The status of ideology in the return of political religion theory

Abstract

The aim of this article is to call to attention a body of recent scholarly literature on the perimeter of political studies and, in turn, to subject it to scrutiny according to the accepted procedure of at least one branch of political studies. To this end, what is identified as the return of political religion theory is considered from the perspective of contemporary theories of ideology. As the idea of political religion has principally resurfaced in historiographical discourse the first part of the article takes the form of a discussion piece and sets out the claims in support of the return of political religion theory on their own terms. Three approaches to political religion are then separated and evaluated. In the process, the intention is to work through the recent literature in order to pare down what is credible in it to a specific claim about the structure of political ideologies as systems of meaning. The substantive core of the idea that is left is thus considered from the point of view of a theory of ideology.

Notes

  1. Emilio Gentile, ‘The sacralisation of politics: Definitions, interpretations and reflections on the question of secular religion and totalitarianism’, trans. by Robert Mallett, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 3(1) (2000), pp. 18–55; Marcela Cristi, From Civil to Political Religion: The Intersection of Culture, Religion and Politics (Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2001).

  2. E. Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. by George Staunton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

  3. E.g. Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1952); Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961); Leslek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution, 3 Vols, trans. by P.S. Falla (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).

  4. See Gareth Stedman-Jones, Introduction to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 3–187; Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 35.

  5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. by Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 142–151.

  6. E.g. Fred H. Willhoite, ‘Rousseau's Political Religion’, Review of Politics, 27(4) (1965), pp. 501–555.

  7. E.g. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 5, Modernity Without Restraint, M. Henningsen (Ed.) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000).

  8. E.g. François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. by Deborah Furet (London: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

  9. E.g. Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century, trans. by David Bellos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

 10. Mark Lilla, ‘Godless Europe’, New York Times Book Review, April 2, 2006, p. 6. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/books/review/02lilla.html [accessed 22 August 2006].

 11. E.g. Christi, op. cit., Ref. 1.

 12. Robert Bellah, ‘Civil Religion in America’, Daedalus, 96 (1967), pp. 1, 5.

 13. Bellah, ibid., p. 5; Christi, op. cit., Ref. 1.

 14. Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. by Joseph Ward Swain (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975). For Durkheim, a religion performs a social function in forging collective identity by means of providing ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things’ (p. 47).

 15. Bellah, op. cit., Ref. 12, p. 3.

 16. See esp. the recent work, amongst others, of Michael Burleigh and Roger Griffin, discussed later.

 17. R. Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991). See also Griffin, ‘The primacy of culture: The current growth or manufacture of consensus within Fascist studies’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37(1) (2002), pp. 21–43.

 18. E. Gentile, ‘Fascism, totalitarianism and political religion: Definitions and critical reflections on criticism of an interpretation’, trans. by Natalia Belonzentseva, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5(3) (2004), pp. 326–375, p. 356. Another origin of the present thinking are the studies of George L. Mosse, who explored the transformation of nationalism into a civil religion in 19th-century Germany and developed the term the ‘sacralisation of politics’. See Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1975); and Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1999).

 19. Roger Eatwell, ‘Reflections on Fascism and religion’, in Ami Pedahzur and Leonard Weinberg (Eds), Religious Fundamentalism and Political Extremism (London: Frank Cass, 2004); Ian Kershaw, ‘Hitler and the uniqueness of Nazism’, Journal of Contemporary History, 39(2) (2004), pp. 249–250; Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 213.

 20. Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 18, p. 330.

 21. Voegelin, op. cit., Ref. 7; Raymond Aron, The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness of the Twentieth Century, trans. by Barbara Bray (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

 22. E.g. Bernd Weisbrod, ‘Fundamentalist violence: political violence and political religion in modern conflict’, International Social Science Journal, 54(174) (2002), pp. 499–508; Stanley G. Payne, ‘On the heuristic value of the concept of political religion and its application’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6(2) (2005), pp. 163–174.

 23. Martin Blinkhorn, ‘Afterthoughts. Route maps and landscapes: Historians, “Fascist Studies” and the study of Fascism’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5(3) (2004), p. 520.

 24. See, for instance, Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War (London: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 5; Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 31; Philippe Burrin, ‘Political religion: The relevance of a concept’, History and Memory, 9(1–2) (1997), p. 322.

