The “sacred property” of language

Back from a conference in Warsaw. „Residues and Innovations within Imperial Orders: Political Assemblies in Continental Europe, 1800–1850”. The question is – I hear you cry – what I have got to do with a topic like that. Well, my presentation was about the struggle for linguistic emancipation in the Hungarian parliament and its connection to the sacralization of language that had been going on an at least since the late 18th century. Calling language a “sacred property” and the cultivation of language a “sacred duty”, venerating the leaders of the language reform movement as “prophets” or “saviors”, or speaking of Hungarian as the most ancient language created by God are only some elements of this sacralization that I’m not the first to observe (see e. g. István Margócsy’s “My Goddess, My Fate, My Everything, Hungarian Language!”). It may even be said that the language issue was part of the concurrently emerging “nation-religion” which authors like András Gerő described not as a contingent by-product but the very essence of nationalism. My only regret is that I’ve missed to add “LANGUAGE” as a separate entry to my recently published book on Secular Religions. But this is just one omission, for you learn about new possible additions almost every day.

Ferenc Plathy: The Apotheosis of Kazinczy (the leader of the language reform), 1859.

Btw, this is not to say that all this is mere nonsense that should be overcome by a more rationalistic approach to language. Without such devotion (or, if you like, “fanaticism”) no transformative politics is possible. It is in fact a paradoxically realist conclusion that when politics is understood not as “business as usual”, the administration of daily affairs, but as politics PER SE, in its true essence, it becomes inevitably inseparable from so-called “religious” aspects.

My own contribution will be published later, but here is the short abstract of my paper for the conference:

“A non-negligible factor of every parliament’s operation is the language in which debates are conducted and accepted laws are formulated. The language of the Hungarian parliament (more exactly the Diet of the Estates) was traditionally Latin, and although the idea of making Hungarian an official language was raised already at the end of the 18th century, its realization was the work of so-called “reform diets” between 1825 and 1844. The paper examines how language became one of the most important issues in parliamentary debates of the time, how it was related to other topics, and most of all, how it became the basis of a peculiar parliamentary (and extra-parliamentary) rhetoric in which language appeared as a “sacrament”, the main politico-religious symbol of emerging nationalism, all this in opposition to the centralizing and Germanizing tendencies of the Habsburg Empire. Although the explicit aim of this was to return to the allegedly ancient heritage of Hungary (in terms of language and cult), it was in fact an element of the modern phenomenon of “nation-religions” that were also present in other European countries, replacing or overriding former denominational commitments.”

A brief conceptual history of “political religion”

A paper of mine – written almost in the form of an encyclopaedia entry – was finally published a couple of weeks ago in the 2021-22 (!) yearbook of Politica e religione at Trento University, Italy. (You know how academic publishing works nowadays.) It is about the concept of “political religion” and yes, it is intended to be a gap filler. I’ve read many things about political religion and was quite amazed how many misconceptions are confidently repeated in the literature, or how many authors are still unaware of some of the basic facts of the history of this term.

I also make some irreverent remarks about great names such as Emilio Gentile, the leading theoretician of… well, this is exactly the problem, for Gentile – in his otherwise thoroughly informative works – remains just as confused about the terminology as anyone else. Sometimes we hear about the “sacralization of politics”, sometimes about the “religions of politics”, then about “politics as religion”, while all these are at the same time categorized either as secular religions, or real ones, or not religions at all.

But see more about those in the paper: https://teseo.unitn.it/politica-e-religione/article/view/3149/3716

BTW, the whole issue of this yearbook, the main topic of which is “civil theology” is extremely interesting!

Fratelli tutti and the Christian Just War Tradition

My paper on Pope Francis’ confused remarks on just war theory (presented two and a half years ago in Helsinki) was finally published last week. It is somewhat more polite than the original one. It would also be better if I could add the latest developments of the Pope’s frequently changing position, especially with regard to the war in Ukraine. But let’s be happy that it has appeared at all. It is open access, and a print version will also be available in a few days.

The savioress

On the way home from the EASR 2024 Conference, I just ran into the latest issue of the German magazine Stern that showed Kamala Harris as an “Erlöserin” (literally, a “savioress” or female redemptor). The most interesting thing here is not that journalists use such bombastic religious language – for religion still has this rhetoric force in our allegedly secular societies – but that the illustration itself shows a double secularization of the religious:

Since the savioress, the new presidential candidate of the Democratic Party is here depicted in the guise of the Statue of Liberty (which was already a secular-religious symbol replacing the statues of old gods with that of a new goddess), one is inclined to say that the use of religious imagery is more than just a journalistic cliché. It rather expresses the constant migration of the holy from its traditional sources to our allegedly secular culture.

