Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism

IN THE ANALECTS 13.1, CONFUCIUS IS ASKED, “IF THE RULER OF WEI were to entrust you with the government of the country, what would be your first initiative?” His response: “It would certainly be to rectify the names.”¹ What would it mean to rectify names like law, justice, and democracy today, if it is not already too late? If a thing does not correspond to its name, does it not create disorder and confusion, and make virtue impossible? One way to characterize the postmodern world that we live in is the determination that things no longer correspond to their names, that names float freely, without anchor, just like monetary currencies. I believe that there is no simple solution, that names cannot simply be rectified in a traditionalist manner. I also fear that we may be entering into another Period of Warring States, and while I am not a junzi (a sage or a virtuous person, sometimes translated anachronistically as “gentleman”), in this book I want to reflect theoretically on the current crisis of the name and state of political theology, including concepts like freedom, sovereignty, democracy, law, power, God, and the messianic.

Religion has returned, famously and controversially, to human thought and culture, and this return is a political (re)turn. I argue that the resurgence of determinate forms of religiosity today represents a crisis of modern liberal capitalism. Liberal modernity is constituted by excluding determinate religion from public life, creating a secular nonreligious space. This distinction between religious and secular is breaking down, so that it is no longer possible to consistently and rigorously separate and oppose the sacred and the profane. Religion and secular spheres and concepts deconstruct, to use Jacques Derrida’s language.

At the same time, the recent and continuing deformation of the line delineating the religious and the secular also demonstrates that it has never been possible to strictly separate the two, although a large part of what we call Western modernity has been predicated on the possibility that religion and secularity can be kept apart. The ideology of secularism is concomitant with liberalism, because liberalism imagines a neutral, value-free space in which a free market can work. By liberalism here, I am referring to classical liberalism more so than to contemporary liberalism, the latter of which is largely a nostalgic vestige of the former. Economic neoliberalism represents the ideological triumph of free-market capitalism at a time when the scarcity of cheap energy, as well as the enormity of public and private debt worldwide, challenges assumptions of indefinite growth.

If religion and secularity cannot be neatly separated, we cannot fully separate or distinguish political philosophy from political theology. In a postsecularist environment, we possess no absolute or certain criterion by which to claim that any phenomenon is theological as opposed to nontheological. Here theology means theoretical reflection about religious phenomena in general rather than a specific tradition or set of truth-claims. This book on political theology analyzes some of the nature and stakes of this inseparable intertwining of religious and secular by attending to the conceptual stakes of this return of religion. A contemporary political theology grapples with important concepts such as sovereignty, democracy, and the role that they play in our current postmodern intellectual and cultural situation. But, this is not simply a book about political theology; it is a book advocating a radical political theology. For me, radical political theology means the attempt to sketch out a constructive theology that is neither liberal in a classic sense nor conservative or orthodox in any way, whether politically or theologically. Many critiques of contemporary secularism as well as the ravages of corporate capitalism are traditionalist insofar as they rely on premodern values and religious or theological expressions to counterpose to the ones that currently reign. I suggest that many thinkers are caught within a liberalconservative binary, where the only way to oppose liberalism is to become conservative or neoconservative, again whether in political or theological terms. But, this binary opposition masks the radical alternative, which is post-Marxist (not anti-Marxist) in a broad sense because it relies upon a critique of capital that has been obscured in many ways by contemporary postmodernism and cultural-humanistic studies. What would a radical political theology look like? While this book does not provide a systematic or comprehensive answer to that question, it does open up concepts and analyses that allow us to understand what is at stake with such a radical political theology. These chapters and readings are not merely descriptive overviews, therefore, but consist of creative interventions onto the theoretical landscape of theological ideas, which is why there is no clear and clean separation of descriptive analysis and imaginative intervention.

In this introduction, I want to engage the discourse of radical theology and show where it links up with political issues and ideas. Radical theology links up with discussions of Continental philosophy and ultimately political theory over the last decades of the twentieth century. Before taking up radical theology explicitly, however, I want to briefly consider the context and nature of the Religious Right in the United States over the past several decades. After this more contextual political analysis, I will engage with the tradition of radical theology in the United States as a potential counterweight to the intensification of the conservative Christianity. As part of an elaboration of radical theology and its significance for political theology, I will focus theoretically upon the concept of freedom, which is both a theological and, I am insisting, a political concept. Human freedom in light of divine omnipotence is a classical theological topic, and modern humanism and existentialism emerges by opposing human freedom to divine power. Today, both of these alternatives—either divine freedom and power or human freedom and self-assertion—are too simplistic in a postsecularist context. Freedom is the freedom to think anything at all, which also concerns the ability to do anything at all, and as liberty becomes a fundamental modern political concept, during the course of modernity we discover more and more how we are not free in any pure or absolute terms. One of the main themes of twentieth-century Continental philosophy is the notion of potentiality, and I am suggesting that “potentiality” is a good contemporary postmodern name for freedom.

Radical political theology seeks to understand religion’s role and significance today, in cultural, economic, and political terms—one cannot understand religion without taking into account these political, cultural, and economic factors. One of the most powerful expressions of religion in American culture is the rise of the Religious Right over the past three decades. To understand the significance of the Religious Right in the United States today, we need to see how it is not only obviously religious, but also and perhaps even more importantly, how it is driven by other—less obvious—political, economic, and cultural phenomena. We need such analytical tools to be able to discern the ideological elements of the contemporary Religious Right.

