Philosophy and the Lost Art of Politics

By Jean-Philippe Gabriel — frameworklove.com | March 13, 2025

When I finished writing Silent God, I realized the work was not just theological. It was also deeply practical. In that book I reframed scripture under a single structure: love. Not love as sentiment or virtue, but love as structure—form and logic together, resolving contradictions that have plagued religion for centuries. Love, expressed as grace and forgiveness, became the absolute by which existence itself could be reframed.

But once the book was complete, a new question arose: how do we apply this in life? More pointedly, how do we apply it in politics?

That question carried me not back to religion, but to philosophy. For philosophy, at its best, reflects the freedom of love: the courage to think. To test. To argue. To seek coherence. Philosophy is not opposed to religion—it was often religion that created the space for philosophy to grow. But where religion can be reduced to slogans and dogma, philosophy demands reason, dialogue, and the humility to pursue truth together.

And this is what we desperately need today: not sentiment, not slogans, not tribes, but thinking. Love wants us to think. Logic is love’s first gift. Only then can we apply form—the visible outcomes of our policies and politics.

The Loss of Philosophy

Some say we have become a less religious nation, and in a sense that is true. But the deeper loss is not simply religion—it is philosophy.

For centuries, Christianity provided the cultural framework in which philosophy could thrive. Theology, ethics, and scripture created the space where reason and logic were tested, where morality was argued, where coherence mattered.

When religion was abandoned, philosophy should have remained. Instead, we abandoned philosophy as well. The result is not a more rational society but a less rational one. We live by slogans and absolutes, clinging to partisan talking points as if they were divine commandments. Science itself has been enthroned as a kind of god—stripped of philosophy, treated as raw authority, rather than as one path of inquiry among many.

This is not enlightenment but paganism: a return to irrationality dressed in the garments of modern progress. Without philosophy, we have no way to weigh love against law, compassion against order, freedom against responsibility. We have only tribes and power.

Politics and the Limits of Right

When it comes to politics, we need to acknowledge a sobering truth: there is no “right” in politics—not morally.

To be right in the moral sense would require perfection, the infinite. But politics is finite. It is human. It is bound by compromise and scarcity. Even law itself is finite. It claims justice but cannot deliver perfection. It preserves order but falls short of coherence. True justice is absolute, aligned with perfect love. That belongs to God alone.

Because we are finite, politics becomes a constant state of progression. Laws change. Policies shift. Each generation corrects what the last left undone. This is not failure but necessity—an attempt to move closer to what cannot be fully reached: perfect justice.

The moment we think “right” or “wrong,” we are already thinking in terms of law. Law, whether codified or not, always frames the argument. And yet, law is not enough. 

Inner Cities and the Futility of Slogans

Take the example of America’s inner cities.

The right insists: the law is there, opportunity is available; if people are not participating, it must be corruption or failure within their culture. The left responds: no, the system itself is broken; laws and policies worked against these communities, driving jobs away and leaving neglect in their place.

Back and forth it goes: unions drove jobs away, companies abandoned workers, corruption hollowed out institutions. What we are left with are debates over “handouts”—a temporary salve that never addresses the root of the problem.

Meanwhile, the reality remains: whole communities live in cycles of poverty, disease, and despair. The conditions of neglect create cultures of hopelessness. The idea of “bootstraps” is meaningless when there are no boots.

And while our inner cities suffer, attention shifts elsewhere: to Ukraine and Russia, to distant geopolitical struggles framed as moral battlegrounds; to illegal immigration, another problem not passively inherited but actively created. Cause and effect ripple outward, while suffering at home remains unanswered.

Both political parties share in the failure. Responsibility is abandoned. Accountability is deflected. Love is forgotten. Love does not indulge endlessly in weapons, pouring resources into the greatest armies on earth while its own citizens languish. But neither does love reduce itself to endless handouts. Real solutions are required: work, purpose, renewal. Support tied to participation, not to dependency.

Can love make demands? By its nature, love gives everything. But when resources are scarce, love must return to logic. We cannot judge the motives of others, but we can measure our own alignment. In politics, that alignment will often look like compromise—not as weakness, but as fruit. Compromise becomes the visible outcome of love’s logic: imperfect, finite, but still coherent, still moving toward restoration.

Love Beyond Parties

If the Logic of God’s Love is true, then political life cannot be about defending absolutes from one side or the other. Under love, there are no permanent parties—because love does not defend positions, it restores relationships.

What we call “the left” and “the right” are not absolutes but inclinations: tendencies toward law, or toward care. Love requires that we begin at the personal level. Whatever our inclination, the measure of love is whether we can frame the other side’s concern with honesty and respect.

If I lean right, I must be able to articulate the left’s concern for compassion and care. If I lean left, I must be able to articulate the right’s concern for order, stability, and responsibility. This is not concession—it is coherence. Because amazingly, the concerns on both sides are true concerns. They are not wrong. They are incomplete.

Consider abortion.

• If I stand on the left, I emphasize the woman’s freedom, her dignity, her right to choose.

