Theology and World Politics

Metaphysics, Genealogies, Political Theologies

Vassilios Paipais

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030376017
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030376024
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Situated within the wider post-secular turn in politics and international relations, this volume focuses not on religion per se, but rather explicitly on theology. Contributions to this collection highlight the political theological foundations of international theory and world politics, recasting theology and politics as symbiotic discourses with all the risks, promises and open questions this relation may involve. The overarching claim the book makes is that all politics has theology embedded in it, both in the genealogical sense of carrying ineradicable traces of rival theological traditions, and also in the more ontological sense of being enacted by alternative configurations of the theologico-political. The book is unique in bringing together a diverse group of scholars, spanning knowledge areas as varied as IR, political theory, philosophy, theology, and history to investigate the complex interconnections between theology and world politics. It will be of interest to students andscholars of political theory, international relations, intellectual history, and political theology.

© The Author(s) 2020

V. Paipais (ed.)Theology and World PoliticsInternational Political Theoryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37602-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Religion or Theology? (Re)introducing Political Theology into the Study of World Politics

Vassilios Paipais¹

(1)

University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK

Vassilios Paipais

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

ReligionTheologyMetaphysicsPolitical theologiesPost-secularism

This is a significantly revised version of an editorial introduction to a 2019 Special Issue on ‘Political Theologies of the International—the continued relevance of theology in international relations’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 22(2): 269–277. Thanks to Springer Nature for the kind permission to republish parts of that introduction here.

End Abstract

The Thirty Years’ Detour

International Relations (IR) as a self-conscious field of inquiry, and also the broader study of world politics, is no stranger to theological thinking. There has recently been a significant body of growing literature, reminding the field that its roots and preoccupations used to be a lot more eclectic, diverse, and contested—and, therefore, some might say, more fascinating—than what was once believed (see, e.g. Vitalis 2015; Ashworth 2014; Guilhot 2011). We now know, or are reminded of by the intellectual historians of IR, that the post-1945 dominance of mainstream neopositivist approaches to the study of international relations has obscured a much more complex account of the field’s origins and evolution in which reflection on world affairs used to cross disciplinary boundaries and which, in addition to other knowledge areas, also included references steeped in the Christian theological imagination.

Nicholas Guilhot (2010), for instance, has issued a compelling reminder of a short-lived theological moment in IR in the 1940s and 1950s that was destined to succumb to the behaviouralist onslaught in the late 1950s/early 1960s. Studies of influential figures in the intellectual tradition of the English School, such as Martin Wight and Herbert Butterfield, have demonstrated the centrality of theological modes of thought in their intellectual make-up (Epp 1991; Hall 2006; Bentley 2011; Bain 2014b). Butterfield (1949) was the author of the influential Christianity and History that was first delivered as a series of six very popular broadcast lectures on BBC radio in 1949, while Wight, an early Christian pacifist (Wight 1936), was prolific in his use of theological metaphors, symbols, and narratives in his discussion of world history, especially reflected in his immediate post-war writings that often assumed apocalyptic tones (Wight 1948).

Last, but not least, Christian realism, with Reinhold Nieburh as its towering figure, stands out as an example of a mid-twentieth-century-applied political theology, firmly ensconced in the peculiarities of American public life that accords a special place to religiously motivated political ethics. Such was Niebuhr’s commanding presence in American public life that some of his illustrious acolytes, including Kenneth Thompson, George Kennan, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, and Hans J. Morgenthau, were historians, political theorists, and policymakers—christened by Morton White as ‘atheists for Niebuhr’—at once revealing not only Niebuhr’s impact as a public intellectual but also the pervasive use of theological vocabulary in American public discourse even among non-believers. Despite the relative decline of its influence in the American foreign policy establishment for reasons that have to do with the steady rise of a technocratic ethos in the US policy-making community, Christian realism continued to enjoy respect and popularity among the American political elite across the political spectrum, from Jimmy Carter and Madeleine Albright to Condoleezza Rice, Hilary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama whose Audacity of Hope is a thoroughly Niebuhrian work (see Paipais 2020).

And yet, as Guilhot (2010) has demonstrated, the mainstream study of international relations seems to have incorporated and secularised many of the fundamental assumptions of early realist thought that used to be premised on a theology-inflected critique of pure secularism (see also Troy 2013). Early realist emphasis on theological notions, such as original sin, the depravity of human nature, the tendency of vice to dress up as virtue, and the critique of self-righteous moralism, that seemed to carry Augustinian insights into world politics (Paipais 2016), gave way to a social scientific analysis, focusing on the structure of the international system, the material resources of states, and the distribution of their power capabilities. Realist political theology was replaced by a secularised theology of the state and the international system. Unbeknownst to them, mainstream IR theorists were reproducing the logic of the sacred by turning social science IR into the religion of the state and power politics. In the process, the formal study of the role of religion in world politics was marginalised. ‘Religion’ (an undifferentiated and contested term, anyway) was treated either as an identity variable or as a cause of conflict, at best, or deemed irrelevant to the study of world politics, at worst. From roughly the early 1960s to the end of the Cold War, the rise of the social sciences as a powerful legitimating discourse, and the secularisation thesis seemed to go hand in glove in rendering IR blind to ‘religiously infused revolutions, faith-based social movements [and], the spread of religious nationalism’ (Pasha 2018, 106). The study of world politics proved inhospitable, if not averse, to references made to religion all the while it was developing a religious-like attachment to the order of the state and to narratives of scientific progress and modernisation (see Hurd 2008; Thomas 2005).

