Telos 194 (Spring 2021): Political Theology Today is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
What does political theology mean today? At the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conference from which many of the essays in this issue originated, a primary goal was to discuss the crisis of secular liberalism and “how faith is reshaping culture and politics today.”[1] But even this project perhaps limits too much the scope of political theology, implying that we have a choice between reason and faith, or that political theology is a commitment to faith rather than an analysis of the element of faith that underlies all of our endeavors. The idea of political theology begins with the premise that every existing human order is built upon some understanding of ultimate meaning. The task would then be to analyze the kind of meaning that each existing order embodies and determine the kinds of decisions about meaning that are made and need to be made at various points in its history. Even secular liberalism, to the extent that it constitutes an existing order, presumes some answer to this question of meaning, and a closer look at the political theology of the United States reveals a mythic dimension that underlies its liberal democratic processes.[2] The essays in this issue examine the political theological underpinnings of economy, politics, technology, and religion, laying out the ways in which these areas of human life develop not as autonomous spheres but as the result of struggles over a set of political theological choices.
Edward Hadas argues that the most essential questions for the modern economy do not concern money but rather the basic relationship between human labor and the gifts of nature on the one hand and the social relationships that may be mediated but not established by money on the other hand. Arguing against the promoters of free markets and economic growth as well as against the proto-Marxist critics who treat money as the basis of commodity fetishism, he contends that money is in fact neutral. Money itself can neither enrich nor alienate people because social relationships are primary and cannot be fundamentally affected by money relationships either for good or for ill. Our structures of production, consumption, and distribution are based on human decisions, not impersonal forces embodied in money, which is in reality just a bunch of numbers. Human economy, however, deals ultimately with qualitative issues. Hadas also makes a useful distinction between token-money and treasure-money, in which the former circulates and facilitates exchange and the latter is held as assets that have a representational value as a sign of power and influence. But whereas pre-modern treasure was generally held as noncirculating assets like gold and jewels, modern forms of treasure are held as fungible assets that can often be difficult to distinguish clearly from token-money, were it not for the way they become, most clearly for figures such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, a gauge of social prestige and power, like the shells of the Melanesian form of potlatch described by Marcel Mauss.[3]
In another attempt to understand the social decisions embedded in capitalist structures, David Westbrook argues against the idea that the economy is organized according to an opposition between capital and labor or between free markets and government. Instead, he maintains that “capital has been socialized,” meaning on the one hand that capital markets like those for mortgages or for stocks have become an instrument of social welfare policy and on the other hand that the state supports well-functioning capital markets for social reasons. Both salaried employees and social security recipients are rentiers who depend on the health of capital markets. The key debates revolve around the structuring of these markets rather than supporting either markets or the state. For Westbrook, the ubiquity of capital in our lives indicates that the economy has become abstract to the extent that transactions are all mediated by electronic money. Yet if money is neutral, as Hadas argues, the abstraction of money is perhaps just a consequence of its usefulness in mediating social relationships. Those relationships remain primary, however, reinforcing Westbrook’s subsequent argument that status in a feudal sense is a better way of describing contemporary social relationships than the idea of contracts between equal, abstract individuals. The key decisions for the state involve the way in which it manages markets to achieve particular goals or to protect or privilege certain status groups, such as tenants, landlords, stockholders, wage earners, or retirees. For Westbrook, the protection of financial markets (and thus the propping up of financial institutions during the global financial crisis) is essential for maintaining not only the assets of stockholders and debt holders but also the financial plumbing that has become essential for contemporary forms of exchange. The assumption has been that the Main Street economy of financial transactions can only be protected through government guarantees of Wall Street assets in financial markets. If the two are in fact not so closely linked, as Hadas’s analysis suggests, then it would be a social choice to prop up the latter.
Tim Luke focuses on the myth of technological progress in order to argue that while the purveyors of the Dark Enlightenment see themselves as hyperrational, their theories actually are grounded in representations derived from films such as The Matrix, in which a self-proclaimed digital elite dominate a world that is otherwise occupied by people unaware of their true situation. The “neo-reactionaries” of the Dark Enlightenment share a faith in digital, machinic systems, and they imagine that the experts of this realm make up a dominant elite of the internet age, who should maintain an autocratic authority. This new political theology based on technological progress becomes a mythic conception, which merges into a cybernetic form of white supremacy that imagines a new race of improved humans that would take over and rule the planet. Rather than the result of a supposedly ineluctable logic of technological progress in an information age, the Dark Enlightenment simply recycles an Aryan mythology.
If Hadas, Westbrook, and Luke show that economics and technology cannot be understood without considering how their history depends on decisions about values and meaning, Giada Scotto conducts a similar analysis for politics. In order to counter the idea that direct democracy would be able to create unmediated access to the people and avoid representational processes of mythmaking, she turns to Carl Schmitt’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of representation in order to argue that political order can never dispense with an authority that creates a representation of political unity. Because the “people” can only constitute itself by demonstrating acclaim for a representation, the construction of popular sovereignty will always be determined by the representational authority. The glorification of the popular sovereign does not empower the people directly but in fact establishes the power of the glorifier, the representer of the people. Consequently, even new social media cannot construct a new kind of direct democracy because its mechanisms still depend upon structures of acclamation in the form of “likes” that are subordinated to the representations that they are acclaiming.
