Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism

MODERN LIBERAL SOVEREIGNTY IS DIVIDED INTO TWO UNEQUAL forms: the political power of the people expressed by the ideology of liberal democracy and the economic power of the market as expressed by the ideology of free-market capitalism. A radical political theology refuses to divorce these two forms of sovereignty and sees liberal democracy as fundamentally corrupted and compromised by free-market ideology, where profits always take precedence over people. Representative democracy in fact is set up to protect the interests of money, property, and capital, and these always outweigh the needs of the people.

Modern liberalism is also essentially marked by the separation (at least in theory) of a secular, nonreligious space from a religious one, which functions as the free civil space for democratic processes and the free economic space for economic transactions. In this chapter I will develop an understanding of liberalism by focusing on the “theo-political” problem as distinctly understood by Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt. According to Strauss, the problem is the distinction and separation of political philosophy from political theology, even though for Strauss this is also an ancient problem. For Schmitt, however, the problem is the impossibility of a simple separation of political and theological concepts. I agree more with Schmitt, but Strauss’s critique of Schmitt also opens up a perspective from which to understand both Schmitt and Strauss as fellow conservative opponents of liberalism.

Although Strauss takes the theo-political problem to be the fundamental difference between philosophy and theology, which many secularist and religious thinkers would agree with, I use Schmitt to show how the real theopolitical problem is the problem of liberalism. Both Strauss and Schmitt oppose liberalism, although for different reasons. Here I will argue that their work is important for their criticisms of liberalism, but I will also suggest that they are wrong in the terms of their critique because they trivialize economic aspects of human existence. By way of this reading and critique of Schmitt and Strauss, I hope to show how the true theo-political problem is the problem of liberalism, but for different reasons than theirs. Liberalism is an economic, political, and moral problem, but it requires a radical, and ultimately radically democratic, rather than conservative solution.

Both Strauss and Schmitt are politically problematic because they denigrate material and economic factors of political and moral life. At the same time, Schmitt’s work allows us to undermine Strauss’s strict division between political philosophy and political theology, which is in fact a quintessentially modern distinction. If we cannot rigorously separate religion from public society and theology from political theory, then all cultural and intellectual situations are related in some way to the problem of political theology. In the case of both Strauss and Schmitt, this problem is liberalism, and while I disagree with their solutions, I agree with them to some extent about the problem. Toward the end of the chapter, I turn to the work of Karl Polanyi to offer a different, more radical critique of liberalism. This engagement ultimately raises the question of democracy, which will be the subject of the following chapter.

In his famous work Political Theology, the German jurist Carl Schmitt claims that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” and he claims that this is true both historically and structurally.¹ Historically, the standard narrative consists of an evolution from religious to secular political forms during the course of Western history. In The King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz surveys the development of the notion of the sixteenth-century distinction between the king’s natural body and political body as it emerges out of a theological background during the Middle Ages. Originally, “the king’s duplication of persons is not founded in law or constitution, but in theology: it mirrors the duplication of natures in Christ.”² So long as modern thought consists of the substitution of secular for religious concepts, this is a familiar story, which can alternately be celebrated or deplored.

For example, Max Weber in his influential work on Economy and Society understands what secularization as a process of routinization of charisma, a kind of rationalization and bureaucratization, which ultimately “dis-enchants” a religious view of the world.³ In a more recent updating of Weber’s disenchantment thesis, Marcel Gauchet also argues that Western secularization consists of a progressive disenchantment in The Disenchantment of the World.⁴ The main difference is that while Weber remains ambivalent about the development of Western rationalism, Gauchet sees this process of disenchantment as positive and as intrinsic to the development of Western monotheism. So the early-twentieth-century view was more compatible with the Enlightenment, which posits a profound break between modern and premodern thought and society, while the late-twentieth-century viewpoint as represented by Gauchet is that there is a crucial dialectical or historical connection between premodern religious and theological attitudes and modern secular understandings. I will return to Gauchet’s reading in chapter 8, by way of engaging with and criticizing Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of the deconstruction of Christianity.

