Political Theology, Political Religion and Secularisation

Abstract

Recent work on the connection between religion and politics has often aligned itself with one of two intellectual traditions. On the one hand there is an expanding body of thought on the problem of the 'theological-political'. On the other, various discourses of 'political religion' amount to a different angle of approach to similar issues. The exact relation between the two orientations has seldom been spelled out. Nevertheless, it is intriguing for a number of reasons. The disjunction between the two is, in the foremost sense, disciplinary in character. The remit of the first is typically that of political philosophy, while the second body of work is largely historiographical. More prosaically, the two traditions are also readily identifiable with the 'big names' with whom they are invariably associated; Leo Strauss might just as well be a shorthand for political theology, and Eric Voegelin (albeit less well known) occupies a similar place in the tradition of political religion theory.To begin to establish that relation is therefore the primary intention of this short review article. The appearance, over the past few years, of a substantial set of monographs would seem an appropriate occasion on which to do so.The argument presented below is therefore intended as a clearing exercise, and it proceeds as follows. First of all, the intended meanings of the two principal terms are discussed, together with the conceptual architectures that support them.At the same time an attempt is made to indicate the kinds of story that the two approaches typically have to tell about modern political experience. In the second section, a brief dialogue is staged between them in order to bring into view an otherwise obscured, common intellectual source.That source is a curious one. European social and political thought in the mid-twentieth century produced a body of ideas which rooted totalitarian politics, in particular, in the relationship between modernity and the declining social importance of religious belief. Those ideas are the mainstay of the texts reviewed here (Burleigh