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What Is Replacing Traditional Religion? | Lecture by Philip Gorski

Name: What Is Replacing Traditional Religion? | Lecture by Philip Gorski
Uploaded: 2019-01-07T18:40:18+00:00
Duration: 1 h 32 min 51 s
Channel: The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute - מכון ון ליר בירושלים
Description: Eine verbreitete Gegenwartsdiagnose lautet: Wenn religiöse und zivilgesellschaftliche Institutionen schwächer werden, suchen Menschen Identität und …

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good evening everyone we would like to begin so to those of you who do not know me I am Shila V the director of the venire Jerusalem Institute it is a great
pleasure to open tonight's public lecture by our honourable guest professor Philip Gorski from Yale University the public lecture is taking
place within the framework of an international workshop titled post secular perspectives on the sacred on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of
widows otto's seminal book does Heidegger I would like to take this opportunity to also warmly welcome our international guests who have come from
far as well as our local colleagues participating in the workshop let me by way of introduction say a few words on the organizing concept of our gathering
at least one of the organizing concepts of the particular I have to say that when I was preparing my my notes I kind of had a general public in mind and now
that I see this highly respectable and knowledgeable audience I feel quite humbled and would have liked to changed the comments that I've prepared but it's
too late for that so I like to say a few words about the post secular and it's important for understanding contemporary societies especially Israeli society
when we begin by asking to what extent are we living today in a post secular society what does that term mean post Sickler like many other posts fabricated
by demyx post-modernism post-colonialism even PO scientism captures i believe some important
insights but may ultimately turn out to be misleading on one level the term post psycho captures the syste logical observation that since the nineteen
sixties or seventies religions have been playing a growing role in the public sphere the phenomena was detected in many different places in North America
and South America and later in post-soviet Eastern Europe and with the growing migration of Muslims has been on Europe's agenda for the past two decades
at least thus countering predictions by many observers of the late 19th and early 20th century that religion was not only fading away but if not fading away
than finding refuge in the privacy of a home in the church but it has become rather an important contester in the public arena this is a logical
description has brought leading some leading liberal thinkers Jurgen Habermas stands out as a prime example to move from the descriptor to the normative and
to recognize the positive contribution of religious traditions alongside secular traditions to our normative landscape others have drawn the opposite
conclusion adamantly opposing with religious manifestations in the public sphere to mean one conspicuous example the veil controversy in many stressful
and Western European countries in Israel arguably similar phenomena have led to the siculus outcry against editar the growing religiosity the growing
religious influence on secular institutions including the military schools and even higher education what is clearer and I can say this partly
based on my own research Muslims and Jews but mainly Muslims in Europe and especially in Germany we are not simply facing obviously the return
of religion religion itself has transformed often breaking with religious traditions religious feminism not necessarily if a liberal kind new
highly individual individualistic forms of religious spiritualism breaking away from religious from the religious church's global religious affiliations
enable a enabled by emerging social media that severed ties with local communities and religious nationalism more about which we will probably hear
tonight or take for example local case we may be worried about how to toss some of us may be worried about the time public schools but how can we make sense
of this at the time when its prime instigator our Minister of Education rejects the authority of rabbis at least to the extent that he has fled from the
religious party to form a new secular religious secular religious party religion may not have disappeared that this is not implied the traditional ways
of life have returned new forms of religious life and experience have emerged but these I would like to suggest a part of our new secular
condition we are not living in a particular society any more than calling our society postmodern means that we no longer live in a modern world if the
term particular society has never less helpful and I think it is is because it helps us put into question familiar and overarching narratives of secularism
that identify modernity with progressive process processes of rationalization and prophesize the gradual decline of religion from the public sphere it is
not that our society this is a double negation it is not that our society is not secular it is that secularism and modernity are not quite what we had
thought it is not simply about the rise of Reason progress enlightenment there is an internal dialectics of modernity which many have pointed out and perhaps
more importantly there are multiple modernity's this is something that I actually had an opportunity to discuss with professor Gorski earlier today by
the same token that we speak of multiple majorities and multiple securities we can speak this is often the following Eisenstaedt we can also
speak of multiple sacredness and senses of the sacred in contemporary societies particular and Europe is not the same or in Central Europe is not the same as an
Eastern Europe not the same in the Middle East or southeast asia and yet what one thing that all circularity is at least share in common is that they
operate in the in the shadow or under the growing influence of a specific kind of secularism of European and Christian secularism and this is perhaps true and
