Abstract
This chapter charts the historical development of the relationship between religion and politics by beginning with the early modern formation of the State. The medieval and modern understanding of politics and religion was founded upon an underlying, animating concept of sovereignty. Understanding modernity as perpetual disintegration and renewal, this chapter takes politics to be the principal force behind disintegration and religion the principal force behind renewal or maintenance during this period. Religion develops in modernity into a private affair, still based on and inspired by sovereign power, as a way of ordering social life and maintaining a sense of meaning in a rapidly changing world. Our contemporary situation lies at the end of modernity, where this relationship between religion and politics has changed. In our time, resistance is the theological enacted politically. It is the expression of the theological—of desire for an alternate, less disappointing world—within the political sphere. This chapter ends with a description of the city as the site of subjunctive politics through discussions of Thomas Merton, David Harvey, and Michel de Certeau.
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Notes
- 1.
Matthew 5:17–19 (NRSV).
- 2.
Romans 13:1–10 (NRSV).
- 3.
Schmitt, Political Theology, 45–6.
- 4.
For instance, when the word “alleluia” is chanted over a series of six notes, one note each for the first, second, and fourth syllables, but “lu” being stretched out over three notes.
- 5.
Certeau, xiii.
- 6.
Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 24.
- 7.
Seligman et al., 11. This line of thought continues, “By recognizing limits, ritual provides as well the vehicle for transcending them. In the beginning of the Jewish daily prayers, for example, the devotee proclaims: ‘What are we? What is our life? What is our goodness? What our righteousness? What our helpfulness? What our strength? What our might? … Indeed all the heroes are as nothing before thee, the men of renown as though they never existed.’ But then, immediately declares as well: ‘However, we are thy people, thy people of the covenant, the children of Abraham thy friend to whom thou didst make a promise on Mount Moriah.’ The first set of sentences circumscribes existence and its meaning, the last opens it up” (12).
- 8.
Certeau, xix. He also explains, “I call a ‘strategy’ the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an ‘environment.’ A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, ‘clienteles,’ ‘targets,’ or ‘objects’ of research). Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model.” Strategy thus implies an advantageous power differential and its application from above, while strategic operations always occur from below.
- 9.
Seligman et al. write on p. 31, “From the point of view of ritual, the world is fragmented and fractured. This is why the endless work of ritual is necessary, even if that work is always, ultimately, doomed.”
- 10.
Seligman et al., 30.
- 11.
Asad, 65.
- 12.
Seligman et al., 35.
- 13.
Seligman et al., 42.
- 14.
McKenzie Wark, “How to Occupy an Abstraction,” from the Verso Books blog, October 3, http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/728-mckenzie-wark-on-occupy-wall-street-how-to-occupy-an-abstraction.
- 15.
Seligman et al., 15.
- 16.
Certeau, 94–5.
- 17.
Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton. Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1966), 44.
- 18.
Seligman et al., 20.
- 19.
Seligman et al., 18.
- 20.
I am inspired by Maia Ramnath for this line of thinking and I am following her lead in her use of anarchist analysis in understanding South Asian anti-colonial movements. See: Maia Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle (Oakland , CA: AK Press/Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2011). The two fields she brings into tension are anarchist political philosophy and decolonial theory. In that text, she uses anarchy to understand anti-colonial activities and, in the process, attempts a decolonization of anarchy. This inspires the component of my project that not only theologizes resistance, but––in the vein of the radical theological tradition––resists theology as well.
- 21.
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 16–7. While I follow Berman’s analysis regarding the foundations of modernity, as will become clear, I do not share his conclusions about the status of modernity in recent decades. This is due largely to the fact that Berman’s primary consideration is art, while mine is the relationship between religion and politics.
- 22.
The history here is complicated and non-linear. The modern concept of the nation did not emerge until the French Revolution. Only afterward did it spread unevenly and incompletely across the European continent. See Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1976), for instance, for an explanation of how France didn’t become a nation until the end of the nineteenth century. I must give a nod to reviewer #1 for helping me flesh this out. I’m also following Lewis and Maslin’s definition of the Anthropocene as starting in 1610 as they lay out in their article, “Defining the Anthropocene,” (Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin. pp. 171–180, Nature. Vol. 519, March 12, 2015).