In some ways, the current situation of religion in American politics and the rise of the Religious Right can be related to the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War, when the South lost its military and political attempt to secede from the Union and form a new nation. My claim is that while the South was defeated in the Civil War, the contemporary resurgence of conservative political religion represents a dangerous victory for the South. While the division over states’ rights and the continued presence of slavery in the South were obviously crucial to the conflict, an often overlooked, though equally if not more important, issue was how the extension of the practice of slavery to new territories and states as the Union expanded west in search of its Manifest Destiny had certain economic and political effects. The rise of maritime capitalism in the Northeast in the early nineteenth century created a competing economic paradigm with Southern plantations, and in fact free factory workers toiling for low wages proved more efficient than the “free” labor of slaves. The majority of interests in the Northern states, with the exception of a small but vocal group of radical abolitionists, were content to contain Southern plantation slavery but would not allow its expansion to new western territories. The Southern states recognized that their lifestyle could not flourish politically or economically if they were overshadowed by an industrial capitalist North and West, so they made a desperate attempt to dissolve the Union.

As we know, this attempt failed, slavery was eventually abolished, and the Union was reestablished. What is important in a religious context is that religion was not necessarily as significant for the American South prior to the Civil War as it was elsewhere in the United States. The waves of religious revivalism that swept across the United States in the early nineteenth century occurred mostly along the frontier of the original thirteen colonies and included upstate New York’s so-called burnt-over district. This movement was called the Second Great Awakening, to distinguish it from the first Great Awakening of the 1730s–1750s.² Although religion was sometimes used by whites to justify slavery, religiosity in the South was not especially intense compared with other parts of the country, with the exception of the African Americans themselves, who were stripped of their African religions and later embraced Methodist and Baptist forms of Christianity.

After the Civil War, white Southerners took refuge in religion and created a nostalgic picture of antebellum life, ignoring or downplaying the brutal aspects of American plantation slavery. In many ways, this turn to religion constituted a repression of other, more explicitly political desires. This repression was enforced by Northern military power as well as the postwar Reconstruction. All of the major Protestant churches split prior to the Civil War. Some of them eventually reunited but only after the Civil War religion was irrevocably split between North and South. As the historian of American religion George Marsden explains, the incredible emphasis upon Southern religion was “an integral part of the southern glorification of the lost cause in the half century after the War Between the States. Although Southerners had lost the war on the battlefield, they were determined to win the war of ideas.”³

The Southern postwar struggle was not just a war of ideas. The Southern states, overwhelmingly Democratic in opposition to the Northern Republicans, evolved a system of segregation between blacks and whites that allowed Southern whites to maintain their economic privileges and sense of cultural superiority. This system was accommodated by the rest of the country in the course of its ascent to the position of a dominant world power. After World War II, however, segregation was increasingly difficult to justify and to maintain, both politically and economically. In the 1950s and 1960s, desegregation and the civil rights movement functioned to dismantle the institutions of segregation and inflicted yet another defeat upon white Southern pride. The civil rights movement, starting with the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and culminating with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, was experienced by Southerners as a repetition of the Civil War.⁴

From the ashes of this defeat emerged the movement that became known as the Religious Right, which managed to co-opt most strands of evangelicalism and fundamentalism in the United States after World War II. During the civil rights movement, a more liberal Christian evangelicalism prevailed, particularly among the major activists and leaders of the movement, including the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition, cofounded and led by Martin Luther King Jr. Democratic party politicians at the national level promoted and enforced civil rights, which led to a backlash on the part of white Southerners. Although Lyndon Baines Johnson won the 1964 presidential election over Barry Goldwater in a landslide, Johnson also remarked upon signing of the Civil Rights Act, “I think we just gave the South to the Republicans.”⁵

From the ashes of its political defeat in 1964, the Republican party, historically the party of big business and corporate interests, made an alliance with white Southerners that eventually propelled them back into power.⁶ The Republicans cultivated Southern anger and frustration over perceived wounds to their culture and pride, and began to adopt the religious language of Southern, white Christians, which culminated in 1980 with the Reagan Revolution, closely tied to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Pat Robertson’s emergence as a national religious figure. The Religious Right became visible in the 1980s, seemed to peak in 1988 with the failed presidential candidacy of Pat Robertson, but reemerged at the grassroots level in the 1994 congressional elections, and finally cemented its central place in American political and cultural life in the controversial election and reelection of George W. Bush.

This is not simply a history lesson. I am analyzing the history of religion in the United States to propose a mechanism for understanding the development of Southern religion as a response to the outcome of the Civil War, as reexperienced in the context of the civil rights movement. Southern religion is the place where repressed political and cultural aspirations are consolidated. The civil rights movement is experienced as a repetition of the Civil War, but this defeat is far less traumatic; and with the help of the Republican party, it produces the Religious Right as a “return of the repressed,” to apply a Freudian term usually understood in terms of individuals to a broader historical and social process. According to Freud, individuals repress traumatic experiences from consciousness, but they reemerge later and elsewhere, often in a destructive way, in what he calls the return of the repressed.⁷ In this case, the vanquished South represses its cultural and political desires and conflates those desires with Southern Christianity. And today we are seeing a return of the repressed, touched off by the civil rights movement and its aftermath.

During the Reconstruction following the Civil War, as well as the early part of the twentieth century, religion provided a space separate from contemporary culture, and American Fundamentalism in particular was a movement that set itself apart from and judged a sinful, secular society. In many cases, Southern white Christianity rejected the entire social and political process, and focused more on its own religious purity and salvation than on saving the country at large. What changed after the civil rights movement, however, is that now this Southern Christianity positively attempts to remake and reconstruct American society along its religious lines. In other words, rather than setting itself apart from sinful, secular society and remaining a largely apolitical religious movement primarily concerned with the saving of individual souls, Southern evangelical Christianity has become politicized.

