Race and Secularism in America

Jonathon S. Kahn, Vincent W. Lloyd, Jonathon Kahn, Vincent W. Lloyd

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780231541275
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Histoire sociale

This anthology draws bold comparisons between secularist strategies to contain, privatize, and discipline religion and the treatment of racialized subjects by the American state. Specializing in history, literature, anthropology, theology, religious studies, and political theory, contributors expose secularism's prohibitive practices in all facets of American society and suggest opportunities for change.

PART I

ORIENTATIONS

1

WHITE SUPREMACY AND BLACK INSURGENCY AS POLITICAL THEOLOGY

George Shulman

This Essay justifies one big claim by pursuing the implications and then the limits of a specific political theory. The claim is that most versions of the secularization thesis are contradicted both by white supremacy as a historical and political phenomenon and by the terms and forms of black insurgency. The theory at issue is Carl Schmitt’s account of political theology as involving sovereignty, decision, and states of exception and, relatedly, his account of “the political” as a kind of intensification of antagonism. I would use his theory to conjure a plausible view of the relationship between race and secularism in the American case but then use black insurgency to show the limits of, to complicate and move beyond, Schmitt’s account.

Let me begin by noting the main accounts of secularization. One is the liberal (Lockean) version in which the privatizing of religion is the condition of creating a political community organized around public reason.¹ One is the Weberian view that the demagification of the world proceeds as instrumental reason and worldly asceticism separate from religious origins and, in conjunction with capitalism, creates a bureaucratic iron cage and the dark night of modernity.² One is the Marxism that posits a progressive secularization of religion, at first as the democratic state and its double consciousness, then as capitalism melts all that is solid, and finally by a revolutionary process that creates a fully humanized and communist world community.³

In each version, secularization can be incomplete, as some people remain wed to the social practices and forms of consciousness associated with religion as an archaic, traditional, ostensibly recessive heritage. The political theorist Wendy Brown thus recently invoked Marx and Freud to call state sovereignty the compensatory heir of theistic expectations and to depict its waning as a religious and thus psychic and political crisis.⁴ Other political theorists invoke Nietzsche’s depiction of a modernity characterized by the death of god but also by a self-defeating search for what he called theistic substitutes, in truth and reason on the one hand and in the nation-state on the other hand. Christianity persists as the “longing for the unconditional” and “slave morality” driving what he calls “the ascetic ideal.”⁵ If the legacy of Nietzsche’s genealogy is a certain kind of atheism, however, it means endorsing not a liberal, Weberian, or Marxist version of secularization but a kind of postsecularism; after Nietzsche, one sees perspectives at play rather than a final truth revealed, which means that one accepts the ubiquity of faith, which drives every ontology and vision of life, including secularism itself as ideology.⁶

Let me also note the key arguments that contest these dominant stories of secularization. As I’ve suggested, one is Nietzsche’s mythopoetic view that faith is both inescapable and generative. One is Tocqueville’s view, updated by Robert Bellah, that American liberal nationalism involves a “civil religion” in which liberal ideals are enframed by a culture of theist faith, Christian moral norms, and providential narrative. In this view, a democratic political community presumes and requires such mythic enframing to posit worthy ends and to exercise self-reflective self-limitation.⁷ A third and opposing critique of the secularization thesis is offered by the work of Talal Asad, which argues that secularism bespeaks a disciplinary project wed to state power and colonialism; for Asad, Tocqueville’s civil religion is thus a “civilizing” project that authorizes certain individualistic (say liberal or secular) versions of religion and politics by pathologizing other (say liturgical and communal) practices as traditional, nonliberal, and antimodern.⁸

Following Asad and virtually all African American scholars, the following arguments assume that liberal modernity has always been entangled with both slavery and religion and that “secularism” is a discursive formation constituting both religion and race as worldly objects. But by focusing on Carl Schmitt’s critique of secularization and bringing it into conversation with critical race theory, my goal is to elaborate this critique by theorizing white supremacy and black insurgency as forms of “political theology” in Schmitt’s sense. In turn, though, black insurgency enables me to show the limits and dangers of Schmitt’s view of “political theology” and to enlarge what that concept might mean.

