’t expect that everyone else would just see that Christianity is rational and true and so on and so forth. But for those on the left, they don’t actually have that experience quite as much. There is this sort of belief-
Shadi Hamid:
Everyone should be like us.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. This belief that everyone else lives by faith, but I live by reason or I live by education or I live by enlightenment, that they are still sort of in the darkness of faith, but I have become enlightened. I have become woke. And when you have that sort of orientation that other people live by faith, but I don’t, it’s very easy to slowly build a hierarchy where you have all the religious people down here, and then there are some who have transcended religion, who have gone above religion. And it’s very difficult for those of us who are still down here to have an equal dialogue and to talk about, I think what you would call priors. And I think-
Shadi Hamid:
First principles. Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, first principles. But you have a difficult time. I mean, that’s been something important to you in Washington, D.C., is having discussions about what are your first principles.
Shadi Hamid:
When you ask progressives sometimes, “Why do you believe what you believe?” And you try to go to the heart of the matter, I’ve often found that they struggle to give an answer because for many of them, it’s almost like their commitments go without saying. So they’re not really used to explaining where they come from. It’s just like, “Oh, I’m woke. This is what everyone should believe. Systemic racism is a matter of faith.” But then you ask, “Well, let’s kind of dig a little bit deeper into the concept of systemic racism. Isn’t there a danger if we see everything as systemic, then we don’t leave any room for individual agency?” Then they stumble because they haven’t been questioned.
And I think oftentimes progressives are primarily around other progressives. They’re not used to being challenged by conservatives where you have conservatives who go to universities in major urban centers and they have to contend with people challenging their worldview all the time because it’s not really cool to be a conservative on campus, so you have to kind of struggle and wrestle with your own beliefs. So I think it helps for political movements to be challenged and to be in some kind of competition and there should be more than one option. Otherwise, you don’t even know why you believe what you believe.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. I mean, and I’ll go back to the yard sign because I think it’s just the perfect picture of this. “In this house, we believe Black lives matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal, science is real, love is love.” The statement, “love is love,” is a perfect circle.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. Doesn’t really make any sense. You’re not explaining where love comes from.
Matthew Kaemingk:
It doesn’t really invite conversation either. It is just a statement, love is love. It’s a perfect circle. There’s no way to really enter the dialogue. There’s no way to really debate it. So when someone comes up to you and says … I mean, who would come up to you and just shout, “Love is love”? Well, what does that mean? Define love. And so as a Christian, I have a Bible that gives a lot of shape to what love is and what it looks like and what the boundaries of love are and what the purposes of love are. But the statement, love is love, there’s no way to enter into a conversation. There’s no democratic debate. It’s more like when someone says, “Love is love,” to me, I feel like I’m being hit by a baseball bat.
The yard sign itself is stuck into the grass and there is no thought to, okay, what is beneath this? What funds these convictions? Right? I think there’s just sort of a lacking of thinking about those first principles. And then it becomes very difficult to have a democratic conversation about why do you believe what you believe?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. And we have to leave … That to me, that question is so key. Whenever you encounter someone who you disagree with, you can disagree and that’s fine. But the second thing that you should do is to say, “Well, let me try to understand, how did this person come to their convictions?” That story is usually a very interesting one and people usually have legitimate reasons for believing what they do. Even voting for Donald Trump, as much as I dislike Trump, there were legitimate reasons to vote for him. And I have a responsibility as a citizen to try to understand why someone I disagree with voted for Donald Trump, because there was a reason. Something led them to vote for this man.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Okay. Let’s make this a little more personal, Shadi. You are a Muslim within the Democratic Party, as many Muslims are.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
First of all, just what is it like being a person of deep Islamic faith being in the Democratic Party with this more sort of woke spirituality as we’ve been talking about? What does the challenge look like for Muslims being a part of this tent of Democrats? What are the challenges? What are you asked to do and be within this?
Shadi Hamid:
I think Muslims in the Democratic Party, they’re reduced to another ethnic minority. We’re ethnicized or racialized. We’re not distinctive because we’re people of faith. We’re distinctive because we’re people of color. Muslims are just another marginalized group and we’re defined by our marginalization. And the fact that we have theological convictions is sort of papered over because that makes people uncomfortable. So we’re different, but we’re different for particular reasons and not other reasons.
