Abstract
The usefulness of the concept of Political Religions (PR) in the modern world depends first of all on the definition of the term ‘religion’. Over a century ago Emile Durkheim established among sociologists and anthropologists the concept that religion consists essentially of the organisation of rites and rituals formed around a belief system aimed at buttressing social solidarity and morality. Thus, any strong ideology that was fully articulated and expressed socially might be considered a religion. This is the definition most commonly employed by those who use the concept of PR.
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Notes
R. Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Witch-Hunts and the End of Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 4–5.
E. Gentile, Le religioni della politica. Fra democrazie e totalitarismi (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2001), ‘The Sacralization of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism’, TMPR, 1 (2000), 18–55; and ‘Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion: Definitions and Critical Reflections on Criticism of an Interpretation’, TMPR, 5:3 (Winter, 2005), 326–75.
For one of the most recent discussions, see R. P. Kraynak, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World (South Bend: Notre Dame, 2001).
The best approach to the broad phenomenon of ‘chosen peoples’ and sacred mission is A. D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
M. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), pp. 205–06.
J. H. Hutson, ed., Religion and the New Republic: Faith in the Founding of America (Lanham, MD and Oxford: University Press of America, 2000).
R. Gamble, The War for Righteousness (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2003).
There is a long literature on this. Among recent publications, see R. T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Champaign-Urbana: Illinois, 2004);
S. Webb, American Providence: A Nation with a Mission (New York: Continuum, Illinois, 2004);
and D. Gelernter, ‘Americanism—and its Enemies’, Commentary (January, 2005), 41–48.
The basic study is P. Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA-London: Harvard, 2002).
J. H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980), reminds us that for most of the nineteenth-century nationalism, not social revolutionism, was the more dominant revolutionary creed.
H. Buchheim, ‘Despotie, Ersatzreligion, Religionsersatz’ in H. Maier, ed., ‘Totalitarismus’ und ‘Politische Religionen’: Konzepte des Diktaturvergleichs (Paderborn-Munich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1996), pp. 260–63.
This is only part of the argument of R. Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), which argues overly broadly the existence of a ‘Christian Nazism’.
Hitler had earlier shown considerable interest in reading about religion (something not to be confused with Stalin’s brief seminary education), and was acutely aware of the ideological indefinition of Nationalism on the level of formal philosophy. On his religious readings and speculations, which may have led him to belief in a sort of immanentist theism, revealed in and through himself, see T. W. Ryback, ‘Hitler’s Forgotten Library: The Man, His Books, and His Search for God’, The Atlantic Monthly (May, 2003), 76–90.
See especially K. Vondung, Magie und Manipulation. Ideologischer Kult und politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), as well as his The Apocalypse in Germany (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000). The literature in this area is, of course, quite extensive.
H. S. Park, North Korea. The Politics of Unconventional Wisdom (Boulder-London: Lynne Riener, 2002).
On the Kim Il Sung cult, see D.-S. Suh, Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader (New York: Columbia, 1988).
See D. Apter, ‘Political Religion in the New Nations’, in C. Geertz. ed., Old Societies and New States (New York: Free Press, 1963), as well as Apter’s Ghana in Transition (New York: Athenaeum, 1963);
L. Binder, The Ideological Revolution in the Middle East (New York: John Wiley, 1964);
and M. Halpern, The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).
I. Esquerra, ETA pro nobis. El pecado original de la Iglesia vasca (Barcelona: Planeta, 2000);
J. Bastante, Los curas de ETA. La Iglesia vasca entre la cruz y la ikurriña (Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2004);
and N. Blázquez, El nacional clericalismo vasco (Madrid: Edibesa, 2004).
I. Sáez de la Fuente Aldama, El Movimiento de Liberación Nacional Vasco, una religión de sustitución (Bilbao: Instituto Diocesano de Teología y Pastoral, Desclé, 2002). In his Nacional clericalismo vasco, 12–13, Niceto Blázquez summarises this study as follows: ‘Those who consider themselves the legitimate representatives of the “people” have the right to demand of the faithful that they kill in the name of the nationalist cause and, if necessary, become martyrs by immolating themselves like kamikazes. And not for reasons of faith in God but of faith in a sacred entity that transcends us and is worthy of any sacrifice. The God for whom the nationalist is to immolate himself is none other but “the people” ’. Here there is no other God than the people as directed by the nationalist leaders. This study dissects the religious model of the Basque National Liberation Movement in doctrinal, ethical, symbolic, ritual and communitarian terms attempting to demonstrate how, by means of the transference of sacralisation, the nationalist left abandons the laic concept of politics typical of modern civil societies in favour of a new cultic object, the People, whose persistence is made visible through daily combat. Similarly, it points out how violence fuels a community of endogamy and endows it with a strong component of martyrdom on the principle that, before the altar of the Fatherland, any salvific sacrifice is acceptable: its vision of reality and its normative apparatus separate two categories of people divided by an uncrossable barrier between those in contact with the truth and the uninitiated who, having not received and internalised the revealed message or having renounced the faith, belong to the sphere of the profane and heretical. The call to the supposed primeval national unity or foundational myth pretends, in addition to justifying the recourse to violence, to develop mobilising liturgies on behalf of a singular Exodus to the Promised Land of a believing community led by the orthodoxy of a military group and its corresponding political arm.
Probably the best single exposition is P. E. Gottfried, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002).
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© 2008 Stanley G. Payne
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Payne, S.G. (2008). On the Heuristic Value of the Concept of Political Religion and Its Application. In: Griffin, R., Mallett, R., Tortorice, J. (eds) The Sacred in Twentieth-Century Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230241633_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230241633_2
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