The intersection of the religious and the secular represents a significant topic in the fields of political science, critical theory and religious studies. Indeed, it is a salient topic because it problematizes the neat binary distinction between these categories. The challenge of political theology to liberal democracy, for example, presents a central theoretical issue to this binary opposition. I argue that because liberal democratic theory is founded on the basis of public justification, and a kind of state neutrality wherein the state operates within the space of both instrumental and substantive reason, political theology presents a fundamental challenge to the normative democratic ideals which often draw sharp distinctions between religious (private) and secular (public) spheres of life. In this paper, I discuss how political theology presents a kind of departure from the liberal-democratic principles which form the common framework in which many western countries use to negotiate these categories.
Seyla Benhabib’s article “The Return of Political Theology,” is a highly important piece that addresses this topic in deeply intelligent and thought-provoking ways. How does Benhabib frame the concept of political theology? In what ways does this present a ‘challenge’ to liberal democratic principles? For Benhabib, in order to address the concept of political theology in relation to liberal democracy it is necessary to discuss the broader political context wherein these ideas converge. Benhabib begins the article with a reference to Samuel Huntington’s thesis on the “clash of civilizations”. For Benhabib, Huntington’s thesis sets the tone for thinking about the contemporary intellectual environment as it ‘comes-to-terms’ with the dualistic forces of political Islam and western liberal democratic states. As Benhabib writes,
Increasingly in today’s world we are experiencing intensifying antagonisms around religious and ethnic-cultural differences. Since 11 September 2001 the vocabulary of the ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington) of the 1980s has given way to what is called a ‘global civil war’ between the forces of political Islam and western liberal democracies. The confrontation between political Islam and the so-called ‘West’ has replaced the rhetoric of the Cold War against communism.
As Benhabib reflects on this situation, it becomes clear how these antagonisms have been filtered into the public sphere in various ways:
Unfortunately, this rhetoric is not restricted only to the destructive foreign policies of the Bush administration and American neo-conservatives. Since the bombings in Madrid (2004) and London (2007), the Danish caricature controversy over the representations of the Prophet Muhammad (2005), the murder of Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands by a Moroccan militant (2004), and the French Scarf Affair (1989-2004), the confrontation between the so-called forces of ‘political Islam’ and western liberal democracies has come to dominate European discourse and politics as well.
Of course, Benhabib’s analysis indicates how these situations have contributed to the perceived threat of political Islam in the Western world, which signals the return of “political theology”.
As Benhabib notes, in order to think more clearly about these social, political, cultural and religious tensions it is important to discuss these issues in the context of the secularization hypothesis advanced in the early twentieth century by the early critics of religion, including Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber, among others. According to the thesis developed in Max Weber’s essay ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’ (1919), the categories of the religious and the secular represent fundamental ways of thinking about the modern world, especially as a period in human history that is characterized by Entzauberung or disenchantment’, as “the loss of magic in the everyday world and the rationalized differentiation (Ausdifferenzierung) from one another of the spheres of science, religion, law, aesthetics and philosophy.” However, because of the fluid and shifting social, political, cultural and religious landscapes of the modern world, Weber’s thesis of the process of modernization is complicated by a wide-range of sociological factors.
As Benhabib notes, the combination of a variety of aspects of globalization, including the rise of religious fundamentalism, and “reverse globalization” (what I understand to be the opposite effect of colonialism, and the greater movement of culture across traditionally recognized cultural barriers), presents tremendous challenges to the secularization hypothesis, especially in relation to how the intersection of the categories of the secular and religious challenge the “separation between religion and politics, between theological truths and political certitudes.” From this perspective, the imagined borders that separate the spheres of social, political, religious and cultural life described in Weber’s essay represent porous sites of political contestation. Benhabib draws on several examples to illustrate how the categories of the religious and the secular have been re-inscribed with meaning and subject to the creative dynamics of religious tension and cross-cultural interaction.
Of course, one of the ways of thinking about the role of religion in these political processes is through the conceptual lens of ‘political theology’. The concept of political theology that Benhabib uses to discuss these dialectical movements of culture is a concept that forms a variety of different interpretations. However, here there are two usages of the terms: one way of thinking about the concept of political theology refers to the use of the term by the German political theorist Carl Schmitt. It can be argued that Schmitt’s ideas take the form of a polemic towards modern liberal democracies. Schmitt argues that the state of exception, an extreme state where the very survival of the state is threatened, represents the very limits of liberal democratic states, proving that in reality these states operate on the basis of state sovereignty. It is theological precisely in the way that the state transcends the limits of its own laws and boundaries when it is confronted by the exception. However, for Benhabib, Schmitt’s version of political theology is problematic and does not seem to provide an accurate account of the way in which we encounter political theology in our world today. According to Benhabib, citing Hent de Vries, in our globalized world, religious movements act as deterritorialized body politics. As Benhabib states, “in the global age, deterritorialized religions not only challenge the authority of the nation-state but dislodge national senses of collective identity as well.” In this global context, the second notion of political theology is important because it paints a picture of the conditions for the restructuring of the private and public spheres, as religious communities, groups and individuals become more politically active and aware of their political identities in shifting political, cultural and social circumstances.
In conclusion, I have traced Benhabib’s writing here to discuss the ‘return of political theology’ as a complex topic that presents a variety of different conceptual facets of modernity. Overall, what is presented in this paper points towards the flexible and fluid nature of liberal democratic societies as they enter into a new global age of community and individual involvement, especially in terms of political activities and identity politics. This has shifted the conversation beyond traditional notions of political theology, and has focused attention on the way in which religious groups represent politically engaged communities that continue to present a variety of challenges towards the liberal-democratic states.
Work Cited
Benhabib, Seyla, Alessandro Ferrara, Volker Kaul, and David Rasmussen. “The Return of
Political Theology: The Scarf Affair in Comparative Constitutional Perspective in France,
Germany and Turkey.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 36, no. 3-4 (March 2010): 451–471.
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