But, Schmitt also affirms the idea that there is an intrinsic analogy between jurisprudence and theology based on a shared “systematic structure,” not just a temporal succession.⁵ Most readers understand Schmitt as indicating and deploring a historical progression of secularization. My reading of Schmitt suggests a more structural interrelationship, which accords with Talal Asad’s understanding of religion in Formations of the Secular, as I mentioned in chapter 1 but will also discuss below.

Carl Schmitt is a singular and controversial figure, because of his striking insights into the nature of law and politics, his acute criticisms of liberal parliamentarism during the period of Weimar Germany in the 1920s, and later his decision to join the Nazi party and become a major intellectual supporter of Hitler’s regime. Although his embrace of Nazism destroyed his academic career and tainted his reputation and legacy, many theorists from across the political spectrum have come to learn from the intensity of Schmitt’s thought.⁶ This chapter takes its point of departure from Schmitt’s conception of political theology, which is not simply historical or developmental but more importantly structural. Here I explore the shape of that structure and at the same time complicate the stereotypical linear progression of religious to secular, whether valued negatively or positively.

The nature and structure of political theology concerns the status of what has come to be called the “postsecular.” The postsecular rides the coattails of the postmodern and has become almost a corollary to postmodernism. That is, if modernity is defined in terms of secularity and secularism, then the transition to postmodernity entails a corresponding desecularization and a return to religion in culture and thought. One reading of political theology asserts that in a postmodern context, all of our political concepts are reverting back to their religious origin. As I stated in chapter 1, I want to resist this simplistic reading and suggest a deeper, more complicated relationship among the secular, religious, and political, one that emerges through grappling with the fundamental theo-political problem. Here it is helpful to supplement a consideration of Schmitt with another controversial political thinker, Leo Strauss.

What is the theo-political problem? The conventional answer, which is Strauss’s answer, is that the question of political theology concerns the foundation of politics and philosophy. According to Heinrich Meier, who has written about both Strauss and Schmitt, “political theology is a concept that makes a distinction insofar as the determination of its intrinsic concern distinguishes political theology from political philosophy.”⁷ That is, political theology is absolutely incompatible with political philosophy, which is the way to distinguish Carl Schmitt from Leo Strauss. Meier shows how Strauss’s review of Schmitt’s book The Concept of the Political reveals the hidden center of faith at the heart of Schmitt’s thought. Strauss’s engagement with the text induces “Schmitt to give answers that make the background of faith, which is omitted by Strauss, emerge all the more clearly.”⁸ Despite the similarity between Strauss and Schmitt on certain levels, according to Meier their exchange shows the fundamental incompatibility between political philosophy and political theology.

As Meier explains in his book on Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, “political theology and political philosophy are bound together by the critique of the self-forgetful obfuscation or of the intentional bracketing of what is most important.”⁹ Both political philosophy and political theology foreground the practical moral question of how best to live. This convergence on the question, however, reveals the incompatibility of their answers. Meier commends Strauss because he forces political philosophy to engage “political theology in the horizon of its strength,” even though political philosophy lacks the fundamental ground possessed by political theology. Political theology grounds political life and law in revelation, or faith in divine revelation to human beings. Political philosophy finds such an appeal to divine revelation questionable, but what makes Leo Strauss so significant is that unlike so many modern political philosophers, he takes seriously the possibility of revelation.

