What If Trevor Noah Is Right About the Left and Religion?

Screen capture of December 16, 2025 episode of What Now? with Trevor Noah

A month ago, I heard something that I’m still thinking about.

Trevor Noah’s December 2025 interview with Zohran Mamdani (NYC’s new mayor, the democratic socialist who actually won) on his “What Now?” podcast was circulating again. I heard a clip where they were talking about why Democrats can’t seem to sell people on, well, anything hopeful. Mamdani was being characteristically blunt about how Republicans dream big while progressives have been busy lowering everyone’s expectations.

Then Trevor tossed THIS out there.

“I sometimes think it’s because of the decline of religion on the left.”

I rewound three times. Went hunting for the transcript later because I needed to sit with what he actually said, word for word. And look, I’m not trying to convert anyone here. God knows (pun intended) that’s not my brand. But Trevor might’ve stumbled onto something that cuts way deeper than the usual “coastal elites don’t get church people” critique.

So here’s what they said

Mamdani’s was doing his thing, diagnosing the problem with Democratic politics:

“Republicans have a limitless imagination. And as Democrats, we’re constructing an ever lowering ceiling of possibility. You know, and we are robbing ourselves of ambition and imagination, and we’re telling people that their choice is between settling or sacrifice. And neither of these are enough. You have to have an affirmative vision of how life can be better than this, because this life already is suffocating people.”

That’s when Trevor drops his theory about religion. His co-host Eugene Khoza immediately pushes back a little, “I don’t think religion is declined. I think faith.”

Trevor nods: “Yeah, the two have been combined for a long time.” Then he gets specific:

“One of the things that faith requires of you is the ability to believe that this current state that you are in is not the end. There is a possibility that something can be greater. And even though you cannot see it, you believe that it can happen. It requires literally everything that you just said.”

Then Mamdani, who literally just ran and won a campaign on big progressive promise, confirms what Trevor’s suggesting: “I’ve found over the course of the campaign that it’s often in houses of worship where New Yorkers still have that trust, really still have that faith, and it’s by and large lost when it comes to politics.”

Then he tells this devastating story. Woman at a town hall. Multiple mayoral administrations promised her neighborhood a speed bump. It has been more than a decade. Still no speed bump. Mamdani’s thinking: how the hell am I supposed to ask her to believe I can deliver universal childcare when city government can’t deliver a speed bump they already promised?

“Wherever you are losing people’s faith, losing people’s trust, that’s also where you’re losing their faith and trust in an ambitious agenda.”

Teaching moment: why imagination actually matters

Okay, so my mind goes to Catholic theologian David Tracy who wrote this book in 1981 called The Analogical Imagination. Stay with me.

Tracy’s whole thing was that the Catholic tradition teaches people a specific way of seeing, what he calls an “analogical imagination.” It’s fundamentally about connection, about seeing the sacred disclosed through the ordinary rather than separate from it. Both/and thinking instead of either/or.

But here’s where it gets interesting for politics: Tracy argued this analogical imagination isn’t some mystical gift you either have or don’t. It’s a trained capacity. A learned skill for seeing possibilities embedded in the present moment, for recognizing patterns that point toward transformation.

Religious traditions, he’s saying, have been teaching people how to look at the world as it is and simultaneously hold in their minds what it could become. Not through fantasy or denial. Through what he called “disciplined attention to what reality itself suggests is possible.”

Tracy called this “the one finite hope of liberation to the essential.” I’d call it: the ability to work for something you can’t yet prove will happen.

And this, THIS, is exactly what Trevor’s talking about. Faith gives you capacity to believe “this current state isn’t the end” without needing a peer-reviewed study proving the future will be better. It’s not irrationality. It’s a different kind of rationality altogether, one that can juggle complexity and ambiguity and hope all at once without dropping any of them.

Think about that for a second. We’re not talking about blind optimism or toxic positivity here. We’re talking about a cognitive and emotional framework that lets you stare directly at how bad things are while still organizing toward how things could be.

Funny thing. A few weeks back I wrote about James Talarico, Texas state rep, who went on Ezra Klein’s and was incredibly Christian and progressive and articulate. He defined faith not as believing certain doctrines but as trust. Absolute trust in something beyond yourself.

For Talarico, that’s trust in love, not the Hallmark card kind but love as an actual force in the universe, as logos, as God (if you are into that).

What’s striking is that Mamdani’s using almost the same language. People don’t lack information about Democratic policy proposals. They lack trust that any politician will actually deliver. The erosion of trust in politics mirrors, maybe even feeds off of, the erosion of trust in religious institutions.