If our politics are always dominated by representations, then there is a mythic aspect to every political order. Sara-Maria Sorentino discusses the ambivalent character of the relationship between myth and history. While Carl Schmitt describes how myth can be an indicator of a hidden truth of history, Sorentino turns this argument around to show how myth can obscure history. In Schmitt’s analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, mythic tragedy is an aesthetic experience that does not suppress history but rather becomes a gauge of historical pressures. The mythic quality of Hamlet stems from the way in which the intrusion of history into the play occurs by way of the absent figure of James I. For Schmitt this sovereign exerts a hidden pressure that forces a change in the action of the drama. Taking up the idea of an absence that reveals a hidden truth, Sorentino argues that black slavery becomes a hidden truth that is obscured by the early modern construction of sovereignty. If Schmitt’s argument reveals myth to be an indicator of sovereignty’s insecurities through Hamlet’s indecision, Sorentino argues that the construction of the myth of sovereignty may depend on certain exclusions, in this case the suppression of the figure of the black slave in the establishment of the European form of sovereignty in the early modern period.
Considering how sovereignty in Egypt depends on its own exclusions, Beau Mullen argues that none of the political actors in Egypt maintain a commitment to liberal democratic values. Instead, a particular form of Islam provides the overarching political theological framework for Egyptian society. The military government under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has maintained its power through the establishment of a military-dominated capitalism on the one hand and a state-sponsored form of Islam on the other hand. While the military retains some legitimacy as one of Egypt’s most stable institutions and controls large parts of the economy, it cannot be considered secular. Its rule is buttressed by its promotion of a form of Islam that marginalizes the Muslim Brotherhood, designating them as an enemy, but also establishes its own forms of repression.
Mullen’s case study of Egypt leads into three review essays that discuss the wider phenomenon of Islamist ideology described in The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism by Elham Manea. In his review, Kacem El Ghazzali recounts how political Islam has transformed the Muslim world over the last forty years into a much less tolerant place. Local customs and traditions have been suppressed in the Islamist drive to impose strict religious restrictions on dress and speech that did not exist a generation ago. Most worrying, even the supposedly moderate forms of Islamism are pursuing the same goal of suppressing alternative traditions and religions. El Ghazzali insists that these developments should be understood neither as the true form of Islam nor as a distortion of Islam but rather as the recent strengthening of a particular interpretation of Islam to the detriment of alternative ones. The primary problem is not Western oppression but the growth of Islamist ideology against those Muslims who support human rights. Unfortunately, rather than allying themselves with such voices of tolerance in the Muslim world, the well-meaning attempts by Western leftists to promote tolerance of other cultures has often led them to defend the most reactionary and repressive examples of Islamic culture.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s discussion of Manea’s book emphasizes that the struggle against violent Islamism must also target the nonviolent versions that reject basic standards of human rights in favor of the goal of spreading Islamist ideology. In this ideological competition between ideals of equality, human rights, and religious tolerance on the one hand and the Islamist rejection of these values on the other hand, the defenders of human rights have been hampered by the charge of Islamophobia. But if Islamophobia is an irrational hatred of Muslims, Hirsi Ali describes the way in which Manea combines extensive personal experience with careful analytical distinctions, empirical studies, and a clear-eyed view of the values at stake to make her case for the danger that the spread of Islamist ideology presents for both the Muslim world and Western democracies. Hirsi Ali argues that it is crucial for Western liberal democracies and their institutions to support Muslim reformers and dissidents in their attempts to defend human rights within the Islamic world.
Emphasizing the theological aspect of this project, Rabab Kamal delves into the Islamic sources of political Islam in order to address how important it will be to establish an alternative theology that can provide a foundation for reformers to offer a more tolerant form of Islam. She points to verses from the Quran in order to describe the difference between the peaceful approach of the Mecca period and the more warlike sentiments of the Medina period. Because this conflict has existed since the beginning of Islam, the current shift toward a focus on the Medina period must be seen as part of the political theological legacy of Islam that can only be effectively countered through an alternative interpretation that would find its support in the Meccan verses. The Western encouragement of such a shift in theology will require a differentiation between these different currents of Islam, as opposed to an acceptance of political Islamism as the “genuine” form of Islam.
The issue concludes with a discussion of the conflicts in the United States surrounding the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Tim Luke observes that the sentiments of the rioters were not new but have been simmering for the past thirty years as part of an opposition between government control and populist rebellion. The Democratic Party has become the party of big business and big government in the kind of merging of market and state described by Westbrook, while the Republicans have aligned themselves with small businesses as well as anti-immigration and anti-globalist groups. Luke contends that this opposition will continue to shape U.S. politics for the foreseeable future. Reflecting on the cultic character of pro-Trump “fundamentalism,” Jay Gupta argues that the Capitol riot was most noteworthy not as a real, direct threat to democracy but in its expressive power, pointing to a problem of political legitimacy of U.S. institutions. Finally, Mark Kelly focuses on the restorationist aspect of the anti-Trump movement. While the Capitol riot as well as the Trump presidency itself consisted of more symbolism than substance, the Democratic election victory has led to a real recapture of state power by the corporate and government establishment. The riot provided the Democrats with an image of the enemy with which to justify their hold on power. For Kelly, the exaggeration of the events into an imagined state of exception that threatens the republic itself seeks to establish unity through the demonization of the populists.
1. “Political Theology Today as Critical Theory of the Contemporary: Reason, Religion, Humanism,” conference description, 2019 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Conference, February 15–17, 2019, New York, NY.
2. See Paul Kahn, “Constitutional Culture: Opening a Space between Law and Power,” Telos 189 (Winter 2019): 15–33; and Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2011).
3. Mauss describes a distinction between two types of exchange, kula and gimwali, among the Trobriand Islanders that corresponds to Hadas’s distinction between treasure-money and token-money. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (London: Cohen and West, 1954), pp. 19–29.