 25. Aron, op. cit., Ref. 21, pp. 178, 204.

 26. Griffin, op. cit., Ref. 17, p. 33. In addition to Aron's contribution, the influence Voegelin's account of political religion is significant, to the extent that there is a general tendency in the literature to construct a polarity between his approach (‘phenomenological’) and Aron's (‘functionalist’). E.g. Burrin, op. cit., Ref. 24; Griffin,‘Introduction: God's counterfeiters? Investigating the triad of Fascism, totalitarianism and (political) religion’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5(3) (2004), p. 304; Hans Maier, ‘Concepts for the comparison of dictatorship: “Totalitarianism” and “political religions”’, in Maier (Ed.), Totalitarianism and Political Religions, Vol. I: Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships, trans. by Jodi Bruhn (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 199–215. Underlying Voegelin's conception of political religion is, fundamentally, a ‘Christian anthropology’, a nostalgia for the passing of the community grounded in shared religious belief, the ‘universal ecclesia’ (Maier, ibid., p. 204).

 27. Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 1, pp. 21, 24–25.

 28. Juan J. Linz, ‘The religious use of politics and/or the political use of religion: Ersatz ideology versus ersatz religion’, in Maier (Ed.), Totalitarianism and Political Religions, Vol. I, p. 107.

 29. Linz, ibid., p. 108. It is important to note that Gentile has lately amended the account he gives of political religion, such that in part it is in tension with Linz's otherwise consensual definition. He now suggests that, while in most cases political religions will be irrevocably hostile to traditional religious institutions, in certain circumstances they might seek ‘to establish a rapport of symbiotic coexistence by incorporating the traditional religion into its own system of beliefs and myths while reducing it to a subordinate and auxiliary role’. See Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 140.

 30. E. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, trans. by Keith Botsford (London: Harvard University Press, 1996).

 31. Uriel Tal, Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Third Reich (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 31.

 32. Talmon, op. cit., Ref. 3. In a sense, Talmon might be said to have advanced an epistemological conception of political religion, having principally been concerned with the kind of exclusive access to truth proclaimed by the vanguards of various political movements in modern European history.

 33. See Robert Colls, ‘Ethics Man: John Gray's New Moral World’, The Political Quarterly, 69(1) (1998), pp. 59–71.

 34. John Gray, Heresies: Against Progress and other Illusions (London: Granta, 2004), p. 5.

 35. Gray, Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 158; Gray, Enlightenment's Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 152.

 36. Gray, op. cit., Ref. 34, p. 1.

 37. Gray, op. cit., Ref. 34, p. 2; Gray, Al-Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern (London: Faber, 2003), pp. 11, 20.

 38. Gray, op. cit., Ref. 34, p. 7. Radical Islam, ‘like fascism’, for Gray, is ‘unequivocally modern’ and finds a parallel in 16th-century millenarianism in that it has its own vision of the new society (op. cit., Ref. 37, p. 20). At the same time, on the Iraq war, Gray writes contemptuously of the ‘millenarian faith in the transforming power of democracy’. Gray, ‘The Mirage of Empire’, New York Review of Books, LIII(I) (2006), p. 6.

 39. Todorov, op. cit., Ref. 9, pp. 9–12.

 40. Todorov, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 14.

 41. Todorov, op. cit., Ref. 9, pp. 30, 34, 82.

 42. Todorov, ‘Totalitarianism: between religion and science’, trans. by Brady Bower and Max Likin, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 2(1) (2001), p. 29; Todorov, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 18.

 43. Todorov, op. cit., Ref. 9, pp. 19–22.

 44. Only then does what would otherwise have only a rather sentimental resonance acquire the trappings of plausibility. ‘Scientism’, Todorov finally muses, ‘is founded on a universality of reason … humanism … assumes the universality of humanity: all human beings have the same rights and merit equal respect, even if their modes of living remain different’ (op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 34).

 45. E.g. Jeffrey K. Hadden, ‘Toward desacralizing secularization theory’, Social Forces, 65(3) (1987), pp. 587–611; Rodney Stark, ‘Secularization, R.I.P.’, Sociology of Religion, 60(3) (1999), pp. 249–273; Callum G. Brown, ‘The secularisation debate: what the 1960s have done to the study of religious history’, in Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf (Eds), The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For a defence of a revised version of the secularization thesis see both Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).

 46. E.g. Roy Wallis and Steve Bruce, ‘Secularization: The Orthodox Model’, in Bruce (Ed.), Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 8.

