Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism

A DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGY NECESSITATES A CONSIDERATION OF religion. As mentioned in the introduction, radical political theology possesses a freedom to engage the current crisis of the names and concepts of religion and theology without simply accepting the traditional or conventional meanings of these terms. In this opening chapter, I will provide a constructive understanding of religion that links two apparently opposing terms, theology and ideology. Ideology attends to the political power plays inherent in religion and religious practice and discourse, while theology here indicates the inherent and irrepressible desire that religion do some good. Much contemporary discussion of political theology either purifies theology of complicity with ideological manipulation and power play or completely identifies theology with such ideology. My understanding of religion and theology here acknowledges the significance of ideology but refuses any simple either/or.

In this chapter, I will attend to some of the political contexts of religion as a term and as a phenomenon. In addition, I will offer a constructive way to think about religion, employing Slavoj Zizek’s use of the word “parallax.” Religion can be studied in parallactic terms as ideology or as theology. Ideology refers to the necessary implication of religion in problems of political power, while theology attests to an irreducible desire for religion to do good. Here, theology is understood broadly as an open-ended discourse about value and meaning in an ultimate sense, which I will call “secular theology” later in the chapter, rather than a narrow, confessional, or apologetic discursive practice.¹

The classical origin of the term “religion” is generally understood as indicating a process of binding or gathering and may indicate what is sometimes called a tradition, although its modern use dates to the European Enlightenment. The concept of religion emerges as an independent notion out of Christianity in the seventeenth century and gradually encompasses non-Christian faiths and practices. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith explains in The Meaning and End of Religion, an intellectual concept born of the Enlightenment becomes historicized during the nineteenth century: “the static quality of the Enlightenment’s rationalism was filled out with an increasing knowledge of, and presently sense of, history.”² Smith refers to the genealogy of the notion of world religions in the late nineteenth century, a process that Tomoko Masuzawa treats in more detail in The Invention of World Religions.

Masuzawa offers a fine-grained account of the development of the idea of world religions out of a more theological and confessional Christian orientation during the nineteenth century. She shows the surprising and disturbing continuities between traditional theological approaches and supposedly more academic, scientific, and objective approaches to the study of world religions. In her conclusion, Masuzawa argues that

The term “religion,” then, is a modern, Western construct that is imposed upon widely diverse phenomena and should be seen as an essentially political and contested term. Postcolonial critiques have challenged the applicability of religion to non-Western practices and phenomena, and postmodern analyses have deconstructed the essential autonomy of the concept of religion.⁵ Religion as it has been constructed and wielded is marked by its origin in Christian theology, and this mark has not been able to be erased. The formation of religion is a political production, and its usage today is no less fundamentally political.

In this context, the contemporary resurgence of neotraditionalist and fundamentalist expressions of what is generally called religion renders this problem even more acute for the modern disciplinary conception of religion, because it attests to the politico-theological struggles that are occurring both within and outside of the academy. Scholars of religion benefit from a more emphatic awareness of the importance of religion in the world today. At the same time, academic scholars who pursue social-scientific methodologies are threatened by the rise of what is sometimes called a postsecular orientation. One response of scholars like Russell T. McCutcheon who desire to establish the study of religion as a legitimate scholarly enterprise is to exclude theology as a confessional approach, turning theologians into natives who supply data and banishing any work that betrays any theological residue or affirmation of religion as a sui generis affair.⁶ The hope is that if we can finally banish any and all confessional theological residue from religion, then we can study it objectively and scientifically, and it will become a legitimate discipline. On the other hand, the work of scholars like Masuzawa suggests that there is a deeper problem. At the end of her book, Masuzawa questions the adequacy of excluding theology from religious studies:

And if and when we will finally manage to round up sundry varieties of crypto-theology scurrying in the tribunal of science, will we then apprehend the right suspects? Or are we failing to see a much larger, systemic network of discursive organization, of which the ones in custody are but low-level functionaries? Is the effort to prosecute these “theological assumptions” for illegally traversing and thereby downgrading the science of religion, then, not like an attempt to punish some unknown evil still at large by burning a host of effigies?⁷

I agree with Masuzawa here. Eliminating the intentional affirmation of religion and religious phenomena in the form of theology by scholars is insufficient and may make understanding the political issues related to religion more difficult to perceive, because these political problems are not only situated at the level of conscious belief or affiliation but also pervade the “systemic network of discursive organization” that shapes how we conceive religion.