According to Meier, “from the very beginning, political theology denies the possibility of a rational justification of one’s own way of life.”¹⁰ At the same time, Strauss as representative of political philosophy also denies the possibility of a complete rational justification of the best way of life, even as he dedicates his work toward the search for that very justification. For this reason, Leora Batnitzky argues that Strauss’s thought functions as a better model for philosophy and politics than that of Emmanuel Levinas, because Strauss delimits philosophy by taking seriously the philosophical possibility of revelation. Batnitzky claims that Strauss leaves open the possibility of revelation as a serious option—a position based on his understanding of medieval Jewish and Islamic thought—rather than foreclosing revelation as a nonrational philosophical option, which most Enlightenment-influenced philosophers do, even those like Levinas who want to valorize religion. Levinas can only affirm religion in a Kantian way, “within the limits of reason alone,” while Strauss allows revelation to ground political theology in a way that provides a genuine alternative and opponent to his political philosophy.

Ultimately, the political philosophy of Strauss is incompatible with revealed religion, in this case Judaism, because Judaism and philosophy are “in basic opposition to one another.”¹¹ Batnitzky appreciates Strauss’s work from the standpoint of revealed religion, whereas she is more critical of Levinas and his assimilation of Judaism and philosophy. For Batnitzky, Strauss is important not because he exposes and dismisses the appeal to faith in divine revelation, but because Strauss’s work represents “an acknowledgement of the fundamental limitations of philosophy when it comes to grounding and articulating the bases of ethical and political life.”¹² Political philosophy is ungrounded, while political theology grounds itself upon divine revelation, and according to Batnitzky, Strauss acknowledges the viability of the option of political theology, even if he is committed to political philosophy. Many religious and theological thinkers, as well as many secular and philosophical ones, would affirm this fundamental incompatibility between political theology and political philosophy: they make two separate discourses, to paraphrase Dominique Janicaud.

Both Meier and Batnitzky agree with Strauss about the nature of the theo-political problem, which involves making a clear distinction between political theology (Schmitt) and political philosophy (Strauss). However, I want to trouble this confidence in the opposition and incompatibility between political theology and political philosophy from the standpoint of what Schmitt and Strauss both oppose, which is liberalism. For Schmitt, the essence of the political concerns the necessity of making clear and absolute distinctions, above all between friend and enemy, and he accuses modern liberal parliamentarism of confusing these distinctions. The basic liberal principle, according to Schmitt, is that “the truth can be found through an unrestrained clash of opinion and that competition will produce harmony.”¹³ Public deliberation and discussion comprises the essence of parliamentary democracy, and this deliberation avoids making absolute decisions. Here is Schmitt’s famous quip that liberalism exists only “in that short interim period in which it is possible to answer the question ‘Christ or Barabbas?’ with a proposal to adjourn or appoint a commission of investigation.”¹⁴ If the essence of politics is unliberal, then it is also essentially theological, that is, based on the principle of making absolute decisions concerning salvation and damnation, war and peace, life and death. According to Schmitt, “liberal thought evades or ignores state and politics and moves instead in a typical always recurring polarity of two heterogeneous spheres, namely ethics and economics, intellect and trade, education and property.”¹⁵ Liberalism avoids and evades conflict, issues of state, and politics, which concern matters of ultimate seriousness insofar as they are essentially theological.

For Strauss, Christianity cannot ground the ethical life, but he is no less concerned with the issue of moral seriousness in political life, and his “Notes on The Concept of the Political” makes clear that “Schmitt’s entire thesis is entirely dependent upon the polemic against liberalism,” and furthermore this polemic is significant precisely insofar as liberalism has failed because it has negated the political, which is essential to being human.¹⁶ Following Nietzsche, Strauss affirms “man’s dangerousness,” which concerns the seriousness of human life. The danger of liberalism’s victory is that it threatens to establish a world without politics and therefore without seriousness. Strauss says that Schmitt “affirms the political because he sees in the threatened status of the political a threat to the seriousness of human life.” For this reason, “the affirmation of the political is ultimately nothing other than the affirmation of the moral.”¹⁷ Where Strauss parts with Schmitt is in the grounding of this moral seriousness in a Christian theological faith, such that Schmitt affirms the political provisionally to clear away the ground in order to expose the enemy, rather than affirms the political as such as an end. “Thus what ultimately matters to Schmitt is not the battle against liberalism,” as Meier explains in his discussion of the exchange. The attack on liberalism is only “meant to clear the field for the battle of decision, or the theological struggle between “this-worldly and truly spiritual opponents.¹⁸

