The Empty Promises of Sentimentalism

In the ancient baptismal liturgy, the Christian is asked to renounce three things: Satan, his works, and his empty promises. The third of these has always been the most fascinating, because it addresses the mode by which evil most characteristically operates. Satan rarely tempts in his odious, gargoyled, form. His works are seldom advertised as such. But his empty promises, the offer of something luminous that conceals something ruinous, can ensnare the best among us.

The temptation in Eden was not framed as an embrace of evil It was an offer of elevation. "You will be like God," the serpent tells Eve, and the genius of the offer is that it traffics in a language of aspiration that is not, on its face, false. Scripture repeatedly warns that deception is most dangerous when it speaks in the idiom of the good. Saint Paul's admonition that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light is not metaphorical decoration; it is a diagnostic claim about the structure of temptation itself.

Augustine understood this with characteristic precision. In the City of God, he argued that the earthly city is not simply a domain of wickedness opposed to the heavenly city of virtue. It is, more subtly, a domain of disordered love, a place where genuine goods are pursued outside the framework that gives them coherence. The danger is not that the earthly city loves nothing worth loving, but that it loves real goods badly, wresting them from the ordo amoris in which alone they can be rightly held. Augustine illustrates the point through Rome itself: the Romans pursued genuine virtues, courage, civic duty, even a kind of justice, but pursued them for the sake of glory rather than for God, and the result was a civilization capable of extraordinary achievement and extraordinary cruelty in almost equal measure. Virtues severed from their proper ordering do not simply weaken; they curdle. This Augustinian insight illuminates a great deal about our present political moment.

Contemporary progressive politics in America is saturated with a moral vocabulary that is unmistakably Christian in origin. We are told about care for the immigrant, mercy for the offender, freedom for women in difficult circumstances, and protection for the poor. The duty to welcome the stranger, the dignity of the marginalized, the obligation to show mercy toward the guilty: these ideas were not assumptions of the ancient pagan world. They emerged from the Christian conviction that every human person bears the imago Dei, and they were elaborated over centuries of theological reflection, from the patristic period through the high medieval synthesis of Aquinas, into the social teaching of the modern Church.

But moral languages can survive long after the beliefs that produced them have been abandoned. When the theological foundations of a moral vision are discarded, the vocabulary often persists. It still carries emotional force. It still commands a kind of authority. But it no longer has the intellectual structure that once gave it coherence and, critically, gave it limits. Reinhold Niebuhr warned throughout his career that liberal Protestantism's great temptation was sentimentality: the substitution of vague benevolent feeling for the hard-headed realism that Christian anthropology demands. What Niebuhr diagnosed in the mainline churches of the mid-twentieth century has now become the governing sensibility of an entire political movement.

The result is a politics that promises compassion while frequently producing consequences that harm the very people it claims to defend. The pattern is consistent enough to deserve sustained examination.

Consider the modern movement for so-called sanctuary cities. The language of sanctuary appeals to a genuine Christian instinct. The Hebrew Bible commands hospitality toward the stranger. The Church has long understood that political communities bear obligations to the vulnerable and the displaced. But the Christian tradition has never understood hospitality as the negation of political order. The obvious rejoinder is that the tradition also teaches, from Augustine through Aquinas, that unjust laws are no laws at all and may be licitly defied. But the tradition sets demanding conditions for such defiance: the act must be ordered toward a more complete justice, not toward the mere suspension of enforcement. Sanctuary policies do not propose an alternative legal order or articulate a superior principle of justice. They simply refuse to enforce, and refusal is not reform. The result is not a more just immigration system but a legal vacuum that consigns the vulnerable to exploitation by the very forces a functioning order would restrain. Hospitality presupposes a household; it does not abolish one.

More than one in three Americans now live in a jurisdiction that refuses to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. As my erstwhile colleague, Daniel Di Martino, has documented, these jurisdictions prohibit local law enforcement from inquiring about immigration status and sometimes refuse to detain even violent criminals until ICE can arrange deportation. The defenders of these policies note, correctly, that immigrants in the aggregate commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens. But as Di Martino observes, this lower rate is in significant part a product of the deportation system itself: immigration law mandates removal after serious criminal offenses, even for legal immigrants, thereby preventing the recidivism that drives the bulk of criminal activity. Sanctuary policies systematically undermine this mechanism.

When a jurisdiction releases a criminal alien rather than honoring an ICE detainer, it is not exercising mercy. It is exposing the community, and particularly its poorest members, to precisely the kind of repeat offending that deportation was designed to prevent. In New York City, ICE reported that of more than fifty individuals arrested in a single enforcement sweep, over thirty had been released from local custody despite active detainers, and all but two had criminal histories in the United States. In Midtown Manhattan precincts, as many as 75 percent of recent arrestees have been migrants, frequently cited for robbery or assault.

The fiscal costs are equally staggering. New York City has spent more than seven billion dollars housing and caring for undocumented immigrants, at an average cost of $370 per person per day, nearly double what the city spends per homeless individual. This is compassion that has been transmuted into an enormous transfer of public resources away from the citizens, many of them poor, who depend on municipal services. Compassion separated from order is precisely the sentimentalism Niebuhr warned against: it does not produce protection. It produces exploitation in one direction and fiscal ruin in the other.

A parallel dynamic is visible in the progressive prosecution movement. Over the past decade, a wave of reform-minded district attorneys have taken office in major American cities, promising to end mass incarceration, reduce racial disparities, and reimagine the relationship between the state and the accused. The moral language has been, again, recognizably Christian in its cadences: mercy, restoration, redemption.