In a postcolonial as well as a postmodern context, scholars of religion find it increasingly difficult to simply assign or ascribe the term “religion” to given practices and beliefs. If the designation of an activity as religious is a political act (for example, the naming of various systems of practices and ideas that are seen as originating on the Indian subcontinent as religion under the aegis of British colonialism and of the reaction to British colonialism as the assertion of an indigenous religion), then the academic study of religion is also a political activity. Postcolonial and subaltern studies have largely focused on India and South Asia, where the profound critique of Western modes of thought and practice has accompanied a commitment to a methodological secularism that in part reflects a third-world, Marxist orientation as well as the secular orientation of the Indian state. For instance, in The Politics of the Governed, Partha Chatterjee pushes readers to grapple with new models of political activity and interaction, complex zones of paralegal practices that exist between governmental functions and community institutions. At the same time, these provocative and experimental aspects of what Chatterjee calls “political society” are limited to a “different modality of secular politics.”⁸ Chatterjee cautions readers that based on his experiences he is wary of possessing “rosy ideas about any sort of innate secularism of the Bengali people, whether Hindu or Muslim.”⁹

While postmodern thinkers may uncritically adopt Western and Eurocentric modes of understanding, postcolonial correctives may too quickly adopt secularist perspectives. As Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests at the conclusion of his groundbreaking work Provincializing Europe,

historicist narratives by secular and rational scholars have produced either harshly judgmental or sympathetic accounts of subaltern social groups’ tendency to treat gods, spirits, and other supernatural entities as agential beings in the worlds of humans. But, sympathetic or not, these accounts all foreground a separation—a subject-object distinction—between the academic observer-subject and the “superstitious” persons serving as the objects of study.¹⁰

The danger of the theory and practice of a complete provincialization, however, is that it threatens to obscure the universal nature of capitalism, or at least its global effects. From a certain theoretical perspective that I will call “twenty-first-century global capitalism,” the resurgence of religious phenomena in thought and culture indicates the convergence of postcolonialism and postmodernism with a certain form of postsecularism.¹¹ Rather than simply celebrate or deplore the so-called return of religion, I suggest that its phenomenal occurrence demands a theoretical framework or perspective that I am calling, provocatively, political theology. In his introduction to the substantial volume Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, Hent de Vries claims that “there is no more urgent project, therefore, than to ask in what sense the legacies of ‘religion’ disarticulate and reconstellate themselves as the elementary forms of life in the twenty-first century.”¹² If de Vries is correct that there is no more urgent project, then political theology would name such a mode of inquiry in a broad sense. For me, political theology names an unstable but critical discourse, one in which the political and the religious imply each other, although this discourse does not necessarily adopt a confessional theological (or political) standpoint.

In this chapter, from the viewpoint of an academic political theology, my constructive theoretical proposal is to think religion as the concept that names the link between ideology and theology. If religion deconstructs or devolves into ideology and theology, this division could open up a productive tension, if scholars resist exclusively choosing one over the other. The term “religion” would continue to be employed, but this analysis would render the concept more transparent, weakening the term somewhat along the lines of Gianni Vattimo’s conception of weak thought.