• If I stand on the right, I emphasize the sanctity of life, the protection of the unborn.

Both are true concerns. But neither is absolute. Love cannot stop at slogans. It must hold together both truths in tension, seeking compromise that respects the sacredness at stake.

The same is true for immigration, poverty, war, sexuality. If I say love is sacred, I cannot dismiss life lightly. If I say freedom is sacred, I cannot dismiss responsibility lightly. If I say care is sacred, I cannot indulge in endless wars while my neighbor starves.

This is what philosophy once taught us: that truth emerges not in defending one side but in testing both, in asking what they mean, what they require of us, what they reveal about who we are.

The Question of Coherence

At the end of the day, the question that must be asked—the question Silent God pressed again and again—is the question of coherence.

Where is the source of law or care? If it is in science, then what does science demand? If it is the earth, then what does the earth demand? Global warming, for instance, is framed not only as a scientific fact but as a moral absolute. But what kind of absolute is this? It is not freedom, not love, not grace, not care for humanity as such. It becomes an abstract demand of survival, detached from any defined account of morality.

And here lies the problem: unless we define the source of our absolutes, we are left only with power. If the earth becomes the absolute, then humanity serves the earth, not the other way around. If science becomes the absolute, then reason is reduced to data without moral frame. If religion becomes the absolute, but without love as its structure, then religion itself becomes incoherent—a system of rules without grace, punishment without forgiveness.

This is why coherence matters.

• On the right, religion without love collapses into incoherence. Law and morality are invoked, but they cannot reconcile suffering, injustice, or imperfection. They offer judgment without grace.

• On the left, global care collapses into incoherence. The language of compassion is invoked, but it cannot reconcile the absolute demands of the earth with the dignity of the human person. It offers sentiment without structure.

In both cases, what masquerades as morality is often only the logic of power.

But if God is love, and love is defined—coherent, structural, logical—then the demands of love are also defined. Love requires creation, autonomy, and succession. Love requires grace, forgiveness, and restoration. Love requires that our politics, our science, our care for the earth, and our care for one another all align under one coherent frame.

The challenge before us is not to choose right or left, law or care, religion or science. The challenge is to ask: are we coherent?

Without coherence, everything collapses—religion, science, politics, morality. With coherence, everything aligns—even if imperfectly—with love. 

Myth and the Image of God

But coherence alone is not enough. Civilizations do not live by logic alone. They live by stories, myths, symbols that embody coherence in human imagination.

Myth matters. It always has. It is myth that carries philosophy to the heart. Without myth, philosophy collapses into sterile abstraction. Without philosophy, myth degenerates into superstition. And without either, as Nietzsche rightly observed, there is only nihilism—raw power disguised as truth, biology without meaning, tribes without love.

To abandon myth is to abandon the very language of our humanity. Without myth, there is no “why,” only “how.” There is no coherence, only force.

If we have even the slightest inclination toward love, then love must lead us. And love is coherent. As I argued in Silent God, coherence itself is the image of God. To seek coherence is to seek alignment with that image. It reconciles science with nature, reason with order, morality with love. It draws law and care into a single framework under justice.

Without myth and coherence, we are mere pods—drifting, consuming, reproducing, surviving. With myth and coherence, we are human: thinking, loving, seeking, capable of restoration.

What Non-Love Looks Like

Scripture itself describes what a society without love becomes. Paul warned that in the last days, people would be “lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, brutal, not lovers of the good” (2 Tim. 3:1–5).

This is not a portrait of one side or the other. It is the collapse of both—law without grace on the right, sentiment without structure on the left. Religion without love can produce this as surely as secular politics without philosophy. Without love, even devotion becomes mechanical; we become machines of power, incapable of freedom, incapable of coherence.

By contrast, the fruits of love are visible in history: the birth of liberal democracies, the elevation of freedom, the dignity of the individual, the value of reason, open debate, and tolerance. These were not accidents of history. They were fruits of love, of philosophy nurtured by a framework of faith.

But today, in the name of love itself, we often restrict the very freedoms that once flowed from love. Consider “hate speech” laws and censorship. The intent is to protect the vulnerable, but the fruit is not freedom, not dignity, not coherence. It is control. This is what happens when we lose sight of the coherence of love: good intentions collapse into power, and society drifts toward the heartlessness Paul described.

Conclusion

The Logic of God’s Love shows us that perfection in form is impossible, but perfection in logic—grace—is always possible. We cannot judge others’ motives. We cannot achieve infinite justice. But we can align our own intent with love. We can adopt the correct attitude of humility. We can pursue forms that bear fruit, even if imperfect.

Politics, then, is not about being “right.” It is about being aligned. It is about whether our laws and policies are moving toward coherence, or away from it. It is about whether we still have the courage to think.

Love wants us to think. To reason. To frame both sides and seek coherence. To recover myth, not as superstition, but as the language of coherence. Only then will politics be more than slogans. Only then will compromise become not weakness but sacred fruit. And only then will love, as structure, guide us again.