In 2020, “identity politics” and “wokeness” became new members of the secular religions club. As Tom Slater put it in Spiked magazine, “Identity politics has become the new secular religion.” The points of similarity are already well-known: collective rituals and liturgical clothes,
Democratic lawmakers in the US taking the knee, in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Source: spiked-online.com
an unquestionable doctrinal system (“wokeness is the new orthodoxy”), including an absolute moral code (“virtue-signalling” and atonement for “past sins”), resulting in popular enthusiasm and intolerance (“a Salem-like hysteria”) or even official persecution (“Heretics must be ousted. Blasphemies must be scrubbed”).
Now all this is once again not a definition, but a parody of how religion is sometimes defined by those who don’t like it. Moreover, it is also unclear what makes identity politics a “secular” religion, and why wokeness is called a “new” – perhaps real? – religion at the end of the article. (And why not simply an “ideology”, for the article also applies the latter.) Yes, I know that this is not an academic paper. And it shouldn’t be. What it nevertheless clearly shows is how “religion” is mostly used as a simple derogation. Moreover, speaking of “the new religion of the ruling class” adds a populist flavor to its anti-religious zeal. All in all, secular-religious talk doesn’t seem to come to and end in 2021. It doesn’t seem to become more accurate, either.
In February, I wrote a review on Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti’s What is Christian Democracy? for our blog at UPS. The title “Christian democracy without Christianity?” sounds a little bombastic, I know, but that’s how blogs work. And it wasn’t my idea, but the editor’s.
From February to May I had a course at the Széchenyi István College for Advanced Studies, based on my Political Theologies (2018), something I’d like to continue as an English-language book on Secular Religions in 2021.
Still in February, I completed a manuscript for the journal Christianity-World-Politics on “Secular religions and the religious/secular divide” (forthcoming in 2021).
In April, I wrote another review for UPS about Rémi Brague’s Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age. To my surprise, the author personally congratulated me. (It seems that automatic translations are becoming better. Or worse?)
In May, I reviewed Gábor Borbély’s book on the philosophy of religion for the journal BUKSZ. At least I had an opportunity to express all my doubts about the concept of religion, a topic that I begin to be obsessed by now.
In June, I wrote a paper for Acta Humanaon “The Religion of Human Rights”, published in Hungarian this fall, and also forthcoming in English in 2021.
In August, I published an article titled “Secular religion in America” in the popular historical journal Rubicon. Popularity can be dangerous, too, but I somehow avoided harsh criticism. (Despite the sensible topic.)
Still in August – thanks to the temporary relief between the first and second wave of the pandemic – we had a “professional picnic” with students of Corvinus University. My lectures dealt with the topic of surveillance; again, not without reference to the theological analogies of panopticism.
And a little surprise, also in August: Routledge published my 2018 book The Tyranny of the Majorityin a paperback edition. Is it a sign of success? I found 112 copies in libraries around the world. Which doesn’t seem like a lot, but just to think that your book is available at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Rutgers, Brandeis, Duke, Fordham, or the Library of Congress is enough to give you chills. Maybe that’s why Routledge approached me whether I had a new book to propose. I certainly do, but this is a task for 2021 (see above).
In September, I started a new course with Széchenyi College. This time on “The End of History” thesis and its critics. From Joachim of Fiore to Francis Fukuyama and beyond.
Then again, in October, I had to return to the French conservatives, presenting a paper at a conference on religion in the 18th century (also to be published in 2021).
I kept on writing reviews, too. This time on Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, a book I’ve mentioned several times here.
And November was even more eventful. One of my friends asked me to contribute to a special issue of the Journal of Political and Military Sociology. The topic is “patriotism”, which gives me an opportunity to examine whether secular religions’ literature distingusihes between patriotism and nationalism. The date of publication is scheduled to be 2022.
And, as you all know by now, we had a great workshop on “Christianity, Politics, and Secular Religions” on November 20, 2020. I still don’t know how I managed to convince such famous authors to participate. Sometimes you’re just lucky. Or maybe the topic of political or secular religions still has its appeal. What’s more, most of them agreed to provide a written paper for our new English language journal Pro Publico Bono in 2021.
In Hungary, we also have a habit of popularizing science for a wider audience. Events like the “Celebration of Hungarian Science” or “Researchers’ Night” are fairly popular among the general public. In November, I gave two such online lectures. One on “Pandemics then and now: historical lessons and contemporary political issues”. Again, not without its politico-theological connections, from Carl Schmitt to Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. And another one on “Politics as a surrogate religion”.