According to Vattimo, “weakening” refers to a nondestructive nihilism thought in the context of Heideggerian Being. The weakening of Being means the opening toward a radical hermeneutics, because we cannot presuppose certainty about our ideas and their conformity to the world but are always caught up in contested interpretations. In an essay on “Nihilism and the Post-Modern in Philosophy,” Vattimo argues for a Verwindung of classical metaphysics. Verwindung is a Heideggerian term that means something like convalescence, a “going-beyond that is both an acceptance and a deepening.”¹³ Verwindung is contrasted with Überwindung, which is a more straightforward overcoming. According to Vattimo, metaphysics is not something that we can simply get away from, but “rather, it is something which stays in us as do the traces of an illness or a kind of pain to which we are resigned.”¹⁴ In some of his later books, Vattimo assimilates the history of metaphysics to the development of (Christian) religion,¹⁵ although I am suggesting a more direct application of Vattimo’s notion of Verwindung to religion here. When Vattimo tentatively offers a translation for Verwindung at the end of his essay, he suggests the term “secularization.” He writes that “secularization/Verwindung would describe the course of history not as a linear progression or as decadence, but as a course of events in which emancipation is reached only by a radical transformation and distortion of its very contents.”¹⁶ Here, secularization is not simply the opposite of religion, but a process inherent within it that empties it or weakens it of its strong, foundational manifestations.

That is, instead of a strategy of intensification or escalation, which de Vries opposes, we could weaken or dilute our concepts, in this case religion. Furthermore, this weakening or secularization of religion as a concept is a work against the escalation of religion and religious sovereignty in the form of violence. In Political Theologies, de Vries attends to what he calls “the geographical and demographic-sociological base of physical struggle inspired or at least verbally legitimated by religion,” and looks for ways to de-escalate this manifestation of religion in its more forceful guise.¹⁷ An academic political theology, according to de Vries, “might well become the discipline of studying and eventually mastering such ‘escalation,’ that is, the excesses of sovereignty and their violence.”¹⁸ The key here is both the relevance of something like what Vattimo calls weakness or weakening and the fact that for de Vries the problem of political theology occurs in a postsecular world, that is, a world in which it is not possible to simply oppose religion with secularism. In fact, the opposition between secular and religious breaks down in a postsecularist context, which can be seen in the work of Talal Asad and William Connolly.

In his book Why I am Not a Secularist, Connolly argues that the idea of the secular needs to be refashioned, away from the straightforward opposition between secularism and Christianity, or the “Judeo-Christian” tradition. He supports a more open “public ethos of engagement” that is deeply pluralistic.¹⁹ Connolly thinks beyond the limits of secularism as it is expressed by many thinkers, including Habermas and Rawls, because this version of secularism inconsistently attempts to contain religious passions and expressions within the private sphere. Connolly appeals to the thought of Gilles Deleuze in advocating for a rhizomatic micropolitics that is radically pluralistic. Connolly writes:

In an age of globalization and the accentuation of speed in so many domains of life, a cultural pluralism appropriate to the times is unlikely to be housed in an austere postmetaphysical partisanship that purports to place itself above the fray. The need today, rather, is to rewrite secularism to pursue an ethos of engagement in public life among a plurality of controversial metaphysical perspectives, including, for starters, Christian and other monotheistic perspectives, secular thought, and asecular, nontheistic perspectives.²⁰

In his book Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, Connolly analyzes the spiritual ethos that informs the contemporary “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine” and offers a counterethos that neither privileges nor excludes theistic and confessional faiths. Connolly affirms the resources of “open theism” (the notion that God is not omnipotent in a classical manner but can listen and change, expressed in reference to the work of John Sanders) from a nontheistic perspective that is both tragic and meliorist (combining Frederich Nietzsche, William James, and Gilles Deleuze). Rather than simply opposing religion with a renewed commitment to antireligious secularism, as commentators like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens do, Connelly draws upon diverse forms of existential faith to envision an “interim future” beyond the hard edge of Right-wing capitalism.²¹ I am less hopeful than Connolly, who “retain[s] the basic capitalist axiomatic” but suggests micropolitical experiments and reforms that “taken together, may launch eco-egalitarianism within capitalism.”²² Even if I am more pessimistic about the possibilities of reforming capitalism, I appreciate both the validity of Connolly’s analysis, as well as his interim vision and his avocation to a deep pluralism. Finally, I agree with Connolly that we need to fashion better theoretical tools to think across the theistic/nontheistic or religious/nonreligious dichotomy.

