Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Criticism of identity politics, the idea that tribal loyalties supersede all else and including universal moral truths,

is mostly and rightly leveled at the political and cultural left, those who most often appeal

to race, class, gender, or sexuality, rather than to arguments. Well, recently, the authors of an

article in Aon online magazine leveled the same critique at those on the political and cultural right,

specifically those who embrace religion as an ethnic and political identity rather than because they believe it to be true about God or the world.

Well, putting their obvious cynicism about religion aside, there's no question that more and more people now vote and then announce their vote on social media,

more as an expression of their political identities rather than after taking careful

consideration of moral truth or of the issues themselves. Or, as Robert George recently noted,

we tend to choose our policies based on our labels rather than the other way around. This move to

politics as identity is the fruit of a deeper cultural shift. A few decades ago, a group of

left-leaning political activists announced that the personal is political. Today, the political is personal,

for far too many, where we locate our purpose and our value, not to mention the value of others,

and our political loyalties. Something as imminent and pragmatic as politics should never be made transcendent.

It simply cannot carry that much weight.

Human beings need something bigger and beyond to ground, meaning, purpose, and value.

For most of human history, faith in God, or at least something transcendent,

provided that higher order for life.

But as religion, especially Christianity,

is pushed further to the fringe of society and further inward to the private corners of the

individual, politics has moved into the vacuum that's left behind. It's a poor imitation,

...