evident two ways in the case of Israel Israel since it's a foundation was part of the of the region in terms of its complex relationship to to secularism
but its concept of the secular has been borrowed from from Europe and strong secularism and the understanding of the secular come from there so that's we
should strive to understand Israeli Sickler and other secular isms in the relationship to the classic European model if that exists in in post
Christian European particular and the post Christian European secular legacy while acknowledging the distinctness and uniqueness of the possibility that this
we displace in other regions had let me conclude by thanking and presenting introducing dr. Yaffe Fischer for organizing the workshop dr. Fischer is
one of the leading scholars in the field of secularism discussions of particular here in Israel and has contributed greatly to our understanding of the
field locally and internationally let me mention just one of her important contributions the collected volume in Hebrew secularity and secularism
interdisciplinary investigations which has become in a very short time canon in the field yoga is also the deputy director of this institute in the head
of the sacredness religion and secularization cluster I want to thank you off he and her team here at the Institute dr. Adam clean
lawn who's here with us Shia was boffins own book for the understanding work that they have put into organizing the workshop and invite Yohe to open and
to introduce our keynote speaker thank you very much thank you trying today one of the most quoted paragraph from voters Otto's classic book the heilige is where
he requests that anyone not able to recall from his memory a moment of intense excitement about the mystery that lies beyond should not continue
reading the book underlying his request was the assumption that religion is based on a state of consciousness that rests on an unmediated experience of the
absolute other of the holy this experience is not rational and therefore without knowledge of or at least some memory of the sacred experience it is
impossible to understand it sacredness can be understood only from within 100 years later religious and secular dichotomies on which day modern self was
supposedly constructed have been blurred their us blurred as they attempt to classify the ologies rituals or experiments as being within or without
the sacred one of our goals here the sacredness religionists accusation theater Van Lear Jerusalem Institute is to deepen the understanding of the
contemporary challenges in tensions that Israel is facing in regards to those issues of religion in a post secular society as I mentioned post secular
attitudes towards the sacred seek to go beyond modernistic assumptions and to look into the ways people believe worship and give meaning to the private
and collective existence some would call it their religions other there are ideologies their credo their heroes order universal ethics is there a
connection for example between new forms of religiosity in the public sphere and the evolving weight of defy human rights values or gender
equality how is this connected to populism ethnocentrism and rapid processes of secularization we are honored to have with us this evening one
of the most interesting and committed scholars dealing with those kind of questions professor Phillip Gorski is a professor of sociology in the
religion studies at Yale University and one of the leading contemporary sociologists his teaching and research focuses on religion politics in the
early modern and modern Western Europe and North America and is particularly interested in the relationship between religion nationalism and conflict he
also works on social theory and in the philosophy of social sciences and Gosk is one of the leaders of the critical realist movement in North America he
uses both a comparative and historical perspectives and scrutinize a wide range of religions and regions his writings that stress stressed the importance of
theoretical approaches alongside alongside neurons contextuality paved the way to important scientific literature that critically reassesses
the relationship between diverse religions movement religious movements and liberal democracies his most recent book is American covenant a history of
civil religion from the Puritans to the present at the book who won a great deal of interest shows in which ways the American civil religious tradition is
now in peril and with it the American experiment as a whole Gorsky is one of the interesting public intellectuals to address contemporary
challenging questions such as what is replacing traditional religion and we are inspired to have him address us tonight
[Applause] just a moment
that's it so it's a restart and it's okay okay
well first of all I'd like to thank the family our Institute and Schuyler V and Yoshi Fisher for the kind invitation sure of often some also for organizing
this and of course all of you for turning out this evening as they mentioned the occasion for this talk is the centenary of Rudolph Otto's famous
book the idea of the holy - time to get and the talk that we'll be giving this evening focuses around this question of the relationship between soo quality and
politics and the modern urine in particular whether there is some specific connection between them so the question is has the secularization of
Western democracies opened up a sort of God shaped hole a hole that is now being filled with so-called political religions the growing number of American
commentators seem to think so David Brooks of the New York Times national you need a little bit of light here to read that wise aren't quite what they
used to be I'm afraid I'll do my best here David Brooks of the New York Times was one of the first to
sound the alarm as America's religious and civic institutions have declined he worries the resulting vacuum is being filled by warrior heroes a pop culture
Americans are deriving a sense of identity and transcendence from partisan political combat rather than from local community or traditional religion as in
the past Andrew Sullivan of New York Magazine concurs quote everyone has a religion he stipulates a practice of life that gives meaning that cannot