In fact, the completely autonomous secular sphere that Connolly critiques is also at least in part a religious conception and creation, as Talal Asad demonstrates genealogically in Formations of the Secular. Asad argues that the exclusion of religion from public life is a political work undertaken by modern European thought. He challenges the self-evidence of the conclusion that “the secular” emancipates human life from the “controlling ‘power’ of religion.”²³ In fact, “the secular” is part of the doctrine of secularism that Connolly criticizes and desires to refashion. Asad traces the genealogy of secularism and concludes that “in the discourse of modernity ‘the secular’ presents itself as the ground from which theological discourse was generated (as a form of false consciousness) and from which it gradually emancipated itself in its march to freedom.”²⁴

As Asad demonstrates, the secular is not simply the emancipation from religion; it emerges also as the religious emancipation, or the establishment of the true, rational religion of the European Enlightenment. The secular is not simply the replacement or the denial of religion but a kind of displacement or rearrangement. “The secular, I argue,” he says, “is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it … nor a simple break from it.… I take the secular to be a concept that brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life.”²⁵ The secular emerges as a distinct orientation to religion that later becomes conceptualized as a nonreligious secularism for the purposes of governing diverse nations of people. The supposed generation of enlightened and tolerant religion occurs in the context of modern nationalism and the nation state. Nationalism is a complex phenomenon, composed of religious and nonreligious elements, but it depends upon an ideology of secularism to mediate a transcendental identity among its adherents.

In any case, questions of political power permeate both the secular and what we call religion, in distinction from the secular. Asad carefully shows how this fundamental opposition is untenable by drawing attention to how the distinction becomes constructed in modernity. Both the religious and the secular are shifting, noncoincident but overlapping terms that indicate distinct forms of life that Asad looks at anthropologically. Secularism, however, is an ideology of the modern liberal state that governs political strategy. Secularism homogenizes human beings into a governable society by transcending “particular and differentiating practices of the self that are articulated through class, gender, and religion.”²⁶ Secularism does not replace religion but regulates it within political and civil society. Asad concludes that “the categories of ‘politics’ and ‘religion’ 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.”²⁷

If the concepts of religion and the secular are deeply implicated by each other, and implicated politically and for reasons of political power, then we cannot simply resolve the “problems” of violence and injustice in our contemporary world by reinforcing secularism and restraining religion or by abolishing the secular and reestablishing religion. Again, all of our concepts are politically charged and contested; there is no safe and neutral space from which to arbitrate religious or secular disputes. Although I am strongly impressed with Asad’s analyses, I would like to follow Connolly in affirming a place for the secular divorced from the ideology of secularism in a postsecularist world, that is, a world in which the secular can never be completely divorced from nor completely assimilated into what we call religion.

My suggestion, then, is not to give up the term “religion” but to argue that we need a more complex understanding of religion and that, in some ways, viewing religion as a parallax might help. In his book The Parallax View, Slavoj Žižek talks about a “constantly shifting perspective between two points [between] which no synthesis or mediation is possible.”²⁸ Every perspective, including even the notion of perspective as such, exhibits this character of parallax. Any duality or polarity attests not to a dualism, or a twoness, but to a “gap which separates the One from itself,” which Žižek calls “parallax.”²⁹ Žižek claims that there are a “multitude of parallax gaps,” but he focuses on “three main modes: philosophical, scientific, and political.”³⁰ Žižek understands parallax more broadly and generally than my application of his work here and does not explicitly treat religion, although he does advocate a materialist theology in relation to the first, philosophical or ontological, mode, a notion to which I will return at the end of this chapter. I think that it is useful here to apply his understanding of parallax to the mode of religion without excluding or discounting the other modes Žižek discusses at length in his book.

