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The Moses of Italian Unity: Mazzini and Nationalism as Political Religion

Simon Levis Sullam

in Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism, 1830-1920

This chapter examines the nature of Mazzini's nationalism by analysing it as a ‘political religion’: a system of myths, symbols, and rituals the subordinates the collectivity to the supreme entity of ... More

This chapter examines the nature of Mazzini's nationalism by analysing it as a ‘political religion’: a system of myths, symbols, and rituals the subordinates the collectivity to the supreme entity of the nation. It studies Mazzinian nationalism both on the level of content – looking at how Mazzini defines the genesis of the nation – and on the level of form, looking at the ‘style’ of Mazzini's political thought. The chapter shows that this style is symbolic and ritual, based on single words that operate as symbols and are ritually repeated for the captivation of the followers. Finally, it explores the boundaries of Mazzini's liberalism, showing the limits of his republicanism and his paternalistic conception of democracy as ‘education’.Less

Political Violence in the Twentieth Century

Charles K. Bellinger

in The Genealogy of Violence: Reflections on Creation, Freedom, and Evil

Adolf Hitler and Naziism are interpreted as an extreme example of Kierkegaard's aesthetic sphere of existence. Stalin and Russian Communism are interpreted as an extreme example of Kierkegaard's ... More

Adolf Hitler and Naziism are interpreted as an extreme example of Kierkegaard's aesthetic sphere of existence. Stalin and Russian Communism are interpreted as an extreme example of Kierkegaard's ethical sphere of existence. The varying forms of psychopathology they manifest make clear the consequences of human rejection of the divine call to spiritual growth. Naziism and Stalinism can also be interpreted as political religions, in other words, as modern forms of idolatry.Less

Lincoln's Political Religion and Religious Politics

John Y. Simon, Harold Holzer, and Dawn Vogel

in Lincoln Revisited: New Insights from the Lincoln Forum

Abraham Lincoln's understanding of the requirements of republican government led him to direct religious sentiment toward responsible democracy or self-government. As a successful republic requires a ... More

Abraham Lincoln's understanding of the requirements of republican government led him to direct religious sentiment toward responsible democracy or self-government. As a successful republic requires a moral or self-controlled people, he believed the religious impulse of society could help moderate the excesses of passion and self-interest in the community. As a means of achieving this social order, Lincoln promoted “support of the Constitution” and “reverence for the laws” to become what he called “the political religion of the nation.” Lincoln believed that the perpetuation of the free government established by the American Revolution depended on this almost sacred law-abidingness, and he called on both politician and preacher to promote this “political religion.” This chapter focuses on a few examples of “Lincoln's political religion and religious politics” to illustrate what he thought was a prudent connection between politics and religion.Less

Political religion: secularity and the study of religion in global civil society

John D'Arcy May

in Religion, spirituality and the social sciences: Challenging marginalisation

The place of religion within the civil society has always been a contested issue. Some contend that religion should be separated from the mechanisms of the society while some argue that religion is ... More

The place of religion within the civil society has always been a contested issue. Some contend that religion should be separated from the mechanisms of the society while some argue that religion is indispensable to public morality and good government. In addition to the debates on religion, the concept of ‘political religion’ is also contested as it is a term loaded with ambiguities. Should religion be instrumentalised by politics? Should it be kept away from the political sphere? Is it the case that religions are constitutively political in their different ways, such that their political orientation will always come to light in the public sphere? These ambiguities in the notion of political religion call for caution in addressing the topic in the field of Religious Studies as well as in the field of International Relations. This chapter investigates in what sense religion can legitimately be political. It also considers the implications of this in International Relations. It ponders on whether the emerging global civil society will be secular in the same sense as its nation state predecessors.Less

Religion and Politics

Jason C. Bivins

in The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History

This chapter examines the relationship between religion and politics in America. Historically, both “religion” and “politics” have been intertwined in American public life. Indeed, American religions ... More

