Totalitarianism and Political Religions Volume III

Maier, Hans

doi:10.4324/9780203942451

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…45 That the movement towards state control started as early as the Middle Ages was later meticulously demonstrated by Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies (1957), which likewise stated that the secularisation -or rather, politicisation -of the church was accompanied by a sacralisation of politics. 46 Therefore, although the German legal scholar Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde was to some extent right to say that the rise of the state was a 'process of secularisation' (and, for that matter, the most momentous one), 47 it is perhaps more adequate to speak of the 'migration of the holy' from the church to the state as John Bossy did in 1985 or William Cavanaugh in 2011. 48 The last big wave of secular-religious comparisons started in the 1970s, this time leaving the field of politics, strictly speaking.…”

Section: The Waves Of Secular-religious Comparisonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The proliferation of secular religions

Nyirkos¹

2021

Pro Publico Bono - Magyar Közigazgatás

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The term ‘secular religion’ first appeared in the description of modern totalitarian ideologies but soon became a general category applied to other political, socio-economic and cultural phenomena. The first problem with this approach is the inherent contradiction of the term, since ‘secular’ by all modern definitions means ‘non-religious’, making a secular religion something like a ‘nonreligious religion’. The second is the wide range of examples from communism to liberalism, from capitalism to ecology, or from transhumanism to social media, which suggests that with some creativity almost anything can be described as secular and religious at the same time. The first part of the paper deals with the terminological difficulties, while the second outlines the history of drawing secular-religious analogies, concluding that the ultimate failure to give a coherent narrative of secular religions is rooted in the impossibility of giving an adequate definition of religion in the first place.

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Section: The Waves Of Secular-religious Comparisonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The proliferation of secular religions

Nyirkos¹

2021

Pro Publico Bono - Magyar Közigazgatás

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“…A term framed by Gentile, Mussolini's philosopher, as a state of 'total power', political power replacing theological authority is a theme in much literature on totalitarianism (Friedrich and Brzezinski 1967). Here 'totalizing' political structures replace the old theological order to form what Voegelin in the 1930s described as the new 'political religions' (Maier 2004(Maier , 2007Maier and Schafer 2007;Voegelin 1999).…”

Section: The Educational Sociology and Political Theology Of Disenchamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As theorists in the sociology of religion, we may usefully return to Voegelin (1999) analysis of the 'political religions' (Maier 2004(Maier , 2007Maier and Schafer 2007) or the enduring literature on autocracy, dictatorship and totalitarianism (Arendt 2004;Casanova 1994Casanova , 2009Friedrich and Brzezinski 1967;Popper 2011;Talmon 1961). But to me, re-reading Schmitt (2005), I note once more his claim that 'All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts' (Schmitt 2005, p. 36).…”

Section: Secularization and Securitizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Educational Sociology and Political Theology of Disenchantment: From the Secularization to the Securitization of the Sacred

Gearon

2018

Religions

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This article provides an outline theoretical synthesis of educational sociological and political theology, through the concept of ‘disenchantment’ to afford insights on critical current debates around secularization and securitization. Drawing together two originating frameworks—Max Weber’s (1918) sociological theorization of religious authority’s intellectual demise as disenchantment of the modern world and Carl Schmitt’s (1922) contemporaneous framing of a political theology—this article argues that a bringing together of these apparently disparate perspectives facilitates an understanding of securitization as a staging post in the history of the secularization of religion in education. Here an educational sociology and political theology of disenchantment thereby provides embryonic evidence of the securitization of the sacred as a staging post in the history of secularization. It is argued, in conclusion, that all these framings are a matter of decision-making in the exercise of ideological, political and theological power in and through education. Such decision-making in educational policy presents new sociological and political-theological territory for empirical and theoretical analysis of the shifting sources of authority amongst what C. Wright Mills called the “power elite”.

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“…There may be good reasons to think of various “secular” economic and political ideologies as alternative “religions” or “faiths.” Scholars such as Emilio Gentile, Michael Burleigh, Hans Maier, and Roger Griffin (reviving the concept of “political religion” first advanced by Luigi Sturzo, Eric Voegelin, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Raymond Aaron, among others) have argued that avowedly atheistic or “secular” ideologies such as fascism, Leninism, and Juche in North Korea can only be fully grasped in terms of the psychology and sociology of religion (Gentile 2006; Burleigh 2007; Maier 1996; Griffin 2005). Robert Nelson makes a similar argument for economic ideologies (Nelson 2001).…”

Section: The Ambiguity Of “Sacred Violence”mentioning

confidence: 99%

Does “Religious Violence” Exist?: An Argument Against Essentialism with Particular Reference to the Conquest of the Americas

Osborn

2014

Politics and Religion

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Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there has been a dramatic increase in social scientific literature on the topic of "religious violence," much of it arguing that there is a uniquely intense and disturbing connection between religion and political conflict and bloodshed. In this article, I challenge mainstream accounts of "religious violence" with an illustrative example from the 16th century of the theoretical and empirical problems with all such essentialist claims. The terms employed in the construction of "religious violence" might today just as easily be applied to the violence of the putatively "secular" nation-state. Furthermore, framing the debate in these sharp binary terms, as William Cavanaugh compellingly demonstrates, is itself part of a political project that had a very particular historical beginning and that conceals as much as it reveals about the nature of violence, both in the past and in the present.

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Totalitarianism and Political Religions Volume III

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

The proliferation of secular religions

The proliferation of secular religions

The Educational Sociology and Political Theology of Disenchantment: From the Secularization to the Securitization of the Sacred

Does “Religious Violence” Exist?: An Argument Against Essentialism with Particular Reference to the Conquest of the Americas

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