For example, one of the most significant, if not very well-known, movements that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s is Christian Reconstruction. Christian Reconstruction is a form of Calvinism that reaches back to eighteenth-century Puritan optimism in its attempt to refashion society, as well as its emphasis upon the Old Testament. Christian Reconstruction, as expressed by Rousas John Rushdoony, asserts the universal applicability of the Biblical Law of Moses.⁸ There is no suspension or revocation of Mosaic Law by Jesus, and furthermore, Jesus will not return until all nations, led by the United States, institute and follow this biblical law. According to Rushdoony’s son-in-law, Gary North, “Christian Reconstruction is the only Bible-affirming movement on earth that offers an uncompromisingly biblical alternative.”⁹

This emphasis on the Bible is not just a matter of belief, but a practical—and political—blueprint for transforming society. Christian Reconstruction is a form of Dominionism, which appeals to the first book of Genesis for warrant that God gave humans, and by extension Christians, dominion over the earth. Faithful Christians must exercise dominion first over the United States, and after setting up a theocracy there will spread Christianity and God’s government throughout the world. Although the Christian Reconstruction movement split as a result of North’s rejection of Rushdoony’s contention that the U.S. Constitution is the Word of God, Dominionism has flourished at the extreme edges of Christian fundamentalism.¹⁰ This Dominionism accompanies and sometimes inspires the primary transformation of what I am calling Southern Christianity during the 1960s and 1970s, which shifts from a standpoint of pessimism to optimism in its attitude toward American society and its political and economic possibilities.

The transformation of white Southern Christianity from pessimism to optimism, from defeat and nostalgia to victory and patriotic American nationalism, and from personal piety to politics coincides with its alliance with the Republican party in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In many ways, this alliance appears to be a bizarre and unholy alliance, because it weds American nationalism and free-market capitalism to Christian evangelicalism and fundamentalism. Ultimately, this Southern Christianity is at least in part a façade behind which dangerous forms of authoritarianism, wealth consolidation, and militarism thrive and grow. At the same time, religion is a necessary catalyst for these processes because religious passion allows a cultural and political legitimization for many of these forces, which would not have been as acceptable or as successful without this religious cloak. The forms of Southern Christianity that have become so pervasive are both powerful and sincere, but they have also been appropriated, enflamed, and directed by other financial interests.¹¹

My argument is that the Republican party, which has historically been the party of big business, co-opted white Southern Christianity and used its energy, its anger, and its pathos as cover to advance its own interests, even as it in turn has been shaped by these religious ideas and beliefs. At the same time, more subtly, corporate capitalism in the form of multinational companies has used both nationalism and religion as a smokescreen to advance its own global and financial interests, which often are in conflict with both national and Christian interests and values. These three phenomena are bundled together in an uneven and highly dangerous fashion, and together they threaten to bring about an apocalyptic catastrophe in the form of financial depression due to overextended debt, environmental devastation due to irreversible climate change caused by emissions from burning hydrocarbons, economic collapse due to the increasing scarcity of fossil fuels, and a military conflagration due to conflicts driven by energy needs and other economic forces.¹²

During the last thirty years or so, the same time period covered by the rise of the Religious Right in the United States, a new, virulent form of corporate capitalism has evolved, which Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism.”¹³ Inspired by the economic prescriptions of Milton Friedman and his disciples at the University of Chicago, disaster capitalism thrives on crises. Friedman advocates radical free-market reforms that cause a tremendous amount of pain and suffering for people who undergo them, and he recognizes that people will not choose to do this voluntarily. Therefore, a crisis must be either precipitated or exploited to realize these reforms. Klein traces the development and implementation of this new form of free-market capitalism from Chile to Eastern Europe to China to Iraq to Great Britain and the United States.

Although Klein does not treat religion in her book, she does expose the dangerous link between the political and military events of the last few decades and the economic policies of the “Chicago Boys” that helped promote and exploit them in ways that have increased wealth disparity and have impoverished millions of people at the expense of wealthy corporations. Klein analyzes a corporatist system and shows how “political and corporate elites have simply merged, trading favors to secure the right to appropriate precious resources previously held in the public domain.”¹⁴ The shock of a crisis induces paralysis and disorientation, which provides an opportunity for introducing radical free-market reforms. Peoples and countries suffer these shocks as torture, and Klein chillingly connects the torture of peoples using methods developed by the C.I.A. with the torture of countries using methods developed by the Chicago Boys and implemented by the I.M.F. and the World Bank. Although “free markets and free peoples have been packaged as a single ideology that claims to be humanity’s best and only defense against repeating a history filled with mass graves, killing fields and torture chambers,” in fact the application of “the contemporary religion of unfettered free markets” has had a very different result. At least in Latin America, where it was first applied, “it did not bring democracy; it was predicated on the overthrow of democracy in country after country. And it did not bring peace but required the systematic murder of tens of thousands and the torture of between 100,000 and 150,000 people.”¹⁵ According to Klein, the shocks of September 11 offered new opportunities for the application of corporatism in Iraq and in the United States.

Whether or not the United States has shaped the War on Terror to pursue its own militaristic and financial ends, at the very least the proliferation of disaster capitalism along with other concerns such as oil, energy, the state of the dollar, geopolitical interests, and even the conflation of war and violence with Biblical Revelations and predictions of the Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ suggest that something is deeply wrong at the heart of the American Empire. For Southern religion, the irony is that the defeated Confederacy gets its revenge on the politics and culture of the United States, but this revenge ultimately leads to national if not global defeat and collapse. Due to the takeover of Southern Christianity by nationalist militarism and corporate capitalism, we have an unsustainable economy and immoral way of life. This time, in a repetition of the Civil War, the whole country loses. The question is how much of the rest of the world we take with us.

