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.