really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value as the old religions continue to decline he warns new ones are being born on the American
right there's the cult of trumpism on the American left the cult of wokes tourism that is the multiculturalist movement with its rigid dogmas of
political correctness and identity politics nor is this diagnosis confined to the ranks of anti-trump conservatives a number of liberal commentators have
delivered a similar verdict the intellectual historian mark Lilla for example writes that the progressive left is in the midst of a pseudo
religious awakening quote that one now hears the word woke everywhere is a giveaway that spiritual conversion rather than political agreement is the
demand relentless speech surveillance the protection of virgin ears the inflation of venial sins into mortal ones the burning of preachers that the
banning of preachers of unclean ideas all these campus identity Follies have left their precedents and American revivalist religion Jonathan Hite and
Greg lukianov offer up a similar interpretation they argue that quote the campus Left operates like a religious sect it
divides the world into good and bad people the woke and the unwell it Wells internal dissent via periodic purges and witch hunts expelling real and suspected
heretics from its ranks and it maintains communal purity by denying Outsiders any access to the pulpit sects need enemies of course the enemy of the campus left
they argue is the off-campus right and of course vice versa each sect provokes the other and the result is an ever-escalating cycle of sectarian
polarization the contemporary contacts discussions of secular political religion in the u.s. is clear enough for nearly two decades now levels of
traditional religious belief and practice in the u.s. have been declining and at an accelerating rate especially amongst the younger generation and the
working classes meanwhile birth rates and marriage rates have been declining as well particularly amongst the better a better educated and especially since
the Great Recession of 2008 so his life expectancy increases in the suicide rate the spread of opioid addiction and the obesity rate or some of the driving
causes conversely rates of social is it social isolate isolation have been increasing more and more people find themselves alone and as if that all were
not enough the cycle of political polarization that began in the mid 1990s has now reached the point that many Democrats and Republicans regard one
another with open contempt and even hatred what is less clear to many I think it's a deeper historical context for the present day historical
discussion of political religion namely the interwar and pre-war literature on this subject it begins with the French Revolution and
more specifically with Edmund Burke's reaction to it having first compelled the Catholic priests of France to swear their loyalty to the Republic the
Jacobin then thought to replace the Catholic Church altogether first with the de istic cult of the Supreme Being and then with an agnostic cult of Reason
these new religions had all the trappings of the old amongst other things saints and martyrs ensconce and the pantheon in Paris national holidays
embedded in a new revolutionary calendar and masked pilgrimages mapped onto a sacred geography of the French hexagon all to the growing horror of the English
sage Edmund Burke religion he opined is the basis of civil society and man is by his constitution a religious animal should we uncover our nakedness by
throwing off our religion he warned than some uncouth pernicious and degrading superstition will inevitably take its place
Brooke hoped and believed that the march of equality and democracy could be halted the French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville did not he was a liberal of
sorts unlike Burke and yet he ultimately came to a similar assessment of Jack urbanism the French Revolution he declared with a political revolution
that developed in the manner of a religious revolution it became a new kind of religion an imperfect religion to be sure without God cult or afterlife
yet a religion that liked Islam inundated the earth with soldiers apostles and martyrs Brooke and Tocqueville were amongst the first to
sketch out a theory of political religion but they themselves did not use that particular term the term political religion first came into circulation
during the interwar years between World War one and two so far as I know Rudolf Otto himself did not participate in the debate in part because he was blessed
with the mercy of an early death in 1937 but if he had though I expect his views would have been quite similar to those of the Austrian philosopher Alec fuga
leaned through he leans famous book the political religions was first published in 1938 one year after Otto's death in 1937 and
one year before the Nazi invasion of Poland let's have a closer look at ferdinand theory you know the old saying about how mark stood Hegel on his head
you might say that fuga lean stood Durkheim on his feet in the elementary forms of the religious life his seminal text on the sociology of religion the
great French sociologist had famously argued that all religions were based on a distinction between the sacred and the profane and further that collective
representations of the sacred arose out of experiences of collective effervescence that is experiences of transcendence in which we lose our sense
of self and feel at one with our environment religion he concluded is rooted in a real experience of transcendence but it misrepresents the
source of these experiences the source he says is not within the divine it's without in society Fukienese theory of political religions is a mirror image of
Durkheim's theory of religion like otto fuga lean believed that human beings have an innate capacity for religious experience
experiences of transcendence do not come from without as Durkin claimed but rather from within also like food alene like Otto foo be lean believed that
these experiences were individual mystical experiences of joy and awe before the immensity and unity of the being that both
