Postcolonial Politics and Theology

Unraveling Empire for a Global World

Kwok Pui-lan

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780664267490
• eBook ISBN: 9781646982301
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Postcolonial Politics and Theology seeks to reform and reimagine the field of political theology—uprooting it from the colonial soil—using the comparative lenses of postcolonial politics and theology to bring attention to the realities of the Global South. Kwok Pui-lan traces the history of the political impacts of Western theological development, especially developments in the U.S. context, and the need to shift these interlocking fields toward non-Western traditions in theory and practice.

A special focus of the book is on the changing sociopolitical realities of American Empire and Sino-American competition, illustrated in Donald Trump's slogan of "Make America Great Again" and Xi Jinping's hope for a "China Dream." The shifting of U.S. and Asian relationships highlights the need to move our theological and political categories away from a vision of strongman domination and toward a postmodern, postcolonial, and transnational world, especially exemplified in the Asia Pacific context.

Throughout, Kwok overturns the idea of centering one cultural framework and marginalizing others in favor of living into a multiplicity of deeply contextual theologies. She explores how these theologies are being developed in global, postcolonial contexts, through struggles for democracy and civil disobedience in Hong Kong, by efforts to reclaim selfhood and sexual identity from exploitative colonial desire, through the work of interreligious solidarity and peacebuilding, and in the practice of earth care in the face of ecological crisis.

PART ONE

CONTESTING EMPIRE

Chapter 1

Toward a Political Theology of Postcoloniality

The relationship between religion and politics—whether in democracies or in so-called theocracies—has always been a necessary yet impossible relationship. Each encounter between the political and the religious has always ended up reconstituting each domain anew.

Achille Mbembe¹

In October 2019, I participated in the De-provincializing Political Theology: Postcolonial and Comparative Approaches international conference at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany.² The conference brought together some twenty scholars from religious studies, theology, history, politics, and law. This was the first time I took part in a conference on political theology billed as “postcolonial and comparative.” The majority of the participants teach in Europe and the U.S., with a few racial and ethnic minorities among them, and two work in India and Colombia. The participants are scholars who study diverse religious traditions, and I was one of the few participants who specializes in Christian theology. I benefited from the papers presented and the questions raised by scholars from other disciplines and religious traditions. In one poignant moment, for example, we discussed what “politics” means in Islam. The conference prompted me to imagine what a political theology that accounts for the postcolonial condition and also religious plurality would look like.

Political theology has enjoyed a renaissance in recent times as books about the topic have been published and conferences on it have been held regularly, oftentimes drawing hundreds of people.³ This phenomenon can be attributed to several factors. Since September 11, 2001, religion has been on the forefront in discussions around the war on terrorism, peace and violence, and conflict resolution. There has been an attitudinal shift in both the secular state and, also, in the public domain with respect to the enduring influences of religion, religious actors, and religious communities. Scholars have discussed, animatedly, a postsecular world and talked about the “permanence of the theologico-political.”⁴ Interest in political theology has also been prompted by crises of liberal democracy in both the U.S. and Europe, as displayed by recent, and accelerating, populist and right-wing nationalistic movements, which support white hegemony, anti-immigration, homophobia, and misogyny. Scholars and critics have called attention to the dangers of fascism, totalitarianism, and tyranny in the past and the present.⁵ While democratic structures have been threatened, mass protests and assemblies in public spaces have become central in the fight for political change, economic equity, racial justice, and queer people’s rights. The most notable of these was the Occupy Movement, which spread to more than 900 cities in the world. In 2020, rallies to support Black Lives Matters were seen in many parts of the world, not just on U.S. soil, where the movement was founded. These recent events and protests call for serious theological reflections on emerging political subjectivity and an imaginary that connects the local with the global.

