The Religion of Success: The Shape of the Right: An Autopsy of American Conservatism-A Ten Part Series, Nr 5
The Sacred Economics of Winning
“The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.” — Lily Tomlin
This essay is part of The Shape of the Right: An Autopsy of American Conservatism, a ten-part exploration of the ideas, myths, and moral compulsions that shaped the American Right. I’m not here to sneer or to support it, but to understand how a movement that began with sermons and self-discipline grew into a politics of grievance and spectacle. Each essay stands on its own, but together they form an autopsy, not of a party, but of a moral psychology that still thinks it’s the soul of the nation.
Entering the Cathedral of Success
I keep finding myself walking into this strange cathedral of American life where the altar looks an awful lot like a conference table and the sanctuary smells faintly of ambition and burnt coffee. I’m never entirely sure why I feel this familiar tug in my chest whenever I start thinking about success. Maybe it’s because success in this country doesn’t live in the realm of ordinary goals. It lives somewhere higher and stranger, where spreadsheets masquerade as scripture and every PowerPoint presentation feels like a moral performance.
I catch myself asking why I feel judged even when no one’s looking. Why do I feel compelled to straighten my shoulders when the topic of success comes up, as if the ghost of an old teacher might appear at any moment holding a report card with my name on it. And why do I feel a low thrum of guilt whenever I’m not immediately productive. These are the embarrassing questions that drift through my mind whenever I sit with the truth that America doesn’t simply admire success. America worships it.
There’s a quiet and almost imperceptible moment in childhood when you start to understand that winning isn’t just encouraged. It’s holy. You learn it not from sermons or textbooks but from the small cultural nods that shape your sense of worth. A gold star on a chart. A trophy. A pat on the head. A parent smiling in that way that says, for a brief second, that you did something worthy of love. We pretend these things fade as we age, but I’m not convinced they do. They simply become more sophisticated symbols. Titles. Salaries. Followers. Influence. The vocabulary changes, but the catechism remains.
When the Market Became a Ministry
Sometimes I wonder how capitalism managed to slip into the role of national chaplain without anyone noticing. It didn’t announce itself. It simply arrived wearing the reassuring smile of opportunity. Before long, we’d replaced sermons with TED talks and parables with podcasts about maximizing our potential. We didn’t even blink when the CEO became a kind of bishop who read sacred texts from a screen and called it ancient wisdom. We treated the earnings report like a liturgical calendar. I once heard a venture capitalist explain the miracle of exponential growth with the same tone a mystic might use for divine revelation. It was impressive in its own way, even if slightly alarming.
I sometimes laugh at how earnest we are about our new rituals. The commandments of hustle culture are printed everywhere. Wake earlier. Grind harder. Optimize your mornings. Build your brand. Never let your inbox gain the upper hand. Rest only when it enhances productivity. I’ve never met an ancient prophet who cared about peak performance metrics, but in America, we expect even our saints to have a solid morning routine.
I’ll confess something that still makes me shake my head. There was a phase of my life when my to do list felt like a barometer of my inner virtue. If I crossed off everything, I felt righteous. If I left even one task undone, I carried a sense of moral failure that clung to me like humidity. I’d sit there at the end of the day asking myself if I’d earned the right to relax. It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud. But perhaps you’ve felt something similar. Perhaps you’ve looked at your calendar and wondered if you were building a life or building a mechanism that was slowly devouring you.
The National Fear of Falling Behind
Failure is treated with an almost superstitious fear in this culture. I sometimes joke that failure spreads more quickly than the flu. One person loses a job and suddenly the entire family walks around as if misfortune might drift across the living room and infect them. We don’t treat failure as a natural part of the human journey. We treat it as an invisible blemish on the soul. Something you should hide, something you should conceal, something you should move away from before it marks your record forever.
This fear shapes our politics. It shapes our social values. It shapes the way conservatives speak about responsibility and character. If you accept that failure can come from circumstances, then you’re forced to admit that luck and privilege play roles in success. And admitting that disrupts the comforting belief that winners are morally superior and losers are morally flawed. It’s easier, in a strange way, to believe the myth. It feels tidier. It spares us from empathy, which can be an inconvenient emotion when you’re defending inequality.