This is why Strauss ends his essay with the claim that Thomas Hobbes is the true founder of liberalism, because he argues that Schmitt actually views Hobbes as an enemy, not as a fellow affirmer of the political. Strauss claims that “the critique introduced by Schmitt against liberalism can therefore be completed only if one succeeds in gaining a horizon beyond liberalism.” Schmitt presupposes this horizon, but he has not succeeded in showing it because he has to keep it hidden since it is in fact reactionary and dogmatic. “A radical critique of liberalism is thus possible only on the basis of an adequate understanding of Hobbes,” which Strauss implies that Schmitt lacks.¹⁹ Hobbes, discussed in chapter 3 as the founder of modern sovereignty, is an enemy for Schmitt precisely because he is not himself liberal, even though he instantiates the modern liberal paradigm.

What is liberalism, and why is it a theo-political problem, especially if one discounts the conception of Schmitt’s political theology, which is polemical, reactionary, and dogmatic? Is there a critique of liberalism that is not simply reactionary or conservative? In his thought, Strauss diagnoses, following Nietzsche and Heidegger, the corrosive nihilism of historicism, and as an alternative, he appeals to the ancients in the famous quarrel between the ancients and moderns.²⁰ Meier claims that Strauss disparages modern life, because modern philosophy and politics envision a world in which humans “remain far beneath the potential of their nature and are capable of actualizing neither their most noble nor their most excellent qualities.”²¹ Both Schmitt and Strauss affirm a nostalgic and noble view of politics as means to an end, whether for theology (Schmitt) or philosophy (Strauss). Both also disparage or neglect economics and material realities, associating economics with modern liberalism. Schmitt identifies another clear political enemy in Karl Marx, who sees modern liberalism as the development of capitalism under the aegis of the bourgeois class, which then leads to class conflict, revolution, and finally the instantiation of communism. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Communist U.S.S.R. functioned as an alternative for many intellectuals to parliamentary democracy, and in some cases, such as Schmitt, the fear of communism drove him to expose the weaknesses of liberal parliamentarism and become a fascist.

Today, according to conventional wisdom liberal democracy has won its struggle against both communism and fascism, although it is now threatened by Islamic terrorism. At the same time, Strauss and Schmitt have become even more significant for their diagnoses of the problems of liberalism. If liberalism has emerged victorious, why has it been savagely attacked, not only by outsiders but within the citadels of contemporary capitalism? And is this struggle an essentially religious struggle? That is, does the resurgence of religious violence attest to a barbaric step backward, a nativistic irrational reaction against the triumph of global capitalism? Or, are Schmitt and Strauss “right” in their critiques, even if they are wrong in their solutions (and does Strauss even have a solution, other than rereading Plato and Xenophon)?

As already mentioned in chapter 1, insofar as liberalism is intrinsically connected with modern capitalism, liberalism breaks down as capitalism encounters real global limits of land, water, fossil fuels, atmospheric carbon absorption, and other finite natural resources. Capitalism demands and is dependent on indefinite if not infinite growth, but the planet is a finite resource that is being overpopulated and outstripped at exponential rates. Can capitalism exist without growth? I do not know, but I doubt it can, at least in its current form, and in fact as classical liberalism has morphed into a savage neoliberalism that is impoverishing many undeveloped countries to sustain the standard of living of wealthy nations, capitalism has become what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism” or “corporatism,” which is consuming the means of economic production themselves to profit from disaster, which is in fact a desperate attempt to fend off disaster itself.²² I claim in this book that the resurgence of religion in thought and culture around the world represents a symptom of this breakdown of liberal capitalism, and for better or for worse, it augurs a significant transformation.

