Opinion: Those who treat politics as religion undermine the Constitution they claim to love

Last week, Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson delivered a speech about election security. Her words were received by some as inspirational and treated by others with contempt. Within this broad range of reaction, we see at least two troubling social and political trends.
On the one hand, individual reactions can be categorized by whether that person believes in and wants to build the institutions that embody our constitutional values — or has contempt for those institutions and equates their destruction with “reform.”
But another trend has reached deeper into our identities.
Arthur Brooks teaches (from an irrefutable behavioral science perspective) that politics has become, for many, their religion — and it is an unfulfilling turn in devotion.
Traditional faith and philosophy are in measurable decline — especially among younger people. Yet human psychology does not like a vacuum. People need a belief system. Today, people increasingly see their identity not in terms of the divine, but in terms of the political. Since morality derives from one’s deepest beliefs, making politics one’s religion means making social and political issues — and the power to control both — the motivation and the justification of personal behavior. In that scenario, the ends will always justify the means.
Yuval Levin adds (in an equally relevant and researched component) that these very social and political views are eroding the trust in our most long-standing and formative institutions — institutions we need to provide the structures and behaviors that sustain life in a free society.
When people make politics their faith, growing distrust in institutions is inevitable — as those with different political views now become the enemies of truth — and elections facilitate not simply expressions of different policy opinions, but a good-vs.-evil moral decline. What was once considered vice, such as attempted political violence or intimidating threats, is now twisted — in the name of the cause — to become a sign of virtue despite the malicious intent.
This confused and perverse perspective on institutions in general is damaging to a republic, and nowhere is it more immediately destructive than when applied to something as elemental to freedom as electing representatives. Proven ways of voting, such as Utah’s system of vote by mail, come under attempted intimidation and violence against election officials, such as the examples that prompted Henderson’s speech last week. But the moral distortions produced by politics-as-religion are, unsurprisingly, based on distortions of the facts.
Utah has had vote by mail for 20 years. The movement toward a primarily vote-by-mail system began 10 years ago and grew from the bottom up between 2014 and 2020. Vote by mail was not driven by manipulation at the top of government but by voters in county after county who slowly and voluntarily signed up for the convenience and research made possible by receiving a ballot in the mail several weeks before Election Day.
In Utah, this organic, bottom-up experience with vote by mail has made Utah’s election system one of the most secure in the nation. Every ballot is tracked with a unique identification number assigned to a voter, required signatures on every ballot are checked against a database of available signatures for that voter and voters can sign up to get text messages that track their ballot from the mailbox all the way to the voting center.
Voters also have options that add more security. If a voter is not confident in mailing their ballot, they can put it in a secure and video-monitored drop box. If a voter has concerns about drop boxes, they can take the ballot directly to a voting center. As a result of these security measures, not even election fraud databases managed by those ideologically opposed to vote by mail have shown any valid voter fraud claims in Utah since counties began shifting to vote-by-mail elections.
The true irony is that individual behaviors of those “called” to expose dysfunction in Utah elections often represent the very dysfunction they lament. If elected county clerks, in an effort to show vulnerability, destroy ballots or manually disable security features of voting machines to “prove fraud,” they are destroying trust in a foundation of our representative democracy guaranteed by the Constitution they have taken an oath to uphold. Such constitutional infidelity means that they do not deserve to hold elected office.
As a free and functioning society, we can and should hold those whom we elect accountable. We should ask questions and demand answers. But people for whom politics has become a religion are trampling on the constitutional principles and values that they claim to cherish. It is incumbent upon Utah voters and elected officials alike to show the political courage and constitutional commitment to reject the poison of politics-as-religion by promoting a confidence in Utah elections that is backed up by the facts.
Rick Larsen is the president and CEO of Sutherland Institute, a nonprofit advancing principled public policy that promotes the constitutional values of faith, family and freedom.