This chapter examines the relationship between religion and politics in America. Historically, both “religion” and “politics” have been intertwined in American public life. Indeed, American religions are de facto political (or at least politicized). This is obscured by the assumption that politics is simply government (and thereby something in which religion has had no place—either in the historical record or for normative reasons). This chapter discusses several themes and orientations that characterize American political religions: the embattled legacies, both practical and theoretical, of the constitutional period; the dynamics of allegiance and dissent (as these are understood by specific traditions, community, or practitioners), or the relation between religious obligations and those required by good citizenship (overlap generally yields sociopolitical harmony, while divergence may yield dissent); the embodied experience of political religions, as felt in areas like gender, race, identity, and will-formation; and the texture of public discourse and argumentation.Less

The Protestant ethic revisited: conservative Christianity and the quality of American democracy

John Anderson

in Christianity and Democratisation: From Pious Subjects to Critical Participants

This chapter examines the developments in Anglo-Protestant culture, with particular reference to its likely consequences for the evolution of American democracy. The factors contributing to the ... More

This chapter examines the developments in Anglo-Protestant culture, with particular reference to its likely consequences for the evolution of American democracy. The factors contributing to the emergence of the Christian Right correspond to those underlying the wider rise of political religion in various parts of the world. The Christian Right threatened American democracy. It promotes a socially conservative agenda. The argument of the Christian Right is that post-war ‘judicial tyranny’ has reinterpreted the First Amendment in such as way as to distort the intention of the founders by creating ever-larger hurdles to religious involvement in politics. There is an interesting parallel between Samuel Huntington's argument that Anglo-Protestant culture is somehow central to American identity and Christian Right claims that good governance requires Christian input into the political process. Christian Right leaders are concerned with their loss of power and authority.Less

Introduction

in Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual History

Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel was an advocate of political “sacralization” and totalitarian political thought who produced a system of reflections that were to shape the political and religious ... More

Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel was an advocate of political “sacralization” and totalitarian political thought who produced a system of reflections that were to shape the political and religious thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For him, political, philosophical, and religious convictions constituted a principled unity. In this chapter, the philosophy of Hegelianism as political religion is examined.Less

Conclusions and Speculations

in Totalitarianism and Political Religion: An Intellectual History

This concluding chapter discusses developmental systems, reactive nationalism, totalitarianism, and the forms of political religion that accompanied it. At the turn of the twentieth century, ... More

This concluding chapter discusses developmental systems, reactive nationalism, totalitarianism, and the forms of political religion that accompanied it. At the turn of the twentieth century, ideologies of reactive nationalism and rapid economic, particularly industrial, development made their appearance. Developmental nationalisms crystallized into true totalitarianisms—Marxist-Leninist, fascist, and national socialist. Hegelianism also had taken on the explicit attributes of secular religiosity typically found in modern totalitarianism.Less

Religion and Politics

Steve Bruce

in British Gods: Religion in Modern Britain

In Catholic Europe, progressive and working-class politics have often been anti-religious. In Britain, class conflict was often expressed within, rather than against, Christianity, with the Labour ... More

In Catholic Europe, progressive and working-class politics have often been anti-religious. In Britain, class conflict was often expressed within, rather than against, Christianity, with the Labour Party having deep roots in dissenting movements such as the Methodists. This chapter details such class connections and associated regional movements (such as the anti-English appeal of the Welsh chapels). It considers Muslim involvement in the Labour Party and the roots of anti-Semitism. The rapid rise and fall of the Christian Party and the Christian People’s Alliance are used to test the electoral popularity of conservative socio-moral positions. An apparent connection between identifying as Church of England and BREXIT-era xenophobia is demonstrated to be largely a matter of nostalgia: regular churchgoers are more likely than nominal identifiers to be pro-European Union and sympathetic to immigrants.Less

“Jewish World Conspiracy” and the Question of Secular Religions: An Interpretative Perspective

Paul Zawadzki

in The Paranoid Apocalypse: A Hundred-Year Retrospective on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

