The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles over the Semantics of Secularization (original) (raw)

The Religion of Politics: Concerning a Postmodern Political Theology "To Come

2008

he religion of politics," wrote the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz, "was born from the ruins of Christianity." The political, "or more precisely, Revolution-co-opted the other function of religion: changing human beings and society." It "was the construction of a universal church." 1 From the standpoint of both world and Western history, the present day secular liberal dogma in the West of the necessary dissociativity of the religious from the political is the most curious of eccentricities. The principle derives, as does the American doctrine of the "separation of church and state," from a radicalization over time of Enlightenment anti-clericism and the deep suspicion among eighteenth century philosophes about the overreach of political sovereigns, whether democratic or autocratic, especially whenever the power of God might be invoked to abridge the free exercise of human reason and the freedom of the citizenry. The radicalization gathered momentum only in the twentieth century-in America the "non-establishment of religion" did not morph into "strict separationism" until an infamous 1948 Supreme Court decision-as positivist science threw religion as a whole on a broad cultural defensive and the secular utopianisms of socialism, communism, fascism, and Deweyan "democratism" routed all otherworldly hopes as legitimate expressions of collective human longing. Militant secularism can, if we pursue Paz's dictum, be regarded as the "universal church" of right reason and techno-scientific hegemony. Just about a generation ago this universal church seemed as secure for the long term as the Roman Catholic Church during the high middle ages. But the world has changed drastically in the last forty years. In the same way as unexpected and untoward historical events-the Black Death, the Great Schism, devastating dynastic wars over two centuries, and finally the printing press-brought down the Medieval Church and its once unquestionable dominion, the great cultural upheavals of

The Vertigo of Secularization: the innovative Notion of Political Authority

Lectora Revista De Dones I Textualitat, 2010

Globalization has challenged us to find new political definitions that can help us cope with the complexities and paradoxes of this new era. In the following paper, I wish to address some of these issues by focusing on the interrelationship between religion and politics and the renewed interest in defining political authority. I would like to show that our historical concepts of authority and their relationship to religion and politics were not simple processes of secularization. The loss of one world-the fully religious one-does not lead directly to the creation of another. There is, in between, a difficult task of historical understanding, of coping with the moral and political dilemmas, of rethinking the past, and of envisioning the need for new conceptual tools. If we need to thematize secularization and the relationship between religion and politics, we must be aware of what Hans Blumenberg said, when referring to "the characterization of a relation [between religion and politics] as the historical dependence of an «alienated» formation on an «original» one is not enough to make it a case for the meaningful application of the term «secularization»" (Blumenberg, 1991, p. 10). Thus, in order to question our traditional views of secularization, I wish to focus on the secularization of politics, in terms of political authority, conceived of as processes of translation, of innovation, and of invention. The term "secularization" here should not be taken only as describing specific losses, but, rather, as a metaphor that best captures the very complex processes by which we humans cope with our "wordly" fear. Again, as Blumenberg claims, "the patterns and schemas of the salvation story were to prove to be ciphers and projections of intrawordly problems, like a foreign language in which is expressed the absolutism of the world of man, of society, so that all unworldliness would be a metaphor that had to be retranslated into literal speech. The problem in such a case, quite logically, is not secularization but the detour that made it necessary in the first place" (Blumenberg, 1991, p. 6). 1 The first part of the essay "The Vertigo of Secularization" deals with Western contemporary examples of such fears. It has been published by the journal Hypatia (Lara, 2003). Both parts of the article can be read as independent, for they deal with different things. I wish to thank for their intelligent commentaries

