Radical Democracy and Political Theology

Introduction

The failure of [contemporary] theology is its unwillingness, or inability, to ground a politically engaged ethos. Ultimately, most antiontotheology amounts to an eloquent mystical escapism … leaving the violent, unjust, idolatrous world to its own devices.

—Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Theology and the Political

This book arises out of two mutually reinforcing observations. First, the tradition of radical theology has heretofore been insufficiently political. Second, the predominant contemporary reading and employment of political theology has been antidemocratic in its thrust. Reading radical democratic theory into political theology redresses both issues. Radical theology joins together with radical democratic theory to provide an alternative political theology. In the process, the theopolitics of democratic theory and practice is laid bare and political theology is made more democratic.

This is the problematic and constructive thesis that the pages that follow will pursue. It is largely a theoretical work that operates on two fronts. First, the question asked throughout is a rather straightforward one—namely, what is political theology? Though straightforward, this proves to be no simple question, for it is intimately connected with the legacy of modern political philosophy, specifically modern liberalism and its predication on the division between the religious and the secular and the private and the public. This division of powers, which has constituted the modern governing philosophy, if not the philosophy of governance, has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. The so-called postmodern return of religion has brought into question the secularization hypothesis that was long assumed within sociological theories of modernity. Within political philosophy and cultural and religious theory, this has meant a shift from the secular to the postsecular, which renders modern liberal philosophy antiquated at best.

Regarding my use of the designation postsecular, it is to be understood in two different registers. Philosophically, it draws on the contemporary theological critique of the reign of secular reason and is concerned with how the supposed neutral public sphere contains its own ideological bias with regard to the rightful place and practice of religion. Specifically, the shift from the secular to the postsecular comes by way of the awareness that the expectation that religion be kept as an exclusively private matter of individual conscience is in fact a modern Protestant norm. Further, the postsecular is a way of talking about the so-called theological turn within contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. If, as John Caputo has argued, modern philosophy can be at least partially distinguished by the Enlightenment critique of religion, the postmodern is postsecular in the sense of it becoming critical of this Enlightenment critique. In Caputo’s words, contemporary philosophy has become postsecular as it has grown disenchanted with the disenchanters, enlightened about the (old) Enlightenment, and suspicious of the Enlightenment suspicion of religion.¹

But shifting registers, the postsecular is also to be understood politically as a fundamental change with regard to the secularist selfunderstanding of the state. This meaning of the postsecular is given expression in a recent lecture given by Jürgen Habermas, when he states in reference to the work of John Rawls and Charles Taylor:

Although the secularization of state authority makes it necessary to justify the political constitution in ways that are neutral toward competing worldviews, the constitution itself must not ignore the political contributions made by religious groups within civil society to the democratic process. It follows that even the collective self-understanding of a democratic community cannot remain unaffected by the religious element within the pluralism of worldviews. The political that has migrated into civil society retains a reference to religion, however indirect, as long as religious and nonreligious citizens respect one another as such and trust one another as post-secular contemporaries.²

It is precisely this postsecular political transformation that opens up the possibility pursued in this book, which is, namely, the development of a democratic political theology. And while this notion of the postsecular has been seized upon by many conservative or neotraditional elements within contemporary thought and politics, my employment of it throughout this work is for a different purpose. By radicalizing the democratic potential of this postsecular moment, this serves to continue, if never to complete, the unfinished work of radical theology.

One more clarification of terminology is in order before proceeding further. By modern liberalism what I specifically have in mind is the strand of modern political philosophy that has become an all-embracing global system predicated on the logic of individual freedoms, and that, in the words of Eric Hobsbawn, is perfectly compatible with the free market.³ While there are of course a wide range of approaches and schools of thought within the general tradition of modern liberalism, my concern throughout in developing the critique of liberalism is how easily its political philosophy of governance has been joined to a free-market neoliberal economic policy such that the political itself has been effectively precluded or, in the terminology of Carl Schmitt, neutralized. This will be developed in chapters 1 and 2 in terms of the postpolitical and the process of depoliticization that has been the long-term effect of the market-based economy that has long since become the global norm. Put briefly, as will be explained in more detail later on in reference to the work of the American political philosopher Benjamin Barber, while democracy is good for free markets, free markets have not proven to be good for democracy.