Constructively, I argue that to fully understand what is going on in thought and in culture, we need to recast the terms of the debate and envision a radical political theology that takes material, worldly things seriously at the same time as it realizes the profound imbrication of religion and politics. This political theology is liberal in Schmittian terms because it does not advocate a clear-cut, polemical division between religion and politics, theology and philosophy, or within religion, politics, and philosophy. At the same time, a radical political theology challenges liberalism at its most basic level, which is that of the market.

According to Karl Polanyi in his book The Great Transformation, liberalism in thought and deed concerns the creation of a self-regulating market. Markets have existed throughout human civilization, but they have always been subordinated to other social demands. What distinguishes the modern liberal Western world is the idea of a total market that is completely self-regulating and that treats all phenomena, including land, labor, and money, as commodities. A self-regulating market entails the interconnection of all local markets, which represent every element of economic industry, and their assimilation into “One Big Market.”²³ To construct a self-regulating market, labor, land, and money must be interchangeable and treated as commodities; this is a necessary fiction because land, labor, and money are not essentially commodities, but are transformed into commodities through a utopian act of incredible violence. Polanyi details the processes throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century by which a self-regulating market is attempted under the name of “free trade.” The attainment of a completely self-regulating market is an impossible goal, because “to allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society.”²⁴ In fact, the single-minded effort to create a self-regulating market, led by Great Britain but followed by most of the other continental powers, led to the rise of fascism and consequently World War II. According to Polanyi, it was the collapse of the market system in the Great Depression and the abandonment of the gold standard by Great Britain and the United States that destroyed the economic order and allowed fascism to flourish as a result. “In reality,” he writes, “the part played by fascism was determined by one factor: the condition of the market system.”²⁵

This claim may seem striking and extreme, especially since the United States was able to resurrect the gold standard in the wake of the World War II with the accords of Bretton Woods and to replace Great Britain as the leading political and economic power. But despite lip service to market capitalism and the sacrificing of various forms of social welfare from the 1970s until the present, the postwar economic and political order has survived because it has not been based on a totally self-regulating market. The idea of a self-regulating world market has been resurrected after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the notion of global capitalism, although in reality the rollback of regulations and the expansion of foreign investments have resulted from the combined crisis of a scarcity of world energy supplies and the complex financial situation of the American dollar.²⁶ The current economic situation in the twenty-first century bears some parallels with the 1930s, because the dollar is being challenged as the world’s reserve currency. If the dollar no longer functions as the reserve currency, the result could be similar to what happened when most of the nations went off the gold standard in the 1930s, that is, protectionism, fascism, and eventually war.

Polanyi’s analysis shows how economics and politics are both linked and separated in liberalism. That is, the role of the state and its policies should be separated from and subordinated to the rules of the market, but in fact this was never entirely the case. Polanyi says that “a self-regulating market demands nothing less than the institutional separation of society into an economic and political sphere.”²⁷ Conservatives like Schmitt and Strauss protest the supplanting of politics in the grand style with technical economics, as well as the attendant confusion that results when economy and politics are separated. Marxism could be said to place politics in the service of economic liberation, which must come about through and beyond liberal capitalism.

In any case, what is clear is that even though the self-regulating market is a fiction or an impossible utopia, we are still not free of what Samir Amin calls the “liberal virus.” According to Amin, in the liberal vision of society “social effectiveness is equated by liberals with economic efficiency which, in turn, is confounded with the financial profitability of capital.”²⁸ This process is contributing to the increasing “pauperization” of the majority of people on earth, but the confounding of social good with financial profit works in such a way that most liberals cannot see or disavow the relationship between the increase of poverty and the maximization of wealth.²⁹ As liberation theologian and former president of Haiti Jean-Bertrand Aristide writes, “the neo-liberal strategy is to weaken the state in order to have the private sector replace the state.”³⁰ The purpose of this privatization, which Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, is the increasing accumulation and concentration of wealth for the elite and the increasing impoverishment of the majority of earth’s people. In the 1980s and 1990s, most developing countries and many former communist countries embraced neoliberal policies: “they have opened their economies to the world, lowered tariffs, embraced free trade, and allowed goods and services from the industrialized world to flow in,” according to Aristide.³¹ And the result?