We recall that for Schmitt, liberal modernity is antipolitical for two reasons: it devalues sovereignty as decision about exceptions, and it devalues the antagonism of the friend-enemy distinction. Celebrating both “ethics” and markets, both universal moral norms enacted by individuals and contractual (that is, consensual) relations among them, liberalism (in his view) elevates a private realm of interpersonal mediation that purportedly does not involve power or decisions about collective fate. In his view, liberalism also devalues antagonism; that is, in an ontological sense it denies the permanence and depth of difference, and in a political sense it denies how forms of difference generate conflict that cannot be subsumed or resolved. That denial is entailed by liberalism’s investment in legal process, parliamentary discussion, and interest-group bargaining, that is, in forms of conflict resolution through procedural and deliberative norms purportedly grounded in consent and reason.⁹

In contrast to what he still calls “politics,” Schmitt defines and depicts “the political” in two ways. On the one hand it is the moment of what he calls “decision” that, by declaring an exception to legal norms and institutional routine, at once creates and enacts sovereignty. As moments of “decision” declare a state of exception that breaks or suspends the authority of law or precedent, so the “sovereign” is whoever or whatever power it is that declares and effectively creates this exception. Lincoln displays sovereignty when he suspends habeas corpus, but American revolutionaries at once claim and display the sovereignty of their “constituent power” in their declaration of independence. In turn, such acts of political decision manifest the theological meaning and worldly persistence of what he calls “miracle.” Arguing that “every order rests on a decision and not a norm,” which is to say that legal structures are founded on faith and will rather than rationality as such, he also depicts acts of decision and so of exception as ways that “the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.”

In this claim we can hear Jesus—“it is written but I say unto you”—or Luther—“Here I stand; I can do no other”—but also Machiavelli’s “armed prophet” or Rousseau’s “the people” engaging in revolutionary acts of “founding” or constituent power that establish legal (even moral) order. We can hear the virtually cyclical view of revolutionary (and charismatic) acts of founding, the routinization of authority, and acts of renewal or refounding, a central trope if not the central narrative form in religious and political life in the West. “The political” for Schmitt thus appears only or specifically in speech and action that bears the generative power to break a pattern and thereby to reorder or refound an order, regime, or community. But also, he claims, the capacity to declare and enact an exception is crucial to save a norm (or a state) in moments of crisis. (Like Machiavelli, he thus endorses a “constitutional” dictatorship, that is, constitutional authorization for declaring a temporary state of exception to save the law or the state.)¹⁰

On the other hand, he depicts the political as the declaration of friend and enemy, for in and by this speech act a community constitutes its existential identity and posits a good higher than its members’ mere life. Schmitt is insistent both on the inescapability of antagonism, given human plurality, and on its value as a condition of existential self-definition. For by discovering the good that distinguishes a “we” from its “they,” human beings are compelled to articulate the terms and meaning of their belonging as a foundational identification. As the articulation of belonging warrants both killing and self-sacrifice, and as mortal commitment gives politics gravitas, so recovering “the political” in this sense might ennoble a liberal modernity that is otherwise bereft of redemptive meaning because it values nothing higher than mere life.¹¹

For Schmitt, then, liberalism and secularization work together to devalue “the political” by avoiding the central issues of authority and belonging, and thus they tend to deny or malign—but therefore “manage”—the dimensions of decision and commitment, as well as antagonism and allegiance, in political life. Issues of authority and belonging, and so of both conflict and what once was called “enthusiasm,” in turn bear traces of religiosity in the form of the sacred or transcendent, the miraculous, and the affirmation of commitment to a faith valued more than mortal life. As critics have rightly noted, though, Schmitt’s political theology uses exception to cement and not only assert sovereignty through the state; his goal is to secure rather than unsettle sovereignty. Likewise, critics rightly see the loss of plurality in his unification of “the friend” as against “the enemy,” whereas in politics these categories are more contingent, changeable, and internally differentiated in ways his theory obscures. Despite the efforts of many on the left to appropriate his theory to defend a revolutionary politics, then, it is no surprise that defenders of the national security state have invoked Schmitt since 9/11.¹²