What is radical theology, and how does a radical political theology represent a discourse capable of helping us grapple with these urgent political, economic, and social crises? Radical theology emerges in the wake of the death of God. However strange or incoherent the Death of God theology that emerged in some quarters of the U.S. academy in the 1960s appeared, it gave rise to a radical theological vision, one attached to the academy to be sure, but detached from ecclesiastical or pastoral commitments and concerns.¹⁶ Radical theology, in the work of Mark C. Taylor, Charles E. Winquist, Carl A. Raschke, and others, welded these insights into the death of God and the poststructuralist philosophies being translated from France in the 1970s and 1980s, fashioning an American postmodern theology.¹⁷ What was missing from this early American postmodern theology, which was more preoccupied with aesthetic, epistemological, and cultural concerns, was an explicitly political focus, as Jeffrey W. Robbins has observed. In an essay on “Terror and the Postmodern Condition,” Robbins examines American radical and postmodern theology, and charges that while its interests “were characteristically broad and far-ranging, moving seamlessly from philosophy and theology to literature, psychoanalytic theory, art and architecture, the political was marked by its absence.”¹⁸ Robbins calls for “a truly radical political theology,” one that “puts both the political and the theological order in question.”¹⁹ He claims that postmodern theology has not met this task, and neither have two other contemporary forms of theological thinking, liberation theology and process theology. According to Robbins, liberation theology, “while effectively integrating a Marxist critique and programmatic into an already-established theological framework, whether it be Catholic, Protestant, or Islamic,” it “never went so far as to put the established theology into question.”²⁰ In a footnote, Robbins argues that process thought “still operates almost exclusively within a Christian confessional framework,” and due to the overwhelming influence of Alfred North Whitehead’s speculative theology, sometimes turns Whitehead’s “famous image of speculative thought as the ‘flight of an aeroplane’ into, at times at least, a rigid system of Whiteheadian dogma.”²¹ I sympathize with Robbins’s criticisms, although I also think that there is important and vital political theology being done in both liberation theology and process theology. But I am working more explicitly in a radical postmodern theological tradition and want to take seriously Robbins’s challenge for a radical postmodern political theology without dismissing other forms of theological thinking.

This political element was partially restored to postmodern theology by the emergence of British Radical Orthodoxy in the 1990s, which combines a radical social theory with important political implications and interventions, and a more conservative, or orthodox, theology. By crossing a radical political critique with a theoretically informed, postmodern version of Christian orthodoxy, Radical Orthodoxy, associated primarily with the work of John Milbank, Graham Ward, Catherine Pickstock, and others, became popular and influential in intellectual, academic, and seminary environments in the early 2000s. My problem with Radical Orthodoxy is that it is not radical enough, however, and it lacks the creative force of earlier American radical theology. Essentially, Radical Orthodoxy desires to effect a restoration of a neotraditional orthodoxy, which is a triumphalist Christianity that was broken with the emergence of a nontheological secular sphere at the start of European modernity. Radical Orthodoxy appropriates postmodern insights and critiques about the nature of the European Enlightenment and modernity but then sublates these problems with a beatific vision of Christian harmony that appears both naïve and incredible. At the same time, Radical Orthdoxy provides a strong and important critique of contemporary liberalism and capitalism and offers nonmodern resources that function as alternative sources of value and meaning.

Unfortunately, the political project of Radical Orthodoxy is based on a medieval vision of Christian empire that eliminates democracy as a viable political form in its critique of liberalism in general. Part of what makes my project distinct is that it articulates a political theology that criticizes liberalism not to salvage orthodoxy but as an attempt to save democracy in the form of a radical democracy, which is the topic of chapter 6. The attention given to social and political issues by Radical Orthodoxy, then, provides an opening and a challenge to develop a radical political theology that would be neither orthodoxy theologically nor conservative politically. My book, unlike more conservative theological projects, takes seriously the breakdown of the secular-religious opposition without simply reducing the secular to the religious.

A recent volume that provides important resources for thinking a radical political theology is Theology and the Political: The New Debate, edited by John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek, and Creston Davis. Most of the explicitly theological essays, however, are inspired by some version of Radical Orthodoxy, and many of the more secular, nonorthodox essays eschew the word “theology.”²² This situation institutes a cleavage or a break that reinforces the irreconcilable split between theology and philosophy, secular and sacred. Many of the most influential philosophers of our time have taken up writing about religion in important ways, including Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri, Jean-Luc Nancy, Gianni Vattimo, and of course the late Jacques Derrida. The problem with the orthodox theological framework is that it can only appropriate these philosophical insights and critiques for the purposes of a preestablished Christian agenda rather than read them as already profoundly theological in a way that challenges the strict separation between philosophy and theology without subsuming one into the other. The encounter that Theology and the Political stages between a radical political philosophy and an orthodox theology that embraces radical social theory opens up a space for a radical political theology, but it does not explicitly name, announce, or pursue this possibility as such.

At around the same time that Radical Orthodoxy was emerging upon the theological scene, a Continental philosophy of religion was taking shape, influenced by the religious implications of the work of Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion, and associated with philosophers such as John D. Caputo, Merold Westphal, and Richard Kearney. Influenced more by phenomenology, these theorists mostly dismissed theology as ontotheology, following Heidegger, although Caputo has recently published an important book of theology, The Weakness of God, which I will consider in chapter 3. Although these thinkers have been interested in political questions, until recently such political concerns were secondary to phenomenological and religious questions.

We now need a radical theological thinking that is at the same time radically political. Radical theology is here the freedom to think God without God, liberated from the weight of traditional formulations that constrain its creativity in dogmatics and sap its vitality in apologetics. Radical theology in the wake of the death of God is freed up to engage in constructive political thought and challenged to create a radical political theology, which is its urgent contemporary task. The political stakes of radical theology are enormous, because what is at stake is the world, which is all that is the case, including whether we can continue to have one.

With his parable “The Madman,” Nietzsche famously announces that God is dead: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”²³ What Nietzsche pronounces philosophically, theology internalizes almost a century later. In the infamous Death of God theology of the 1960s, God is finally killed in his own name, which became somewhat of a fad and a media event despite the theological sophistication of many of its proponents. Contemporary religion, including many forms of Western monotheism, is currently living off the remains of God’s corpse. Traditional faith in a rational, benevolent, and omnipotent deity has become incredible and has been replaced by reactionary forms of evangelicalism and fundamentalism.