I’ll admit another uncomfortable truth. I’ve caught myself admiring people simply because they looked like they were winning. It didn’t matter whether they were kind or wise or even remotely decent. Something in me saw their success and felt the tug of respect. That tug embarrasses me now, but it also reminds me how deeply the religion of success runs in this country. We admire affluence the way earlier generations admired righteousness. We don’t call this idolatry, but perhaps that’s what it is.
The Prosperity Gospel Without the Gospel
This is why the prosperity gospel fits so seamlessly into the American psyche. It wasn’t created out of thin air. It was built on the foundation of economic myths we’d already accepted. God must love winners. God must reward them. God must bless them with material abundance and spiritual immunity. This idea is so appealing that it eventually escaped the confines of religion and wandered into the political arena. Suddenly wealth wasn’t just a sign of competence. It was a sign of divine approval. And those who lacked it must have failed some cosmic test.
The market became our new moral judge. If it succeeded, it was good. If it failed, it was flawed. I sometimes marvel at the naivety of this belief, especially since the market behaves like an impulsive teenager with a short attention span. Yet we invest it with the authority of a prophet. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard someone say that the market is speaking, as if we should all hush and lean forward to hear the divine message. Half the time the market is muttering nonsense, but we treat it like scripture.
The Loneliness at the Top
Every so often I talk with someone who has reached the upper echelons of their field. They have everything we’re taught to prize. Wealth. Recognition. Visibility. Influence. And almost every time, they confess something with a quiet voice that surprises me. They feel trapped. Their success has become a cage made of gold and anxiety. They can’t stop. They can’t rest. They can’t reveal their vulnerabilities because vulnerability is read as weakness, and weakness threatens the illusion that keeps them adored. They’re exhausted but afraid to step off the podium. I always feel a strange mix of sympathy and sadness in those moments. The view from the top is beautiful, but the silence is unbearable.
Success promises fulfillment, but it rarely delivers intimacy. Success promises security, but it often breeds paranoia. Success promises freedom, but it frequently demands obedience. It’s a bright light that blinds more than it illuminates. When I think of this, I start to ask myself a quiet question that feels more personal than philosophical. What part of myself have I sacrificed on the altar of achievement, and was it worth the offering.
A Different Kind of Covenant
Sometimes I imagine what would happen if America stopped treating life like a tournament. If politics weren’t a sport. If community weren’t a marketplace. If we abandoned the idea that every interaction must generate some form of social capital. Maybe we’d breathe again. Maybe we’d remember what it feels like to be human without constantly performing humanity for an audience.
I keep returning to a single troubling question. What if the only thing we have in common now is the fear of losing. That fear makes us frantic. It makes us guarded. It makes us suspicious of one another’s success. It makes us reluctant to show weakness. It makes us believe that people who fall deserve the fall. It makes us hard. And it makes us lonely.
Yet even in this strange age of competition and insecurity, I feel a quiet pull toward a different kind of covenant. A covenant that measures a life not by its trophies but by its tenderness. A covenant that honors integrity over influence. A covenant that values connection over domination. I see glimpses of this in the happiest people I meet. Their joy rarely comes from achievement. It comes from generosity. It comes from being present. It comes from belonging. It comes from meaning. None of these things fit neatly into a profit and loss statement.
Sometimes I imagine the American dream as a dinner table rather than a ladder. A wide table where everyone sits and shares the bread. A table where you don’t have to climb over anyone to feel worthy. A table where success isn’t measured by height but by kindness.
That image feels sentimental, but I’m not ashamed of it. Sentiment is rebellion in a culture that thinks cynicism is wisdom.
So I’ll end with a simple truth. I no longer want success to be the judge of my soul. I no longer want the market to decide my value. I no longer want to confuse achievement with belonging. I want a life that feels real. I want a life that feels steady. I want a life that remembers goodness more than performance.
And maybe you want that too. Maybe you’ve felt the quiet ache of wanting to live rather than win. Maybe you’re ready for a covenant built on humanity rather than hierarchy. If that’s true, then perhaps we’re already building something new together. Something gentler. Something truer. Something that doesn’t require a quarterly report.
And maybe that’s the first real victory any of us have had in a very long time.
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