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

[Tukhachevskii]

I wish I had the time to post a more in-depth response. I would start by arguing that the entire idea of a “Divine right” of kings, as opposed to a god king, as some other societies would view their political leaders, creates a defacto separation of church and state. That the passage of two keys (or two swords) was simply a recognition of a belief already prevalent in Roman times that the church and the state represented action in two separate spheres of human activity.

Instead I will ask a question relevant to the thread:

“Why is religion so closely tied to political legitimacy?” Even where there is a separation of church and state many laws are based in religious beliefs. Politicians swear oaths before God. Congress opens with a benidiction. What is the connection? Why is it important to our mortal lives?

It is only right that I explain my premises rather than simply assuming that they are evident at least so that we and others may know what our respective positions are. My rather rakishly rebellious refusal to follow any sort of “criterion of elegance” (as Herbert Blumer termed the over-identification of a researcher with a particular method of research rather than the object of research) has resulted in my thought processes not only confusing others but also myself (there is perhaps something to be said for methodological parsimony).

My issues with the notion of “political” religion / political “religion” require, unfortunately for the reader, a little foregrounding. This will, however, not only help clarify my position but also the premises with which I am working. Everything I write here, of course, is simplistic, general and only skims the surface.


1. The Concept of the Political: The Meaning of Being (Human)

Firstly, I make a distinction between “the political” (la politique/ das Politische), the human condition of being with others (a la Heidegger) and the word politics (le politique/die Politik) itself representing purely administrative issues to do with the management of the state (in this I am largely following lines of thought initiated by Ernst Vollrath ( ‘The Rational and The Political An Essay in the Semantic of Politics [no link avaliable]). The former, then, represents the ontological conditions that make the latter possible; the political is about the very meaning of life itself or in Heideggerian language, the meaning of Being (with others/ Dasein as Mit-Dasein). In those terms what could be more political if not religion?

I think, from my reading of archaeology and anthropology (I had always wanted to be an archaeologist but chose another path instead; a dead end too) that the evidence supports that conclusion. As my brother (pbuh) used to say “religions were the first political theories that could only be disproved when their “Gods” had been destroyed or undermined”. Though discussing sacred relics and the like, Andrew Cowell’s discussion (in The Medieval Warrior Aristocracy: Gifts, Violence, Performance, and the Sacred ) is apposite in this context;

It is thus not surprising that true power in society should rest with those who have access to these objects, and thus to the resources of the sacred. As Godelier notes, regarding Melanesia, the “big man” is ultimately less powerful than the “great man,” who controls such access to the sacred, kept object (1999:8). Likewise, in the Plains Indian cultures of North America, it is the keeper of the Sacred Pipe who is the ultimate locus of authority in the tribe, not the wealthiest and most generous giver, or the bravest and most successful taker. In a medieval context, Irish kings gained power through performance, but then “assumed a sacred mantle that was central to the legitimization of their rank” (Aitchison 1994:70). More specifically, they were “seeking to formalize and render less challengeable the possession of rank”(Aitchison 1994:73). The efforts of the French monarchy to establish its privileged access to sacred power – especially healing power – as incarnated in the possession of sacred objects such as relics and the crown itself are emblematic of this fact. Access to sacred power marks the ultimate in vertical exchange. It represents not the vertical exchanges downwards between lord and dependents, however, but a vertical exchange upwards between God or gods and those who have access to these exchanges. Such power clearly trumps any possible advantages deriving from horizontal exchanges within the society, and thus allows the recipient a form of integrity which literally transcends the bonds of reciprocity between human individuals and groups. Anyone familiar with the thirst for relics exhibited by medieval society will recognize the validity of these ideas. (p.90)

At this point we may need a definition of religion for the sake of argument if nothing else and why not fall back on old Durkheim for that purpose (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life);

A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church all those who adhere to them. The second element which thus finds a place in our definition is no less essential than the first; for by showing that the idea of religion is inseparable from the idea of a Church, it conveys the notion that religion must be an eminently collective thing. (p. 47 in my 1915 George Allen & Unwin edition)

Aside from Durkheim there are others, as listed in Jack Eller, Introducing Anthropology of Religion: Culture to the Ultimate ](p. 7-8);

James Frazer: “a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and human life” (1958: 58–9).

