The term “political theology” took an unfortunate turn in the early part of the last century. Prior to then it had a rather august history. Saint Augustine’s City of God and Hobbes’s Leviathan are manifestly works of political theology, carefully tracing the ways in which theological judgments form political commitments and also the ways in which political exigencies might alter our theological dogmas. Both writers occupied themselves with the question of how political societies get constituted and on what basis, with Hobbes bringing greater conceptual clarity by borrowing Jean Bodin’s conceptions of “sovereignty.” Since then, we have organized our politics on the basis of the problem of sovereignty: its sources, nature, and operations.
A recent effort to join the millennia-long discussion of the relationship of authority, sovereignty, religion, and politics is as often confusing as it is illuminating.
By Luke Bretherton, Vincent W. Lloyd, Valentina Napolitano
(Columbia University Press, 2025)
I said that the term “political theology” fell into disrepute about a century ago. In 1922 a 34-year-old jurist by the name of Carl Schmitt published in Germany a book by that title. It is undoubtedly a brilliant work of political analysis, the slim volume taking a place among the canonical works of 20th-century theory. Schmitt deftly demonstrated that many political problems have their analogues in theological ones; for example, just as miracles reveal to us the true nature of the deity, so also decision-making in times of crisis reveals to us the nature of the decision-maker. Like Max Weber, Schmitt feared that politics had become technocratic and bureaucratic, the reliance on rules and procedures occluding the human elements of politics. He resisted seeing the state “as a huge industrial plant” and emphasized instead the possibilities and dangers of human action.
Which might have been fine had Schmitt not, in the summer of 1933, joined the Nazi Party. He remained a party member until the end of the war, at which point he was detained but never tried by Allied authorities. Still, a pall was cast over his reputation. Just as with his compatriot Martin Heidegger, scholars became skittish about his work; if they engaged these thinkers at all it was in the effort to prove that Nazism was not extrinsic to their philosophy. In the case of Schmitt this became especially tempting since he talked so much of power. Here, too, Schmitt thought analogically: The primordial use of political power was modeled on the exercise of divine power in creation, in bringing order out of chaos.
A second element of Schmitt’s political theology involved his famous use of the friend/enemy distinction. The sovereign act formed individuals into a people, a unity, one whose identity could be both constructed and maintained dialectically in opposition to an existential threat. The friend/enemy distinction is thus one of high stakes, where unification against the enemy is necessary for survival. Schmitt saw the distinction as essential to taking responsibility “to preserve one’s own form of existence.” It is, as Samuel Huntington might say, a clash of civilizations, or at least a clash of faiths.
A third element of Schmitt’s political theology involved what we might think of as the kingly and priestly function of the leader. Law ultimately emerged from the “common consciousness” or “spirit” of “the people.” The leader articulated and administered this common mind; one might think of Lincoln’s expression of civil religion in the American context. The people were already so constituted, but someone had to express it and turn it into law.
At the core of this analysis is Schmitt’s claim that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.” Even if the idea of an omnipotent leader could be traced back to the idea of an omnipotent deity, theological concepts still underwent transformation over time. The most consequential development occurred in the classical liberal tradition with the fracturing of Hobbes’s notion of the indivisibility of sovereignty. Liberals emphasized adherence to rules and procedures and thus obviated the human element in politics. Schmitt believed the inevitably of conflict and the persistence of existential threat required resolute action that could operate outside rules and procedures. The rule of law was a fine thing but not in exceptional circumstances.
As I said, Schmitt’s relationship to Nazism made him a pariah, and I suspect that subsequent writers avoided him to avoid any association. He seemed to be regarded more as a Nazi theorist than as a theorist who was a Nazi. Contemporary Integralists, sharing his rejection of liberalism, often refer to him, spurring suspicions of their own authoritarian ends. However, Schmitt had withdrawn active participation in the Nazi Party by 1936, and in his postwar interviews with Allied authorities he expressed disgust with Hitler. His initial enthusiasm for Hitler seems to have resulted from the fact that he regarded sovereign decisions as “miracles” in the sense that they had no references except for the fact that they happened, and he believed that Hitler’s exercise of sovereign power had that miraculous quality. But neither should we discount Schmitt’s own anti-Semitism.