Aristide’s leadership of Haiti and avocation for the poor proved to be so threatening to the neoliberal and neoconservative elite that the United States led a second coup in 2004 to remove him, as Peter Hallward details in his book Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment.³³ Faced with “the unruly threat of ‘popular democracy,’” the United States countered with liberal democracy, whose values “have for some time been indistinguishable from those of the transnational elite, and are perfectly compatible with the preservation if not intensification of global inequalities.”³⁴

For Leo Strauss, the protest against liberalism and homo economicus is meant to insist on the moral nature of the human being, and traditional political philosophy assists in that endeavor. For Carl Schmitt, politics must decisively oppose economics to expose the enemy in its most naked sense, the denigration of spiritual humanity to material stuff and the obscuring of the theological war between good and evil. Both, however, fail to grapple explicitly or sufficiently enough with the evils of the self-regulating market, the construction of satanic mills that grind commodified social humanity into dust.³⁵ Markets in themselves are not evil but become forces of evil when they and corporations trump any and all human interests. The fantasy of modern capitalism is that the free market encapsulates the entire social and political sphere; this fantasy is both impossible to completely enact and detrimental in its effects. Markets of course can and need to function within circumscribed limits.

What is the status of religion in the context of the liberal market? As we can see in John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, the establishment of liberalism relegates religion to a solely private status, an affair of the heart. Locke writes that “I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion, and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other.”³⁶ Religion should be tolerated so long as it does not impinge upon the actual workings of the state and the market. Politics involves publicity, and what is publicly relevant concerns the establishment, maintenance, and enforcement of markets with the impossible goal of constituting a completely self-regulating market. This ideal of a self-regulating market functions as a utopian, or religious, ideal, but religious activities should not affect the functioning of the market as such. Religion in a liberal context is private and nonpolitical, at least directly. Here is the separation between modern political philosophy and what passes for political theology: for the former, explicit religious concerns and commitments are banished from political and economic consideration.

The political element is foregrounded in early modern political philosophy as the concept and reality of the nation-state takes form, while the more explicitly economic aspects of liberalism are theorized later, beginning with Adam Smith and continuing through the nineteenth century. As Polanyi explains, the political and economic are both conjoined, that is, they both function and work together, and disjoined, or thought as distinguished into two separate realms, especially in the nineteenth century. Although secularism is generally viewed as the absence of religion or religious commitments, what is generally called “the secular” is constituted by the liberal public sphere.

As discussed in chapter 1, Talal Asad’s work in Formations of the Secular is important for an understanding of the development of modern secularism, even though he fails to specifically address market capitalism in his account. Asad counters Schmitt’s historical reading, which sees theological ideas and practices being replaced with secular ones. Asad’s genealogy of secularism as an ideology that regulates both the secular and the sacred in political terms complicates a linear straightforward account where secular society simply replaces religious society, for better or for worse. He explains that secularism does not simply entail the negation of religion, but it implies and is based upon a certain “kind of religion that enlightened intellectuals … see as compatible with modernity.” In this case, “only religions that have accepted the assumptions of liberal discourse are being commended, in which tolerance is sought on the basis of a distinctive relation between law and morality.”³⁷ The religious is not replaced by the secular, but secularism as an ideology of the modern liberal nation-state regulates religion, mostly in terms of public and private.

