How Moral Certainty Corrupts Politics and Corrodes the Soul
We are often tempted to think that the great danger in public life is the presence of evil men. In truth, the greater danger lies in something far more ordinary: the belief that evil belongs entirely to the other camp. This is not a modern error. It is perhaps the most ancient one.
Every age convinces itself that it has finally identified the villains, isolated the threat, and placed wickedness safely outside the boundaries of its own tribe. And once that belief takes hold, something strange happens: vigilance fades, self-examination stops, and self-restraint gives way to temptation. The conviction that we are righteous becomes the very thing that blinds us to what we are capable of becoming, and that justifies us doing the very things we oppose.
It is a great mistake to imagine Satan as a partisan. He is not. Satan is a two-way player. He plays both sides of the ball. The Great Tempter does not care whether we call ourselves progressive or conservative, Democrat or Republican, compassionate or traditional, enlightened or patriotic. He does not need us to abandon morality. He only needs us to believe our own moral certainty places us beyond corruption, and the other side beyond salvation.
On the Left, the temptation takes the form of moral purity. The cause is justice. The language is compassion. The goal is the protection of the vulnerable. And because the intention is noble, dissent becomes suspect. Speech becomes harm. Disagreement becomes violence. Exclusion becomes safety. Punishment becomes progress.
And so the same proud party that once fought against McCarthyism now silences and ostracizes others, arguing they are not merely wrong, they are dangerous; not mistaken or misguided, but evil. And once that line is crossed, the old restraints vanish. Speech is suppressed as hateful or misinformation. Blacklists return in the form of cancel culture. Careers are destroyed for the sake of virtue. Social exile is rebranded as accountability. Every cultural arm, from media to academia, must align against all dissidents, bringing all force to bear. And all of it done, of course, in the name of the good.
But the Right is not immune to the same temptation, only to a different form of it. Where the Left is seduced by purity, the Right is seduced by order. It sees chaos rising, norms collapsing, institutions eroding, and it grows fearful. And fear has always been the great accelerant of power. The state must be stronger. Authority must be firmer. Dissent must be controlled. Force becomes acceptable so long as it is aimed at the “right” targets.
The irony is that we on the Right pride ourselves on skepticism of power, and yet, when threatened, we seem willing to concentrate it. Surveillance is justified. Coercion is excused. Emergency measures become permanent. A police state grows. Justice becomes weaponized. And all of it is defended with the same quiet assurance: we are the good guys.
This is the shared error.
Both sides believe their intentions are pure. Both believe their enemies uniquely dangerous. Both believe their actions are justified by the righteousness of the cause. Each is convinced that if power must be wielded, it will be wielded by them responsibly, because it is in the right hands. If only our side had the One Ring to rule them all, we would use it for justice! In the hands of others it is treacherous, but we would not be corrupted by it!
It is precisely this belief that imperils our republic. The tragedy is not that we seek justice or order. The tragedy is that we, in our pride, forget our nature, and stop asking the only question that truly matters: What might this make us become?
Evil rarely announces itself as evil. It does not arrive with horns or fire. It arrives with confidence. With moral certainty. With the calm assurance that history, reason, or God Himself is on one’s side in a war against the other. It does not demand that we abandon our values, only that we trust them, rather than Him, so completely that we stop questioning how we advance them.
I recognize this temptation because I have felt it. And if you’re being honest, you have too. The comfort of believing your side is all holy. The relief of assuming that corruption only happens elsewhere. It is an easy lie to accept, especially when the world feels unstable and the stakes feel high. But history offers a consistent warning: the people most convinced of their righteousness are often the ones most likely to fall into sin.
It is worth recalling that the first temptation in Scripture was not a temptation to cruelty or chaos, but to certainty. The serpent did not urge disobedience for its own sake. He promised knowledge, moral clarity, the ability to see good and evil for oneself, removed from God. The allure was not wickedness, but independence. The suggestion that once enlightened, man would be capable of judging rightly, acting rightly, ruling rightly, without God’s guiding hand.
That same temptation has never left us. The conviction that our side is righteous becomes the veil that blinds us to what we are capable of becoming. And once righteousness is assumed, almost any act can be baptized in its name.
None of this is meant to suggest that all sides are equal, or that moral distinctions do not matter. We choose sides precisely because we believe one to be better — morally clearer, more grounded, more likely to lead to a just and stable society. We are conservatives for good reasons. We argue, persuade, and vote because we believe our ideas are superior, not interchangeable, and that outcomes are not morally neutral.
But acknowledging that one side may be right does not mean that it is immune. Virtue may favor one cause more than another, but temptation does not discriminate. Power tests everyone. Certainty flatters everyone. And no movement, however well-intentioned, is exempt from the danger of believing that righteousness alone will keep it honest.
The answer, then, is not cynicism. It is not moral relativism. It is not the abandonment of conviction. It is humility, the uncomfortable recognition that no cause, no movement, no ideology is immune from corruption, from sin, from becoming the very thing it fights against. Neither side has a monopoly on virtue. Both sides have sinners and saints. A healthy society is not one in which everyone agrees on what is good. It is one in which each of us recognize the good in the other. The moment we believe otherwise, we place ourselves in the greatest danger of all.
This is what Satan demands we surrender: not our values, but our humility and our humanity, for with those come a recognition of our own fallibility. And what better way to achieve his destructive ends than to flatter both sides that they are unfailingly righteous, and the other unfailingly evil.
It is often said that God is neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I believe that to be true. But the devil, I am convinced, is both.
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