The world always appears new. Politics and religion , sovereignty and theology, resistance and ritual play key roles in the making, maintaining, and remaking of that world. This may be counterintuitive. According to conventional wisdom, the world had been losing its religion. From the nineteenth century until the last few decades, in both scholarly and popular outlets, the proponents of this secularization thesis seemed to dominate the discourse about religion. Science and technology, through the twin legacies of the Enlightenment and industrialization, would ultimately erode the sphere of human meaning typically occupied by religion, thus bringing humanity into a new, secular-humanist epoch. Modernity would destroy religion.1 But despite exponentially advancing technological and scientific change and vast improvements in world literacy and education, the world has not secularized as it had been predicted. Especially since the Iranian Revolution, the rise of the Moral Majority and Christian evangelicalism in American politics, the rise of religious extremism and violence, and the Arab Spring, it has become increasingly clear that the secularization thesis, while ubiquitous in the middle of the twentieth century, wasââquite simplyââwrong. Religion did not disappear. And yet neither is this a simple case of a return. The religion that seems to have returned is different than it had been. The relationship between religion and the secular has thus proven to be more complex and nuanced than previously imagined.
In response to this so-called return of religion, there has been a growing body of scholarship that, over the last 30 years or so and increasing in volume and frequency, has attempted to re-conceive religion, politics, the secular, and the relationships between them.2 Talal Asadâs Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity is a prominent and important example. In it, Asad explains that the growing academic disenchantment with the secularization thesis is not just a result of the new importance that religion seems to be playing in politics. He writes:
This is a typical example of the ways in which a traditional understanding of the secular needs to be frustrated and reexamined. For Asad, both are expressions of power and the State. So not only do the secular and the religious depend on one another, but the religious and the political implicate each other as well. Studying the religious, the secular, or the political thus requires studying all three. As a result, this has profound implications for both political philosophy and theology, as well as for their hybrid, political theology.In a sense what many would anachronistically call âreligionâ was always involved in the world of power. If the secularization thesis no longer carries the conviction it once did, this is because the categories of âpoliticsâ and âreligionâ turn out to implicate each other more profoundly than we thought, a discovery that has accompanied our growing understanding of the powers of the modern nation-state. The concept of the secular cannot do without the idea of religion.3
We are living through a time of renewed emphasis on religion. Further, it is not coincidental that we are also living in a time of increasingly accelerating political and social change around the world. Most notably, recent phenomena such as the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, the Zapatista Rebellion, the 15-M Movement in Spain, the activities in Gezi Park in Istanbul, the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, Idle No More in Canada, #BlackLivesMatter, and the encampments at Standing Rock in North Dakota have demonstrated a trend of peoplesâ unwillingness to accept the imposition of injustice through neoliberal globalization and its allies. Increasing wealth disparity, the depletion of natural resources, and political and social violence through racism, misogyny, and homophobia are all features of the emerging, dominant political-economic system on the planet. There has been an explosion in political theory in recent years attempting to resist neoliberalism through rethinking such tried and true political concepts as democracy, anarchy, and socialism.4 In light of Asadâs connection of religion and the secular to the political sphere, any understanding of the human condition in todayâs world requires an understanding of resistance movements occurring within the contexts of religion, the secular, and neoliberalism.
Political theology is a way of thinking that has the potential to shed light on this matrix of religion, politics, and social change. Political theology is not theology that is political or has political implications. It is a hybrid branch of political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and theology that investigates ways in which religious concepts, postures, and thinking underlie political, social, economic, and cultural discourses and institutions. Perhaps its most famous proponent is Carl Schmitt whose Political Theology, written in 1922, lays out the theory that political sovereignty is a secularization of divine sovereignty and, thus, political theory and theology are disciplinary cognates.5 The social-creative powers of religion and politics thus lend themselves to a political-theological understanding.
The principal questions guiding the trajectory of this book are: (1) how might political theology understand contemporary political resistance? and its reciprocal, (2) how will an examination of contemporary resistance force a reconsideration of political theology? To answer these questions, the project begins by investigating the historical development of the relationship between religion and politics and their common foundations. I propose certain ways in which religion works to create a meaningful, political world in which one might live. I then critically investigate the relationship between radical theology and its relationship to the construction of community and political activity. The culmination of this project takes place in its second half: experimental and creative performances of resisting theology. The relationship, tension, and translatability between religion and politics are constant points of reference.
Subjunctivity is common to both religion and political resistance. In using that term, Iâm appropriating a concept that refers to the grammatical mood of a verb used to express uncertainty, hypothesis, contingency, possibility, desire, potentiality, necessity, or hope and extrapolating it out into a concept.6 This idea has been theorized most fully in Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simonâs Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity, in which they develop one of the anthropologist Roy A. Rappaportâs most significant insights: that the work of any given ritual, regardless of its particular meaning, is to create an order that is self-consciously distinct from other possible social worlds.7 In short, the subjunctive describes the world, not as it is, but as it might be. This âmight beâ is the root of both movements of political resistance which seek to model...