Although many religious and nonreligious people would view the secular as the complete opposite of religion, Asad’s genealogy of the secular and of secularism shows their interdependence. He says, “I am arguing that ‘the secular’ should not be thought of as the space in which real human life gradually emancipates itself from the controlling power of ‘religion’ and thus achieves the latter’s freedom.”³⁸ Rather, secularization is also seen as generating true religion. Asad details the role that secularization and religion play in the construction of modern nationalism and the rise of capitalist nation-states, and his study shows that the secular is a complex religious form. The secular originates as a term of theological discourse that then paradoxically comes to mean an emancipation from theology as a form of false consciousness, a release that helps to achieve human freedom, which is ultimately a freedom of the market.³⁹

As a possible counterargument to my reading of Asad, however, one could return to Leo Strauss and appeal to his idea of persecution. Strauss argues that what we call secular is not new but has always been hidden, requiring that the fundamental struggle between political philosophy and political theology be carried out at least partly in secret. During a time when direct and honest expressions of atheism or secularism would subject the author to the threat of persecution, including even death, he or she had to resort to esoteric means of expression. “Persecution, then,” Strauss writes, “gives rise to a peculiar literature of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines.”⁴⁰ In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss examines Maimonides, Farabi, and Spinoza carefully and esoterically, alert to the distinction between contradictory statements made by these authors. Strauss claims that to our modern eyes, these writers seem to contradict themselves, but this is an effect of their writing under the threat of persecution. He says that as a rule, if an author makes a vulgar or common statement, agreeing with the masses, and then elsewhere makes a statement contradicting this vulgar statement, “the statement contradicting the vulgar view has to be considered his serious view.”⁴¹

If Strauss is correct, then perhaps we can reinstate the absolute opposition between reason and revelation that was discussed above and carefully read the history of Western philosophy as the esoteric struggle of political philosophy over against the predominant political theology, at least until modern times. Strauss argues that political philosophy is sharpened and strengthened from the battle because there is so much at stake, while with the victory of modern liberalism, philosophy’s task becomes too easy because it does not have to take political theology seriously as an opponent. I want to appreciate Strauss’s insight into persecution, but I want to radicalize it with the psychoanalytic idea of the unconscious. Strauss bases his work and his philosophy on the attempt to discern the intentional and conscious meanings of the philosophers he studies, but the notion of the unconscious ruins this attempt in any complete way. Strauss may reject or resist the idea of the unconscious, but if we take it seriously, then we have to learn to read symptomatically as well. That is, an author may suffer internal rather than simply external persecution, and this may affect and distort the text in various ways. Furthermore, as I suggest below, the idea of the unconscious is important for a radical political theology because it undermines the simple-minded notion of a conscious allegiance to a faith, as if we can always choose to believe, what to believe, and how to enact such belief.⁴²

The idea of the secular retains an important place in the conception of a radical political theology, as affirmed in chapter 1. A radical political theology refuses the false choice between embracing a determinate historical religion and endorsing a simple-minded secular atheism. Every secular form is residually religious, just as every religious form is inherently secular and at least potentially heretical. We need to think beyond this modern opposition, and the notion of the unconscious helps us do this. Too often the question of religion is put in terms of conscious allegiance based on a Protestant notion of freedom that now seems incredible. Do you believe in this religion, that religion, or no religion at all? Even if the notion of belief is supplemented or replaced by that of practice, this fails to grapple with the radicality of the idea of the unconscious, which means that one’s identity, beliefs, and intentional practices may not be determined or fully determinate on the conscious level. (How) do I know what I believe? Am I a Christian? An atheist? A Buddhist? What if I don’t know, or am in principle unable to decide the truth? I will return to the political implications of the unconscious in chapter 6, by way of a discussion of the contemporary crisis of law and Deleuze’s notion of the event.