The last thing I remember from 2020 is a December conference of doctoral students at the Corvinus University, a panel called “Religion and politics.” The best presentation was about Reinhold Niebuhr‘s criticism of secular religions. So the topic doesn’t seem to fade away, at least not in 2021.
Last month, the Tablet Magazine published an article by Pascal Bruckner called “The Flagellants of the Western World.” Or, as the summary says: “Like God, colonialism is invisible and omnipresent, responsible for everything that happens on Earth.” An ironic gesture once again, rather than a systematic comparison of secular (political) and religious ideas or practices, but it remains interesting how often these parallelisms come up in today’s journalism. A quicklist of other “religious” terms in the article: catechism, repentance, apostolic, messianic, Eden, myth, inquisitor, self-flagellates, (messianic) vocation, angelic, sacrosanct, extreme unction. And this is not even a long one.
Illustrations from the Nuremberg Chronicle, by Hartmann Schedel (1440-1514) Source: Wikimedia Commons.
The other example is (even) less serious. It is from a review of the Hungarian reality show “Feleségek luxiskivitelben” (The Real Housewives of Hungary). As the title goes: “Botox is my religion.” Now this may just be a random phrase (people from my generation all remember that even a certain brand of whiskey can be called a new religion), but the article goes on. “The group of luxury wives divided like the Red Sea” (before Moses and the Jews, that is); into “Botox believers and Botox deniers”, which is “a serious debate, not of the lousy homoousion / homoiousion type.” All this is a joke once again, of course, or – who knows? Interestingly, there are some references to a deeper analogy as well: “Today there is also some spirititual essence in beauty trends, since, as it turned out, those who passed through the Intervention (or Interventions, for this is not like baptism that is enough to take once) belong to an entirely different sect.” The religion-like features of the beauty industry or certain fitness movements have been described by more serious literature as well.
Our workshop on “Christianity, politics, and secular religions“ last Friday was absolutely outstanding. It was a special honor to have William Cavanaugh (author of The Myth of Religious Violence and Field Hospital), Patrick Deneen (the author of Democratic Faith), Phillip Blond (director of the ResPublica think-tank), Hans Otto Seitschek (a contributor to Hans Maier’s famous Totalitarianism and Political Religions), and Michal Gierycz (whose European Debate on the Human Being is forthcoming by Springer) among our presenters.
As the above list already suggests, we also had some real debates. Bill and Patrick will never completely agree on what a Christian contribution to politics means; nationalism as a “spendid idolatry” remains disputed by anyone who thinks of it as part of the Christian heritage. Phillip’s idea of “good” and “bad” empires also remains controversial, of course, even if Christianity is supposed to be “universal in the sense that it promotes all particularities that represent the universal.” Not to mention the anthropological disputes within the EU and the Christian Democratic parties’ role in such disputes (the topic of Michal), of which Phillip simply remarked that Christian Democracy is dead. Totalitarianism (by Hans Otto) was perhaps the only topic on which there was a consensus, but even in this case, the “religious” nature of totalitarianism seems somewhat problematic. To me, it looks more like a political appropriation of Christianity, and not of religion in general.
But I may return to some of these topics later on. For the time being it suffices to say that “secular” or “political” religions, despite all their terminological problems, still seem to be inspiring, and not only for me.
“The Church as Ship” by Jacob Gerritsz. Source: Utrecht, Catharijneconvent.
Next Friday (November 20, 4:00 PM CET) we’ll have an interesting online workshop on the relationship between “Christianity, politics, and secular religions” hosted by the University of Public Service. It is a special honor for me that such outstanding scholars and public intellectuals accepted my invitation as William T. Cavanaugh and Patrick Deneen from the US, Phillip Blond from the UK, Hans Otto Seitschek from Germany, and Michal Gierycz from Poland.
A brief description
The current politico-theological debates in the West have deep historical roots. The “rise of the state as a process of secularization” as the German jurist Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde put it, created a public sphere where Christian churches lost much of their political influence, while the sources of individual ethos and social cohesion became increasingly problematic. This challenge was answered by totalitarian regimes by the creation of new “political” religions, while liberal democracies insisted on maintaining religious and ideological neutrality, even if in a highly ambiguous fashion, some of them never abandoning the idea of a “civil religion” of the nation-state. The very proliferation of political, civil, or – more broadly speaking – “secular” religions raises the question whether the traditional conceptualizations of secularization are still valid, or Christianity itself faces a new situation in which Christian churches, Christian democratic parties and political actors need to redefine their relationship to a newly emerging empire. A Christian contribution to the politics of the future seems to depend on giving an appropriate response to this question (and many other related ones) in a both theoretical and practical sense.