In the early twenty-first century, we live in a period of counter-Enlightenment. The European Enlightenment and its universal ideals have been rendered questionable at best despite urgent attempts to resurrect them.²⁴ Our era, the Latin term for which is a saeculum, is one of postmodern revivalism. Evangelicals are just beginning to realize how conducive postmodernism is to their project.²⁵ At the same time, however, some aspects of this religious revivalism stink of big business, no matter how heartfelt and sincere its adherents may be: “Gods, too, decompose.”²⁶ The resurgence of neotraditionalist forms of religion in thought and culture threatens to overwhelm critical thinking if we are not careful. Witness all the evident religiosity; we are saturated by it, even drowning in it. But again, it reeks: of corporate capitalism and its gospel of wealth and financial prosperity. According to Mark C. Taylor, the resurgence of religion since the 1970s coincides with the explosive growth of global capitalism: “Global capitalism, in other words, is inseparable from a global religious revival.”²⁷

The resurgence of more conservative forms of religion represents a reaction to the expansion and hegemony of global capitalism. At the same time, as Taylor points out, there is “a critical difference in the relation of religion, politics and economics within and beyond the US borders.”²⁸ For many people outside the United States, conservative religion “often becomes a strategy to resist global capitalism and all it represents. In the United States, by contrast, conservative religion is commonly used to promote the spread of global capitalism.”²⁹ Taylor equates religion and economics, claiming that both are confidence games that rest upon nothing other than the faith of their true believers. He correlates the Death of God theology of the 1960s with the abandonment of the gold standard by the Nixon administration in 1971, which signaled the end of the 1944 Bretton Woods arrangement.³⁰ After the end of the gold standard, currencies were left to float, revealing their true nature as virtual. As already discussed above, the unholy alliance between global capitalism and conservative religion gave rise to the Religious Right, with its continuing influence upon the cultural and political situation in the United States. Taylor outlines the ways in which the economy becomes ever more complex and defies the assumptions of market fundamentalists, who ironically become more fundamentalist in light of this growing complexity. Both religious and economic fundamentalists dream an impossible dream of a world of simplicity in which complete redemption is possible, overseen by a rational and dependable God.³¹

The more we pursue God, the more we are forced to recognize God’s complicity in the human projects of economic moneymaking and political domination and that these projects often produce immoral and brutal results. Another way to express this is to recognize that the death of God is the result of a genuine theological yearning for God, not simply a cynical and self-serving pronouncement. In the third essay of his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche poses the enormous problem of the ascetic ideal. He argues that “all great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming.”³² Christian morality brings about its own destruction precisely through its own intensification, and in this process it follows the collapse of Christian dogma. “In this way Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality,” Nietzsche writes; “in the same way Christianity as morality must now perish, too: we stand on the threshold of this event.”³³

If the death of God is the self-devaluation of the highest value, this is due to the radicalization of these very values, which ultimately turn against their origin and betray it in its name. Nietzsche names this radicalization the will to truth, which itself in turn becomes questionable. The devaluation of the highest values is called European nihilism, and it is an inherently ascetic process that ultimately denies and sacrifices life for the sake of truth. The point here is that just as Nietzsche offers a genealogy in which our belief in truth breaks down precisely under the intensity of our will to truth, I am suggesting that the death of God is the result of radical theological interrogation. At a certain point the will to truth, to be faithful to the “truth” is forced to admit that there is no truth or that truth is a lie, or to discover that the will to truth is in fact a will to power. In the same way, radical theology is forced to sacrifice traditional belief in God for a thinking about divinity “that does not disappoint,” as Charles Winquist puts it.³⁴

In response to the death of God, we can envision at least three distinct possibilities. The most natural response is simply to discard theology as a viable mode of intelligible discourse. A great many self-conscious, thinking intellectuals have taken this option, including philosophers, historians, and sociologists of religion. Recently, the widespread cultural and political power of the Christian Right as well as neofundamentalist forms of Islam have produced a new secularist reaction by scientists such as Richard Dawkins, intellectuals such as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, and journalists such as Christopher Hitchens.³⁵

Why adhere to a way of thinking that does not make sense because it lacks a credible referent, especially given the violence that religious adherents have promoted? The problem with this response lies in its inherent superficiality, because by jettisoning theology such thinking lacks a discourse in which to think or discuss ultimacy. Of course, ultimacy can be treated in other languages, including philosophy, ethics, mysticism, and naturalism, but these languages themselves are ungrounded precisely in the same way that theology cannot be grounded in a traditional belief in God. That is, questions of ultimate concern are theological issues, to use Paul Tillich’s language, but they are ungrounded insofar as they possess no certain or stable foundation. Much antitheological discourse seeks to dispense with questions of ultimacy because of the dangers of arrogant fundamentalism. This move is purely reactive, and in fact any attempt to eliminate religion would have to become at least as violent as religious fanatics are purported to be.

I argue that religion is universal, that it is part of the nature of being human, and even though phrases like “ultimate concern” are vague, there is no escaping the questions that are raised, whether or not the answers can possess any credibility. I endorse the definition of the historian of religion Charles H. Long, who defines religion as “orientation in the ultimate sense, that is, how one comes to terms with the ultimate significance of one’s place in the world.”³⁶ Even if conventional reality is completely identical with ultimate reality, the determination that this is the case would be implicitly a religious conclusion. Because we are animals who can think in symbolic representation, we are capable of imaginative flights of fancy as well as incredible efforts of technical understanding, and religion appears to be coextensive with human culture.