But here’s what I wonder: If we strip away religious frameworks entirely, what’s left to train people in costly, sustained trust? What teaches you to hold hope through disappointment? What gives you practice believing transformation is possible when every piece of evidence says otherwise?

I genuinely don’t know.

When vision actually worked

Martin Luther King Jr. had a word for what he was building. Called it the Beloved Community.

Not some pie-in-the-sky utopia. Not heaven on earth. King insisted the Beloved Community was a realistic, achievable goal. Something that could actually happen in history if enough people committed to nonviolence and trained themselves in its methods.

His vision came straight out of Black church theology. But it wasn’t just spiritual. It was concrete. It gave people a way to imagine radical transformation that wasn’t naive about how bad things were but also wasn’t resigned to how bad things would stay.

In Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, King wrote that he believed the Beloved Community would eventually be actualized in history. Not perfectly. Not completely. But really. His hope was rooted in his faith in God’s power to work through people within history. Not outside it, not someday in heaven, but here.

That’s Tracy’s analogical imagination put to work. King looked at Jim Crow America, the violence, the systemic brutality, the entrenched resistance to change, and could see not just what was but what was trying to be born. He asked people to risk everything (their jobs, their safety, their actual lives) for a future they couldn’t touch yet. And somehow, he sustained that vision through beatings and bombings and betrayals and assassinations.

“The ability to believe that this current state is not the end.” That was King’s whole project.

And it worked not because he gave good speeches (though obviously he did), but because he could train people in a hope disciplined enough to survive contact with reality. Hope grounded in something bigger than election cycles or quarterly earnings or poll numbers.

Obama got this, by the way. “The audacity of hope” wasn’t branding. It was Black church theology doing political organizing. His roots in that tradition gave him access to frameworks for sustaining hope that purely secular politics keeps trying and failing to replicate.

The uncomfortable question

So here it is, the thing Trevor’s actually asking: Has religious illiteracy on the left become a political liability?

Not in the obvious way. Not just “progressives should stop being condescending to churchgoers” (though, yeah, that too). I mean something weirder and harder to fix.

Has losing religious literacy meant progressives have lost access to the actual tools needed for transformative politics? The capacity to imagine genuinely different futures? The frameworks for sustaining hope when everything looks bleak? The practiced ability to trust in possibilities you can’t prove yet?

Because Mamdani’s right, people are suffocating under current conditions. Trevor’s right that faith trains you to believe the current state isn’t final. King proved that religious imagination can ground the kind of political organizing that actually wins real change.

But what if you’re like me? Someone who doesn’t claim religious identity, for whom religious institutions feel inaccessible or problematic?

What then?

So what do we do with this

Look. I’m not saying everyone needs to find Jesus or join an ashram or start davening.

I’m definitely not saying that.

But maybe—and I’m genuinely asking—maybe we need to take seriously what religions have always understood: Imagination isn’t frivolous. Hope requires training. Trust needs practice. The capacity to envision and organize toward futures you cannot yet see is a skill, not a personality quirk some people are born with.

Maybe “religion reimagined” in this context doesn’t mean adopting traditions wholesale. Maybe it means letting religious wisdom be a conversation partner. Learning from King’s Beloved Community even if you don’t share his Christology. Drawing on Tracy’s analogical imagination even if Catholic theology leaves you cold. Taking Talarico’s insight about trust seriously even if you’re not sure what you’d trust absolutely.

The portable insight here, the thing I think we can actually use, isn’t “progressives need to get religion.” It’s this: The vision problem Trevor diagnosed isn’t fundamentally about messaging or policy wonkery. It’s about deep cognitive and emotional capacities that religious traditions have spent literal centuries developing. And secular politics hasn’t figured out how to replicate them yet.

Mamdani noticed that houses of worship still have trust while politics has lost it. Maybe that’s because religious communities have been practicing hope longer. They’ve developed what you might call technologies (okay, practices, frameworks, whatever) for sustaining vision through disappointment. For training people to believe in transformation they can’t see yet. For building the kind of trust that makes costly commitment possible.

We don’t all need to become religious.

But we might need to learn from traditions that have been doing this work for a very, very long time.

Because Trevor’s right: You can’t inspire people, can’t move them toward an affirmative vision of better futures, without the capacity to imagine and trust in possibilities beyond the current ceiling.

Faith,however you end up defining it, isn’t a luxury.

It’s the foundation.

If you enjoyed this post please comment, like, or share (that helps get it in front of others). And if you’d like to support my work and to learn more about what I think spirituality with the ethics and tradition infused back in looks like, consider pre-ordering my book, Beyond Wellness.