As more people become interested in the relationship between the political and the theological, it is worthwhile to pay attention to a question posed by Corey D. B. Walker. In his introduction to a collection of essays titled “Theology and Democratic Futures,” Walker asks, “What is the fate of theology in a post-theological moment?”⁶ By “post-theological,” he does not mean we are “entering an age devoid of theology,” because the strong influence of religious fundamentalism in political and theoretical discourses persists.⁷ Rather, Walker’s term points to the fact that traditional theological discourse can no longer hold the breadth and depth of what animates current intellectual discussions on theology and politics emerging from many disciplines and quarters. The return of theology to public discourse and to the North Atlantic academy means that intellectuals, whose training may not be in theology, and whose interests far exceed that of the “theology” proper, are seriously thinking about theology today. Their exploration, Walker says, overflows the categories, concepts, languages, and frameworks of theology, thereby making them inadequate to contemplate both the negation of traditional theological formulations and their (re)emergence in new forms.⁸

This “post-theological” moment opens theology to interdisciplinary inquiries and critical scrutiny that has gone beyond the traditional parameters of theology. As new questions are being broached, postcolonial theology contributes to this moment by exposing colonial imaginaries embedded in theological systems and frameworks by showing theology’s complex and ambivalent relations to empires. Postcolonial criticism challenges Eurocentric biases in the conceptualization of political theology as a field of study, which has so far not taken seriously political questions from the majority world. Instead of a Eurocentric genealogy of political theology, I argue for transnational and multicultural origins and genealogies, using developments in Asia as an example. I then discuss the scope and contours of postcolonial politics, which goes beyond the usual juridical-institutional understanding of politics. In the final section of this chapter, I outline a postcolonial and comparative theology of postcoloniality.

WHITHER POLITICAL THEOLOGY?

In their introduction to the second edition of Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (2019), William T. Cavanaugh and Peter Manley Scott define political theology as an “analysis and criticism of political arrangements (including cultural-psychological, social, and economic aspects) from the perspective of differing interpretations of God’s way with the world.”⁹ In this sense, political theology has existed since the beginning of Christianity. Jesus preached the Kingdom of God and contrasted life under God with life under Caesar. He died a condemned political prisoner under Roman imperial rule. Paul’s relation to politics has been up for debate. On the one hand, he encouraged Jesus’ followers to be subject to the authorities (Rom. 13:1), but on the other hand, he challenged the lordship of the emperor by calling Jesus “Lord.”¹⁰ In keeping with Paul, Augustine wrote his City of God when the Roman Empire was threatened, in which he contrasted the city of God with the earthly city. He defended Christianity against its critics and saw the history of the world as a contest between God and the devil. He refused to sacralize any human-made state (the City of the World) and argued that human society only finds completion in the realm of God.¹¹ In the medieval period, the relation between the church and the state became thorny as a result of power struggles between the papacy and secular rulers. During the Reformation, Martin Luther proposed his theory of “two kingdoms.” These two kingdoms consisted of the spiritual regiment, concerned with the soul and the inner person, and the worldly regiment, concerned with the body and the world. After many years of war, the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) marked the end of “Christendom” by giving secular authorities the power to determine matters of religion in their own state. The authority of the church was further challenged during the Enlightenment, when philosophers attacked religion and pushed to separate religion from public affairs. Later, Max Weber would characterize modernity as the “disenchantment of the world.”¹²

Many scholars trace the development of modern political theology to the book Political Theology published by German conservative jurist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) in 1922.¹³ This controversial figure penned his book during a time of political crisis after World War I. He saw the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic being undermined by atheism, capitalism, and political radicalism. He argued that these social and political currents denied a place for transcendence in modern society which had been provided for by religion. Concerned about the need for a stable social order, Schmitt proposed a particular account of sovereignty, which I will discuss below. From Schmitt, scholars have traced the development of political theology through Johann Baptist Metz, to Jürgen Moltmann, and Dorothee Sölle after World War II, before moving on to the present theological turn in political discourse on both sides of the North Atlantic.

Such a (white) genealogy of modern political theology traces its origin to Europe as it grappled with the political crises of the two world wars. This genealogy foregrounds the works of European and Euro-American theologians, placing their reflections on politics at the center of inquiry. Two introductory texts on political theology written from different viewpoints illustrate this bias. Elizabeth Philips’ Political Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed (2012) is a text based on traditional theological approach.¹⁴ The book offers a Eurocentric development of political theology, citing Schmitt, Augustine, Calvin, Yoder, and Hauerwas, before discussing topics such as the church and the political, the politics of Jesus, violence and peace, and liberalism and democracy. Although she includes the discussion of oppression, marginalization, and liberation, she does not discuss liberation theology adequately and mentions women theologians from the Global South only in passing. The audience she has in mind are primarily white students living in Western democratic countries.