And I think that actually reduces Muslims to something that they’re not. Islam is a faith. It’s not an identity group, ultimately. It’s not an ethnic group. It’s not a color. So I think that the Democratic Party relies on this idea that we’re a patchwork of different marginalized identities and we’re all equal and the same in our difference, or just everyone has an identity group and that’s to be respected and honored.
But the Democratic Party, I think also, there’s a kind of uncomfortable relationship with people of faith, as I mentioned earlier, because the Democratic Party is not as hospitable to theological conviction and to faith. There’s a sense that, “Hey, if you Muslims want to be part of our coalition, then you downplay your theological commitments and you play nice with others.” And so, for example, if you have moral objections to gay marriage, stay quiet about that because you’re in coalition with the LGBTQ+ community and everyone has to agree to respect the other, so don’t talk about morality when it comes to gender identity or sexuality or anything like that. So we’re asked in effect to be less than we are or to downplay certain core commitments that make us Muslim.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. So your faith, it needs to be reduced to sort of a personal value set.
Shadi Hamid:
Something private.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. Something private and personal. Yeah. So, I mean, how do you see that as you think about Muslim Democrats? And you think of prominent Democrats like Mamdani and others, how does that manifest in terms of how they lead within the Democratic Party? How do you see that playing out?
Shadi Hamid:
I think you’ll notice that they have to play very nice when it comes to LGBTQ issues, which can be a source of division in the community where ordinary Muslims in the Democratic Party … For example, there were some Muslim-led protests a couple years back when certain school districts removed the opt-out option for LGBTQ-themed classes. So some Muslims didn’t like that and felt that as parents, they should have the right to not have their kids be in certain lessons, which had been a previous right, they had these kind of opt-out clauses.
But then if you want to be a Muslim on the national level, and if you want to be successful like Zohran Mamdani or Ilhan Omar, you have to be very pro-LGBTQ+. So that’s a kind of exchange or bargain that is expected. And so I think that it’s like, don’t touch those controversial issues. And I get it. I understand where that’s coming from. The Democratic Party is a coalitional party. It is made up of these different groups, whether we like it or not, so I can kind of get where that’s coming from. But I think it does play a limiting role and it doesn’t speak to the truth of one’s full religious identity if you’re asked to kind of edit yourself in public and to downplay certain parts of who you are.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So in the last episode, we talked about the spiritual sickness of the right, and now we’ve been discussing the spiritual sicknesses of the left, but we ended with what needs to be done. And I am curious for you as someone who’s watching the Democratic Party, who’s watching, I think, the shifts for the woke movement here in America, I’m wondering, what do you think needs to happen within the Democratic Party for a healthier political movement as it relates to religion, as it relates to the woke discussions that we’ve been having about the demand for purity and cancel culture? How do you think about the future of the Democratic Party and the Democratic movement when it comes to these things?
Shadi Hamid:
Well, I think it’s good that wokeness is playing less of a role. That’s a major shift over the past few years, and it was inevitable that wokeness would burn itself out. When something has so much passion and so much emotion behind it, it can’t last forever. People are going to get tired and exhausted and policing those boundaries and engaging in cancel culture, it takes a lot of effort and energy, and I think people just ran out of energy. So that’s a good thing.
I do think that Muslims can play a leading role in being open about their faith. They don’t necessarily have to go into theological specifics if they don’t want to, but I think being openly Muslim sets an important precedent. It tells other people of faith that it’s okay to be both a Democrat and a member of a religious community. And if Muslims can do it, then perhaps Christians can be more comfortable doing it. Certainly there’s room for the Black Christian tradition in the Democratic Party.