I should be clear that I do not intend this critique of modern liberalism so much in ideological terms—that is to say, as a blanket condemnation of liberalism writ large—but more as a way of situating the present political predicament. Indeed, I find much value and even inspiration in the work of contemporary liberals such as John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and Richard Rorty. Additionally, Habermas’ recent claim that it is Rawls who is the first political philosopher who systematically takes into account the relevance of religious doctrine and religious communities for both the founding of a secular constitution and the democratic processes within such a frame⁴ must be noted. By persuasively demonstrating how Rawls retains an important role for religion in legitimating a secular state authority, Habermas makes clear the important contribution that the modern liberal tradition can and must make to this burgeoning field of study regarding the nature and parameters of contemporary political theology and, more specifically, the connection between political theology and democratic theory. But in examining the long shadow cast over the field by the legacy of Schmitt and his explicitly antidemocratic casting of political theology, I believe that the best and most helpful resources and theoretical orientation for the development of a fully democratic political theology lie elsewhere than in the recuperation of modern liberalism.

Specifically, as I will detail in the chapters that follow, contemporary political theology first emerged and continues to thrive directly as a consequence of the despair over the perceived failure of modern liberalism. As such, political theology is originally conceived as the first and greatest rival to the dominant but increasingly weakened and ineffectual political order. While the modern liberal democratic state languishes in the technocratic grasp of economic bureaucrats, rendering contemporary politics nothing more than a means of money management, political theology clarifies the true nature of the political. Whether this is by the conceptual politics of enmity or more directly still, by political theology’s focus on the nature of sovereign power, the field of battle is set, matching modern liberal philosophy against its ancient and enduring foe, political theology. At stake is not only the proper relationship between religion and politics but, even more fundamentally, the very meaning of power and the conditions of possibility for political practice. Therefore, if modern democratic theory and practice are predicated on modern liberalism, then what becomes of democracy in the postliberal, postsecular moment that political theology hearkens? Does the postliberal and postsecular require us also to be postdemocratic as well? Or might there be another way to conceive of democracy, one that is not predicated on the liberal separation of powers nor in cahoots with neoliberalism’s free-market ideology and thus able to survive liberalism’s apparent demise?

It is with regard to this latter question that radical democratic theory emerges as the necessary alternative to liberal democracy and political theology as currently understood and practiced. The selfappointed task of radical democratic theory is, accordingly, to show how and why this alternative conception of democracy is not only a desirable but a necessary alternative. The global economic cycles of boom and bust, culminating in the September 2008 world financial collapse, should prove that the present collusion between liberalism and corporate power is untenable: mounting debt, imperial hegemony, a permanent state of war, to say nothing of irreversible environmental degradation, the looming energy crisis, and so on. As the radical democratic theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write on this point in the preface to Multitude: Never has democracy been more necessary. No other path will provide a way out of the fear, insecurity, and domination that permeates our world at war; no other path will lead us to a peaceful life in common.⁵ In many ways, Hardt and Negri’s collaborative works provide the inspiration for this present book. By their radical conception of democracy they refuse to allow the politics of democracy to be usurped by the economics of free-market capitalism. Nevertheless, they acknowledge that global capital functions as an empire, only it is an empire without a controlling center, one that eclipses even the sovereign power of the modern state form. As such they renew the central task of democratic theory as first begun by Alexis de Tocqueville by grappling with the particular nature of democratic power as a diffuse force. But, as this book will explore most directly in chapter 6, whereas Tocqueville’s concern was primarily in showing democracy’s palpability for the postrevolutionary world (and, as such, his Democracy in America was a quintessentially modern work in political philosophy that still took for granted the sovereignty of the nation-state), Hardt and Negri belong to the age of globalization and thus give articulation not only to a postliberal conception of democracy but also a postmodern and even a postnational one. In this way, radical democracy takes the sting out of political theology’s original critique by severing the ties between modern liberalism and democratic theory and practice. In other words, political theology and democracy need not be opposed as mutually exclusive options, but instead, by conceiving of democracy otherwise, this paves the way for an alternative form of political theology as well. In short, while getting its impetus from the despair over the perceived failures of modern liberalism, political theology need not, and must not be allowed to, translate into a rejection of democracy as such.

