I rewatched last night the political thriller The Ides of March, and though I remembered it as sharp, slick, and cynical, something else stood out this time, something oddly theological.
In the movie’s opening line, Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) tells us what he is not. “I am not a Christian.” No, his faith is in something far greater, far nobler, far less superstitious: the Constitution, politics, the machinery of democracy. “Politics is my life,” he later says, and he places his faith in a man—Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney), the would-be savior of America, the rare politician who is not, as all others are, a liar and a fraud.
Meyers, of course, is a fool. The belief that any man, let alone a career politician, could be immune from ambition, desire, or corruption is the sort of naivete that collapses the moment it meets reality. And collapse it does. Morris, the paragon of virtue, turns out to be little more than a particularly smooth practitioner of the ancient political arts: deception, coercion, and self-preservation. He has seduced and impregnated a young intern, a girl barely old enough to vote, and when the problem presents itself—and do let us call it a problem, for that is how it is treated—Meyers, ever the dutiful disciple, steps in to solve it.
And what does “solving” it entail? Not care, not concern, not the kind of responsibility that any decent moral framework would demand of an older, powerful man who takes advantage of a subordinate. No, the solution is, as it always is in these cases, to make the evidence disappear. Off to the abortion clinic she goes, escorted by a man who once thought himself honorable. What follows is nothing less than the film’s theological linchpin. The girl, overwhelmed with grief, despair, and perhaps a terrible realization about what has been done to her—about what she has done—takes her own life. Abortion is not here heroic, it is catastrophic, leading directly to despair and death.
Here, the film’s subtext becomes impossible to ignore. We are not simply watching a political thriller. We are watching a parable about the wages of sin. The film, likely unwittingly, presents an argument as old as Christianity itself: when man rejects the divine, when he refuses to humble himself before a higher moral order, he does not become enlightened or liberated—he becomes corrupted. Meyers does not reject religion; he merely replaces God with false god, and Clooney is his Christ. He does not pray to the Almighty, so he prays to power. And as the story so vividly illustrates, his god is no less demanding.
But what makes The Ides of March particularly sinister is that it does not depict a dramatic, singular fall from grace. There is no moment when Meyers gasps in horror at what he has become. His transformation is subtle, incremental. And this, perhaps, is the most theologically accurate aspect of the entire film. The corruption of the soul is rarely a sudden catastrophe—it is a slow, creeping process, a series of small compromises in which each individual sin feels necessary, justified, even good at the time.
Meyers tells himself that he is serving a higher good by helping the intern get the abortion, because it serves to help candidate Morris, and Morris’s election is the highest moral virtue. He tells himself that power is necessary to enact good, and this abortion is necessary to achieve power. But necessary evils are still evil, and more pernicious because they’re rationalized. So Gosling facilitates the abortion, thinking he’s doing damage control, but in reality, he’s participating in something deeply destructive, not just to the child and the girl, but to himself. This theme continues throughout the movie, and at each stage, he believes that his actions are not only defensible but pragmatic. What he never realizes, what so few ever do, is that by the time he sees what he has become, the damage is already done.
What makes The Ides of March so compelling is not its indictment of politics—such critiques are neither new nor particularly revelatory—but its examination of misplaced faith. There is, at its center, a deeply theological message hidden beneath the film’s polished exterior. Meyers, in rejecting God, does not become faithless; he simply replaces one object of worship with another. Morris is his idol, his substitute for a divine savior.
But faith in man and his institutions is always misplaced, and politics, the most heretical of all religions, offers no true messiah. Its creed, that everything is negotiable in service of the greater good, leads not to utopia, but to moral decay. And, in a grim echo of Matthew 16:26, we see what it has cost Meyers in the final shot of the film, as he, having by then achieved the pinnacle of his profession, stares vacuously into the camera, his face impassive and drained of spirit: For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
At its core, this is a film about false gods. About idolatry. About putting trust in men instead of God. About thinking you can save your soul with the right ideology, the right leader, the right movement. But men are flawed. Leaders lie. Political messiahs fail.
Gosling’s opening declaration — “I am not a Christian” — isn’t just a throwaway line, and it’s not accidental. It’s a confession. A tragic one. Because by rejecting the real Messiah, and the true faith, he makes the same mistake every generation before him has made: he puts his faith in something that cannot save him. And by the end, when the camera holds on his dead-eyed stare, we see the truth as plain as day.
He may win the campaign, but he lost his soul.
