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Strauss often remarked that although politics can address finite problems it can never resolve the fundamental contradictions of life. Those contradictions have their source in the human need to answer the existential question "How should I live?," a supra-political question giving rise to stark alternatives. In the West, those alternatives were seen in philosophy and divine revelation, the lives of Socrates and Moses. The tension between them was, in Strauss's view, the hidden wellspring of our civilization's vitality. But the thinkers of the modern Enlightenment, horrified by religious war and frustrated by the other-worldliness of classical philosophy, tried to reduce that tension. They mocked religion, advocated toleration, and tried to redirect philosophy toward more practical pursuits, whether political, technological, or moral. They imagined a world of satisfied citizens and shopkeepers, and nearly succeeded in creating it. But as the nineteenth century progressed it became abundantly clear that one problem, the "Jewish question," could not be dissolved. Not because of Christian prejudice, which was real enough, or Jewish stubbornness, but because the existence of the Jews as a people constituted by di-vine revelation was a challenge to the Enlightenment's hope that politics could be isolated from supra-political claims. The principle leading to emancipation—that, to quote from the debate in the French National Assembly of 1789, "the Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals"—proved untenable; the call of revelation could not be extinguished from thought or politics. And that, for Strauss, meant that philosophy needed to reconsider the original "theological-political problem" afresh.

I found this in an article Does Society Need God?

Crime and Punishment

Throughout Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, religious morality governs the actions of many characters such as Sonia, Dounia and Raskolnikov's mother. Raskolnikov confronts the idea of being an "extraordinary man" and being able to overcome God's will to commit a sin that he justifies by persisting that it's for the better of society. On the contrary, Dounia and his mother live self-less lives in their pursuit of morality through religion. Even Sonia, the prostitue, is able to overcome the sin her immoral career and read to Raskolnikov from the bible. The Christian religion manages to keep some citizens moral, while posing a challenge for other citizens to overcome its lingering grasp of morality.

Dounia and her mother rely on God to confirm their beliefs, "People will write anything. We were talked about and written about, too. Have you forgotten? I am sure that she is a good girl, an dthat it is all nonsense. God grant it may be!" (pg 210)

Sonia defines Raskolnikov's belief in God and at the end, it is his brief sighting of her that motivates him to confess, "She looked wildly at him. He stood still before her. There was a look of poignant agony, of despair, in her face. She clasped her hands. His lips worked in an ugly, meaningless smile. He stood still a minute, grinned and went back to the police office." (457)