- 23.
William Cavanaugh, “‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House:’ The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” pp. 397–420 in Modern Theology 11:4 (October 1995), 398.
- 24.
Cavanaugh, 399.
- 25.
Cavanaugh, 399.
- 26.
Cavanaugh, 400.
- 27.
Cavanaugh, 402.
- 28.
Cavanaugh, 404.
- 29.
Cavanaugh, 403.
- 30.
Cavanaugh , 404. He continues, “The concept of religion being born here is one of domesticated belief systems which are, insofar as it is possible, to be manipulated by the sovereign for the benefit of the State. Religion is no longer a matter of certain bodily practices within the Body of Christ, but is limited to the realm of the ‘soul,’ and the body is handed over to the State,” 405.
- 31.
Cavanaugh, 408.
- 32.
Berman, Marshall (2009). All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience Of Modernity (9th ed.). London, New York: Verso. pp. 345–346.
- 33.
Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 16. Additionally, Negri writes in Subversive Spinoza, ed. Timothy S. Murphy (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), “Spinoza’s Political Treatise is the work that founds, in theoretical terms, modern European democratic political thought,” p. 9. Finally, see also Chap. 16 of Baruch Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, second edition trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2001), 173–184.
- 34.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Richard D. Heffner (New York: Mentor Books, 1956), 57–8. Tocqueville’s insight and its relevance to both radical and political theology are treated fully in Jeffrey W. Robbins’s Radical Democracy and Political Theology.
- 35.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), aphorism 125, pp. 181–82.
- 36.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xxiii.
- 37.
For instance, Lyotard ends his essay, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” on page 82 of The Postmodern Condition, (translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, foreword by Fredric Jameson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) by writing, “The answer is: let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unrepresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.”
- 38.
Lyotard, xxiv.
- 39.
Charles E. Winquist, “Postmodern Secular Theology,” in pp. 26–36 of Secular Theology: American Radical Theological Thought, ed. Clayton Crockett (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 26.
- 40.
Winquist, 27.
- 41.
Clayton Crockett, Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 14.
- 42.
See his Desiring Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
- 43.
Tillich, Theology of Culture, 40.
- 44.
Tillich, Theology of Culture, 20.
- 45.
Crockett, Radical Political Theology, 12.
- 46.
Robbins, Radical Democracy, 190.
- 47.
Carl Schmitt in a letter to Armin Mohler on August 14, 1958. Schmitt cites Jacob Taubes as the originator of this idea. See: Jacob Taubes, To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 26.
- 48.
Winquist, 128.
- 49.
John D. Caputo’s argument that radical theology is parasitic upon confessional theology (see Chap. 4, “Theopoetics as the Insistence of a Radical Theology,” The Insistence of God, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013) does not go nearly far enough. Radical theology is not parasitic upon confessional theology. All of theology is parasitic upon culture. Confessional theology is a naked emperor.
- 50.
Michael Loadenthal’s The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017) is a study in property destruction and street violence that studies a truly insurrectionary politics. While I engage with similar concepts in Chap. 7, I mean to distinguish that form of insurrectionary politics from what I am calling “insurrectionist thinking” at work here in Winquist.
- 51.
Winquist, 133.
- 52.
Winquist, 133.
- 53.
Winquist, 134.
- 54.
Michel de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 38.
- 55.
Certeau, 37.
- 56.
Certeau, 37.
- 57.
Certeau, 37.
- 58.
Winquist, 128.
- 59.
Winquist, 135.
- 60.
Winquist, 137.
- 61.
Marcella Althaus-Reid, From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology (London: SCM Press, 2004).
- 62.
Winquist, 127–9.
- 63.
Althaus-Reid, 105.
- 64.
Winquist, 143.
- 65.
Althaus-Reid, 72.
- 66.
Philip Goodchild, interview for Rorotoko, November 30, 2009, http://rorotoko.com/interview/20091130_goodchiled_philip_on_theology_of_money/?page=1.
- 67.
Philip Goodchild, Theology of Money (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2009), 4.