William James: “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (1958: 34).

Émile Durkheim: “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set aside and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (1965: 62).

Paul Radin: “it consists of two parts: the first an easily definable, if not precisely specific feeling; and the second certain acts, customs, beliefs, and conceptions associated with this feeling. The belief most inextricably connected with the specific feeling is a belief in spirits outside of man, conceived as more powerful than man and as controlling all those elements in life upon which he lay most stress” (1957: 3).

Anthony Wallace: “a set of rituals, rationalized by myth, which mobilizes supernatural powers for the purpose of achieving or preventing transformations of state in man and nature” (1966: 107).

Sherry Ortner: “a metasystem that solves problems of meaning (or Problems of Meaning) generated in large part (though not entirely) by the social order, by grounding that order within a theoretically ultimate reality within which those problems will ‘make sense’” (1978: 152).

Clifford Geertz: “(1) a system of symbols which act to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (1973: 90).

Or as per Emilio Gentile (quoted in Richard Shorten, “The status of ideology in the return of political religion theory”, Journal of Political Ideologies, 12:2, 2007) religion is,

a system of beliefs, myths and symbols which interpret and define the meaning and the goal of human existence, making the destiny of an individual and of the community dependent on their subordination to a supreme entity. p.177

But, and it’s a big Jennifer Lopez but, the modern concept of religion is nothing more than an ideal-type,

If by religion is meant a matter of belief, separable from forms of action and political organization, signified by one’s assent to a creed and enacted in certain ritual behaviours (i.e., worship), then even in Latin the modern term “religion” has no equivalent. ( The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Volume 5, p.2408, my italics)

[Tukhachevskii]

Also, as Winston King states in the Encyclopaedia of Religion, 2nd Ed., Vol. 11,

“Many practical and conceptual difficulties arise when one attempts to apply such a dichotomous pattern [ sacred / profane ] across the board to all cultures. In primitive societies, for instance, what the West calls religious is such an integral part of the total ongoing way of life that it is never experienced or thought of as something separable or narrowly distinguishable from the rest of the pattern. Or if the dichotomy is applied to that multifaceted entity called Hinduism, it seems that almost everything can be and is given a religious significance by some sect. Indeed, in a real sense everything that is is divine; existence per se appears to be sacred. It is only that the ultimately real manifests itself in a multitude of ways—in the set-apart and the ordinary, in god and so-called devil, in saint and sinner. The real is apprehended at many levels in accordance with the individual’s capacity.” p.7692, my italics)

Of course, I would argue that the so called “Western” phenomena is of recent and local provenance and hardly universal.

Seeing religion as a subset of la politique or “the political” also gives new meaning to Easton’s famous description of politics as “the authoritative allocation of values” (The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political Science, p. 117). The question for me then isn’t so much why religions become political but rather why isn’t religion considered a political force in the first place (at least according to my idiosyncratic schema)? To borrow a quote from Carl Schmitt (Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty ) I would argue that

“the political is the total and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision” (p.2)

My real gripe, therefore, is that religion has come to mean something non-political (like economics) when IMO the reverse is true. It is from that PoV then that I take issue with theorists of “political religion” and I might be in good company (the complicated debate is excellently set out and explored in Norris & Ingelhart, Sacred & Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, 2nd Ed.). The indistinguishable religion / politics matrix is explained by Paul Radin, Primitive Religion: Its Nature and Origin in connexion with early societies,

”Where there is little trace of a centralized authority, there we encounter no true priests, and religious phenomena remain essentially unanalysed and unorganized. Magic and simple coercive rites rule supreme”.p.21

George Simmel is also instructive in his “Contribution to the Study of Religion”[no link available], The American Journal of Sociology, 60: 6, 1955, (his portion was excised due to length and I’m sure many of you wish more had been).

This begins to change with complex societies that display social stratification and a division of labour. Says Jack Eller, Introducing Anthropology of Religion (Op. Cit.)

