The historian Henry Adams once described politics as “the systematic organization of hatreds,” and that’s often where we seem to be in these last days before our nation’s 250th birthday. As a Wall Street Journal column noted earlier this week, chronic Democratic hatred of Donald Trump, along with Trump’s own many “genuine sins and imagined ones, handed the left permission to come unglued,” with the result that “radical, dangerous, and merely stupid [ideas] are not only permissible but mandatory” on the growing port side of the Democratic party.
Our need to escape from today’s constant political hysteria is one of the reasons we bury ourselves in entertainment. We’d all like to find a safe and quiet place to live, even if its name is Fantasyland.
Alas, as Christians we can’t simply ignore politics. We’re supposed to be leaven in the world. So we can’t just retreat to the hills as St. Benedict did. Living our faith in the real world means that we need to help build a better society. And in 2026, that’s harder than ever. What a Christian means by the “common good” and “human dignity,” and what a non-believer means by exactly the same words, can be
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