In this case, religion can be seen parallactically as either theology or ideology. A division of religion into two parts or shares, the ideological and the theological, reconstructs religion as a political theology, but not a substantial political theology, because ideology and theology are always kept apart, at least slightly, which is the goal of de Vries in his conception of a de-escalating political theology as well. As a parallax, religion names the gap between the ideological and the theological, between religion as ideology, which completely explains religion, and religion as theology, which completely subsumes it. Together, however, both offer resources to better comprehend religion.

First, as ideology, a post-Marxist (but not anti-Marxist) analysis of capital can be deployed. According to Louis Althusser’s Marxist understanding of ideology, “ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”³¹ Ideology in the form of ideological apparatuses summons the subject into being through a process that Althusser calls “interpellation.” The subject becomes a subject to these ideological apparatuses that determine the subject in its very being. He claims that the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology “insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects.”³² Ideology is imaginary, however, in contrast to a real that can be discovered with science, and Althusser considers Marx to be the founder of the science of history.

Althusser utilizes Lacan’s terms “imaginary” and “real” to distinguish ideology from (Marxist) science. In a more orthodox Lacanian sense, though, the real as such recedes and cannot be captured in a science, which means that ideology pervades not only the imaginary but also the symbolic. Ideology is radicalized to such an extent that we cannot simply delimit or demarcate its field and functioning. Religion, in one of its two modes, is coextensive with ideology. For Christian religious ideology, Althusser explains, in the Scriptures, particularly in the case of Moses, “God thus defines himself as the Subject par excellence, he who is through himself and for himself (‘I am that I am’), and he who interpellates his subject, the individual subjected to him by his very interpellation, i.e., the individual named Moses.”³³ Religion interpellates human subjects in ideological terms, summons them to see themselves as subject to a belief that determines their material, social, and political practice, and masks the real workings of these practices and beliefs. The problem, however, is that there is no nonideological space outside of ideology from which to critique ideology. The only frameworks possible from which to engage in ideological critique are those constituted by other ideologies.

Althusser insists that ideology, like the unconscious, is eternal; but at the same time, he suggests a historical link with capital, which is the historical relationship that Marx forged and which distinguishes his work. What are the relationships between religion and capital, and how does religion function to serve capitalist ideology as well as provide opportunities to expose and critique it? The works of Immanuel Wallerstein, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Antonio Negri, among others, help us better understand the ideology of capitalism. From books such as Marx Beyond Marx, Time for Revolution, through the celebrated works coauthored with Michael Hardt, Empire and Multitude, Negri develops a counterideology to capitalism that describes the multitude as the biopolitical subject constituted in the “singular event of the decision upon the common” based on love and living labor.³⁴ The multitude is a production, a generation that escapes being captured in a determinate state-interpellated subject. I will elaborate upon Negri’s political reading of Spinoza through Marx and its implications for a radical political theology in chapter 4.

In her book, Empire of Capital, Ellen Meiksins Wood shows the intrinsic links between capitalism and imperialism, including war and military force. She states that “what makes class domination or imperialism specifically capitalist is the predominance of economic, as distinct from direct ‘extra-economic’—political, military, judicial—coercion.”³⁵ Capitalism is able to detach and deploy primarily economic force, but it must be supported or backed up by more conventional forms of power, and this “extra-economic power is today, as before, primarily supplied by the state.”³⁶ The nation-state, far from being dissolved into a postmodern empire, as Negri and Hardt seem to imply, still functions to maintain these fundamental and invidious economic relationships. At the same time, perhaps the devolution of the most powerful state, the United States, from an apparently predominantly economic power to a more explicitly military power points to a crisis or a weakening of capitalist relations, because the state is forced to resort to more conventional forms of coercion.