- 68.
Robbins, Radical Democracy, 63.
- 69.
Robbins, Radical Democracy, 5–6.
- 70.
Robbins, Radical Democracy, 62. In this passage, Robbins is summarizing and commenting upon Jacques Rancière’s work on radical democracy.
- 71.
Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism, 7. My emphasis.
- 72.
I am well aware of the historical tradition of political anarchism that includes such luminaries as William Godwin, Peter Kropotkin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, and others. While I am deeply informed by that tradition, I do not mean to suggest that what I am calling “anarchy” here is identical with that. I am using the term, following Ramnath, in a more abstract sense. I am certainly interested in how that abstraction is worked out in practice as I detail in the chapters to follow, but I am less concerned with a lineage of thought than with the workings of a subjunctive concept.
- 73.
Robbins, Radical Democracy, 72.
- 74.
Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 28.
- 75.
Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism, 15–6.
- 76.
Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, trans. Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988), 19.
- 77.
Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, 5. My emphasis. See section “Manufacturing the World” in Chap. 2 for my initial discussion of this point.
- 78.
Peter Canning, “God is of (Possibility)” in Secular Theology: American Radical Theological Thought, ed. Clayton Crockett (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 233.
- 79.
Marcel Detienne, “The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities,” trans. Janet Lloyd, in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-secular World, eds. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 91–101. He writes, “… we thus find a society … in which a certain idea of the city, Hestia [the goddess of the hearth, architecture, and the right ordering of the domestic sphere], is formed by a group that, for its part, comes to believe that the sovereignty of this new unit, the city, resides in itself,” p. 100.
- 80.
The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, Volume XII: Poise-Quelt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), politic, 31–32; political, 32–34.
- 81.
OED, Volume XII, 29, 32.
- 82.
Certeau, 94–5.
- 83.
Certeau, xii–xiii.
- 84.
Harvey, “The Right to the City,” 23 and Rebel Cities, 3–4.
- 85.
David Harvey, Rebel Cities, 4.
- 86.
As quoted in Certeau, 93.
- 87.
Certeau , 92. Commonly, Certeau’s chapter, “Walking in the City,” to which much of our discussion here refers, is read as a response to Michel Foucault’s chapter from Discipline and Punish on panopticism. This is quite appropriate as Certeau was writing with Foucault in mind as one of his principal interlocutors. The “all-seeing eye” that looks down on a city from atop a skyscraper resonates explicitly with Foucault’s understanding of Bentham’s penitentiary. My interest in Certeau’s “Walking in the City” is less for its engagement with Foucault’s understanding of surveillance and more for its use of reading cities like texts and listening to urban actions like speech. In short, I find Certeau’s methodological synesthesia useful for my purposes here in performing a theology of resistance. Still, the common understanding of Certeau’s essay should not go unremarked. We should not forget that Bentham designed the viewing position in the panopticon to remain potentially empty, dispersing the function of surveillance out among the inmates themselves. This is the view of a god who isn’t there.
- 88.
Merton, “Celebration,” 46.
- 89.
Merton, “Celebration,” 46.
- 90.
Merton, “Celebration,” 52.
- 91.
This brings to mind Mitt Romney’s infamous comments at the Iowa State Fair in August, 2011: “Corporations are people, my friend. Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.”
- 92.
Merton, “Celebration,” 47–8.
- 93.
Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, Second Edition, 1966 and 1992), 248.
- 94.
Merton, “Celebration,” 48.
- 95.
Merton, “Celebration,” 49.
- 96.
Merton, “Celebration,” 52.
- 97.
Merton, “Celebration,” 52–3.
- 98.
Merton, “Celebration,” 53.
- 99.
Harvey, Rebel Cities, xvi–xvii.
- 100.
Certeau, 93.
- 101.
Certeau, 93.
- 102.
Certeau, 97.
- 103.
Certeau, 98.
- 104.
Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006), 97.
- 105.
Jeffrey W. Robbins, Radical Democracy and Political Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 191.
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Miller, J.E. (2019). Resisting Theology Part 2. In: Resisting Theology, Furious Hope. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17391-3_4
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