This chapter examines the role of the Protocols as part of an ominous new phenomenon: secular “political religions.” The Protocols is a remarkable case study in the way that, under the secular ... More

This chapter examines the role of the Protocols as part of an ominous new phenomenon: secular “political religions.” The Protocols is a remarkable case study in the way that, under the secular pressures of modernity's skepticism, scientific rigor, and drive to separate church and state, religious beliefs reemerged in a new and different idiom. The Protocols appeared in the middle of the “1900 moment” (1880–1910), when “the general worldview was affected by the fall in influence of the great religions” and when that collapse of traditional religion created a devastating psychological void. In this sense, the Protocols as a mythical narrative participated in the “re-enchantment” of the world—acting not as a regression from modernity but as a response to it.Less

The Progressive Mind and the Islamist Challenge

David Martin Jones

in History's Fools: The Pursuit of Idealism and the Revenge of Politics

At the millennium a progressive consensus influenced and constrained western democratic behaviour. The new consensus transcended conventional party politics. Its more prominent exponents considered ... More

At the millennium a progressive consensus influenced and constrained western democratic behaviour. The new consensus transcended conventional party politics. Its more prominent exponents considered developed states without enemies. It was no longer implausible to embed a realistic utopia, where global citizens, cherishing minority rights, would enable cosmopolitan democracy to flourish in a world society. This ambitious project pursued the universal emancipation of the culturally and colonially oppressed. Yet when the progressive mind encountered a rejection of its values expressed in a politically religious, Islamist idiom, it refused to countenance it. Assuming all problems available to rational solution, the progressive liberal order dismissed faith-based rejections of its universally shared, but essentially secular norms. The consequences of this rejection were fateful. Political Islam, in an absolutist mode, found the west’s commitment to secularism, democracy and progress delusional. This chapter explores the manner in which a distinctively Islamist idiom of expression, that in an extreme form, countenanced violence to instantiate its apocalyptic version of the end of history, rejected the secular liberal vision, but found in its tolerance, technological resources helpful to the promulgation of its postmodern message, in the Muslim world and across Europe.Less

Totalitarianism from Hitler to Pol Pot

Gregory Claeys

in Dystopia: A Natural History

This chapter focuses on the Hitler and the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, Stalin’s Bolshevik regime and the Gulag camps, and Pol Pot’s rule in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. It also includes ... More

This chapter focuses on the Hitler and the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, Stalin’s Bolshevik regime and the Gulag camps, and Pol Pot’s rule in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. It also includes consideration of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Its aim, as in Chapter 3, is to explain how persecution became so extreme, violent, and bloody in these regimes. An explanation is offered of how the concept of ‘political religion’ has been defended as a means of explaining these regimes. The foregoing argument about the relationship between fear, paranoia, and dystopian groups is then used to extend and refine this analysis.Less

Eric Voegelin and Representation

Miguel Vatter

in Divine Democracy: Political Theology after Carl Schmitt

This chapter discusses the political theory of Eric Voegelin as the earliest example of anti-Schmittian political theology based on the rejection of sovereignty. The chapter shows how Voegelin adopts ... More

This chapter discusses the political theory of Eric Voegelin as the earliest example of anti-Schmittian political theology based on the rejection of sovereignty. The chapter shows how Voegelin adopts Schmitt’s suggestion that political theology turns on the idea of a non-electoral representation of political unity but rejects Schmitt’s identification of this representative with the sovereign. Voegelin instead argues that ‘democratic’ societies are characterized by a dual system of representation, where philosophical and theological representatives of the transcendent God stand above sovereign representatives. Conversely, ‘totalitarian’ societies are societies that ‘close’ themselves to divine transcendence because they see salvation as a function of enacting immanent social laws. The chapter ends with a discussion of the relation between Voegelin’s idea of non-sovereign representation and contemporary accounts of populism, especially that of Ernesto Laclau.Less