Which brings us to the other theoretical front opened by this book—namely, to demonstrate the necessity for a robust political theology as a critical supplement to contemporary radical democratic theory’s efforts at rethinking the conceptual bases of democracy itself. If the fault line between modern liberalism and political theology comes down to the meaning of power, we are still left burdened with another significant question: what is the true nature and source of political power? By its conception of and appeal to popular sovereignty, modern democracy was truly revolutionary. But as has been shown by a slate of recent radical democratic theorists, by conflating popular sovereignty with a representative system of government, modern liberal philosophy effectively restores or maintains the theopolitical rule of the one. In this way, the revolutionary impact of modern democracy is contained and curtailed. Rather than following the logic of democracy to its true ideal of self-governance by the rule of all by all, which would mean the dispersal and diffusion of power, the sovereignty of the people kept the logic of sovereign power inherited from the theology of the indivisible divine intact. While radical democratic theory accomplishes the conceptual shift from the people as one to the multitude as many, a democratic political theology might serve as its critical and necessary supplement by drawing on alternative theological sources, specifically theologies of the weakness of God as opposed to those traditionally oriented around divine power. Or, as the present work will claim, a democratic political theology reveals democracy as the political instantiation of the death of God.

This argument is meant in a constructive fashion by detailing the nature of a viable form of political resistance for today. In other words, when radical democracy is wed to political theology, exodus—defined as a flight from sovereignty and a taking leave of domination—rather than transcendence is shown to be the only means for a meaningful form of resistance and rebellion. Rejecting both the theopolitical fatalism of the late Heidegger, who tells us in an interview from 1966 that only a God can save us now,⁶ and what Mark Lilla terms Carl Schmitt’s politics of theological despair,⁷ which rests on a nostalgic vision of a unified Christian world and breeds a virulent form of political cynicism, this book instead theologically affirms democracy as the rightful coming-to-power particular to humanity. As a democratic political theology informed by, and intended as a critical supplement to, radical democratic theory, this coming-to-power is necessarily understood as an immanent force. If, as Hardt and Negri suggest, democracy is the necessary means by which we get beyond the present state of war, domination, and environmental degradation, then this path can only come from within. As an inside-out force, the exodus to the beyond is not imagined in terms of some other world but an unveiling and affirmation of our own present possibilities.

