Much of the contemporary backlash against “identity politics” rests on a confusion: Politics is always about identity.
Politics is the activity of identifying and sustaining a “we” that orients the lives of those who belong to a polity — not absolutely, but necessarily. To object to identity politics is therefore to misunderstand political life. The real question is not whether politics involves identity but how our many other non-political identities are acknowledged, ordered and brought to bear in political judgment.
In everyday usage, “identity politics” refers to the invocation of a particular identity — gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation — in order to press a political claim. Critics often object that such appeals are divisive and fragment society into competing subgroups, undermining civic unity. Against this, they typically invoke broader and vaguer identities: citizenship, shared nationality or our common humanity. Political life, they argue, should proceed on this more universal footing.
This objection is not cynical, nor is it wrongheaded. Political identity is necessarily abstract, and rightly so. A civic or national identity does not — and should not — attempt to capture the fullness of a human life. Politics is not an absolute identity, and political membership is not meant to subsume every dimension of who we are. Abstraction is what allows political order to exist alongside other forms of life rather than overwhelming them.
The difficulty arises when this abstraction is treated as self-sufficient. Because political identity is thin by design, it cannot by itself determine which aspects of a polity’s members’ identities are relevant. Part of political life, therefore, consists in negotiating what counts as political in the first place, which requires attention to the thicker identities through which people actually live, suffer and make sense of their circumstances.
To see why, we must clarify what an identity is in political terms. An identity is not an “essence” or a hidden “inner truth.” Politically, it functions as a socially intelligible standpoint: a way in which experiences become legible, harms become articulable, and claims can be recognized as having public significance. Identities do not tell us everything about a person, but they do shape how that person appears within shared institutions and common life.
Identities are plural and overlapping. Any given person inhabits many at once: Christian, spouse, parent, teacher, Canadian. None of these exhausts the person, and none necessarily excludes the others. Political life always involves foregrounding some identities, depending on context. The danger lies not in naming identities, but in mistaking any one of them — political identity included — for the whole.
Catholic identity offers a clear illustration of this dynamic. For Catholics, faith is a constitutive identity that cannot be reduced to politics, yet it cannot be sealed off from political life either. The Church understands the human person as ordered beyond the political — to God, to moral truth and to forms of community that no state creates or fully governs. This conviction places principled limits on political authority, resisting the temptation to treat civic identity as exhaustive or to invest political institutions with salvific expectations.
At the same time, Catholic identity is not merely private or inward. It shapes how dignity, obligation, suffering and solidarity are understood, and therefore how political claims are recognized, weighed and judged. Catholic participation in public life does not proceed from the assumption that faith supplies a comprehensive political blueprint. Rather, faith informs the questions Catholics bring to political deliberation: Which lives are rendered invisible by prevailing abstractions? Which forms of dependence go unacknowledged? And which moral claims struggle to find public recognition?
Bringing Catholic identity into public life does not mean turning politics into theology. It means allowing faith to shape how Catholics and their fellow citizens recognize and respond to political questions. When Catholics raise concerns about how the poor are treated by social policy, how we protect the unborn, or how end-of-life laws define dignity and care, they are not claiming religious privilege. They are asking whether existing political frameworks adequately account for forms of dependence, vulnerability and moral obligation that shape real lives. These considerations may also matter to non-Catholics, even if their moral perspectives do not foreground such concerns in the same ways.
In these cases, Catholic engagement can resemble identity politics — not because faith is being elevated above politics, but because political categories are being challenged from the perspective of a specific identity. To dismiss such engagement as a violation of neutrality is an error, as this amounts to accepting a different set of moral assumptions already built into public life — assumptions shaped over time by earlier judgments about which identities and concerns counted as politically relevant.
Seen in this light, identity politics does not attempt to replace civic identity with narrower identities. It is a way of testing the limits of political abstraction. Identity-based claims ask whether existing political categories adequately capture the experiences they are meant to govern. They raise questions about whether a supposedly general rule, norm or institution is responsive to the variety of lives it encompasses.
At its best, identity politics performs a diagnostic function. It does not deny the importance of political unity but challenges assumptions about how that unity has been defined and maintained. It presses the question of relevance: Which differences matter politically, and which properly remain outside the political sphere? That question has no final answer, and its ongoing contestation is not a failure of politics but a condition of politics.
This does not mean that all identity-based claims are equally sound. Identity can be overstated, instrumentalized or treated as morally exhaustive. It can crowd out other considerations or harden into an unquestionable standpoint. However, these are errors of judgment rather than reasons to reject identity politics altogether. The same risks attend absolute appeals to national unity, public order or tradition. No political vocabulary is immune to misuse.
Politics without identity is impossible. Political identity, precisely because it is partial and abstract, must remain open to revision in light of the lives it governs. Identity politics, understood charitably, is one of the ways that revision occurs. The task is not to suppress identity in the name of neutrality, but to deliberate openly about which identities matter and how they implicate our politics.
The real danger lies not in acknowledging the plurality of who we are, but in forgetting that political life itself is only one part of who we are.