Many liberals believe that the main reason to oppose political theology is the problem of religious violence, which has become more visible in our world as liberalism struggles to maintain itself. Why not resolve the theologico-political problem by delinking religion from politics? In response to the contemporary political power of Christian fundamentalism and the Religious Right, intellectuals such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens advocate a resecularization, or a severing of the link between religion and politics.⁴³ In an essay addressing the religio-political situation in Algeria, Derrida also affirms this separation. Derrida states: “We take a stand for the effective dissociation of the political and the theological.”⁴⁴ This is a natural and liberal response, but if Asad is right then it cannot work. The secular functions no less than religion as a form of political power. Again, Asad concludes that

Religion cannot be completely separated from politics, and the idea that it can is a liberal illusion, the fantasy of secularism as an ideology. At the same time, the secular cannot be severed from religion; it is a complex religious form. If Asad is correct that the concept of the secular cannot do without the idea of religion, then this is a postliberal, postmodern, and postsecularist insight. To appreciate Asad’s analysis we do not have to choose to affirm or practice a traditional form of religion, but we must recognize the implication of the secular in the religious and, furthermore, the essence of liberal secularism in the concept of the market, which Asad does not explicitly develop.

Can religion do without the notion of the secular? Or without reference to some form of secularization or disenchantment? I would argue that we cannot think religion apart from or without the notion of secular, and that this is the meaning of the term “postsecular,” if it has any meaning, although I prefer the term “postsecularism.” “Religion” and “secular” are modern terms, and they are interdependent; we cannot think one without the other. The secular cannot be abolished to “save” religion, or a particular institutional or practical form of religiosity. I am complicating the historical evolutionary story where religion disappears and is replaced by the secular. According to Asad’s analysis, this is not historically accurate, no matter which side one chooses to affirm. I am acknowledging the structural claim of Carl Schmitt in his articulation of a political theology, even if this is not a simple structure, because the religious and the secular cannot simply be disentangled or pulled apart.

As indicated in chapter 1, a radical political theology thinks the theological notion of the saeculum, as affirmed by the Death of God theologian Gabriel Vahanian, in terms of what Gilles Deleuze calls a plane of immanence.⁴⁶ A secular plane of immanence does not exclude the theological or settle questions of transcendence, but it argues that all discussions of transcendence must at least be referenced on the plane of immanence, which is the minimum consistency necessary to constitute a shared world of intersubjective experience.

We cannot eliminate religion from society or completely separate religion from politics. A secular or postsecularist political theology retains critical resources, however. Radical political theology thinks the embeddedness of the religious in the political and offers insights to help prevent the escalation of violence that threatens when particular religio-political formations, including that of fascism, become predominant. This is not simply the restoration of liberal tolerance, because there exists no neutral, nonreligious public space in which to arbitrate among disputes.

In conclusion, the opposition between secular and religious grounds the distinction between political philosophy and political theology, as seen by Strauss and Schmitt. If the fundamental incompatibility between philosophical rationality and faith in a revealed divine law is quintessentially modern and liberal, then the distinction between political theology and political philosophy begins to crumble. What is the theologico-political problem to which both Schmitt and Strauss point in controversial and insufficient ways? It is the breakdown of liberalism and the crisis of concomitant concepts such as secularity, modernity, and democracy. Political theology in its widest and most radical form concerns the political constitution of society and humanity, and it is residually secular because it attempts to think political theology without a determinate political theology, or what Jacques Derrida calls a “religion without religion.” At the same time, it calls its own liberal status into question, not for the sake of a traditional religious or philosophical form nostalgically imagined, nor for the cynical manipulation of those who are duped and controlled by religion in a Machiavellian fashion.

Radical political theology attempts to think a future beyond liberalism, a future that is humane, or failing that, at least human. The question is whether opposing the devastating capitalist market of modern liberalism necessitates opposing democracy. That is, is liberal democracy the only form of democracy or can there be democracy without liberalism? Most opponents of liberalism also oppose democracy, although much of the significance of Hardt and Negri’s collaborative project in Empire and Multitude involves the elaboration of a radical conception of democracy. In the next chapter, I will sketch out some concepts to help us think more deeply about radical democracy.