Religion best serves public life by relativizing the importance of public life, especially of public life understood as politics. Authentic religion keeps the political enterprise humble by reminding it that it is not the first thing.

This March the magazine FIRST THINGS is celebrating twenty years of publishing with a 20th Anniversary Issue chock full of vintage articles: Farewell to the Woman Question; Christians and Postmoderns; Abortion Before Roe among others. The editorial, Putting First things First, is reprinted from March 1990. It stands up well. Some excerpts:

This is a statement of editorial prejudices. Prejudices, rightly understood, are prior judgments. They are the considered assumptions that frame what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it. We would be very unhappy if anyone thought us entirely open-minded. Our judgment that this or that is true and important inescapably prejudices us against judgments to the contrary……..

Religion and public life. The trick is in making the right connections between the two. And making the right connections requires a measure of clarity about what we mean by “religion” and what we mean by “public life.”

The first meaning of First Things is that, for the sake of both religion and public life, religion must be given priority. While religion informs, enriches, and provides a moral foundation for public life, the chief purpose of religion is not to serve public life. Here we discover a necessary paradox. Religion that is captive to public life is of little public use. Indeed, such captivity +produces politicized religion and religionized politics, and the result, as we know from bitter historical experience, is tragedy for both religion and public life.

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The link (URL) to the original article is unavailable and has been removed.]