One way to read the shift of American imperialism from an economic to a military emphasis after September 11, 2001, is to see it as symptomatic of a breakdown of capitalism. Immanuel Wallerstein analyzes the development of capitalism in modern Europe in his important two-volume work The Modern World-System.³⁷ In a later book, The Decline of American Power, Wallerstein argues that “the period 1450 to today … marks the life-cycle of the capitalist world-economy, which had its period of genesis, its period of normal development, and now has entered into its period of terminal crisis.”³⁸ Wallerstein identifies “three major secular trends that are approaching their asymptotes” and contributing to the terminal crisis of capitalism.³⁹ The first is the rise of real wages relative to costs of production. Although in the United States, real wages have generally been stagnant or falling since the 1970s, the rise in real-world wage levels has spurred corporations to desperately seek areas around the globe where they can pay lower wages. The second secular trend that is approaching a real limit involves the cost of material inputs. One reason that materials are becoming more expensive is that natural resources are becoming scarcer, making it is much more difficult to externalize costs. A major issue here is the ecological and environmental situation, including the growing awareness of large-scale climate change. Businesses and governments are forced to reckon with and calculate some of the effects on the environment, however insufficiently or ineffectively this works in practice. The final secular trend involves the difficulty of taxation despite the popular demands for services such as “educational institutions, health facilities, and guarantees of income across the lifetime of individuals.”⁴⁰ As these services are demanded more insistently, social pressure increases the level of taxation, but “at a certain point, such redistributive taxation reaches levels where it interferes seriously with the possibility of accumulating capital.”⁴¹ The capitalist response has been to attempt to rollback or dismantle the welfare state, but this contributes to rising poverty and social unrest.

My point is that if Wallerstein is correct in his assessment that modern capitalism is entering a state of terminal crisis, and one effect of this development is the increasing militarization of the United States, then another symptom of this crisis may be the resurgence of more traditionalist forms of religion. My contention is that in many ways, the resurgence of religion must be read ideologically in relation to the spread of global capitalism and symptomatically as evidence that, despite its expansiveness, global capitalism is far from well. Capitalism is reaching real limits to growth, and it is not clear whether capitalism can continue to function in the absence of economic growth. The resurgence of religion is an important political phenomenon in its own right, but it is also related to the breakdown of global capitalism.

The British philosopher of religion Philip Goodchild makes important links between religion and capital in Capitalism and Religion, where he demonstrates how faith in money replaces faith in God in the modern world and calls for an alternative form of postcapitalist piety based on attention to human suffering.⁴² Furthermore, in his subsequent work Theology of Money, Goodchild develops his understanding of the sovereignty of money, including the relationship between money and energy and between money and debt. As capitalism runs up against the real limits of energy, ecology, and natural resources, the bubble of economic growth collapses, leaving us swamped by debt. According to Goodchild, capitalism is “the social system in which capital is measured as an accumulative quantity in terms of exchange value,” which means that capital can only be valued as monetary profit.⁴³ It is currently more profitable in the short term to consume the means of production of capital itself than to preserve them for the production of future capital. Since capitalism cannot simply grow without cheap energy inputs, it is consuming the means of production itself in a desperate attempt to generate ever-diminishing amounts of short-term profit. Goodchild proposes new methods of evaluation and credit that subvert and exceed the sovereignty of money as absolute value, though perhaps these are only thinkable because of the desperate situation in which capitalism finds itself.

Although less explicitly academic, Kevin Phillips’s book American Theocracy brings together religious and political with economic and financial phenomena. Phillips argues that oil has fueled the rise and maintenance of American power and prosperity, and that recent military operations in the Middle East including the Iraq war are driven by the need for oil. This drive for control of global oil production is even more acute given the evidence that world oil production is peaking or will peak within the next few years.⁴⁴ This drive for oil is masked by a radicalized Southern religion where a cynical Republican party manipulates religious ideology to provide cover for its corporate capitalist interests, as treated in the introduction. Theocratic cultural expressions are useful because they distract people from the underlying economic causes of military intervention, and they supply an apocalyptic orientation that does not emphasize preserving the world or natural resources in light of an imminent end of the world.⁴⁵ Finally, Phillips analyzes the explosion of debt at all levels of American public and private life, and draws parallels to the decline of previous empires such as Spain, Holland, and Great Britain. The increasing financialization of the American economy indicates an unstable imbalance that will most likely lead to a long-term decline, if not a short-term crash, and his analysis has been validated by events of the last few years. First, we saw the bursting of the housing market bubble and the turmoil that enveloped financial institutions beginning in August 2007 that led to massive bankruptcies and bailouts, the run-up of oil prices to almost $150 a barrel in summer 2008, and finally the steep downturn of the stock market in fall 2008 that touched off a global recession.