The concern for mercy is legitimate. Christianity has always insisted that justice must be tempered with mercy, and the American carceral system has undeniable pathologies that demand reform. But in the Christian tradition, mercy does not replace justice. It presupposes it. Aquinas is emphatic on this point: mercy that undermines the order of justice is not mercy at all, but a species of disorder. Without a stable framework of law, "mercy" becomes indistinguishable from abandonment.

The recent record is damning. Philadelphia recorded 562 homicides in 2021, the highest in the city's modern history, during the tenure of District Attorney Larry Krasner, who had campaigned explicitly on ending "addiction to mass incarceration." Krasner insisted publicly that the city faced no "crisis of crime" or "crisis of violence," even as homicides had risen roughly 60% from pre-pandemic levels and the city set records it had not approached since the crack epidemic of 1990. Commercial burglaries rose 40%. Carjackings more than doubled in a single year, from 410 in 2020 to over 847 in 2021. In San Francisco, District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled in June 2022 by 55% of voters in one of the most liberal electorates in the country. Misdemeanor petty theft prosecution rates under Boudin's office fell from 70% in 2019 to 44% in 2020.

As Charles Fain Lehman observed in Wall Street Journal, blanket policies of de-prosecution "create a presumption of release that will inevitably lead to avoidable, tragic crimes." The recall effort was organized and funded overwhelmingly by liberal Democrats who had concluded that the promise of compassionate prosecution had become a warrant for visible disorder. Rafael Mangual has argued at length in Criminal (In)Justice that the harms caused by decarceration and depolicing are borne disproportionately by those who can least afford them: the black and brown residents of high-crime neighborhoods who are most frequently the victims of serious violence.

Thomas Hogan's synthetic control analysis, published in Criminology and Public Policy, found that de-prosecution policies in Philadelphia were associated with a statistically significant increase in homicides. A broader 2024 study by Petersen, Mitchell, and Yan in the same journal, examining the 100 largest U.S. counties from 2000 to 2020, found that jurisdictions electing progressive prosecutors experienced 6.7% higher relative rates of property crime. Crime fell everywhere during this period; it simply fell less where prosecutors chose not to prosecute. The finding, modest in isolation, confirms a basic insight that conservative thinkers from James Q. Wilson to George Kelling have articulated for decades: when institutional signals of order weaken, disorder migrates to the communities least equipped to resist it.

The same theological tension appears in the modern defense of abortion. The practice is overwhelmingly justified in the language of compassion: care for women in crisis, relief from unbearable hardship, freedom from circumstances not of one's choosing. The emotional force of these appeals is not trivial; the suffering they describe is real. But the Christian moral tradition has always insisted that the measure of a civilization's justice lies in its treatment of those who cannot advocate for themselves. A society that resolves hardship by eliminating its most vulnerable members, the unborn, has not expanded the reach of compassion. It has merely redefined who qualifies for it.

Even programs designed to alleviate poverty have sometimes reproduced the same pattern. The great public housing projects of the mid-twentieth century were conceived as instruments of social uplift. Their architects, many of them sincere New Deal liberals, believed that rational planning and federal resources could break the cycle of urban deprivation. What resulted, in city after city, was something closer to the opposite. Because local governments controlled siting decisions and because political resistance prevented construction in middle-class neighborhoods, the projects were overwhelmingly located in areas already marked by concentrated poverty and racial segregation.

As of 2019, public housing units remained situated in neighborhoods with an average poverty rate of 32%. Sixty percent of Black families in public housing lived in high-poverty neighborhoods, compared to only 13% of white families. The most notoriously distressed developments, Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, Cabrini-Green, became synonymous with the very pathologies they were meant to cure. HUD's own Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing concluded in the early 1990s that the program failed "almost totally in its responsibility to the residents." Children raised in the bottom quintile of the income distribution have a 43% chance of remaining there as adults; only 4% ever reach the top quintile. The bureaucratic management of poverty, however well-intentioned, became a mechanism for its perpetuation.

The HOPE VI program, which demolished many of the worst projects and replaced them with mixed-income developments, has shown dramatically better outcomes. A recent Harvard study tracking over a million public housing residents from 1993 to 2019 found that children who grew up in HOPE VI revitalized housing earned 50% more as adults than those who did not. The lesson is not that public investment is futile. It is that investment severed from an understanding of what human communities actually require, intact families, functional institutions, a moral ecology in which human beings can flourish, will reliably produce the opposite of its stated intentions.

None of this means that the people who advocate these policies lack compassion. In most cases the impulse toward mercy is genuine. But sincerity does not guarantee wisdom. Good intentions do not ensure good outcomes. And the persistent gap between the language of compassion and its practical consequences is not an accident. It is the predictable result of a moral vocabulary that has been uprooted from the theological soil in which it grew.

The baptismal liturgy offers a clarifying standard. Christians are not asked merely to renounce cruelty or injustice. They are asked to renounce empty promises: moral visions that imitate the form of compassion while discarding the truths that make compassion coherent. Consider Augustine's disordered loves, Niebuhr's sentimental illusions, Aquinas's insistence that mercy without justice is not mercy but chaos: the tradition is remarkably unified on this point. As Pope Benedict XVI masterfully articulated in Caritas in Veritate, compassion that is not disciplined by truth does not liberate. It destroys.

Every political movement in America today claims to care about the vulnerable. The real question is simpler and more demanding than any of them wish to acknowledge.

Does it actually help them?

When compassion is invoked but suffering increases, when mercy is proclaimed but the vulnerable are left more exposed than before, the promise has proved empty.

And the Christian response to empty promises has not changed.

Renounce them.