 47. Jeffrey Cox, ‘Master narratives of long-term religious change’, in McLeod and Ustorf (Eds), The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, p. 205.

 48. It accords with a much-quoted statement of Carl Schmitt's—‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of state are secularized theological concepts’—a claim that is dramatic to say the least, but which is open to contest. Equally it avers with Karl Löwith's thesis that Christian eschatology becomes secularized as the modern notion of progress. See Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. by George Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 36; and Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of a Philosophy of History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1949). Contra Schmitt and Löwith, for a defence of an independent theory of modernity see esp. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. by Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 3–120.

 49. See, respectively, for instance, the earlier remarks of Fritz Stern, in relation to National Socialism—‘the religious tone remained, even after the religious faith and the religious canons had disappeared’—by contrast with Burleigh's comment that, with Nazism, Christianity's ‘fundamental tenets were stripped out, but the remaining diffuse religious emotionality had its uses’. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (New York: Doubleday & Co, 1965), p. xv; Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Macmillan, 2001), p. 256.

 50. Burleigh, op. cit., Ref. 24, p. 12.

 51. Richard Steigmann-Gall, ‘Nazism and the Revival of Political Religion Theory’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5(3) (2004), p. 383.

 52. The point corresponds with the sceptical note regarding secularization theory that contests the notion that from some Nietzschean ‘death of God’ moment onwards ‘disenchanted’ populaces inevitably begin to succumb to replacement faiths, holding that the kind of ‘psychological void’ clichés such accounts rest upon are invalid. Blinkhorn, op. cit., Ref. 23, p. 516.

 53. Burleigh, op. cit., Ref. 49, p. 9.

 54. Steigmann-Gall, op. cit., Ref. 51, p. 382.

 55. See esp. Burleigh, op. cit., Ref. 24, pp. 199–275.

 56. R. Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 3.

 57. Eatwell, op. cit., Ref. 19.

 58. Burleigh, op. cit., Ref. 24, pp. 144, 154, 263, 145.

 59. Christi, op. cit., Ref. 1.

 60. Bellah, op. cit., Ref. 12, pp. 18,13; Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 20–25.

 61. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J.P. Mayer (Ed.), trans. by George Lawrence (London: Fontana, 1994), pp. 287–295.

 62. See Burrin, op. cit., Ref. 24, p. 328; Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. xv, 141.

 63. It should be noted that some of Gentile's latest work—which has explicitly characterized the relationship between political religion and traditional religion as ‘syncretic’—unfortunately loses sight of this implication (e.g. op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 141). The ambivalence here is equally expressed in his concession that ‘the problem of the “syncretic” relationship between political religion and traditional religion … is a subject requiring deeper research and reflection’ (op. cit., Ref. 18, p. 362).

 64. Daniel Bell, ‘The return of the sacred? The argument on the future of religion’, British Journal of Sociology, 28(4) (1977), pp. 419–449.

 65. Ultimately, it is the distinction between a strong claim (making a religion out of politics) and what amounts to a rather tamer claim (the making of a politics out of religion).

 66. Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 1. The extent to which Gentile holds consistently to a conception of political religion that is entirely ‘independent of the prior location of the sacred’ is open to doubt. See notes 2 and 63.

 67. Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 1, pp. 18, 19.

 68. In this connection, for a defence of a straightforwardly ‘metaphorical’ conception of political religion, see Richard Shorten, ‘The Enlightenment, communism and political religion: Reflections on a misleading trajectory’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 8(1) (2003), pp. 13–37.

 69. E. Gentile, ‘Fascism as a political religion’, Journal of Contemporary History, 25 (1990), pp. 229–252.

 70. R. Griffin, ‘Cloister or cluster? The implications of Emilio Gentile's ecumenical theory of political religion for the study of extremism’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6(1) (2005), p. 43. See also Griffin, op. cit., Ref. 26 and Griffin, ‘The palingenetic political community: Rethinking the legitimation of totalitarian regimes in inter-war Europe’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 3(3) (2002), pp. 24–43.

 71. M. Burleigh, Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda (London: Harper Collins, 2006).

 72. E.g. Burleigh, op. cit., Ref. 49, pp. 1–23. Such was the intent, in the deployment of the term in the 1930s, for instance, to turn on their head prevailing Marxian materialist theories of fascism that reduced ideas to a merely epiphenomenal status relative to ‘deeper’ socio-economic forces.