Program
1. Hans-Otto Seitschek: Totalitarianisms as political religions in the 20th century: historical and philosophical reflections 2. William T. Cavanaugh: The splendid idolatry of nationalism 3. Tamás Nyirkos: The proliferation of secular religions: theoretical and practical aspects 4. Michal Gierycz: The EPP’s role in anthropological disputes within the EU 5. Patrick J. Deneen: Liberal and Post-Liberal Theology: From One City to Two 6. Phillip Blond: Christianity and Empire – Realizing the Universal
The event is open for everyone interested. For more details, click here.
As I said before, Wikipedia’s definition of “secular religion” is problematic in itself:
“A secular religion is a communal belief system that often rejects or neglects the metaphysical aspects of the supernatural, commonly associated with traditional religion, instead placing typical religious qualities in earthly entities.”
But the bigger problem is that the initial list of secular religions already contradicts this definition:
“Among systems that have been characterized as secular religions are capitalism, communism, Juche, anarchism, fascism, nationalism, democracy, liberalism, progressivism, transhumanism, Auguste Comte’s Religion of Humanity, and the Cults of Reason and Supreme Being that developed after the French Revolution.”
On this somewhat chaotic list the most obvious mistake is, of course, the reference to the Cult of the Supreme Being. The Supreme Being is certainly not an “earthly entity” but a transcendent deity. The name was chosen only in order to distinguish it from the idea of the Christian God. This shows already the most typical presupposition of secular religion discourse: that everything that is similar to Christianity but not identical with it; and has a secular purpose as well, must be a secular (or quasi-, or pseudo-) religion, even if it has an evidently supernatural, personal Absolute. I would understand, to be sure, if a (fundamentalist?) Christian theologian made such a move. If one thinks that there is only one true, revealed religion, namely Christianity, then everything else will look very secular. And even more dangerously so if it in some way imitates Christianity. What I don’t understand is how anyone else can make a similar distinction between “secular” and “genuine” religions.
All in all, let’s face it that the Cult of the Supreme Being was exactly what the name says: a cult (a worship, or a “religion”, if you like) of a personal God. Even the immortality of the soul (another not very secular idea) was added:
“The French People recognize the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul.” Anonymous print from France, 1794. Source: Gallica Digital Library.
All in all: there was nothing secular here, except the moral, social, and political purposes that the cult of the Supreme Being certainly aimed to serve. But are “genuine” religions totally devoid of such purposes? Are there any “transcendent” religions that are “fully” transcendent?
But this is only the most obviously problematic example. By a closer look, the Cult of Reason also implies belief in a transcendent Absolute. The “Reason” mentioned here is not the mind of any individual person, but an imagined universal principle of rationality, so not a personal deity, but a transcendent something all the same.
It could also be asked whether the new, transhuman (sometimes literally “immortal”) creations of transhumanism, the imagined “People” of democracy, the idealized “Proletariat” of Communism, or the “invisible hand” of the market are any more “secular” than the Supreme Being of the French Revolution. Or even any more impersonal, for formulas like the “will”, the “wisdom”, or the “actions” of the people, the proletariat, the market, etc. keep reappearing all the time. Are all these metaphors only? Maybe so, but the question still remains to be answered: why do we use exactly these kinds of metaphors? Does the fact that we cannot get rid of them points to a more profound issue? Or is it just a sign of our basic irrationality?
By the way, it seems that even Reason is impossible to worship without some divine personification.
The Feast of Reason in the former Notre Dame in 1793. Source: Gallica Digital Library.
As the Wikipedia entry on secular religion says (and I’m inclined to take it as a definition): “A secular religion is a communal belief system that often rejects or neglects the metaphysical aspects of the supernatural, commonly associated with traditional religion, instead placing typical religious qualities in earthly entities.”
But what is a “communal” belief system? Does it mean that there are also “non-communal” ones? Is there any belief system (with an emphasis on the word system) that is not communal but – let’s say – individual?
To go further: what does it mean that such a system “often” rejects or neglects metaphysical aspects? That sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t? Then what is the difference between a belief system that rejects or neglects metaphysical aspects and a belief system that doesn’t? Or do both of these belong to the same category?
Also, is it the same to “reject” something and to “neglect” it?
As for “metaphysical aspects”, I wonder what the non-metaphysical aspects of the “supernatural” would be, for “supernatural” seems very much like a per se metaphysical concept itself.
I also don’t understand what the phrase “commonly associated with” means. Who is this “common” self who associates the “supernatural” (whatever that means) with anything?
