It is easy to point to
instances in which elected government-officials stage political theater for
effect, for in the domain of politics, perception has a political currency that
can leave a real imprint almost as if the staged were actual rather than pretense.
When the leader of one group takes over as Speaker of the U.S. House of
Representatives from a person of another partisan group, for example, it is
customary for them for the mallet literally to be handed over. In the U.S.
Senate, its president, who is also the Vice President of the U.S., may sit in
the presider’s chair during a vote if a tie is expected; the Senate President
can vote only to break a tie. A certain depth of political meaning can go along
with the actual presider presiding. Sometimes, however, an arrangement
can have a depth of meaning as well as carry actual political weight. The
Senate’s vote on additional economic sanctions on Russia on July 28, 2026 is a
case in point, for the synchronicity itself could have caused goose-bumps on exposed
skin. Even so, even profound political meaning (and fulfilment) is a far shot
from religious belief and experience. Distinguishing these is important in this
case, for the day of the vote included a very relevant funeral at the National
Cathedral that many senators no doubt attended, and could be expected to ponder
their own mortality and what may lie beyond.
The vote took place just hours
after the funeral of Sen. Graham of South Carolina; that he, along with Sen.
Blumenthal of Connecticut, had been the main Senate negotiator on the
underlying deal with the White House meant that the timing of the vote was no
accident and could be expected to be felt emotionally by the senators voting in
the affirmative. As if this alignment were not laden with enough
political-emotional meaning for the senators, the sitting president of Ukraine
was watching the vote in the Senate gallery in the chamber, and such a relevant
and high-status presence is itself remarkable. Referring to Zelensky, Sen.
Blumenthal remarked, “watching his face when he was in the gallery as we were
voting was truly a moment of joy.”[1]
The word truly may be overused by politicians, but in this case, it is
easy to believe the senator that the presence of the president of Ukraine
enabled the 86 senators voting in favor to feel even a profound sense of
meaning in what they were doing for an invaded people and its government. That
Sen. Graham had been the chief negotiator of the legislation and many of his
colleagues had been at his funeral just hours earlier may have added a sense of
multi-layered significant meaning to the vote. The life/death element added to
a sense of profound political meaning in a political act may even intimate a religious
element in the mix.
Senators with a heightened sense
of religiosity may have wondered whether a deity had weaved together the day’s
events, and even been behind the passage of the legislation itself. The late
senator is in heaven, a senator may have believed, and is looking down on what
we’re doing in the chamber during this vote, and perhaps he even feels
vindicated in his “hawkish” defense stance because the sitting president of
Ukraine is even sitting in the gallery watching the vote! Unlike political
meaning and significance felt profoundly, however, religious meaning and
significance are qualitatively different. This means they are different in kind,
rather than just that they are felt more deeply. To say that the late senator
was in heaven is at best a loaded, controversial question; to posit the late
senator’s soul has made it to heaven, assuming there is such a thing as an
afterlife, goes far beyond anything that we can know, at least while we are
corporeal.
To be sure, it could be that very
moving political and religious meanings that affect a person profoundly are the
same psychologically, rather than the religious sensibility being felt closer
to one’s core sense of one’s being. Even so, the nature of the
phenomenology of religion—the domain of religion—is very different than what
the world of politics is. The political domain is entirely within our realm,
and thus potentially is entirely within the limits of human cognition,
perception, and emotion. From the perspective of the religious domain, the
world of politics is entirely within Creation, rather than transcending it. Religious
belief and experience, however, are “open-ended” in that they are oriented to a
reality, point (e.g., an entity, such as a deity) that is inherently beyond
those limits that pertain to Creation. This is the main idea of the sixth-century
Christian theologian, Pseudo-Dionysius.
For all that a senator’s sense
of inner-fulfilment politically might be authentic, such as in casting a vote
in favor of economic sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine unprovoked and
thus in violation of international law (and in intentionally bombing civilian housing,
a war crime), the experience at Sen. Graham’s funeral that a senator may have
had in viewing one’s life, and life itself, as relative, and thus perhaps in
yearning for a sense of inner peace that is based beyond, is
fundamentally different. A senator would not ponder the afterlife anything like
how the prospects of a pending piece of legislation would be assessed. Even though
legislative Whips can be quite good at forecasting votes, none of us has any
idea what, if anything, lies in store for us after we die. It follows that attempts
to base a political system on any religious belief, which of course transcends
human cognition, perception, and emotion by definition, is fraught with
difficulty, to say the least. Even if seemingly successful, the output, such as
the doctrine of the divine right of kings, can be said to be dogmatic in the
sense of being too arbitrary to warrant any claims of being known rather
than just a matter of belief.
1. Mary C. Jalonick, Kevin Freking, and Lisa Mascaro, “Senate
Takes First Steps on Russian Sanctions as Zelenskyy Watches from Senate Gallery,”
APnews.com, July 28, 2026.