Ecology in the discourse of secular religions

Today, I made my presentation at EASR 2024. Following the main topic of the conference, I demonstrated the “Ecology” chapter of my book. I was a little worried whether it would not offend some devout ecologists, but it was in fact very well received. We had a good conversation with a fairly large audience, and even my conclusion about the impossibility of defining religion (illustrated here by the case study of ecology as a secular religion) turned out to be less alarming than I’d expected. There were in fact many other scholars who seemed to be as skeptical about the religious-secular divide as I was. Most of them, however, preferred the terminology of “implicit religion”, which was a little surprise for me. Not because I hadn’t known the term before (or Edward Bailey, who coined it) but I didn’t realize how important it was for so many. If I’d known, I would have covered it more thoroughly in my own book, although I’m still not convinced that implicit religion is a less problematic concept than secular religion (or, for that matter, than “quasi”, “surrogate”, “intrinsic”, “remixed”, etc. religions). In any case, here is the short abstract of my presentation:

“While many religious traditions have (or can be re-interpreted as having) an ecological vision, there are also modern, secular forms of ecological thought and related movements which are sometimes described as ‘secular religions’, showing a substantive or functional analogy with their overtly religious counterparts. Such descriptions can be harshly critical, debunking the alleged “dogmatism” and “intolerance” of deep ecology, or ridiculing the ‘saints’ and ‘rituals’ of climate activism. On the other hand, there are some attempts which overtly declare that ecological thought should become something ‘like’ (even if not exactly as) a religion: an overarching code that requires a true conversion, with nature as a sacred entity at its center. Without such a basic transformation of human attitudes, the principles of ecology would remain shallow and without effect, especially when compared to the magnitude of the challenge.

The paper analyzes the discourse of these different approaches, using a concise set of examples from both scholarly literature and popular journalism from the 2010s to the present day. The scope of the investigation extends to mentions of ‘ecology’, ‘ecologism’, ‘environmentalism’, ‘climate activism’, ‘warmism’, and related topics such as ‘animal rights’, ‘vegetarianism’, and (ethical) ‘veganism’ in contemporary discourse, in connection with expressions like ‘secular religion’ and its synonyms (‘surrogate religion’, ‘secular faith’ or ‘cult’, etc.).

The prospective thesis is that both the negative and positive approaches – despite their different normative outlook – are right in suggesting that a radical ecological theory and practice is impossible without sharing some features of traditional religions: an idea of the sacred, a comprehensive worldview, a moral code, and at least some ritual and symbolic manifestations of commitment that bind the community together. What is more difficult to tell is whether the adjective ‘secular’ is needed at all in the discourse of such a ‘religion’. Or rather, whether the entire distinction between secular and genuine religions is not superfluous in the case of any sufficiently serious form of ecology.”

EASR 2024

The conference of the European Association for the Study of Religion. This year the topic is “Nature, Ecology, and Religious Responses to Climate Change”, so I will present the “Ecology” part of my secular religions topic. But there will be other interesting presentations, for instance on implicit religions, which seem to be a surprisingly popular term here. For more information, see the conference homepage.

Secular Religions – published today!

As you could see here, this book was very long in the making. I wrote a first attempt on political theologies back in 2018, which was published in Hungarian as Politikai teológiák: a demokráciától az ökológiáig (Political Theologies: from Democracy to Ecology). I’ve been never satisfied with the wording, however. Of course, you can say that “everything is politics”, so ecology – or, for that matter, capitalism – are also “political” ideologies that resemble theologies; but what about celebrity cults or AI? (Yes, I wrote about AI years before the craze about ChatGPT.) And what about the ritual and symbolic – not strictly speaking theological – aspects of such things? So I finally decided to change the terminology to “secular religions”; even though this is a nonsense word, meaning something that is religious and non-religious at the same time. But what I try to expose is exactly this: that dividing the world into two distinct spheres called “secular” and “religious” is nonsensical. So this book is already something like a journey “across the great divide” of modernity. If I ever write a popular (OK, an even more popular version than this, its title would be something like this. And I also love The Band, by the way.)

Until then, here is the book “Secular Religions: The Key Concepts“, published today. Don’t let the title mislead you: it was just the publisher’s suggestion to promote it as part of an already well-known book series. But it is in fact more like a mini-encyclopedia containing more than a hundred entries. This is exactly why it was impossible to write as a traditional monograph (you know, in ten to twelve chapters). And that is why it took so long, for I myself experimented for years with different formats, until I returned to the original idea, a sort of collection or vocabulary. Which also means that I consciously avoided inventing “new” secular religions. (Although with some routine in the genre, you can easily describe any political, social, or cultural phenomenon as a form of religiosity.) In this book, there are only examples taken from the literature. Yes, there are more than a hundred, and my list keeps on growing since I finished the manuscript. So much for our “secular age”.