The term “traditional religion” – especially in the singular – is likewise difficult to understand. There may be traditions that are sometimes vaguely called “religious”, but I know of no such overarching category as a single “traditional” religion.
I’m also unaware of any “typical religious qualities,” just as I’m unaware of any “earthly” ones; at least until someone explains to me why the opposite of “religious” is “earthly”, especially when the very term “secular religion” suggests that “earthly religions” are just as “religious” as non-earthly ones.
The perhaps most miserable word of all is, of course,”entity”, which usually means “I-know-not-what” – but, as we have seen, it is true of the whole article that its creators had no idea of what they were talking about.
A few days ago, a friend of mine asked me about a comprehensive introduction into the topic of “secular religions”. There is, however, no such book srictly speaking. The only one by a similar title, Hans Kelsen’s Secular Religionwas written in the 1950s and 1960s, and it is actually (as the subtitle goes) A Polemic Against the Misinterpretation of Modern Social Philosophy, Science and Politics As New Religions, so rather an extroduction than an introduction.
We have, of course, plenty of great books on political theology and political religions, as well as on many specific topics from the altars of Wall Street to psychology as religion. Just a few months ago, Tara Isabella Burton published a new one called Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, but once again on specific cultural (or spiritual, whatever that means) phenomena in contemporary America, and not on “new religions” in general.
Yes, of course, Wikipedia also has an entry on “Secular Religion”, but this is rather a medley of different arbitrary examples: citing for example only ONE modern case, that of the former Turkmen president’s cult of personality. Hm. Maybe I will also write a more detailed review on this entry later.
The nineteenth century was perhaps the last when philosophers could openly declare that belief in democracy and equality was indeed a belief, not even a completely harmless one. As John Stuart Mill wrote in his On Representative Government (1861):
The American institutions have imprinted strongly on the American mind that any one man (with a white skin) is as good as any other; and it is felt that this false creed is nearly connected with some of the more unfavourable points in American character. It is not small mischief that the constitution of any country should sanction this creed; for the belief in it, whether express or tacit, is almost as detrimental to moral and intellectual excellence as any effect which most forms of government can produce.
Let’s read the passage carefully, though. What Mills says is NOT that the creed is “false” because it declares that men and women, or people with white and black skin are equal. Quite to the contrary: it is false (or self-contradictory) because it fails to live up to its own premises when it comes to issues of race and gender; and false (or irrational) because its idea of equality ignores obvious differences in people’s moral and intellectual capabalities.
Being an “elitist” (as Mill and other “politico-theological” critics of democracy are often called) does not necessarily mean that they were, at the same time, sexists or racists. It was exactly their worries about prevailing majorities that led them to reject a purely majoritarian idea (or even religion) of democracy. A few lines down, Mill explicitly argues for women’s suffrage:
All human beings have the same interest in good government; the welfare of all is alike affected by it, and they have equal need of voice in it to secure their share of its benefits. If there be any difference,women require it more than men, since, being physically weaker, they are more dependent on law and society for protection. Mankind have long since abandoned the only premises which will support the conclusion that women ought not to have votes.
Should anyone make the objection that this belief in women’s rights also sounds like a “creed”, I readily admit it does. I’ve never said that so-called “secular beliefs” are bad in themselves; only that they are what they are: beliefs and not assertions of scientific “truths” or historical “facts.” When it comes to principles and values, we always have to choose, without pretending that our choice is determined by anything else than our belief in something higher then ourselves.
As Alexis de Tocqueville already observed, the idea of popular sovereignty hovered over the entire political system of the United States, or, in other words, the people ruled its political world as God ruled the universe. Tocqueville, however, knew very well that this popular deity was not the “people” itself but its current majority, and there was no good answer to the question why such a constantly changing, temporary phenomenon as the will of the majority should be taken as an objective fact. The “omnipotence” of the majority, its benevolence, and the infallibility of its decisions are nevertheless treated as dogmas in democratic thought: even if the majority sometimes seems to err, it is always the fault of bad advisors, and not of the sovereign itself. Let us remark as well that such divine attributes (omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience, etc.) are not “religious” concepts, but the concepts of Christian and certain other monotheist theologies, even if this theistic framework is so obviously synonymous with “religious” for Tocqueville as it was for all other authors mentioned earlier.
The Tocqueville castle in 2019.
Tocqueville’s critique of democratic theology (though he never used the term as such) established a long tradition in Western thought. John Stuart Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government in 1859 spoke of the “false creed” of American democracy, by which he meant the unprovable dogma of the people’s equality, especially with regard to voting rights. Herbert Spencer’s The Man versus the State in 1884 also criticized the representative system as a the expression of popular will: “The great political superstition of the past was the divine right of kings. The great political superstition of the present is the divine right of parliaments. The oil of anointing seems unawares to have dripped from the head of the one on to the heads of the many, and given sacredness to them also and to their decrees.”
