Is liberalism a religion? The claim is false as a matter of definition but revealing as a matter of rhetoric. Liberalism is a political doctrine built on procedural principles—constitutional government, individual rights, and the rule of law—not a system of worship with a deity, revealed text, or clerical authority. Yet critics from Ann Coulter on the right to John Gray on the postliberal spectrum have argued that liberalism functions like a religion, supplying a cosmology, a moral framework, and a sense of meaning that its formal principles cannot acknowledge without undermining their claim to neutrality. The strongest version of this argument does not prove that liberalism is a religion; it shows that liberalism depends on a quasi-religious faith in reason and progress that it cannot openly avow.
This fact-check distinguishes between three distinct claims that are often conflated. The first is semantic: that liberalism fits a functional definition of religion. The second is historical: that liberalism emerged as a secular substitute for Christianity. The third is political: that liberals treat their commitments with a dogmatic intensity that resembles religious conviction. Each claim has a kernel of truth, but none establishes that liberalism is a religion in any sense that matters for law, politics, or intellectual honesty.
The Functional Definition Problem
What Counts as Religion
The claim that liberalism is a religion usually rests on a functional definition: a belief system qualifies as religious if it provides meaning, community, ritual, and a moral code, regardless of whether it posits a supernatural being. By this standard, nationalism, Marxism, and even professional sports fandom can be classified as religions. The definition is so broad that it loses discriminating power. When Ann Coulter writes that liberalism has "its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches," she is not offering a serious analytical framework but a rhetorical provocation .
The problem with functional definitions is that they beg the question. If religion is defined as whatever functions like a religion, then any sufficiently intense commitment qualifies, and the claim becomes unfalsifiable. Scholars of religion have long noted that the very category of "religion" as a distinct sphere of life is itself a modern construction, one that liberal secularism helped create by separating church from state . The irony is that the functional definition used to attack liberalism as a religion is a product of the liberal order it seeks to indict.
The Secularism Paradox
Liberalism's relationship to secularism is more complicated than the religion thesis allows. The liberal commitment to separating church and state does not require hostility to religion; it requires the state to treat citizens of different faiths and of no faith as equal before the law. This is a procedural principle, not a theological one. John Locke, whose Two Treatises of Government laid the foundation for liberal politics, was himself a devout Christian who argued for religious toleration on theological grounds. The claim that liberalism is a secular faith that displaces Christianity ignores the extent to which early liberals understood their project as compatible with, and even derived from, Christian premises.
John Gray's version of the argument is more sophisticated. In The New Leviathans, he contends that liberalism became a separate religion in the hands of John Stuart Mill, with humanity serving as the Supreme Being and progress replacing providence . Gray's target is not liberalism per se but a specific mutation: the Enlightenment faith that history has a benign trajectory and that reason will progressively reform human institutions. This is a critique of a particular philosophical optimism, not a demonstration that liberalism as such is religious. A liberal who accepts that history has no guaranteed arc, and that reason is fallible, escapes Gray's indictment entirely.
The Historical Substitution Thesis
From Providence to Progress
The historical claim is that liberalism filled the vacuum left by the decline of Christian authority in the West. The Cambridge historian John W. de Gruchy notes that liberal democracy has been described as "the first great secular religion in the West, the first ideology which is divorced from Christianity" . This description captures something real about the nineteenth century, when liberal thinkers like Mill and Herbert Spencer invested political reform with a moral seriousness previously reserved for religious vocation. The language of progress, enlightenment, and civilization carried a providential charge that secular politics could not entirely shed.
But historical substitution is not the same as identity. The fact that liberalism inherited some of Christianity's cultural functions does not make it a religion, any more than the fact that universities inherited some of the monastery's functions makes them monasteries. What matters is whether liberalism makes claims that are properly religious—claims about ultimate reality, divine command, or salvation. It does not. Liberalism is a theory of how political power should be organized, not a theory of what exists or how to be saved. The confusion arises because liberalism emerged in a culture saturated with Christian assumptions, and some of those assumptions lingered in its rhetoric long after their theological foundations were abandoned.
The Postliberal Genealogy
Contemporary postliberal thinkers have revived the substitution thesis with greater philosophical ambition. Patrick Deneen argues in Why Liberalism Failed that liberalism is not merely a constitutional order but a comprehensive philosophical view that denies any objective good beyond individual preference. On this account, liberalism is a pseudo-religion because it claims neutrality while imposing a substantive vision of human flourishing centered on autonomy. The postliberal critique is that liberalism cannot sustain the virtues it depends on—self-restraint, solidarity, sacrifice—because it denies the transcendent framework that made those virtues intelligible.
This is a serious argument, but it proves too much. If liberalism is a religion because it rests on unprovable premises about human dignity and equality, then every political doctrine is a religion, including the postliberal alternatives that Deneen and others propose. The charge of religiosity becomes a way of delegitimizing one's opponents rather than a genuine analytical category. Moreover, the postliberal critique tends to reify liberalism into a single comprehensive system, ignoring the tradition's internal diversity and its capacity for self-correction. A liberal who supports the welfare state, a liberal who favors market deregulation, and a liberal who emphasizes civic virtue are not subscribing to a single dogma; they are disagreeing about how best to realize shared principles.