underlies and transcends all existence they were not just experiences of society finding like auto fuga lean saw biblical religion as the most accurate
and complete representation of the divine Christianity not totemism as the purest form of religion Auto & fugu mean were as much delusions as philosophers
so that this is the background for fuga lean theory of political religions political religions arise when we make the things of this world into objects of
worship and of hope in particular when we were that worship class or race or nation as occurs in Jacobin ism communism fascism and Nazism for
instance in fuga Dean's pithy phrase political religions in men and ties the eschaton they amenitized the eschaton they put the end of history back into
history so what Durkheim argued that religion arises when we turn social things into divine things fuga being argued that political religion arises
when we turn social things into divine things now fuga leads is perhaps the best-known theory of political religion but it was not the only such theory nor
was it even the first interestingly one of the first observers to note the quasi religious characteristics of the popular political movements of the interwar you
interwar year years with none other than Bertrand Russell writing in 1920 following the extended visit to the Soviet Union Russell had this to say the
war has left throughout Europe a mood of disillusionment and despair with calls allowed for a new religion Bolshevism has supplied the new religion
it promises glorious thing demand of injustice of war of the disunion of classes unlike fuga lien Russell was not
concerned about the heretical character of the new religion he was after all an atheist and a scientific materialist nor was he worried about its anti
capitalism he was also a socialist of sorts when alarmed Russell was the irrational and hubristic character of Bolshevism he predicted correctly that
the Russian Revolution would result in tragedy rather than triumph in tyranny rather than equality if Bolshevism was the first example of a new religion in
the interwar period then fascism was of course the second an Italian commentators were amongst first to elaborate a full-fledged theory of
political religions one of the fiercest critics of Italian fascism was Luigi Stewart's own store so began his career as the working-class priest in his
native Sicily he was also a leading figure in the Italian popular party following in exile in 1924 he turned his attentions to the nascent discipline of
sociology his critique of totalitarianism drew heavily on catholic political theology and catholic social teachings its critique of of
totalitarianism was that it systematically obliterated the separation between spiritual and temporal power if thereby destroyed as
he thought the dualistic system of rule by church and states that had emerged in Western Christendom during Late Antiquity it replaced it with a monistic
system and which the state had absolute and unchecked sovereignty or rather took absolutism to his logical conclusion Stuart so also had a second critique as
well totalitarianism obliterated the separation of public and private life it made education and family into instruments of the
state thereby violating the Catholic principle of subsidiarity unstirred sus reading totalitarianism was not simply an unintended consequence of
secularization it was a direct result of a devil's bargain between certain segments of the Catholic clergy and the leaders of Italian fascism Sturt so
referred to this pact as cleric Oh fascism nor was the Italian fascist and the only example of clerical fascism similar alliances between churches and
fascists could be observed throughout Europe including even in Germany where National Socialism and German Protestantism enjoyed an uncomfortably
close relationship the analyses of political religion that I have enumerated so far differ in their political and religious orientations
Burke Tocqueville fuga leaned stored so to conservatives to liberals to Catholics to Protestants but all before had a clearly Christian inflection one
of the first analyses of political religion from an avowedly secular perspective is found in the high Mahone's writings on secular religions a
whole defined secular religion says quote doctrines that in the souls of contemporaries take the place of a vanished faith and that locate
humanity's salvation in this world in the distant future in the form of a social order that has yet to be created his concern like Russell's was not that
political religion distorted religious truth rather it was that it created unrealistic expectations about what was morally and politically possible
expectation that could easily issue into tyranny and tragedy as the emigrate intellectuals of the interwar period returned to the
scholarly pursuits they had been forced to abandon they took the new theory of political religion with them the result was a steady stream of
increasingly specialized studies focusing on topics such as fascist ritual Hitler's theology and statistical correlations between Protestant beliefs
and Nazi voting to name just a few but the overarching narrative remained the same the rise of political religion with connected to the decline of traditional
religion and not only within the West the rapid spread of Marxist movement throughout Asia could also be folded into this story so could the rise of
radical Islamist movements beginning in the 1980s recall the Tocqueville had already described Islam at the political religion over essentially earlier it was
around the time that Tocqueville was first writing his book on the French Revolution the Charles Darwin first introduced his famous distinction
between lumpers and splitters lumpers lumped things together that is they look for similarities while splitters split things apart they look for differences
the literature on political religion has been dominated by Lumpur's Jacobin ism communism fascism Nazism were all lumped together during the interwar years and
in the ensuing decades christianism Islamism secular progressivism and radical multiculturalism were also added to the lump when a few
overzealous campus activists in evangelical pastors are tossed into the same bucket as the SS and the Khmer Rouge I think it's time for some
