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!