Source: Politics is Religion Channel: Saint Explainer Published: June 8, 2026 | Archived: June 8, 2026

Video: Politics is Religion
Channel: Saint Explainer
Published: June 8, 2026
Duration: 11:45
Views: 789
Category: People & Blogs
Video ID: HimqWJKsqnI

Description

Let’s get political! Why does politics matter so much more than religion? Because politics is religion.

Why the official neutrality of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints holds us back in a polarized age, and what to do about it.

Transcript — YouTube panel (human-authored)

0:00 Warning, this video contains inside baseball stuff for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. So, I have a question. Why is it that I get along so well with people who share my politics but not my religion compared to the other way around? I mean, if the restored gospel of Jesus Christ is as important as we all say it is, then this really shouldn’t be the case, should it?

0:23 But the fact that it is the case just raises more questions. like what do I even mean by politics here? And why is it such a big deal in everybody’s lives? And the answer that I’ve come to to all these questions is that politics is religion. That just because I’m a member of the same church as somebody doesn’t mean that we have the same religion. And in a very real sense, those people that I get along with who share my politics, actually, it’s because they share my religion. But this leads me to thinking that the church’s official stance of political neutrality has kind of become a problem and also led me to thinking about where and why the church’s public statement should not be taken at face value. Which means I really ought to put this disclaimer on the screen here.

1:06 Nothing in this video is doctrine. I’m not trying to teach doctrine here. I’m just trying to figure stuff out. Earlier on this channel, when I really didn’t like something that happened at church, I put my thoughts on here and asked for you guys’ input. And it uh went really well because I have awesome commenters. So, I guess I’m going to kind of do it again, tell you what my take on all this stuff is, but I’m very happy to hear from you guys. Anyway, if you’re new around here, welcome. My name is Saint Explainer. I’m a pixelated head and I explain things about my religion, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And that means, yes, I’m a Mormon. I have to say that for the algorithm. Okay, moving on. Let’s imagine a guy who thinks about Jesus very much the way we’re all supposed to these days. To be a Christian is to be very non-judgmental and very peaceful.

1:51 And all the times that Jesus said something that don’t really match with that, he kind of just ignores. And let’s say we had another guy who believes in all the sword stuff with the same literalist fundamentalist fervor that the first guy believes in not judging. He ignores or explains away all the peace stuff the same way the first guy ignores or explains away all the sword stuff. Do these two men share a religion with each other? I mean, they’re reading the exact same text from the exact same book. But I think the answer is no.

2:23 Because ultimately, it’s not the words on the page that define your religion. It’s how you think about the words on the page that defines your religion. There’s this interpretation layer that takes the text and turns it into the day-to-day actions of your life. And where I’m going with this is that in modern-day America, that layer is politics. If you think about what people are arguing about politically these days in America, it’s questions like what is truth? What is good? What is just? It’s questions like what does it mean to love? I mean, both sides of the ongoing deportation controversy consider themselves to be acting out of love for their neighbors. Politics is also arguing about how a human being ought to live and what obligation, if any, do we have to a higher power and what is that higher power? And all of these are questions that in the past people would have turned to religion to answer.

3:20 They’re religious questions. But these days, people turn to politics instead. And it’s worth asking why this is happening. And I don’t think it’s because people suddenly stopped liking religion and started liking politics. I think it’s because religious questions have become political. And in order to explain what I mean by that, we’ll have to ditch this framing of politics as Republicans yelling at Democrats.

3:42 Because there are actually three political religions: woke, based, and boomer. Now, to be fair to the boomers, the thing I’m calling boomer was not invented by them. It’s just that it mostly is old people who believe it these days. A more accurate term for it would be the post-war consensus. This is the dominant moral and values culture in the west that developed after World War II. It is a set of answers to those fundamental what does it all mean religious questions. You can think of the post-war consensus as the things that a Republican boomer and a Democrat boomer would agree on. Or you can think of it as the morality that you were taught in elementary school unless you went to school recently enough to be taught by the next contender on our list. Woke obviously needs no introduction, but in the context of this video, I’m going to characterize it as post-postwar leftism, a leftist reaction to the culture of the post-war

4:39 consensus. And similarly, what I’m going to call based is postwar rightism. And I’m going to go on a little bit of a tangent here because it is very hard to sum up this group concisely. It contains a huge range of people and perspectives and what their goals are and what their stand for is not at all unified. I couldn’t even figure out like what symbol I’m supposed to use to represent everyone here. I figure a guy holding a torch is close enough. And really, there’s only two things that tie these people together. The first is that they’re not woke. And the second is that they don’t think the post-war consensus contains the answers to their questions.