In contrast to Philips, British political theorist Saul Newman offers an introductory text that we can call a “secular” political theology. His book Political Theology: A Critical Introduction (2019) follows the convention of beginning with Schmitt, before moving on to critical figures such as Bakunin, Stirner, Freud, Hobbes, Benjamin, Foucault, and Agamben.¹⁵ Newman’s various chapters explore sovereignty, psychology, economy, spirituality, and the politics of the profane. His book traces from Freudian psychoanalytic politics, through the reimagination of power by Foucault, all the way to power relations in the current form of capitalism. He does not assume any belief in God, nor does he dwell on theology, for he argues that “political theology is not so much a problem of religion in modern societies as a problem of power.”¹⁶ On the surface, Newman’s secular approach is very different from Philips’ book. However, though they cite different registers of thinkers, they both draw primarily from Western sources, especially canonical figures in their respective fields. The problematic that the two authors want to address arises from crises and tensions within liberal democracy.

If an introductory text by a single author is limited by the author’s horizon, multi-authored companion volumes on political theology do not fare better. In the second edition of Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, Cavanaugh and Scott write that they have paid more attention to the growth of Christianity in the Global South.¹⁷ This edition improves over the first by including a few more chapters on the Global South, with additional chapters on postcolonialism and grassroots social movements. Yet only seven out of forty-three chapters focus explicitly on issues and figures from outside the North Atlantic. While Schmitt, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Moltmann, Metz, Hauerwas, and Milbank each have their own chapter, political theologies from Asia and Africa are each given only one chapter, and Latin American liberation theologies are given two. The majority of the contributors are either Europeans or Euro-Americans. The Cambridge Companion to Christian Political Theology (2015) is even more problematic.¹⁸ Out of fourteen chapters, only one chapter is on liberation theology and one other chapter covers postcolonial theology. The book lacks a global perspective, and the issues discussed do not touch on many political concerns from the majority world.

This Eurocentric bias in many books about political theology reveals the field is outdated and fails to catch up with the changing geopolitics of our time. Since the meteoric rise of China and its growing global political impact, Asia Pacific has become a strategic region poised to shape the future of the twenty-first century. The U.S. government has spoken about the “pivot” to Asia and Asia Pacific as a key military theater for the U.S. The Sino-American trade wars, the tech cold wars, and the rush to control space have rattled the world’s economic and political orders in recent years. It was ironic to see Chinese President Xi Jinping defend globalization and world trade, while President Donald Trump resorted to protectionism and economic nationalism. In the midst of shifting global politics, there exists a time lag between political theology that continues to focus on the Atlantic and the world we live in today.

To combat Eurocentric biases, we have to reject the notion of a single, originating moment, or a singular tradition, of political theology. Instead, I propose a transnational and multicultural articulation of the origins and genealogies of political theology. Edward Said has taught us to read histories contrapuntally and to see histories as intertwined and overlapped.¹⁹ Around the time when Schmitt was writing Political Theology, a different kind of political crisis emerged on the horizon in China. On May 4, 1919, students in Beijing took to the streets to protest the transfer, to Japan, of Germany’s rights over China’s Shandong peninsula at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, even though China had entered the war on the side of the Allied powers. Germany had previously obtained the right to build a naval base in Qingdao in 1898 and occupied territories in Shandong to extend its military power in the Pacific. After the protests in Beijing, a mass movement swept through the country, denouncing Western imperialism and demanding democracy alongside radical cultural reforms.

The year 2019 marked the centenary of the May Fourth movement. As we look back over the past hundred years, we find that political theology can be traced to different genealogies. A largely white and male genealogy traces its modern origin to Schmitt and is concerned about religion and the state, secularism and the postsecular world, church and politics, and liberalism and democracy. The other genealogy deprovincializes the Eurocentric approach by placing political theology in the struggles against colonialism, neocolonialism, dictatorship, authoritarianism, militarized violence, and religious and ethnic strife in the majo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Postcolonial Reflection on the Political and the Theological
• Part One: Contesting Empire
• Part Two: Political Theologies from Asia Pacific
• Part Three: Practices
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index