I

While this is the book’s main argument, I must first step back to provide some context for the opening observations. Concerning the first, where I assert that the tradition of radical theology has been insufficiently political, another way to put that point is to say that there is no truly radical political theology. On the contrary, radical theology, either wittingly or unwittingly, often serves to buttress an inherent political conservatism, whereas radical political theory and left-leaning political movements and organizations have consistently failed to appreciate the truly revolutionary potential of religion as a mobilizing and motivating force. When speaking of radical theology, I have in mind a specific trajectory of late twentieth-century Anglo-American Protestant theological thought that takes its lead from the methodological reconfiguration of theology that was accomplished by the earlier crisis theologians, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich. As the Anglican Bishop John Robinson so eloquently summarized the challenge that these Protestant thinkers posed to traditional Christian theology in his best-selling book from 1963, Honest to God, in order for Christianity to be relevant and credible in the modern, scientific age, it must strip itself of religion (Bonhoeffer’s religionless Christianity), mythology (Bultmann’s method of demythologizing), and supernaturalism (Tillich’s notion of God as the ground of being).⁸ In its American variant, this trajectory came to expression in the radical death-of-God movement, whose leading voices included Thomas J. J. Altizer, William Hamilton, and Gabriel Vahanian. One effect of these radical death-of-God theologies was the creation of the seemingly oxymoronic movement within American philosophical theology called secular theology, in which a certain strand of philosophical theology sought to sever its ties from its traditional bearings in the church and generate an alternative language of faith as desire.⁹ This marks the onset of postmodern theology, as various figures such as Carl Raschke, Mark C. Taylor, and Charles Winquist incorporated a deconstructive analysis into their respective theological projects, thereby radicalizing the earlier theology of crisis by questioning the very conditions of possibility for theological thinking and extending the radical death-of-God theologies by announcing the impossibility of classical theology.¹⁰ Finally, this genealogy comes to its contemporary expression in the theology of the weakness of God, a theology unlike the radical death-of-God movement or its postmodern a/theological successors by its explicit affirmation of the religious desire for God. Only now, this is a religious affirmation for a God who has passed through the crucible of the death of God and the critique of ontotheology and is thus a God whose power is a power of weakness and in solidarity with the poor and outcast instead of being imagined in terms of the divine sovereign.

While the interests of the radical and postmodern theologians were characteristically broad and far ranging, moving seamlessly from philosophy and theology to literature, psychoanalytic theory, art, and architecture, the political was notably absent. This lack of interest in and disengagement from political theory and analysis by the radical and postmodern theologians is perhaps most emblematic when it concerns its treatment and understanding of Marx. Almost without exception, Marx is conflated with Nietzsche and Freud as an evangelist of suspicion and commended for his contribution to the hermeneutics of suspicion, whereas Marx’s more programmatic political efforts are given little to no attention at all.¹¹ My point here is not that radical theology must somehow become more Marxist in order to engage the political but rather that even an overtly political thinker such as Marx is treated in a characteristically apolitical fashion.

The apolitical nature of radical theology is one thing, but its essential conservatism is something else. The argument concerning the conservatism of radical theology has been made by Nick Brown in his observation of the British theological scene. Brown argues that there is an underlying commitment to inherently conservative political principles that animates much of the radical theological project. Indeed, there is a curious connection in how a number of radical Christian thinkers, despite [their] commitment to a socialist reading of the Christian faith, nevertheless demonstrate an interest and indeed faith in concepts which are valued and promoted within Conservative traditions as much as they are in any other political philosophy.¹² Most significant is the shared emphasis that both radical theology and conservative political philosophy place on individualism, and correlatively, anti-institutionalism, by pitting individual freedom against overbearing institutions (whether the church or the state). Also, as Brown observes, the love of freedom and the opposition to overbearing institutions brings with it a call for individual responsibility (87). For Brown, this exemplifies a central tension that he finds expressed by the radical Christian theologian Don Cupitt:

[there is] a permanent tension within Christianity itself between order and freedom—between, that is, the need in any historical society for standard symbols, rituals, and disciplinary structures, and the clamour of those who will always try to argue that we have now outgrown the need from such structures and can escape into pure spiritual freedom.

The excitement and dynamism of Conservatism this century has been generated by a creative tension between these two principles: our belief on the one hand in individual freedom … and on the other hand a commitment to maintaining the institutions which hold our nation together.¹³

A truly radical political theology would be one that put both the political and the theological order in question, whereas what passes as so-called radical theology uses its theological critique in the service of a prevailing, even if unseen or unquestioned, political order.