In the context of these interwoven phenomena of oil, debt, and radical religion, religion functions ideologically as a smokescreen for deeper economic processes. Religion and culture mask material situations, such that the so-called clash of civilizations between Western Christianity and a barbaric Islam can be seen as a manipulated spectacle to distract from military struggles over energy resources. If world oil production is peaking, then the fight to control oil supplies in the Middle East and Central Asia becomes extremely significant, even if oil is broadly dismissed as the reason for American military operations. Furthermore, a financial analysis that understands how oil is linked to the U.S. dollar becomes significant for understanding why an exchange such as the Iranian bourse, which sells oil in currencies other than the dollar, threatens U.S. hegemony, taking into account that Saddam Hussein declared that he would sell oil for euros rather than dollars shortly before the U.S. invasion.⁴⁶ So long as observers and academics accept only the superficial religious explanations that are offered, they risk being duped by mediatized processes that work against understanding.

The critique of ideology is not sufficient, however. There is no neutral, objective space for ideological analysis, just as there are no neutral explanations. All terms are contested, and although the term “theology” seems even more problematic than religion, one advantage of deploying the term is that it might make naiveté more difficult. A strategy for legitimating the discipline of religious studies has been to exclude theology. However, the work of Masuzawa and others shows how religion continues to be infected and affected by a theological or quasitheological agenda.

My constructive suggestion is to think theology as the alternative mode of the parallax of religion. Theology indicates a commitment to certain values, whether these are identified, acknowledged, intended, or deployed. These values may be more traditionally religious or more secular, but we should keep in mind the difficulty of fully distinguishing the two terms. Using the term “theology” would pressure scholars of religion to reflect upon their own commitments, principles such as freedom, ethics, dialogue, liberation, and understanding, and certain aspects of particular academic, religious, or political traditions. Every intervention into a state of affairs alters the state of affairs; even observation is not neutral. And every scholarly study is also an intervention, including interventions that take the form of cautioning other scholars not to intervene. For instance, Connolly in Capitalism and Christianity, American Style not only exposes the Christian-capitalist assemblage and its workings, he also envisions his book as an intervention, a counterassemblage and counterethos, and he affirms his own nontheistic but nondogmatic existential faith in a nonreductive naturalism.⁴⁷

Secular theology paradoxically names a nonconfessional and nondogmatic theology in a postsecular context that is not chained to secularist ideology. Playing upon the equivocation between the religious and antireligious connotations of the Latin saeculum, I suggest that a secular theological thinking is possible that is open-ended rather than committed to a particular institutional, dogmatic, or ecclesiastical orientation, and this could include varieties of open theism as well as nontheism. Secular theology confronts the impossibility of rigorously separating religion and religious concerns from secular and nonreligious ones, which is connected with the use of the term “postsecular.” Postsecular does not mean antisecular, anymore than postmodern means antimodern. Secular theology indicates that we cannot avoid questions of meaning and value, even those of ultimate significance, in our theoretical understanding of religion. If theology is not necessarily confessional, which is one legacy of the tradition of radical theology influenced by the Death of God theology in the United States, then theological commitment may be viewed in more formal and minimalist terms or in more substantial and maximalist ones. Traditional views of theology are generally viewed as maximal and substantial by proponents and opponents of theology and religion. At the same time, I suggest that there is formally an ineliminable minimal commitment to some sort of “good” in every study, including the most objective academic ones, which is also implicated in and shaped by political processes.

Every particular commitment to making things better, in religious, humanistic, political, scientific, and ethical terms, is at least in part the expression or effect of an ideological formation. At the same time, theological commitment as such, the pure desire to do good, or to make better, or even to stop desiring to make things better exceeds ideology as such, even as it is coextensive with ideology.