Gaetano Mosca‘s 1896 Elementi di scienza politica drew a similar analogy between monarchies and representative democratic governments:
“A conscious observer would be obliged to confess that, if no one has ever seen the authentic document by which the Lord empowered certain privileged persons or families to rule his people on his behalf, neither can it be maintained that a popular election, however liberal the suffrage may be, is ordinarily the expression of the will of the people, or even of the will of the majority of the people.”
Vilfredo Pareto’s Trattato di sociologia generale of 1916 also spoke of a “democratic religion” which emerged very much in the same way as the Christian religion had in the first centuries of our era: “The two phenomena present many profoundly significant analogies.” The analogy is thus once again between Christianity and democratic thought, which has its own dogmatic structure inherited from Rousseau, but also notably different from the original direct democratic ideal: “This game is all to the liking of Rousseau’s admirers, and they go on playing at it. Still again X is modified, and once the opinion of the majority (?) of the electors, it now becomes the opinion of the majority of those elected. Such the evolution of one of the sublimest dogmas of the democratic religion.”
The main problem with representative democracy, however, is not that it distorts the “will of the people”, but that there is nothing to represent strictly speaking:
“We must not be led astray by the term ‘people,’ which seems to designate a concrete thing. Of course the sum of the inhabitants of a country might be called a ‘people,’ and a ‘people’ in such a case is a real, concrete thing. But only in virtue of an abstraction wholly foreign to reality can such an aggregate be regarded as a person possessing a will and the power to express it.”
Speaking of democratic religion or faith has remained regular until the mid-twentieth century. Ralph Henry Gabriel’s 1940 The Course of American Democratic Thought stated that “The persistence of the democratic faith in an age of science is a phenomenon of significance. The essence of the formula is faith. Not one of its doctrines can be proved in any scientific sense.” While the non-scientific character of democratic faith means that its free, rational, and basically good individuals are just as different from empirical human beings as Rousseau’s, Marx’s, or Hitler’s people, Gabriel kept on using terms like “social faith” or “culture religion”, suggesting that democratic faith was something secular, as compared to real – in this case, once again Christian – belief. Others like Crane Brinton also compared the non-scientific character of democratic faith to that of Christian theology:
“Democracy, in short, is in part a system of judgments inconsistent with what scientists hold to be true. This inconsistency would not create difficulties – or at least would not create some of the difficulties it now creates – were the democratic able to say that his kingdom is not of this world, able to say that his truth is not the kind that is in the least tested by the scientist, any more than the truth of the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist is tested by the chemical analysis of the bread and wine. Such a solution of the democrat’s intellectual quandary is not a happy one, but it is not altogether inconceivable. Democracy may become a genuinely transcendental faith, in which belief is not weakened by lack of correspondence between the propositions it lays down and the facts of life on this earth. (…) In short, democracy may be able to take its promised heaven out of this world, and put it in the world of ritual performed, of transcendental belief, or vicarious satisfactions of human wants, may keep it an ideal not too much sullied by the contrast with the spotted reality.”
Brinton mentions the same divine attributes of the democratic people as Gabriel (freedom, rationality, and goodness), and even derives “democratic faith” from the “Enlightenment faith,” which he, however, also describes as one that “admits no supernatural above the natural”, despite the fact that its beliefs can never be proven scientifically.
In 1974, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Leftism also detected an analogy between the dogmas, rituals, and institutions of Christianity (or, more precisely, Catholicism, so once again not of religion in general) and those of democracy, which, however, did not prevent him from calling the latter a Religionsersatz, again without explaining what the distinctive features of real and ersatz religions would be . Since then, it has become perhaps less fashionable to criticize democracy as a theological or religious system, but there are books like Patrick Deneen’s 2005 Democratic Faith, which realize that the deification of democracy (a striking example of which is the statue of the Goddess of Democracy on Peking’s Tienanmen Square in 1989) has nothing to do with existing democracies, only with an idea of democracy that today’s democratic societies can never really grow up to. As for the idealized people of democracy, this is also a product of imagination in both deliberative and agonistic models of democracy, which may be approached, but will never become exactly the same as the currently existent sum of citizens. A full democracy is only achievable with a fully rational or ab ovo democratic citizenship, but the advent of such a people is an article of faith, and not something that has been proven by anyone.
![Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World by [Tara Isabella Burton]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51P-lNiNGNL.jpg)
