Institutions and the Politics They Keep

Religious and cultural institutions like to describe themselves as standing above politics, tending to matters of the spirit or tradition rather than the passing concerns of government. In practice, few institutions manage to stay above anything for long. The moment an institution owns property, employs people, or commands the loyalty of a large membership, it becomes a political actor whether it wants the label or not, because political actors are exactly what property, payrolls, and loyal constituencies create.

The interesting question is rarely whether an institution has political influence — most large ones do — but what it chooses to do with it, and how honest it is about the choice. Some institutions lean into their influence openly, endorsing candidates, funding causes, and treating political engagement as part of their mission. Others prefer to keep their influence implicit, operating through informal pressure and social expectation, all while maintaining that they don’t “do politics.”

That second category tends to draw sharper criticism when it is finally called out, precisely because the gap between the stated neutrality and the actual influence feels like a kind of quiet dishonesty. An institution that openly backs a cause can at least be argued with directly. An institution that insists it has no political position while consistently aligning with one side of every major dispute is much harder to hold accountable, because there’s no explicit claim to challenge.

PSAN doesn’t think institutions need to be apolitical to be trustworthy — that standard is close to impossible to meet and probably not even desirable. What we do think matters is transparency about where an institution actually stands, including institutions with roots in socialism or any other tradition that claims a moral high ground. The problem was never influence itself. It’s influence exercised while denying that it exists.