Theology for me names what Derrida calls an “originary possibility,” or a “religion without religion,” rather than a determinate theology, which would necessarily take the form of ideology. In his essay “Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida analyzes the two sources of religion as belief and the sacred or holy, and he claims that these two sources can be deployed in a positivistic manner to create “something like a religion,” understood as “an instituted apparatus consisting of dogmas or articles of faith that are both determinate and inseparable from a given historical socius.”⁴⁸ This determinate religion conforms broadly with what I call ideology above. At the same time, with the same conjunction of the sacred and belief, we can think “the most originary possibility” of religion as such, which I call “theology,” although Derrida does not use that word.⁴⁹

An understanding of theology in Derridean terms as the “originary possibility” of religion implies that such a theology is a radical theology. Radical theology etymologically refers to a radix or root, the rootedness of theological issues and questions in religious experience, practices, and traditions. Radical theology names this originary possibility at work in the constitution of religion, before and beyond all dogmatic assertions about the nature of divinity and humanity. Originary possibility concerns potentiality, as discussed in the introduction. By linking theology with ideology, across a gap, I am also suggesting that a radical theology is necessarily a political theology. That is, radical theology necessarily finds itself informed and engaged with political conflicts and cannot simply appeal to a transcendent entity to escape or trump human social and political conversations and contestations. There is an irreducible gap between the originary possibility, understood here as radical theology and the instituted apparatus that takes ideological form, which is what Žižek calls a “parallax gap.”

Theology always takes the form of ideology. There is never theology without ideology, but there is also no ideology or critique of ideology without a liberative theological component. There is always a gap between ideology and theology, and religion is this gap, the link between the two. And the gap is also a parallax gap. Most of the time theologians want to operate solely at the theological level, which risks avoiding, obscuring, or neglecting the ideological aspects of religion, including the beliefs and practices of theologians. Sometimes scholars and scientists avoid or obscure their own theological desires, because it would be “bad” if they were seen to infect or corrupt scholarly or scientific work. At the other extreme, religion is viewed by some scholars solely as ideology because theological aspects are deemed invalid and excluded, but this solution restricts scholars from reflecting upon the ideological implications of their study, as well as their intense and unacknowledged theological commitments. Presumably, nobody could justify education or scholarship if it does not produce some good, in some way, in some form, for at least some people, a fact that is dangerously naïve to ignore.

In The Parallax View, Žižek invokes a materialist theology, although he does not distinguish religion and theology in same the way that I am doing. Žižek refers to Kierkegaard’s distinction between the aesthetic and the ethical and says that for Kierkegaard “the Religious is by no means the mediating synthesis of the two, but, on the contrary, the radical assertion of the parallax gap.”⁵⁰ In another essay, Žižek explains the strange nature of the atheist belief that accompanies materialist theology. Atheist belief is, strictly speaking, unbelief, which is “the pure form of belief deprived of its substantialization.”⁵¹

For Žižek, materialist theology is another name for religion because it names and spans the parallax gap, which presupposes the recognition of ideology and the desire for the real as well as the profound implication of the two. Materialist theology is a way to name the gap for Žižek, whereas I am using the term “theology” to indicate one irreducible pole of what we can call religion, which can be slightly confusing. But, I think it is worth the risk to illustrate a constructive theoretical understanding of religion. Religion names the parallax gap and devolves into ideology, on the one hand, and theology, on the other.

This parallactic understanding affords a more nuanced understanding of the historical and contemporary context of the resurgence of conservative forms of Christianity, or the Religious Right, and its unholy alliance with corporate capitalism as discussed in the introduction, which Connolly analyzes in Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. In the next chapter, I will take up the issue of sovereignty, which is a form of religio-political ideology, and show how the deconstruction of sovereignty in the philosophies of Derrida and Agamben, as well as the theological work of Catherine Keller and John D. Caputo, provide crucial resources to recast notions of divine and human power.