The Dogma Charge Examined
When Conviction Looks Like Faith
The political version of the religion charge is that liberals hold their beliefs with a dogmatic intensity that resembles religious faith. This is an accusation about behavior, not doctrine. It is true that some liberals treat opposition to their preferred policies as evidence of moral failure, and that this style of argument can feel religious in its intolerance of dissent. But the same can be said of libertarians, socialists, and conservatives. The problem is not liberalism but the human tendency to invest political commitments with identity-level significance, a tendency that any ideology can activate under conditions of polarization.
The more precise charge is that liberalism contains an internal tension that makes dogmatism likely. Because liberalism claims to be neutral among conceptions of the good, liberals who encounter opposition to their principles cannot simply say "we disagree about values." They must argue that their opponents are irrational, prejudiced, or acting in bad faith. The neutrality claim raises the stakes of disagreement: if your position is neutral and mine is not, then your position is not merely different but superior in kind. This dynamic does produce a kind of secular dogmatism, but it is a pathology of liberal rhetoric, not evidence that liberalism is a religion.
The Faith in Reason
The deepest version of the religion critique targets liberalism's confidence in reason itself. If liberalism rests on the conviction that political questions can be settled through rational deliberation, and if that conviction cannot itself be rationally proven without circularity, then liberalism rests on a kind of faith. This is a real philosophical problem, but it is not unique to liberalism. Every political theory must eventually appeal to premises it cannot justify without begging the question. The liberal wager is that reason, constrained by institutions and open to correction, produces better outcomes than tradition, authority, or violence. That is a bet, not a dogma. A bet can be revised in light of evidence; a dogma cannot.
The distinction between faith and fallibilism matters here. Religious faith typically involves commitment to propositions that are held to be true on the basis of revelation or authority and that are not subject to empirical disconfirmation. Liberalism's core commitments—to individual rights, constitutional government, and the rule of law—are defended through arguments that can be challenged, revised, and abandoned. The history of liberalism is a history of such revisions: from the exclusion of women and the propertyless to their inclusion, from the defense of colonialism to its critique. A doctrine that can learn from its critics is not a dogma, even if some of its adherents behave dogmatically.
What the Religion Charge Gets Right
Liberalism's Unacknowledged Dependence
The religion charge is wrong as a description of what liberalism is, but it points toward a genuine problem: liberalism depends on social and cultural conditions it cannot itself produce. A liberal society requires citizens who are tolerant, self-restrained, and willing to accept unfavorable outcomes. These virtues are not generated by liberal principles; they are cultivated by families, schools, religious communities, and civic associations. If those institutions decay, liberal politics becomes unstable, and the temptation to treat liberalism itself as a source of meaning and identity grows stronger. The religion charge is a symptom of this dependence, not a refutation of it.
This is the kernel of truth in the communitarian critique that Michael Sandel advanced against Rawlsian liberalism in the 1980s. Sandel argued that the liberal self, stripped of constitutive attachments, cannot sustain the obligations and solidarities that make a polity cohere . Whether or not Sandel is right about the self, he is right that liberal institutions cannot reproduce the social capital they rely on. The religion charge, stripped of its polemical excess, is a way of saying that liberalism has not solved the problem of its own reproduction. It has not explained how a society of free and equal citizens sustains the virtues that freedom and equality require.
The Rhetorical Function
It is worth asking why the religion charge is so persistent despite its analytical weaknesses. The answer is that calling an opponent's beliefs religious is a way of placing them beyond the reach of rational argument. If liberalism is a religion, then liberals cannot be reasoned with; they can only be converted or defeated. The charge is a rhetorical weapon designed to delegitimize, not a serious contribution to political understanding. This does not mean that all who make the charge are acting in bad faith. Some critics, like Gray, are genuinely grappling with the problem of secular meaning. But the popular version of the argument, exemplified by Coulter's Godless, is closer to invective than analysis.
The fact-check verdict is therefore mixed. Liberalism is not a religion in any sense that would satisfy a theologian, a legal scholar, or a philosopher of religion. It has no deity, no sacred text, no ritual, no clergy, and no claim to supernatural revelation. But the charge captures a real feature of liberal culture: the tendency of some liberals to invest political commitments with religious intensity, and the dependence of liberal institutions on virtues they cannot generate. The correct response is not to deny the dependence but to acknowledge it, and to ask what non-liberal sources of meaning and solidarity a liberal society can tolerate without ceasing to be liberal.
The question of whether liberalism is a religion ultimately reveals more about the questioner than about liberalism. Those who ask it are often searching for a way to understand why political disagreements feel so intractable, why compromise seems impossible, and why the stakes of ordinary politics feel existential. The answer is not that liberalism has become a religion but that modern politics has become totalizing, investing procedural questions with ultimate significance. Liberalism, at its best, offers a corrective to this tendency by insisting that politics is about how we live together, not what we worship. Whether that corrective can succeed depends on whether liberals can recover the modesty that their own principles demand.