It is hard to discern a man’s motives, especially when he writes in difficult times. Schmitt was exceptionally fond of Melville’s novel Benito Cereno and associated himself with the title character. The lesson Schmitt apparently drew from the book is that individuals have to compromise with evil when their safety is at stake, and this view would square with his own construal of politics: Leaders have an obligation to maintain the people and the nation. The central question is whether the relationship with Nazism is incidental to his thought or central to it . One hesitates to answer because if one allows for an essential connection, it then makes it most difficult to endorse anything Schmitt wrote. Granted, one is playing with dark forces here, but I don’t think arguing that Schmitt deepens our understanding of “the political” commits me to authoritarian principles any more than listening to Wagner commits me to anti-Semitism; nor does the fact that Plato worked for the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse mean I should no longer read or teach him.
The lesson Schmitt apparently drew from Benito Cereno is that individuals have to compromise with evil when their safety is at stake.
If Schmitt believed that liberalism devalued “the political,” he also worried that liberalism made religion in the modern world a recurring problem. In Germany in the middle part of the century, Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg engaged in an extensive debate over the idea of secularization itself. Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age vigorously argued that modernity had to be understood on its own terms and not simply as either an extension or rejection of the Christian centuries that proceeded it. In Blumenberg’s analysis, secularization was an argumentative term but not a scholarly one.
Those who reinvigorated political theology in the latter decades of the last century and the early part of this one aligned themselves more closely with Löwith’s argument—namely, that modernity could only be understood in reference to its Christian, theological roots: either as a rejection of them, a heretical reforming of them, or an extension of them. A great deal of the most interesting political theory of this century has resulted from analyzing the religious relationship between the modern and the premodern world.
The most important book in the genre (for my money) was Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations, an exceptionally profound work that O’Donovan wrote based on his study of Hobbes. O’Donovan largely defended the modern conception of sovereignty, arguing that “the legal-constitutional conception is the essence of Christendom’s legacy,” political sovereignty being compatible with divine sovereignty. Whatever else political thinking requires, it involves careful reflection on the nature of authority, which we may think of as power made legitimate.
Other writers see political theology as fundamentally opposed to secularization, including its derivative ideas of sovereignty. One recent example is What Is Political Theology?, written by Luke Bretherton, Vincent W. Lloyd, and Valentina Napolitano. The authors co-wrote the introduction, which is followed by individual chapters whereby each author tries to make his or her own distinctive contribution to political theology. The ghost of Schmitt is in the background of the book, and while the authors don’t come right out and say that Schmitt’s analytical work necessarily results in authoritarianism, that is very much the spirit of the work. I also think it’s unfair.
If Schmitt’s work was animated by German failure in the First World War and the corrupt formalism of the Weimar Republic, these authors clearly respond to contemporary events in America, although in their case they believe “authoritarian and proto-fascist movements ... captured the White House.” No fans of liberalism because of the way it “obscures questions of life and death,” they nonetheless do not want it “conceded to reactionaries and fascists.” At the same time, their analytical framework self-consciously derives its categories from critical theory, which, too, emerged from the chaos of the middle part of the last century and largely results in analyses that emphasize oppression and domination, holding out the possibility of liberation. While the first critical writers were serious thinkers engaged in substantive analysis, all too often their epigones find themselves handling tools clumsily. The resulting lack of refinement can’t be compensated for by highly stylized language.
The introduction is reasonably clear, however. The authors acknowledge that “in the background of each chapter is the critique of secularism, an ideology entangled with forces of mastery.” Since political theology alone has the conceptual tools to critique secularism and its offspring—capitalism and liberalism—it alone has the means at its disposal to liberate individuals from oppressive forms of domination, which is the practical aim of the authors. How expansively they conceive such forms varies by author, although their defense of democracy results from the fact that “the ordinary, everyday world is the site at which forms of domination, and the precarity and oppression they produce, are most acutely displayed.” Even so, systems remain their main concern; maybe that’s because things don’t look that bad up close.
