Religion and Politics

Believing in an idea that regulates everyone’s life, will influence all aspects of everyone’s life. One simply cannot live a “Christian life” solely involving religion and divide themselves when they deal with politics. Thus believing in anything shapes each individual as a person: creates their boundaries, defines morality, and what is just and unjust. Therefore, religion will always be tied into politics. Consequently, I am researching the inevitability of the two seemingly separate ideas overlapping and impacting one another.

In my last paper, I observed how religion and politics overlap one another in the Renaissance, and I continue my hypothesis into this paper, however focusing on the post Renaissance era. The two ideas need to be balanced and is quite hard to find an equalizer when a person cannot avoid the influence of their religion. Some might argue atheists have the balance, conversely, aren’t they being influenced by choosing to not believe, and denying any possible idea of religion? Religion and politics are held to be separate ideas, but on the contrary influence one another in more ways than society cares to acknowledge.

First, religion and politics have influenced one another and the people have noticed. For instance, Alexis de Tocqueville stumbled upon the great influence of religion on politics specifically in America. He traveled from France to America to study the prison systems but became enveloped in their social and political inequalities in the early 1800s. Tocqueville wrote in Democracy of America, “There is hardly any human action, however particular it may be, that does not originate in some very general idea men have conceived of the Deity, of his relation to mankind, of the nature of their own so...

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...itizen, or James Madison who was in between for most of his life and eventually agreed that it was too complicated to have both involved together, so he suggested that they should be separate. Also, Mill was on the air of caution, because he believed that religion tended to be one sided instead of multisided and could create blockers when searching for the truth. Weber, Smith, and Marx all concluded the same topic that they were involved, but would partially disagree with the outcome of each argument. Karl Marx believing that religion is the downfall to the proletariat, Weber and Smith believing that it is the benefit to teach people that making money and trying something new is not as bad as society has tried to tell them. Religion and politics will forever be tied to one another, because history repeats itself, and has a way of staying in each individual’s lives.