Still, during this era of permanent war some political theorists have used Schmitt’s political theology to authorize avowedly democratic projects. For moments of decision and declarations of exception—as the Arab Spring recently demonstrated—can perform the countersovereignty of “the people” against the state acting in their name.¹³ Declaring a frontier between the many and the few, antagonism appears as a crucial part of “populist” or oppositional politics. Such an “event,” breaking open the continuity and authority of a regime, is readily linked to Jacques Ranciere’s idea of the political as “dis-agreement,” as the moment, event, or encounter that stages a “dispute” over a sovereign order and the “partition of the sensible” by which it defines who counts as enfranchised and who is “of no (ac)count.” For Ranciere, unlike Schmitt, though, any recentering of sovereignty is an instance of what he calls “the police,” not of the political, which he defines in wholly ruptural terms.¹⁴

If for Schmitt secularization means the rule of the ordinary as routine repetition of the same, then moments of decision, exception, and antagonism are the disturbing intervention of the transcendent not in a literal theistic sense but as acts and powers rupturing immanence. “The people” in revolutionary moments can thus be said to enact that role, and in this (Schmittian) sense it is said, “the voice of the people is the voice of God.” Even if one argues with Schmitt about where or in whom he lodges the transcendent and miraculous, and even if one rejects his own investment in cementing sovereignty, it is crucial to credit the appeal of his effort to rescue politics from insignificance by depicting the properly political as an extraordinary act, event, or moment that breaks into, opens up, and redeems the ordinary as a routinized or imprisoning iron cage. Thus, even when Hannah Arendt rejects his equation of the political with sovereignty and instead equates the properly political with what she calls “action in concert,” she still attributes to it a “natality” (for initiating new beginnings) she calls miraculous and endows with redemptive meaning. The political—whether lodged in state sovereignty by Schmitt or in capacities to initiate by Arendt—thus becomes a fugitive spirit and sacred presence that redeems an otherwise deadened, one could say profane, world. What I would emphasize in Schmitt’s concept of political theology, then, is not only decision, sovereignty, and antagonism but also the narrative structure of exceptionality that posits the rule-bound immanence of the ordinary to conjure the political as the extraordinary act that breaks it open. I will dissent from this view later, but my conclusion thus far is that Schmitt’s political theology means redemptive investment in the political as a response to a death-in-life equated with secularization under liberalism.

What happens, however, when we think about secularization and the political through the prism of white supremacy and the insurgency of racialized others? Schmitt insisted that “liberalism” was incapable of “the political” in the sense of avowing the centrality of decision, exception, sovereignty, and antagonism, but the history of liberalism in the United States suggests otherwise. Most simply, what Schmitt calls “political theology” is enacted in the United States in racial terms, partly as the metaphysics marking the damned as black to produce a redemptive whiteness, partly as the racial state of exception founding sovereignty, partly as an antagonistic declaration of the constitutive outside and internal other of American liberal nationalism. The declaration of a racialized state of exception can constitute sovereignty in localist, populist, or “Jeffersonian” forms, as in the popular sovereignty of white citizen’s councils or the recent Tea Party rhetoric, but also in the “Hamiltonian” form of a national security state authorized by anticommunism and wars on terror. But either way, as blackness is associated with the license that subverts self-mastery, with the dependency that defeats autonomy, or with the irredeemable criminality or violence that threatens order, so “democracy in America” is re-produced by recurrently declaring both a racialized exception to liberal norms and a frontier of antagonism defining the friend by marking the enemy.¹⁵

What Michael Rogin calls “counter-subversion” is thus Schmittian decision in American drag: liberalism’s political theology is revealed as it repeatedly re-constitutes sovereignty, national belonging, and normative citizenship by projecting and enforcing racialized frontiers.¹⁶ But liberalism typically disavows its entanglement with domination, except in extraordinary moments of crisis or hysteria, which in turn are readily forgotten as their legacies are normalized. It is as if Schmitt took “liberalism” at its word rather than looking at its practice, when in fact Schmittian racial politics is the secret that liberalism at once displays and disavows. The racial state of exception in American liberalism is constitutive not anomalous, permanent not temporary, and it remains invisible bec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Managing Race, Managing Religion
• Part I: Orientations
• Part II: Readings
• Part III: Inflections
• Conclusion: James Baldwin and a Theology of Justice in a Secular Age
• Afterword: Critical Intersections: Race, Secularism, Gender
• List of Contributors
• Index