The second possibility is the one that most obviously passes for theology today, but unfortunately it is also the most conservative. Here a desperate attempt is made to resurrect the God who is dead, to restore God as an object of belief. This move amounts to propping up a corpse. While this is certainly a harsh conclusion, as I mentioned above in reference to Taylor’s work on global capitalism, this effort at resuscitation is sometimes undertaken for the most cynical and manipulative of reasons despite the evident sincerity of most believers. In a radical, Nietzschean sense, there is a lining of bad faith that necessarily accompanies this project, though it is often understandable and undertaken with the best of motivations. It is natural to resist the declaration that God is dead, which on the face of it is an absurd claim; but the truth of God’s death remains in its very questionability. That is, the questionability of God “is” the death of God, and this cannot be undone. Once one learns to question God, or breaks the link of self-evident authority whereby it is possible to not believe in God, God “dies” in terms of absolute transcendence and can only be recovered or restored, that is, shored up. The freedom of the death of God means the freedom to think theologically with and without God, that is, without presupposing that God is, God exists. Finally, to take the empirical resurgence of religion in the contemporary world for evidence of God’s resurrection confuses the issue, because these conservative forms of faith called fundamentalist or neofundamentalist constitute a reaction against the death of God, a refusal to accept this reality, and an intense repression that breaks out in virulent and deadly ways.

Finally, the third possibility is to substitute for God other names in a complex metaphorical or dialectical interplay of meanings and significations. Some of these names, most of which are human, ethical, or naturalistic, are reinterpreted in such a way that they pass under the Name of God. Here, theology retains in part the form of a traditional religious language, but God is reinvested with new meanings. This project is sometimes straightforward about what it is doing, and other times more ambiguous, in using the word God to designate, capture, and activate concepts such as goodness, suffering, life, justice, being, compassion, love, the universe, order, meaning, reason, logos, death, univocity, uniqueness, complexity, information, and freedom. In an autobiographical account in the essay “Circumfessions,” Jacques Derrida claims that for him, “the constancy of God in my life is called by other names,” such that he can “quite rightly pass for an atheist.”³⁷ Here, theology would be the obverse of Derrida’s description, because God would be used either along with or instead of these other names, such that one could rightly pass for a theist.

My constructive suggestion is a variation upon option three, and I suggest that such a passing could be called an intercession. Intercessions are not simply pastoral prayers, but in the course of a radical political theology, pragmatic interventions into contemporary theoretical thinking about the intersections of religion and politics. Specifically, in this introduction I venture to name freedom as that which now passes for divinity in the wake of the death of God, even if the rest of the book explores the theoretical resources of other names. Freedom also metonymically names the freedom of theology to think matters of ultimate concern—political, moral, existential, cosmological—without the constraint of tradition, authority, or the presumed certainty of dogmatic answers.

Freedom does not simply substitute for God, but in a formal sense captures the possibility of thinking God as well as thinking anything at all. In this sense, a formal theological thinking would attend to what makes concepts available for understanding and articulation. Concepts such as God here refer to the passing, the passing for, and the passage among thing, image, and word that is also an impossible passage, what Derrida calls an aporia following Aristotle. Despite its impossibility, such passings occur, and freedom is a name for these passages, even though freedom, like God, does not exist as such.

Freedom undergoes a similar devaluation during the course of European modernity. The more intellectuals pursue scientific, political, philosophical, and religious freedom, the more they discover how unfree we really are. It is the desperate struggle for freedom that dialectically reveals the state of bondage of human beings, which is tied to or determined by nature, causality, physiology, and evolution, and deluded by individual desires, as well as social, political, and economic interests. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche analyzes the problem of free will and destroys its classical formulation, although this understanding had already been unsettled by Kant.

Kant provides the modern philosophical articulation of the problem of freedom, specifically in the third chapter of The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. For Kant, the idea of freedom accomplishes the transition from a metaphysic of morals to a critique of pure practical reason. The positive concept of freedom is an a priori idea that is necessary to sustain the principle of morality, which consists in good will. A good will must be characterized by freedom, so we have to think the moral will as free even though we can never experience freedom in nature under the rule of causality. We must presuppose freedom “if we wish to conceive a being as rational and as endowed with consciousness of his causality in regard to actions,” but “we have been quite unable to demonstrate freedom as something actual in ourselves and in human nature.”³⁸

Freedom is necessary to have morality, but it is not possible to experience this freedom in nature. Kant sets up an antinomy between the idea of freedom supplied by reason and the experience of causal necessity given by the understanding. He then resolves this antinomy by positing a distinction between the sensible world and the intelligible world. Kant explains that “as regards mere perception and the capacity for receiving sensations he must count himself as belonging to the sensible world, but as regards whatever there may be in him of pure activity … he must count himself as belonging to the intellectual world, of which, however, he knows nothing further.”³⁹ The grounds of this distinction are ultimately Aristotelian, because Kant associates passivity with the sensible world and activity with the intellectual world. Furthermore, even though we know nothing determinate about the intelligible world, Kant claims that “the intelligible world contains the ground of the sensible world and therefore also of its laws”; it is self-legislating.⁴⁰

The will must be thought according to physical laws of causality by the understanding insofar as it is an object of experience, or a thing that appears. But, the will must be posited as free in itself by reason according to the idea of freedom. Freedom cannot be experienced or explained but must be posited to salvage morality, because only a moral law that is self-prescribed is ultimately valid as duty. In conclusion, Kant affirms that “while we do not comprehend the practical unconditioned necessity of the moral imperative, we do comprehend its incomprehensibility.”⁴¹ Of course, Nietzsche is highly critical of the separation Kant makes between sensible and intelligible world to resolve the antinomy between freedom and necessity. This is the Kant whom Nietzsche describes as “a fox who loses his way and goes astray back into his cage. Yet it had been his strength and cleverness that had broken open the cage!”⁴²

Nietzsche collapses the distinction between sensible and intelligible worlds, between nature and freedom, which he claims has only served to devalue life. Discussing the will in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche argues that what we call free will is simply a strong will and its opposite, the unfree will, is only a weak will. “The ‘unfree will’ is mythology,” just as much as the “free will”; “in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills.”⁴³ Nietzsche sets aside philosophical prejudice to examine the will phenomenologically. He says,

Present along with these sensations is thinking, and furthermore, “the will is not only a complex of sensation and thinking, but it is above all an affect, and specifically the affect of a command.”⁴⁵ According to Nietzsche, the will is divided between a part that commands and a part that obeys, and our experience of freedom occurs when we identify ourselves with the commanding part, whereas our experience of unfreedom results from identifying with the obeying part.