Nazism—A Political Religion? Rethinking the Voluntarist Turn

Neil Gregor

in Nazism, War and Genocide: New Perspectives on the History of the Third Reich

This chapter offers a critique of Michael Burleigh's description of National Socialism during the Third Reich as a ‘political religion’. It examines many of Burleigh's arguments, such as his claim ... More

This chapter offers a critique of Michael Burleigh's description of National Socialism during the Third Reich as a ‘political religion’. It examines many of Burleigh's arguments, such as his claim that ‘Adolf Hitler's refashioned and selective account of his own life consisted of a series of dramatic awakenings like Paul on the road to Damascus’. It also challenges Burleigh's characterisation of the context which produced Nazism and his identification of the perpetrators, arguing that his perspective on the history of the Third Reich is at odds with much of the most compelling recent scholarship. In particular, the chapter contends that Burleigh's characterisation of the Nazi movement and regime as a ‘political religion’ reflects an older theoretical literature on nationalism which attributed its emergence mainly to secularisation. Finally, it finds the language of ‘political religion’, and its use to explain genocide, problematic because of what it implies about the nature of the act of killing of the Jews.Less

The Compensations of Illiteracy

Matthew Taunton

in Red Britain: The Russian Revolution in Mid-Century Culture

The illiteracy of the Russian peasantry was a key term in British understandings of the country in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. For writers such as the Russophile Stephen Graham, the Russian ... More

The illiteracy of the Russian peasantry was a key term in British understandings of the country in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. For writers such as the Russophile Stephen Graham, the Russian peasants benefited from an oral culture that brought them closer to God, and exempted them from the excessive rationality of Western literate culture. The opposition between Russian orality and British literacy was fundamental to many British responses to the Russian Revolution, and this chapter explores the lasting impact of this not only on views of Russia but also the development of the idea of literature, which was increasingly constructed as a dialogical alternative to the monologism of Soviet culture. The chapter also shows how deeply such debates were embedded in a much longer intellectual history of the Reformation. Writers discussed include Stephen Graham, Doris Lessing, and Jack Lindsay.Less

The Beerhall Putsch and the Transformation of the Nazi Movement after 1923

Derek Hastings

in Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism

This chapter focuses on developments that ultimately set Nazism on a markedly different trajectory and led to the demise of its relationship with Catholicism. It first considers Adolf Hitler's ... More

This chapter focuses on developments that ultimately set Nazism on a markedly different trajectory and led to the demise of its relationship with Catholicism. It first considers Adolf Hitler's decision in September 1923 to abandon his previous insistence on strict organizational independence before turning to the Nazi movement's alliance with other radical right-wing organizations under the leadership of the staunchly anti-Catholic Erich Ludendorff to form the Kampfbund. It then examines the impact of the Beerhall Putsch on the Catholic faith and the reconstitution of the Nazi party that signaled the shift away from Catholic imagery toward an increasingly secularized, all-encompassing political religion. The chapter concludes by describing the new Nazi trajectory after 1925.Less

Catholic Fascist Ideology in Argentina

Federico Finchelstein

in The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina

The fascists of Argentina believed fascism had to be rooted in Catholicism.This Argentine emphasis on the Catholic nature of their fascism did not affect the dissemination of an international ... More

The fascists of Argentina believed fascism had to be rooted in Catholicism.This Argentine emphasis on the Catholic nature of their fascism did not affect the dissemination of an international understanding of fascism, including Italian fascism and Nazism. Argentine fascists believed that fascism was a universal ideology with distinctive local adaptations. Their ideology was not only a radical form of political religion but also an extreme fascist political theology. Sacred violence was the premier Argentine way to synthesize fascism and religion. For the Argentine fascists, fascism as it was known in Europe was objectionable, but conceived for the Argentine context and in terms of the nacionalista religious crusade it was not only possible, but sound. The nacionalista concept of a war between believers and infidels represented a metaphor for future state-sanctioned terrorism. Nacionalistas justified this terrorism theoretically before it actually became a reality some decades later.Less