“Civilizations are characterized by large and/or interconnected communities which are socially heterogeneous. Social relationships cannot remain personal but become “practical” and “rational.” (Weber said the same thing about modern societies, as we will consider in the next chapter.) Kinship as an organizing principle gives way to “politics,” in the shape of formal government, contractual relations, and the stratification of power and wealth. Specialization and differentiation within the society comes to include religion itself, which becomes an institution among other social institutions, albeit one that supports the political institutions. In the process, religion becomes more “professional,” with religious specialists, and more reflective, self-conscious, and systematic”. (p.190)

The process of religion becoming universalist and thus un-tethered from a particular community is a complex but not unrelated factor. However, I would still see that as part of a political process with an admixture of other causes (usually persecution). There are also more prosaic reasons. Witness the relative ease with which the Roman Empire was able to pacify larges areas. When a legionary confronted his opposite defeated number he would ask “who is your God”. The phrase “your God” does not mean what entity outside of the world and its affairs do you personally, on an individual level, believe in. It means what God represents your existence, what God defines who you are as a people....&c? “What?”, says the Legionary ,“Oh, that sounds like Mithras to my ears. Brother! We have the same god but by another name in our pantheon! (And thank the gods below they did have a pantheon). Come, brother, join the Empire”. The mirroring of the divine stage upon the earth (Caesar as God Emperor) is obvious (and, again, later appropriated by Catholic political philosophy). Michael Mann in The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1 has an excellent overview of these issues (I just couldn’t find the book for an actual quote; you’re welcome!). His IEMP (Ideology, Economics, Military, Political) model is also pregnant with possibilities. In sum, as religions form a social function, by regulating the affairs of man, they are at base political. In Islam, for instance, one does not see political factions without also seeing religious sects.

2. Religion dethroned: The de-sacralisation of the Political: Man becomes God

Political thought (and scientific thought I might add) from the late 17th century onward is an attempt to grapple with a disentangling of religion from social life in an age in which (pace Nietzsche (pbuh)) “God is Dead”. This is evident in the work of explicitly Catholic political thinkers like de Maistre or his nineteenth century “secular” Catholic compatriot Durkheim. Indeed, aping Schmitt we can say that all sociological concepts are merely an attempt to fathom the absence of a transcendent moral centre in human life. Concepts such Marx’s alienation and Durkheim’s anomie are the fruits of such a process. The great age of political thought is great precisely because of the innovative new ways that the relationship of man to man was rethought in the absence of a transcendent lodestar. The Liberals satisfied themselves with the rather queer notion of a social contract drawn up between free, sovereign individuals (which found fertile soil in the U.S. again, via, Locke and his ilk) where as in Europe where ethnic and territorial states had already developed a nascent sense of nationalism fell back on that (racism is a perversion of nationalism, attributable to trends in nineteenth century biology, not a logical outgrowth).

Secular politics, so called, thus replaces the transcendent vision with an immanent one; the nation, or the people or the law, or the constitution now becomes the ultimate regulating principle. What is a politician doing if not promising a paradise on earth? Thus Nazism’s manic “faith” in “race” is a form of religious politics (in which the divine is replace with the immanent sanctity of the genome). As is America’s Manifest Destiny an expression of a supposedly Chosen People (but by whom?). We can see the same set of theological reasoning underpinning Communism in the idea of dialectical materialism. As Carl Schmitt once said in Political Theology,

“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts‟ (p. 36)

or again in The Concept of the Political that

“The juridic [sic] formulas of the omnipotence of the state are, in fact, only superficial secularisations of theological formulas of the omnipotence of God‟ (p. 42).

Hobbes’ Leviathan, then, is perhaps rightly designated as the first truly modern (secular) vision of politics in which the state itself becomes God (for later Liberals it is the sovereign Man which takes the place of the transcendent as the pole around which politics revolves). Not for nothing did Nietzsche (pbuh) call the state the “new idol” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 48). Now it is not so much in the name of god but in the name of the people or even, humanity (gulp!). What is nationalism but each people declaring itself to be “the chosen people”? (more so in America I find). Indeed, the logical corollary is the need for a messianic figure (a Fuhrer, or President, or Supreme Leader) to lead them.

[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?