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When real religion becomes a secular religion

The total confusion of “secular” and “religious” religions becomes most obvious when someone criticizes the very idea of secularism (in French, “laïcité“) for its religious bias. As an article on Political Theology suggests, even the Notre Dame of Paris can be called a “secular cathedral“, inasmuch as it symbolizes a sort of “cultural Christianity” that nevertheless remains a religious idea, despite being non-religious. In other words, the cathedral, which – as the less educated observer would think – is an unquestionably religious symbol is not really a religious symbol, but a symbol of something else (a certain cultural and political ideology), while this ideology is indeed religious in the sense of being pro-Catholic. It is indeed impossible to decide what the real problem of the author is: is it that religion thus becomes secular, or that secularism becomes religious? We have all heard the same stories about “politicization” as a pathology of religion, and “religionization” as a pathology of politics. But when both are invoked in the same breath, the two suspicions seem to cancel each other out. If a religion becomes secular by becoming political, but the secular in turn becomes religious by the very same act, the only logical conclusion is that the main objection against this religion is that it remains just as religious as it was before. Which is not only paradoxical to the point of being non-sensical, but also historically absurd. Words like “catho-laïcité” may sound well for an ear trained on postmodern oxymorons, but no Catholic will ever forget how laicism emerged as a primarily anti-Catholic ideology. The confiscation of Church property during the French Revolution, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790, the de-Christianization campaign, the 1905 law on the separation of the churches and the state, and all similar events are very hard to see as a clandestine cooperation between the French Republic and the Catholic Church; or if it was, it was the most well-hidden conspiracy in the history of church-state relations.

The fact that laicism has since become more tempered and does not nowadays exclude cultural references to the Catholic tradition only proves that religion, culture, and politics are not distinct fields that can be hermetically separated. But this is no new revelation, and those who still think that it is something outrageous should first explain why “cultural Christianity” – which may well be a secular idea – is to be rejected not because it is secular but because it is a religious one.

Feu dans la charpente de Notre Dame photographié depuis le square René Vivani à 19 h 51. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Incendie_Notre_Dame_de_Paris.jpg)

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“Good” and “bad” political religions

This week I attended an extremely interesting conference in Tilburg on the “liquid presence of religion in the public square“. The wording may be a little awkward for those who are not familiar with that kind of postmodern verbal acrobatics, but the strange word “liquidity” only wants to emphasize that the boundaries between religion and other institutional spheres such as politics, economy, education, care, and the arts are much less obvious than we usually suppose and need a thourough revision. All this fits well into my own scheme of problematizing the religious-secular distinction, even if by a different terminology.

My presentation – with all primitivity of its title – was about the strange fact that “political religion” has always been used both as a positive and a negative word, regardless of the fact whether an already existing religion was used (or abused) for political purposes, or a political ideology became a (good or bad) substitute for religion. Which means that the main dividing line is not between “real” or “explicit” religion(s) on the one hand and “quasi” or “implicit” ones on the other, but between different concepts of the relationship between the individual and the community, either in a religious or in a political context. (Suggesting, of course, that these are two contexts and not one, which is what I most strongly oppose.)

I was also honored that one of the participants of our panel quoted my book, although he might not have known in advance I’d be there. It was thus a very flattering experience, and questions from the audience were also to the point. Someone asked me about the relationship between political theology (in the Schmittian sense) and political religion, to which I could reply that Schmitt was just as confused about the two types of political theology (explicit and analogous) as all those who wrote about political religion in a broader sense. (This is what my conceptual-historical analysis also aimed to demonstrate: that the early modern notion of religio politica contained the same good/bad ambiguity as the later versions of religion politique, political religion, or religioni della politica.)

Another question about the distinction of “political” and “civil” religion also touched on a very important issue, even though my response could only be that this was not a theoretical distinction. The only reason why some authors distinguish the two is that they try to avoid the conflation of totalitarian and democratic ideologies and practices under the same label. Yet this is not an issue of definitions (civil religion, after all, is just as political as a political religion) but an issue of ideological commitment. “Political religion” and “civil religion” are both linguistic constructions that do not describe reality as such, but tools to present and defend certain positions in a debate.

In any case, it was a great experience to be part of a discussion that was at last about the only important question of our time.

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“Secular Religions” after a year

Or why it is so hopeless to change people’s minds on “religion”

This day marks the first anniversary of the publication of this book:

It is currently available in about 130 libraries, mainly in Europe and the US, and at least the Introduction can be read for free on academia.edu.

There is no reason to celebrate, though, for the main experience of this past year was that practically no one could be convinced of the core message of the book. No matter how many examples were presented that undermined the whole distinction of the secular and the religious, or how all definitional attemps of religion were pulled into doubt, the overall reaction was always the well-known commonplace “Oh, this can’t be true, there MUST be a difference!”

It’s not that I’m surprised, of course. “Religion” has always been what an educated German would call a Kampfbegriff, a word that does not describe a thing but defend a position in a debate. Now since the debate between those who call themselves “religious” and “secular” is far from over, it would be futile to expect that any of them will change their mind because of contrary examples and theoretical arguments. After all, the belief in the existence of “religion” is itself a belief. And not even the least dogmatic one.

(Hm, maybe I should start making TikTok videos instead.)

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The Middle Ages continued

It seems I’m still in my medieval revival phase. Today I’m presenting at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, on William of Saint-Amour and Thomas Aquinas. This is also connected to a book that will be published this fall on the conceptual history of “work”. A brief outline of today’s presentation:

“In the 1250s, the mendicant orders’ rising stature at the University of Paris incited a bitter controversy about the role of teaching and learning, preaching and praying, or manual labor and begging in religious life. Although this was an obvious existential and prestige struggle between the lay clergy and the regulars, it also had a long-term impact on theoretical discussions, including the definition of labor. As can be demonstrated by the texts of William of Saint-Amour, the main opponent of the mendicants, and the replies given to it by Thomas Aquinas or Albert the Great, it was during this controversy that intellectual activities such as teaching and learning began to be treated not as the mere opposites of manual work but as specific forms of ‘labor‘ themselves. “

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Fratelli tutti and the just war tradition revisited

Yesterday I presented – more or less – the same paper that I published a few months ago in the Helsinki Yearbook of Intellectual History (“Political Violence: Historical, Philosophical and Theological Perspectives“). It’s about the strange transformation of the complex philosophical reflections on war in Augustine to an ever simplified list of criteria in medieval and modern just war thinking, up to the point when Pope Francies tried to reduce the number of criteria to zero (at least until the realities of the war in Ukraine forced him to change his mind).

I didn’t expect it to be a popular speech, but it was truly astonishing how – although the conference was supposed to be about just war and just peace – most participants carefully avoided any hard questions of just war to repeat vague sentimentalities about the beauties of peace and justice.

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Fraternity and friendship in politics – published today

A very interesting project indeed: Fraternity as an Overlooked Element in Global Politics, edited by Joanna Kulska and Anna M. Solarz. I contributed with a small essay on Thomas Aquinas’ concept of “political friendship” (amicitia politica). It feels good to return my medievalist origins. (Yes, once I thought I’d be a historian of medieval philosophy, it was only during my college years that I turned to political philosophy instead. Or not even “instead”, for medieval political thought keeps coming back to me. As the present case shows.)

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The continuing popularity of “secular religions”

I almost forgot to mention that the topic of “secular religions” became so popular recently that even people like Elon Musk created x.com messages about it.

“Childless hedonism” thus seems to be a new member of the secular-religious family. If I were to write my book now, I should add this one. And many others, since I discover further examples almost every day. And this is what some people call a “secular age”.

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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.”

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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!

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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.