Book #1: Religion and State by L. Carl Brown

[Tukhachevskii]

Before Hitler, there was Napoleon. On the 13th October 1806 following the defeat of Russia and Prussia by Napoleon’s forces Hegel wrote that

“I saw Napoleon, the soul of the world, riding through the town on a reconnaissance. It is indeed wonderful to see, concentrated in a point, sitting on a horse, an individual who overruns the world and masters it” (quoted in C. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, p. 105n7)

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To this end, as de Maistre pointed out -though, admittedly in a different context-

“institutions are only strong and durable to the degree that they are, so to speak, deified” ( Considerations on France, p. 80, my italics)

Durkheim would seem to agree (from Elementary Structures),

“in the present day just as much as in the past, we see society constantly creating sacred things out of ordinary ones. If it happens to fall in love with a man and if it thinks it has found in him the principal aspirations that move it, as well as the means of satisfying them, this man will be raised above the others and, as it were, deified. Opinion will invest him with a majesty exactly analogous to that protecting the gods. This is what has happened to so many sovereigns in whom their age had faith: if they were not made gods, they were at least regarded as direct representatives of the deity. And the fact that it is society alone which is the author of these varieties of apotheosis, is evident since it frequently chances to consecrate men thus who have no right to it from their own merit. The simple deference inspired by men invested with high social functions is not different in nature from religious respect”. (p.213, 1915 Ed.)

What I think we see from the renaissance onward is the gradual de-sacralisation or secularisation of the political in Western Europe (Eastern Europe and Orthodox Christianity present a different kettle of fish) with the rise of humanistic, rationalistic and post-Reformation political philosophies. It is also a period that Eric Voegelin describes exhibiting the “secularisation of history”. In Voegelin’s words from ‘Secularised History: Bossuet and Voltaire’, in (From Enlightenment to Revolution) this trend

“becomes revolutionary by its implication that the sacred history' the "theology;' is unimportant and that profane history has the monopoly of determining the relevance of peoples and events. The centre of universality is shifted from the sacred to the profane level, and this shift implies the turning of the tables: that the construction of history will, in- the future, not be subordinated to the spiritual drama of humanity, but that Christianity will be understood as an event in history. Through this shift of the centre of interpretation the dualism of sacred and profane history disappears. The profane history is profane only as long as sacred history is accepted as the absolute frame of reference and when this position is abandoned, the two histories merge on the level of secularized history. By secularization we mean the attitude in which history, including the Christian religious phenomena is conceived as an inner worldly chain of human events, while, at the same time, there is retained the Christian belief in a universal, meaningful order of human history”. (p. 7)

The consequence of this is a liminal vacuum described by Weber (‘Science as a Vocation’) as stemming from a “disenchantment with the world”. As Clifford Porter explains regarding Voegelin (‘Eric Voegelin on Nazi Political Extremism, Journal of the History of Ideas, 63:1, 2002)

”With spiritual reality denied or obscured, something must take its place to respond to the human need to express the feeling of being created. Voegelin argues that modem philosophy had gradually attributed to the state the redemptive power that belongs to God”. (p.160)

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Your correspondent agrees with Voegelin. The loss of the central Metanarrative of human existence provided by religion (as a part of “the political”) resulted in what Karl Jaspers (in the Origin and Goal of History, I think, but can’t be certain) identified as the age of totalitarian ideologies each of which vies to replace lost certainties (metanarratives) with appeal to a deified humanity (either that of the liberal individual, the nation or the race, etc.) beginning with the French Revolution. All of these are Western European phenomena (encompassing its offshoots). But the key point is this process of de-sacralisation never occurred in the rest of the world with such intensity if at all except, perhaps, where European empires made their mark. What we see with Islam is merely a continuation of a process which we in Europe abandoned long ago. Islam and Muslims, then, have not re-discovered or perverted their religion but merely sloughed off the secular ideologies that they believed failed them (i.e., pan-Arab nationalism, communism, etc.,) and reverted to type (as it were). As Khomeini put it (Velayat-e Faqih) before the revolution of 1979;

“The colonialists have spread the insidious idea that religion should be separated from politics and that men of religion are not qualified to act in political and social matters. In the Prophet’s times, was the church separate from the state? Were theologians distinct from politicians?” (p. 190 in my bootlegged copy)

It wasn’t that Islam became political but rather that the failed revolutionaries, and those who had been marginalised because they insisted on Islam-centric action, rediscovered Islam was political (the Islamic reformation you all fantasise about has already occurred, but not in the way you hoped). The consequence of this kehre for us, and our ability to understand our foes, is profound. It means we are confronted with a language and a system of meaning that we only rarely comprehend (especially when we try and translate it into similar but ultimately different systems of thought). And that may have been deliberate.