This is how Nietzsche reduces Kant’s antinomy between freedom and nature to a duality between strong and weak wills. Nietzsche rejects the absolute nature of Kantian morality and replaces the opposition good and evil with that of good and bad, where humans generally associate strength with being good and weakness with being bad. At the same time, Nietzsche preserves a shadow of Kantian freedom in his writing when he affirms that the philosophers of the future “will be free, very free spirits.”⁴⁶ That is, they will have to freedom and the courage to think difficult and dangerous thoughts, even the thinking of their own bondage to drives and wills and their enslavement by an illusive morality or a deceitful grammar.

I want to capture this very paradoxical Nietzschean freedom in my discussion of radical theology: that the more we freely seek freedom the more we discover our own enslavement, or that the more we seek to adequately comprehend divinity the less credible God becomes, which is not simply due to the weakness of our own ability to conceive God. At the same time, our world becomes more and more unbearable, that is, we desperately need God precisely because we know that God does not exist, and we desperately require freedom even as we recognize that our postmodern society is relentlessly shutting down any and all spaces of freedom from capitalist, bureaucratic, or military control, often in the name of freedom or democracy.

In twentieth-century Continental philosophy, the problem of freedom transmutes into the problem of potentiality, and potentiality is gradually dislocated from actuality. Freedom becomes a possibility, but possibility is no longer subservient to what actually exists. According to Derrida, God refers to “a structure of conscience” within the human being, which is the possibility of keeping a secret: “God is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not from the exterior.”⁴⁷ Beyond the metaphorics of inside and outside at work in this definition, God is here associated both with possibility or potentiality and with secrecy, the possibility of keeping a secret, which is connected with Nietzsche’s examination in The Genealogy of Morals of the tortured process through which human beings became creatures who could keep promises, that is, tell the truth or keep a secret. For Derrida, the Name of God still encapsulates this potentiality though he rightly passes for an atheist!

The potential to keep a secret testifies to the division or divisibility of the self, because “once there is secrecy and secret witnessing within me, then what I call God exists, (there is) what I call God in me, (it happens that) I call myself God.”⁴⁸ What is the secret of God here? That Derrida is a closet believer? Not necessarily, or at least, not simply. The gift (of death) that connects me with others concerns “the infinite sharing of the secret,” which generalizes and thus in a way destroys the secret as a secret, since it is infinitely shared, as least potentially.⁴⁹ Taking up the side of potentiality, which is a postmodern term for freedom, here is the potential for a radical rethinking of God as secret and as shared, as gift and as death, which is what God means. God is this potentiality.

Potentiality is the locus of freedom because it is divorced from a necessary connection to actuality (the secret is shared before it is said, the gift is given prior to any actual distribution), and this understanding of potentiality is sometimes called “virtual.” I want to indicate that the notion of potentiality or the virtual is a thinking of freedom in the thought of Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, and Antonio Negri (each of whom, along with Derrida, is an important influence upon this book), although I defer more detailed discussions to later chapters.

The distinction between potentiality and actuality goes back to Aristotle. Aristotle is also the philosopher who privileged actuality over potentiality, and this bias persists throughout the Middle Ages into European modernity, to the extent that St. Thomas Aquinas can define God as pure act, actus purus. In the twentieth century, Heidegger’s engagement with Aristotle provides a breakthrough for Heidegger’s understanding of Being and time. Furthermore, Heidegger rereads Aristotle’s discussion of potentiality and actuality in the Metaphysics and reverses the significance of these two terms.⁵⁰ According to Heidegger, the potentiality of Being to be is the highest power of Being, not its actualization in particular beings.

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben was a student of Heidegger, and he further develops the significance of Heidegger’s reversal. In some of his most important essays, Agamben wrestles with the concept of potentiality and shows how it connects with the notion of impotentiality. For Agamben, potentiality is closer to the original Aristotelian definition, whereas impotentiality is the “potential to not do,” which is a refusal of actuality and a higher form of Being because it is a kind of freedom.⁵¹ Impotentiality in Agamben is closer to Heidegger’s understanding of the potentiality of Being. Impotentiality is also close to what Derrida calls “impossibility” in his claim that deconstruction concerns both the conditions for possibility and the conditions of impossibility of actual phenomena.⁵²

I suggest that the concept of sovereignty is deeply problematic in both political and theological terms, and I will engage with this notion in chapter 2 with a more developed discussion of Agamben’s ideas of potentiality and impotentiality. I will also consider recent theological emphases upon weakness as opposed to strength and power. I will also return to Agamben’s work, but more explicitly his political thought, in chapter 6, where I will engage his significant book State of Exception and apply his reading of Carl Schmitt to our contemporary crisis of faith in law.

Another name for potentiality, a more postmodern name, is virtuality. In his books Bergsonism and Difference and Repetition, Deleuze provides a thinking of the virtual that approaches Agamben’s understanding of potentiality. Deleuze does not use the term “potentiality” because he wants to find a way beyond the constraining opposition between potentiality and actuality in its Aristotelian formulation. The virtual is not what is possible, because possibility connotes something that has less reality. For Deleuze, the virtual is contrasted with actuality, but both are understood to be fully real. The virtual becomes actualized in a process of differenciation.