Luke Bretherton’s chapter largely avoids jargon and is, in my estimation, by far the most successful effort of the three. Unlike the other authors, Bretherton has an actual theory of politics: the craft of forming and sustaining a common life with others over time in a particular place. I think that’s actually a pretty good way to think about politics, even if some important elements are left out of the definition. The most important omission in his chapter is the lack of attention to the issue of authority, which plays a central role in Christian renderings of political theology (although the authors commit themselves to a pluralized notion of political theology, not wanting to exclude other religions).
One potential problem in the book is that with the occasional exception by Bretherton, the authors substitute the vague “religious beliefs and practices” for actual theology. Bretherton avoids this by doing some interesting work on how eschatology operates politically. He writes:
Theologically understood, an apocalyptic orientation is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, nor does it represent a form of catastrophizing. Rather, it entails trusting that history is open to change, that a new creation is coming, and that the Spirit can bring into being a radical, surprising, and unanticipated newness, often in response to the cry for justice and love by those on the underside of history.
This rubs against arguments made by Eric Voegelin and others that eschatological ruminations are always destructive; Bretherton, however, fails to provide us with constructive examples.
I have less to say about Napolitano's chapter because I didn't understand it.
Lloyd
Lloyd makes it clear who the primary victims of oppression are: homosexuals, transgendered persons, women, racial minorities, and so forth, all of whom live under the constant threat of an untimely death. The most interesting part of his analysis occurs when he discusses prison abolition. “Political theology makes prison abolition left, not liberal.” It is about “purging a moral abomination,” and just as abolitionists considered slavery bad in the 19th century, so prison abolitionists consider prisons morally objectionable in the 21st. The idea is not necessarily to tear down walls but to rethink the very ideas of security, safety, and punishment, particularly the latter since, as Lloyd argues, the overcrowding of prisons “obviously … has nothing to do with crime.” The key is to shrink the whole system, but here, too, Lloyd’s theology seems absent a sensible view of authority, or of sin, other than one that locates sin completely and exclusively among the oppressors.
I have less to say about Napolitano’s chapter because, quite frankly, I didn’t understand it. I did get out of it that she wants to revivify the Weberian project of “reenchanting” the world against the forces of secularization, but I have little idea what the payoff is, other than eliminating oppression. She peddles frequently in abstractions and just as frequently assigns agency to them. Granted, she discusses immigration and race issues, but I’m not sure how this ties in to “a political theology of the guts that rests in the intricate relationship between fetish imagery, God’s work, commodities and money, desires, and potency,” nor how “the impersonal, as that which overcomes a mechanism of discontinuity and separation between who are, are not yet, are no longer, or will never be persons becomes part of a doing and an undoing of justice, beyond a sovereignty of possession and dispossession.” I suppose those who “will never be persons” will be the ones who do the “posthuman scholarship” of which she speaks. I could give even more egregious examples of her tortured prose. The margins of her chapter are filled by my question marks, and the fact that she is either unwilling or unable to write a clear English sentence makes me think she’s up to no good.
Unlike the other authors, Bretherton has an actual theory of politics.
What might that “no good” be? Napolitano seems especially wary of exercises of authority and its tendency toward exclusion or domination. An anthropologist by training, she advocates for an anthropological political theology. Yet the head-scratching elision of anthropology and theology makes me wonder why she needs theology at all. I think she tends to equate theology with religious studies, taking an ethnographic rather than a dogmatic approach. Imposed on the ethnographic research is the oppressor/oppressed scheme. Trying to cut through her rhetoric, it seems to me that she is especially concerned with what happens at the margins of sovereignty’s reach, and this analysis brings the whole concept of sovereignty into question. This tracks with her emphasis on apophasis: We know something only in terms of what can’t be said about it. I suppose the most charitable way of characterizing her style is that she’s trying to say what can’t be said, but the result neither quickens the pulse nor stirs the mind.
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