5:16 Hence, postwar writism is really the only thing I can say that actually represents everybody in this group. Anyway, back in the olden days, the post-war consensus answers to all of these various questions were just the settled answers that more or less everyone believed in, helped of course by a top-down mass media culture at the time. The politics of that era was just disagreements on how to achieve goals which both sides agreed were good. Which is why the conservatives of that era are just liberals driving the speed limit.

5:49 When first woke and then based emerged on the scene questioning the post-war consensus, it took previously settled religious questions and unsettled them. This thing that has emerged that we call polarization is just the reemergence of religious conflict in American civic culture, which has made the church’s performance of political neutrality a lot harder than it used to be. especially because it’s trying not to alienate any of its members over their political persuasion, which has proven difficult because none of these groups want the church to agree with or publicly promote any of the others, which has led to some real tension that I’m sure you’ve noticed between maintaining this polite neutrality and saying anything of substance at all about the religion. Because these political questions are religious questions in disguise, there’s really not a lot of depth you can get into in discussing religion before you say something that seems to favor or reject

6:44 one of these three groups. Which is one of the reasons why what’s said at general conference and what we get in Sunday school and especially elders quorum is so shallow and surface level. What makes all of this worse is that the church’s performance of political neutrality is just that, a performance. It actually has a favorite among these three groups and it’s not actually woke, which is a little bit of a surprise because wokeness controls everything.

7:10 But the church can and does get away with being anti-woke. But the thing it can’t do is be anti-boomer. The church cannot preach against the post-war consensus. The reason for that is the relationship between wokeness and boomerism. Sure, woke is postwar leftism, but woke also is the post-war consensus. The consensus idea of freedom is being able to do whatever you want, whenever you want, to have choice without consequences. The freedom from obligations or circumstances, not continuously chosen. The consensus idea of equality actually stems from this.

7:46 Not just equality before God or the law, but equality of outcome. So that the unchosen circumstances of your birth don’t constrain what you can or want to do. Whether those unchosen circumstances are genetic or cultural or gender roles or economic, doesn’t matter. They all need to go so that everybody can do all the same things. Now, if that’s starting to sound kind of woke to you, that’s because it is woke. Boomerism makes unprincipled exceptions to these rules in order to have a functioning society.

8:15 And wokeism took over the world by just asking the consensus to live up to its own standards. This meme on the screen right here is literally how they did it. So the relationship between woke and the postwar consensus is that taken without reservation, the consensus is woke. And the wokes being in charge, they demand adherence to the consensus in order to keep themselves in charge. This causes a few problems for us as Latter-day Saints. The first is that it requires the church effectively to teach another religion. Sure, we can teach specifically Latter-day Saint answers to specific doctrinal questions, but all the gaps in between tend to get filled by consensus boomerism. We can’t teach the restored gospel as a coherent value system that answers any secular questions, any questions that aren’t strictly religious in nature, which has created a circumstance where your average modern Latter-day Saint doesn’t really think like a Latter-day Saint.

9:09 This is also the reason, I think, why a lot of people have left the church over its history and doctrine recently. All of these so-called hard parts of church history and doctrine are just the places where it conflicts with the consensus. I mean, I’d be the first to say that the church and its history are not perfect, but it gets a whole lot worse when you judge it by the standards of an alien religion. And the other problem with having boomerism as a favorite is that that means we have based as a least favorite because this is the only one of these three groups that questions the postwar consensus. And frankly, the consensus needs to be questioned.

9:46 Post-war Americans were the wealthiest human beings to ever exist. And they mostly lit that money on fire trying to realize this vision of society that says that it is both possible and desirable to create a world where everybody is free to do whatever they want whenever they want. This created a very shortsighted and selfish culture which saw no problem with eating the seed corn for their own pleasure. And so they did, which left a far worse world behind for all of us young folks to inherit and try and figure out what the heck are we even going to do about all this. Solving any of these problems will require questioning the consensus, which means ripping off the band-aid and admitting that the restored gospel of Jesus Christ is a coherent morals and values and yes, political system that is better than the one we’ve all been taught, which is a de facto endorsement of this based group.

10:40 Even though I’m not saying that the church would just be preaching quote unquote basedness, because remember this isn’t even a unified set of ideas to begin with. No, rather I would want the church to be able to preach itself. To get back to the original question of this video of how politics becomes religion as it becomes the interpretation between our beliefs and our actions. Freeing up the church to teach the restored gospel as a complete and coherent value system rather than having to teach someone else’s religion would allow us to have the depth of understanding of our own religion to allow it to interpret itself. for the restored gospel to become the interpretive layer by which we take our belief and turn it into our day-to-day actions. And I think this is the way it ought to be. I know this one turned into a little bit of a ramble, so if you’re still here at this point in the video, I

11:31 guess that means you’re interested. If you want to watch a previous video about how the church’s attempts to make peace with the post-war consensus force it to lie about itself, you can check that out right here. Otherwise, this has been Saint Explainer. Jesus loves you. Thanks for watching.