 73. Burleigh, op. cit., Ref. 49, p. 11.

 74. Indeed, even critics of the political religion turn in the study of fascism are sympathetic to this line of inquiry. Thus, Kershaw is happy to talk about Nazism ‘tapping religious or quasi-religious emotions’ (op. cit., Ref. 19, pp. 249–250).

 75. Burleigh, op. cit., Ref. 49, p. 12.

 76. Blinkhorn, op. cit., Ref. 23, pp. 516, 520.

 77. Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 2–3, 138.

 78. Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 4–15, 145.

 79. Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 9–15.

 80. See Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 9–11; Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, trans. by John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1923).

 81. See Jean-Pierre Sironneau, Sécularisation et religions politiques (New York: Mouton, 1982); and Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1961).

 82. Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 18, p. 361.

 83. Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 18, p. 363.

 84. Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 18, p. 363.

 85. Payne, op. cit., Ref. 22, pp. 163–174.

 86. Griffin, op. cit., Ref. 70, p. 34.

 87. See Kershaw, op. cit., Ref. 19.

 88. Griffin, op. cit., Ref. 70, pp. 37, 43.

 89. Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 47–95.

 90. Freeden, ibid., p. 128.

 91. Griffin, op. cit., Ref. 70, p. 39.

 92. Freeden, op. cit., Ref. 89, p. 76.

 93. See Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 30, p. ix; Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 1, p. 25; and Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 18, p. 328.

 94. Griffin (2004), op. cit., Ref. 26, p. 315.

 95. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and the Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London: Pimlico, 1993), p. 13.

 96. M. Burleigh, ‘National Socialism as a Political Religion’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 1(2) (2000), p. 9; Burleigh, op. cit., Ref. 49, p. 10.

 97. This is both interesting and curious, because while Burleigh's approach explicitly leans on Voegelin's earlier work on political religions, both Gentile and Griffin take the trouble to expressly distance themselves from it, principally in connection with the (indeed) rather speculative reading of history intrinsic to Voegelin's interpretation. See Gentile, ‘Political religion: A concept and its critics—A critical survey’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 6(1) (2005), p. 25; and Griffin, op. cit., Ref. 70, p. 44.

 98. Burleigh, op. cit., Ref. 96, p. 4.

 99. Voegelin, op. cit., Ref. 7, pp. 32–33.

100. These entities are properly designated as being invested with ‘sacred’ but ‘non-divine’ status in the semantic sense that the former implies a process of becoming worthy of reverence while stopping short of connoting the ‘divine’ as such; indicating, that is, the attributes of God within monotheistic religions.

101. E.g. Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 30, p. 165; Gentile, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 26.

102. Mona Ozouf, ‘The revolutionary festival: The transfer of sacrality’, in Ronald Schechter (Ed.), The French Revolution: Essential Readings Festivals and the French Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 282.

103. See Burrin, op. cit., Ref. 24, p. 345.

104. For example, liberalism might be said to wed together a conception of liberty as non-interference with a conception of the state as limited in its legitimate interference in private life, augmented by a conception of the individual as principally the occupant of a private sphere; and, in this process, these particular interpretations of concepts are ‘decontested’.

105. Freeden, op. cit., Ref. 89, p. 62.

106. This notion bears similarities with Hannah Arendt's conception of ideology as the internal logic of a single idea. Anything resembling the cultural aspect of sacralization is, however, absent in an account of this kind. See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1973), pp. 460–482.

107. To add, in the last analysis, the separation of the logical and cultural aspects of sacralization-as-decontestation is continuous with Gentile's most recent attempt to clarify the nature of the relationship between traditional religions and political religions (op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 141). He describes this as having at least two important aspects. One facet of the relationship he has lately described as mimicry. Political religions reproduce the form of traditional religions, he has suggested, by ‘consciously or unconsciously’ adopting the latter's method of ‘developing and representing a system of beliefs and myths’. The elevation of a single entity to a position of supreme ineliminability is, one must surmise, the irreducible feature of such a method of structuring faith, whether it be of a political or (traditionally) religious kind. A second facet of the same relationship Gentile describes as entailing the adaptation of pre-standing traditions and myths within the ‘mythical and symbolic universe’ of political religions. In this way the latter come to incorporate the substance of traditional religion. And in so doing they accord closely with the manner in which ideologies decontest the meaning of core concepts in the cultural sense.