In their coauthored works, particularly Empire and Multitude, Negri and Hardt sketch out a political ontology based on the potentia (potential power) of the multitude, which is opposed to the potestas (actualization or instantiation) of sovereign power that currently takes the form of empire and expresses itself in global war, even though these two terms are not explicitly used in Multitude. The theoretical background of these political works becomes manifest in the context of Negri’s own philosophical works, including The Savage Anomaly and Time for Revolution. I am suggesting that the political and the theological problem of our time is that of freedom, which takes the form of potentiality in Agamben, the virtual in Deleuze, and potentia as constituting power in Negri. Freedom is a political project, not merely a theoretical one. Radical theology’s epistemological and political task is to think freedom, which means to think the death of God, especially since the idea of God traditionally grounds sovereign power and serves as its highest instantiation.

This book constitutes a sketch for a radical political theology, which is not a systematic theology in any way but takes the form of discrete but related interventions, or intercessions. Radical Political Theology is an effort to grapple with the politico-theological stakes of contemporary theoretical and cultural forms. Chapter 1, “The Parallax of Religion,” reads religion as a parallax, following Slavoj Žižek. A parallactical perspective shifts from one perspective to another but affords no synthesis or unity. I argue that religion can be seen as a parallax divided between ideology, on the one hand, and theology, on the other. In chapter 2, “Sovereignty and the Weakness of God,” I will consider the deconstruction of traditional notions of sovereignty and argue that sovereign power must be seen as political and theological at the same time and must be countered theologically and politically. The coincidence of the religious and the political in the constitution of sovereign power is profoundly ideological, and I will address the deconstruction of sovereignty in Derrida’s and Agamben’s work, following a brief discussion of Hobbes as a founder of modern sovereignty. I will also take up the contemporary postmodern theologies of Catherine Keller and John D. Caputo, along with the distinction between weakness and power, and argue that weakness is not simply the opposite of power but a resource of potentiality to challenge theo-political forms of power. Finally, Judith Butler’s interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s influential essay on “The Critique of Violence” will show what it means to align divinity with impotentiality rather than actual violence.

The middle of the book, chapters 3, 4, and 5, constitutes a complex engagement with issues of political theology as they are formulated in Spinoza and Carl Schmitt. This discussion attempts to work beyond both thinkers in order to preserve a more Spinozist perspective and oppose a more Schmittian one, even while learning from the force of Schmitt’s critique of modern liberalism. Chapter 3, “Baruch Spinoza and the Potential for a Radical Political Theology,” expands upon my reading of Negri above and elaborates on the potential for a radical political theology in the wake of Deleuze’s and Negri’s interpretations of Spinoza in a postsecular context. Potentia as understood by Negri is seen as a supplement to Derridean possibility and Agamben’s conception of potentiality rather than a substitution. Chapter 4, “Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Theo-Political Problem of Liberalism,” directly engages with Carl Schmitt’s conception of political theology and compares his thought with Leo Strauss, another influential and controversial intellectual. I seek to learn from Schmitt while disagreeing with him, as well as Strauss, and I suggest that we must understand what both Strauss and Schmitt criticize, which is liberalism. Liberalism is seriously compromised by its entanglement with industrial capitalism, as the work of Karl Polanyi demonstrates. If liberalism is dead, or replaced by neoliberalism, and capitalism is triumphant but savagely immoral, then what about democracy? In chapter 5, “Elements for Radical Democracy,” I articulate the idea of a radical democracy that sets the problematic up within the terms of Spinoza and Schmitt but then opens up beyond this horizon by considering the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Ranciére, and Catherine Malabou.

Chapter 5 raises the most important question of this book and risks thinking a radical democracy beyond liberalism and capitalism. Chapter 6, “Law Beyond Law,” turns to the question and current crisis of law and suggests that we are seeing a breakdown of our faith in law and that, in part, the neofundamentalisms of both Christianity and Islam, as well as other religions, can be seen as reactions to this situation, a desperate attempt to invoke a literalistic, divine law. I use Agamben’s thought in State of Exception to frame the problem, which is also an urgent practical problem in the context of the defiance and dismantling of United States and international law, partly with executive signing statements. Then, after briefly passing through Lacan and the post-Lacanian political thought of Alain Badiou and Žižek, I develop a post-Lacanian idea of unconscious law that I then relate to Deleuze’s notion of a productive event. Law is unconscious; it is not simply there (just as God does not simply exist) but rather is produced unconsciously, that is, before and beyond simple conscious, instrumental thought, by an event. This is a complex and constructive reading and leads in chapter 7, “Radical Theology and the Event,” into a further elaboration of the event by reading Deleuze into the current theoretical discussion of the importance of St. Paul raised by Badiou and Žižek, among others. Paul becomes a Deleuzian saint by reading Deleuze against the grain of his own antipathy to Paul but in a way that raises significant questions about the event of Christianity, the Resurrection of Christ Jesus, and the political stakes of our era.

Finally, the last chapter, “Plasticity and the Future of Theology: Messianicity and the Deconstruction of Christianity,” notes the messianic tone that pervades postmodern theology and philosophy of religion but also critically questions whether this messianism does not represent a desperate stratagem to preserve the hegemony of the West, by tying Western modernity so closely to its religious (Christian, or at most Judeo-Christian) identity. Here I draw upon the work of Catherine Malabou and her conception of plasticity to think a different configuration of theology, one that is more focused forward than backward, one that may be freed somewhat from the bonds of tradition and the responsibility for an oppressive and suffocating past. Plasticity is a new form of potentiality, but one that is immanent to form rather than transcendent of it. Plasticity can be viewed as a kind of immanent freedom in material terms. In a brief conclusion, I will summarize the claims of the book by articulating six theses of political theology.