The one group that isn’t really allowed to express its religiosity is white Christians. That has to change because we have to win over more Evangelicals if we want to win elections. If 80% of white Evangelicals are voting for Donald Trump, let’s try to get that down to 75% or 70% and pull over five to 10% of them. It’s electoral math. And if you want to win elections, you always have to try to expand your tent, not narrow your tent. And I think we as progressives, people on the left, we were so intent on moral purity that we were making the tent very small, and that’s just alienating to a lot of people. You got to make the tent as big as possible.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So as we wrap this up, I think for you and I, as we think about the spirituality of American politics today and the kind of spiritual fervor and the spiritual intensity of American politics, sometimes we call it the existential nature of politics, that it’s so intense, it’s so apocalyptic, it’s so cosmic in its intensity. And you and I want it to chill out. We want politics to be more boring, more mundane. We actually want people to take politics less seriously than they do.
And I think that one of the things we’ve been thinking about is how our faith actually helps us take politics less seriously and to be actually less spiritually charged in our politics. And we just finished this book. The theme we picked up on was actually idolatry as an important concept for us, which is a very ancient concept. We don’t really talk about idolatry much in contemporary society anymore, but I think there is a really important lesson in both Islam, Christianity, and Judaism on this issue of that there is only one God and everything else is just creation. It’s just politics. It’s not a divine movement. It’s just politics.
And so when you are a true monotheist, when you believe that there is only one God and everything else is just stuff, that there’s actually a real political gift in that, that this election is just an election, this issue is just an issue. The fate of the world does not rest on this election. It belongs to a single God who’s sovereign. There’s something very idolatrous to me about getting overly spiritually passionate about a political issue because you believe something else is God other than God.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. We have to stop making idols out of worldly things and politics is about this world and we have to keep it at that level instead of elevating it to something existential, something that is on the level of God. Politics does not equal God. And I think also what our religions tell us is God is the only ultimate judge. Other people are not judges of us. They can’t excommunicate us or tell us that we’re not good enough or that we’re not morally pure enough. God is the only one who makes that determination and he doesn’t make it now. He makes it in the next life. That gives us a kind of delayed judgment where up until that point, we can chill a little bit. God will sort everything out when the time comes. And until then, we do our best, we try our hardest, and we’ll make our arguments in the political sphere. We can still be passionate about politics, but there’s a limit to that passion because it’s of this world and not of the next world. And I think religion equips us with something very powerful in that regard. It puts things into perspective.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. Monotheism, rightly understood, should put you in your place, right? Remind you that you’re not God. And there’s something tremendously self-centered about believing this is the most important election of my lifetime, or this is the most important issue or political leader or whatever else, that core to this belief in Sabbath for Christianity and Judaism is this belief that I’m going to rest today. I’m not going to work today and the world is actually going to keep spinning even if I don’t do anything, that ultimately I’m resting on Sunday because I believe that God upholds the world, not me. And rest is something, just that concept of rest is something that I think is, it’s unimaginable to the hard right and to the hard left, a restful life.
And I know, Shadi, you’ve been trying to take a little bit of sabbatical and a little bit of rest and feeling burned out. And there is, I think, a lot of burnout in American political culture because, ultimately, it is exhausting to try to be God. It is exhausting to try to control everything. And I think a lot of the political sickness of America has to do with this lack of rest, that God is sovereign. Because if God is sovereign, then we can chill, we can rest, and we can still enter into political debate, but we can engage in political debate and discussion with a restful heart, knowing that it doesn’t depend on us.
Shadi Hamid:
Amen to that. Yeah. The world keeps spinning. I’ll take this as a kind of advisory note for myself. I think there’s sometimes this pressure as a writer and as someone who speaks publicly on political issues that every time something big happens, you have to have an opinion. There’s this sense of, “Oh, I have a big audience and I have to share my views with the world because I can maybe tip things in the right direction.” It’s kind of elevating your own importance that your voice is so important that you can never just take a step back and not comment on everything, but it is okay to sometimes be quiet and to not have an opinion about every single issue.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. And then I think that is the gift of prayer, is bowing your head and stopping from the work, stopping from the grasping, and recognizing that God holds these things and God holds this government.
And, well, friends, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a fantastic conversation. I’m really excited for Zealots at the Gate to be launching again with these conversations, and we look forward to a really amazing season. So please stick with us.
Shadi Hamid:
Thanks to everyone. Bye.
