Public Life Beyond Politics

What is public life? In the leadup to the election, the evangelical author Nancy Pearcey tweeted out an appeal for pastors to be more political. Those who do not preach politics, she argued, offer “a privatized Christianity.” At a major conservative conference, I recently heard a panelist make the flip side of the same argument: that if the state is not actively enforcing certain values, those values are being “relegated to the private sphere.” This view on what is “public” and what is “private,” increasingly common to hear on the right today, brings to mind a famous quote by former Democratic Representative Barney Frank: These conservatives seem to believe that politics is “the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” There is no room, it seems, for something to be public, and yet not political.