Since the end of the Cold War, however, the growing talk of a ‘clash of civilizations’ and the ‘return of religion’, primarily typified in the rise of political Islam and the Christian right in the US, has become one of the most pervading and controversial features of contemporary world politics (e.g. Kepel 1993; Huntington 1996; Juergensmeyer 2008). Moreover, the significance of religiously motivated actors and faith-based ideologies became even more pronounced after 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’ when the impact of Islamic militantism exposed the limits of secularism both as an ideology and as an analytical tool for understanding global politics (Habermas 2002; Wilson 2012; Hurd 2015). Within International Relations (IR), recent debates on the post-secular ‘turn’ have explored the implications of the resurgence of religion and a post-secular international system for security, democracy, and global governance (e.g. Mavelli and Petito 2014).

The models of secularisation previously in use (premised on the replacement or ‘expropriation’ of the religious by the secular) have come increasingly under attack for residing on a misleading opposition between religion and faith, on the one hand, and modernity and reason, on the other. The emerging paradigm of post-secularism seems to enjoy a wider consensus in philosophy, sociology, political theory, and IR, although there is still much debate on whether it remains too parasitic on, and therefore overdetermined by, secularism qua the hegemonic term of the opposition (Pabst 2012). At any rate, this novel post-secular mood contests the view of religion as a private or violent affair (see Cavanaugh 2009) and calls for a renewed exploration of how religious traditions can, and perhaps should, contribute to the project of a post-secular democracy and world order (see Barbato and Kratochwil 2009; Butler et al. 2011).

From Religion to Theology

Situated within this wider reassessment of the relation between religion and politics, this collection takes the discussion forward by deliberately focusing, not primarily on religion per se, but rather on theology. While religion has traditionally been the focus of attention within the post-secular paradigm, studied sociologically as an identity marker, a ‘thick’ element of ‘culture’, or an affective dimension of transnational civil society, theology is usually treated as an expression of metaphysical dogmatism, a witch’s brew, perhaps too tied to mysticism and obscurantism to merit serious consideration. Much as Western thinking has been explicitly grounded in theology for most of its history, dominant strands in modern thought sought to overcome this heritage by offering a naturalist metaphysics rooted in human reason and the hegemony of secular immanentism. This culminated in a host of nineteenth-century thinkers (e.g. Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche) proclaiming the ‘death of God’, a proclamation that, in turn, led many twentieth-century philosophers (e.g. Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze) to explore the possibility of purging theological metaphysics from philosophy and political thought, typically dismissing it as superstition, religious dogmatism, and otherworldliness. In this respect, both secularism and some of its leading post-secular rejoinders share a post-metaphysical orientation that confronts any possibility of conjoining the study of the political and the theological with suspicion, or condescendingly calls for the ‘translation’ of theological ideas into publicly validated variants. According to this view, the theological story is no longer believed—or if it is, this is only one of the options available in the public sphere (Taylor 2007); at best, it carries a ‘semantic potential’ that can be rehabilitated as an imaginative ethical archive or a convenient dialogic/hermeneutic ‘resource’ (see Habermas 2011; Dallmayr 2010).

Yet, the political and the theological are no longer considered strange bedfellows, if they ever were. Beyond Schmitt’s (2006, 36) familiar dictum that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts’—an aphorism which was rather meant as a contribution to a sociology of juridical concepts—there is now a burgeoning literature that explores what Claude Lefort (1988) has coined ‘the permanence of the Theologico-Political’. Debates on the relevance of theology for a reconceptualisation of the political, but also of the political for the renewal of traditional theology, have lately proliferated (e.g. Scott and Cavanaugh 2004; De Vries and Sullivan 2006; Lilla 2007; Elshtain 2008; Gillespie 2008; Taylor 2007; Agamben 2011; Cavanaugh et al. 2012; Critchley 2012; Newman 2019). The field of political theology is now an exploding scholarly domain that has attracted some of the most illustrious thinkers in its ranks. Leading contemporary philosophers and political theorists, such as Giorgio Agamben, Charles Taylor, Jean Elshtain, Simon Critchley, Mark Lilla, and Michael Gillespie, have argued that modernity’s turn away from theology ent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Religion or Theology? (Re)introducing Political Theology into the Study of World Politics
• Part I. Metaphysics
• Part II. Genealogies
• Part III. Political Theologies
• Back Matter