3. The re-sacralisation of the Political; Or, on the Fuzziness of “Political Religion

Political religion as a notion (is it coherent enough to be a concept?) - usually taken to mean that a religion has come off the reservation allotted to it and is meddling in affairs that don’t concern it -isn’t the stable signifier we assume it is either given the multiplicity of meanings attached to it. If you have access to the Journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions you’ll see what I mean.

[Tukhachevskii]

The only possible usage for the phrase political religion, as far as I am concerned, would be to signify a pseudo-religious phenomena (I know, that’s even more than less than unhelpful), i.e. one that does not refer to the supernatural but one that rather takes as its referent a non-supernatural entity and deifies it (such as the state, the race, or a class). Hence communism, liberalism and Nazism can be described as politically religious. I think I might be veering off here (only here!?) but I’ll let it stand. In this I stand side by side with Albert Piette whose phrase ‘religion potentielle’ captures what I want to say about the phenomena in two words (eloquent bastard!). I think I may also have been inspired by Ernst Nolte’s Three Faces of Fascism (it was a question of not disturbing my piles of books for a quote, its messy enough in my room). I would also agree with Emilio Gentile (“Political religion: a concept and its critics - a critical survey” , Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6:1, 2005), when he states,

“Personally, I would easily renounce the use of this term and other terms alike, such as civil religion or secular religion. But even after banishing these terms, the historical phenomenon from where they originated still remains, the phenomenon which in my study I defined as the ‘sacralisation of politics’. However it may be defined, I do not consider it possible to deny that in the modern age, politics, after conquering its institutional autonomy toward traditional religion, at certain important moments of contemporary history, starting from the American Revolution until the present day, has acquired the aura of sacredness up to the point of asserting, in an exclusive and complete way, as was the case with the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, the prerogative to define the ultimate meaning and the fundamental goal of human existence on earth. This concept does not refer to the political mobilisation of traditional religions, but to the modern political ideologies and movements which adapted religious habits to secular ends. The sacralisation of politics is manifest in the way the ideal of politics was conceived, experienced and represented by its supporters, in their style of life as well as in their attitudes towards the adversaries and opposing ideals. Modern political movements are transformed into secular religions when they: (a) define the meaning of life and ultimate ends of human existence; (b) formalise the commandments of a public ethic to which all members of these movement must adhere; and (c) give utter importance to a mythical and symbolic dramatisation in their interpretation of history and reality, thus creating their own ‘sacred history’, embodied in the nation, the state or the party, and tied to the existence of a ‘chosen people’, which were glorified as the regenerating force of all mankind. The sacralisation of politics occurs all the time by virtue of the fact that a political entity, for instance, the nation, the state, race, class, the party, assume the characteristics of a sacred entity, that is, of a supreme power, indisputable and untouchable, which becomes the object of faith, of reverence, of cult, of fidelity, of devotion from the side of the citizens, up to and including the sacrifice of life; and as such it lies in the centre of the constellation of beliefs, of myths, of values, of commandments, of rites and of symbols” (my italics, p.29)

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Though taking an opposite tack, Mathias Behrens makes similar arguments in “Political Religion – A Religion? Some remarks on the concept of religion”, in Totalitarianism and Political Religions, Vol. II: Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships. Hans Maier, “‘Political religion’: The potentials and limitations of a concept” (in Op. Cit.) in a different vein writes that,

“The concept of ‘political religions’ might provide an inadequate label for all this, but – as I see it – it is still indispensable, at least provisionally. It reminds us that religion does not allow itself to be driven from society at will”. p.282

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Let’s end on that as I fear I may have wandered away from our original dispute about whether or not Islam was perverted by the MB to serve nationalist ends (i.e., religion is not political or something).


I have said my peace and await eagerly for the thread to refocus on some aspect of the book we are reading. What was that again?