A similar observation was made years ago by the sociologist of religion Richard Fenn, when he commented on the death-of-God theologies of the 1960s. For Fenn, radical theology is a misnomer because of its unwitting tendency to sanctify the dominant, if not ruling, values in American society.¹⁴ This assertion might seem counterintuitive at first glance, especially when considering on the one hand the personal political leanings of most radical theologians and, on the other, the personal piety of most Americans. It is safe to say that the triumphant proclamation of the death of God was a scandal to, rather than the sanctification of, the dominant religious values of most within American society. But what Fenn was identifying was a much deeper form of political ambivalence within the death-of-God movement, one expressing itself either in the form of a religious and political moratorium wherein faith, ritual, and organization are all suspended indefinitely or, even more problematic, by its unqualified Yes to the world as a balance to its No to God. By evacuating God from its religious, moral, political, and cultural analyses, the death-of-God movement found itself bereft of a critical lever by which to judge and direct the energies of society. In the words of the historian of religion Charles Long, who writes in reference to the death-of-God movement, they

have no particular touchstone, no specific understanding of any reality as ultimate from which to launch a truly radical attack on these issues [of racial injustice, civil rights, etc.]. They suffer from a linguistic confusion—an inability to assign the proper words to reality. They are like that religious figure, the trickster, who has the power to create but no sense of what or how to create. And thus their works burst above and around us as the ephemeral balloons that they are.¹⁵

This is not to discount or diminish the landmark achievements of the radical death-of-God movement in theology nor its postmodern deconstructive successor. Rather it is to say that it was important but incomplete precisely because it was insufficiently political. Its limitations are apparent especially when surveying the desperate need for a meaningful, viable, and potent alternative ideology to counter the unrestrained and increasingly unregulated spread of global capital and to direct the energies of opposition toward a future beyond either dehumanization or terror. Further, not only has radical theology failed to contribute to contemporary political theory, but also and perhaps more telling, it has thus far been unable to generate an alternative piety. As Phillip Goodchild states, there is no higher task, yet the truth of the matter is that radical theology has yet to break through into the mind of religion as practiced. It remains, in the most limited sense, an expression of academic theology. As such, the long-term change it hoped to effect in the very institution of religion never materialized. Meanwhile, conservative religiosity, increasingly wedded to a conservative political and cultural agenda, now reigns supreme.

Another way to put this concern, as suggested by the moral philosopher Jeffrey Stout, would be to critique contemporary theology for its self-marginalization or isolation, with the result being that in the midst of the return of religion, the public is utterly lacking in a meaningful theological understanding. Stout writes,

Academic theology seems to have lost its voice, its ability to command attention as a distinctive contributor to public discourse in our culture. Can theology speak persuasively to an educated public without sacrificing its own integrity as a recognizable mode of utterance? … Theologians with something distinctive to say are apt to be talking to themselves—or, at best, to a few other theologians of similar breeding. Can a theologian speak faithfully for a religious tradition, articulating its ethical and political implications, without withdrawing to the margins of public discourse, essentially unheard?

He continues:

The worry that this question imposes an exclusive choice between two foci of loyalty, that one must turn one’s back on tradition in order to be heard by the educated public at large (and vice versa), has turned many theologians into methodologists. But preoccupation with method is like clearing your throat: it can go on for only so long before you lose your audience. Theologians who dwell too long on matters of method can easily suffer both kinds of alienation they fear. They become increasingly isolated from the churches as well as from cultural forums such as the academy and the leading nonsectarian journals of opinion. This isolation helps explain why the much-heralded religious resurgence in American culture lacks a theological (as opposed to a prophetic or evangelical) voice and also why theology has benefited little from the resurgence. The resurgent piety tends not to be disciplined by serious thought, just as academic theology tends not to be nourished by piety—at least not the kind of piety now enjoying resurgence.¹⁶

The lone possible exception to this problem of the disconnect if not irrelevance of contemporary theology to public life would be the liberation theologies that swept through the worlds of Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Islam in the latter half of the twentieth century.¹⁷ But even liberation theology, which was perhaps the most effective and wide-ranging recent theopolitical intervention, does not escape the problem and does not entirely mesh both a radical politics with a radical theology. For while effectively