The Revelation and Re-veilation of American Politics

Pneuma, 2022

Politics in the United States of America is in a tumultuous era, with a divisiveness that has cracked open the preexisting social order. It seems as if American politics is in a life-and-death struggle for the soul of the nation. In this crucial moment, politics is both a revelation and a re-veilation. It conceals the beauty of the American common life, the interspaces of its democratic system, and the ideals of human flourishing that brought together and bonded its various and diverse groups. It also reveals the hidden tensions, antagonisms, and divisions that have been eating away at the ethical substance of this nation. The events and acrimonies of the present speak to being and being-together, which are always at stake, and to a nation's existence, qua coexistence, which is the nature of the political. One way to interpret politics is to view it as the way in which a people attend to the being that is at stake in how their lives hang together, the being of their existence which is always a coexistence. Politics is a way of sharing their beingwith, their coexistence in a common polity, their living together in a political space. In the last decade or so, the political has, more than ever before, brought to the attention of many observers that the being and well-being of the nation are at stake, open to contestations by various forces and interests, in ways that are strange, estranging, and threatening. The old ethos that defined politics appears to be giving way to something new or nebulous in the United States. And Pneuma, as the flagship of pentecostal-charismatic journals, wanted to gauge how this moment of perilous politics is playing out among Pentecostals in the country. We thus enlisted the services of the prominent pentecostal constructive and political theologian Steven M. Studebaker of McMaster Divinity College to gather a team of pentecostal-charismatic scholars to investigate pentecostal faith, practice, and theology, and their connection to the nature of the political in the United States. Studebaker gathered a stellar team of intellectuals: Jacqueline Grey, David D. Daniels, iii, Gastón Espinosa, and Marlon Millner. Together, these five scholars provide brilliant analyses of Pentecostalism and politics in the United States in one half of this double issue of Pneuma, and in so doing make sub

Liturgy, Sovereignty or Idolatry: on recent political theology

Politics is liturgy by other means. This is the novel idea proposed by Georgio Agamben. For Paul Kahn, on the other hand, politics is the sacrificial practice of freedom. In his view, modern political agents transcend themselves, and thus become free, by sacrificing themselves for the sake of the popular sovereign -''the people'' whose imagined unity and sacred presence legitimates the nation-state. Despite their immensely different styles, these leading exponents of modern political theology share the conviction that contemporary political life continues to be shaped by the religious heritage that gave rise to it. The method of political theology, however, is quite different from sociological inquiry into the forces religion still exerts over individual and collective agents or the study of politics as a civil or state religion. 1 Nor is it ultimately concerned to historicize the secular age and its political institutions by reference to their Christian origins, though for Agamben the genealogy of concepts is methodologically indispensible. Nevertheless, important as the historical and sociological components of modern political theology are, practitioners of the discipline are primarily interested in something else, namely, the reappearance of theological concepts and theological experiences in ostensibly secular political life. This distinctly modern type of political theology is therefore to be distinguished from investigations of the relation between church and state, the role of religious belief in political systems, or the degree to which religious clerics wield direct and indirect political power. The political theology of interest here begins by accepting, in large measure, the separation of church and state as a characteristic feature of modern political life in order to examine how secular politics, separated from institutional religion, extends the structures, implications and experiences of theology. The claim is that without an ''archeology'' of modern political concepts (Agamben) or a ''phenomenology'' of their theological character (Kahn) we will continue to be surprised by the sacralization that the sociologist describes, and deceived by our expectations of secular political life.

Post-secularity and (global) politics: a need for radical redefinition

Review of International Studies, 2012

The past two decades have produced a bulky literature on religion and politics, with many writers being influenced by Habermas's notion of ‘post-secularity’. However, despite the vast amount of literature, there is still little agreement on the meaning of this term. The article explores two main directions in which the expression has been interpreted: one direction where religious faith is in a way ‘secularised’ by being adapted to modern secular discourse; and another where faith triumphs over secularity by expunging its modern corollaries. What surfaces behind this divergence is a version of the immanence/transcendence conundrum which accentuates a presumed contrast of language games in which one linguistic idiom is said to be more readily accessible than the other. In agreement with Charles Taylor, this article challenges the assumption of an ‘epistemic break’ between secular reason and ‘non-rational’ religious discourse. Once this challenge is taken seriously, a new and more...