I also received my own copies yesterday. The hardcover is simple but expensive, but the paperback looks beautiful. I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to choose a unique cover, and yes, it is part of the game that the reader can guess what the picture is about.

Secular Religions: The Key Concepts on Amazon

Although I’m still waiting the proofs, and the proposed date of publication is late August this year, “Secular Religions: The Key Concepts” is already there on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Secular-Religions-Concepts-Routledge-Guides/dp/1032744332/

It is also available at Routledge:

https://www.routledge.com/Secular-Religions-The-Key-Concepts/Nyirkos/p/book/9781032744339

“Secular Religions: The Key Concepts provides a concise guide to those ideologies, worldviews, and social, political, economic, and cultural phenomena that are most often described as the modern counterparts of traditional religions.

Although there are many other terms in use (quasi, pseudo, ersatz, political, civil, etc.), it is ‘secular religion’ that best expresses the problematic nature of all such descriptions which maintain that modern belief systems and practices are secular on the one hand and religious on the other. Today, the topic is as popular as ever, and secular religions are discovered far and wide. Hence, a critical summary is urgently necessary. The juxtaposed title is itself an expression of ironic distance. The book emphasizes inherent tensions of relevant literature in a critical and informative fashion. The author provides over 100 entries, from abortion to wokeness, as well as a detailed introduction, which gives an overview of the different definitions of ‘religion’ and ‘secular religion’ as well as the history of secular–religious comparisons. The main text reconstructs the argument of several key works on each given topic, while lists of sources for further reading are provided at the end of each entry.

This book provides a clear introduction to ‘secular religions’ and will appeal to researchers and students of religious studies, political philosophy, political theology, the history of ideologies, and cultural studies.”

Would you believe I have more than 100 entries? (And I discovered others since I finished the manuscript…)

A        Abortion

           Anarchism

           Animal Rights

           Anti-Racism

           Art

           Artificial Intelligence

           Atheism

B        Beauty

           Biotechnology

           BLM

           Bolshevism

           Boxing

C        Capitalism

           Celeb culture

           Climate Activism

           Cloning

           Colonialism

           Communism

           Computer Science

           Constitutionalism

           Consumerism

           Critical Race Theory

           Cultural Marxism

D        Dataism

           Darwinism

           Democracy

           DNA

E        Ecology

           Economics

           Electism

           Enlightenment

           Entertainment

           Environmentalism

           Evolutionism

F         Fandom

            Fascism

            Feminism

            Fitness

            Food

            Football

G         Gender

            Genetics

H         Health

            History

            Humanism

            Human Rights

I           Individualism

J           Juche

K         Kung Fu

L         Legalism

            Leninism

            Liberalism

            Love

M        Maoism

            Marxism

            Medicine

            Multiculturalism

N         Nationalism

            Nazism

            Nietzscheism

            Neoliberalism

O         Olympism

P         Pacifism

            Panopticism

            Patriotism

            Personality Cult

            Political Correctness

            Pop Culture

            Populism

            Positivism

            Postcolonialism

            Posthumanism

            Postmodernism

            Progress

            Psychology

R         Racism

            Republicanism

            Revolution

            Rock

S        Scientism

           Selfies

            Selfism

           Sex

           Singularity

           Skateboarding

           Social Justice Culture

           Social Media

           Socialism

           Sports

           Stalinism

           Statism

           Superintelligence

T         Technology

            Thinness

            Transhumanism

U         UFOs

           UN

           Übermensch

V        Veganism

           Vegetarianism

W        War

            Warmism

            Wokeness

Getting closer

We’re getting closer to the publication of my book on “Secular Religions: The KeyConcepts.” (That will be the final title, it seems.) Yesterday I received the possible covers, so it will look something like this:

Quiz: does anyone recognize the building on the cover photo and what it has to do with “secular religions”?

Rethinking the secular in Edinburgh

Our research group “Rethinking the Secular” had a great workshop at Edinburgh University. Since I have to complete my manuscript in just two weeks, I asked some final advice from my colleagues. Or rather, I didn’t even have to ask; the first pieces of advice I received already in the taxi on our way to the meeting.

(The discussion itself was mainly about the introduction to my upcoming book on secular religions.)