splitting so let's start by splitting up religion now am i reading perhaps oversimplified sociologists of religion have defined
their object of study in for at least four different ways I'm going to call these approaches phenomenological ontological ritual and institutional the
phenomenological approach makes individual experience the basis of all religions it includes approaches that are explicitly grounded in philosophical
phenomenology from the early 20th century so here one thinks for example of Peter burgers writings on the social construction of reality and his famous
book the sacred canopy but it also includes other approaches that are not explicitly phenomenological for example route of Otto's new content approach or
more recently hunt yo Oz's neo pragmatism approach the common denominator here is the appeal to experiences of self transcendence as the
starting point for religion the notion of transcendence is also central to what I'm calling ontological approaches though it's understood rather
differently not in terms of experiences but rather in terms of representations specifically representations that divide the world into two distinct realms that
are thought to be ontological II discontinuous with one another earthly versus heavenly changing versus unchanging created versus uncreated and
so on the best examples here are the Burien and neo Bavarian approaches to religion Weber famously distinguishes between magic and religion and the
magical worldview divine powers live in the same world as human beings like the Greek gods on Mount Olympus and the religious worldview they live in a
separate realm like the God of the Bible the Quran from this perspective the idea primitive religions is the contradiction in terms
primitive societies do not know religion they know only magic not so of course in the ritual approach it makes collective enactment and bodily experience into the
fonts a Torgo of all religion the paradigmatic example of the ritual approach is of course Durkheim's theory of collective effervescence a shared
focus of attention synchronized speech and movement often song and dance sometimes also intoxicants all culminating in a state of collective
ecstasy and the merging of self and other such of the familiar dynamics of collective effervescence it's a contrast between such heightened states of
collective emotion and the humdrum routine of everyday life the Durkheim Ian's argue that are at the root of all distinctions between sacred and profane
and thus of all religion to the fourth and final approach is institutional it defines religion in terms of a set of religious elites and organizations that
are clearly differentiated from non religious elites and organization priests and monks theologians and gurus tabernacles and monasteries and so on on
this account the emergence of religion is connected to the emergence of agrarian societies societies that generate an economic surplus that can be
used to support a division of labor including a class that intellectual and ritual specialists so for different type ologies for different approaches to
religion phenomenological ontological ritual and institutional this is obviously an ideal type of the usual Mayberry in disclaimers apply these are
pure types rarely found in reality mixed and hybrid types are the rule so what is the point of this little theoretical detour what leverage
does this give us over the problem of political religion well there are a couple of different ways in which we can use this typology to get a better handle
on this problem the first is simply to use that as a yardstick a scale more formally to measure how religious as it were a political particular political
movement is does it resemble a religion in one of these senses two three all four and to what degree this also enables us to compare and contrast two
or more political movements with one another in a quasi quantitative fashion so let's start with a comparison of National Socialism and political
correctness I realize this seems like a crazy crazy comparison to make but it's actually not as unusual as you think just to give you a quick example here so
let's start we're all such comparisons start naming with the Nazis experiences of individual transcendence check just look at the rapt faces and one of me
nearly finished Oz famous propaganda movies what inspired it maybe charisma but maybe it was also the ritual pageantry of Nazism so check again
ontological discontinuity yes to some degree there's of course a mini key and distinction between Aryans and Jews along with the state colorization of
race and nation they're also millenarian elements Hitler's thousand-year hike and Christ's millennial rule how about at the level
of beliefs and institutions about the existence of a Nazi elite with the quasi sacred status and putatively superhuman powers no question about that
you lead ISM with central to the entire Nazi program about not the institution or debate as possible you know we might recall on a rants famous definition of
totalitarianism as the perpetual motion machine that dominated via disruption more than through order still all in all knots ISM obviously scores very high on
the political religion scale now what about our politically correct campus activist I think it's pretty obvious that American multicultural activism is
not a political religion anything like the degree that German National Socialism was but let's just go through the exercise anyway experiences of
individual transcendence well maybe you know there's this whole being woke thing I suppose but at this face I mean Judith Butler is not Adolf Hitler powerful
speaker yes a charismatic demagogue not so much right and a kappes rally isn't exactly the Nuremberg rally in terms of ritual and pageantry more disorganized
ontological discontinuity there's a little bit of a tendency to demonize white guys and romanticize people of color I guess but this is hardly
comparable to non not the anti-semitism and Arianism is there a PC elite that's equivalent to the German SS no there are some people who think they're smarter
and more enlightened than everyone else maybe with fancy degrees some fancy colleges like Yale but let's be serious shouting down speakers is not the same
as shooting down subhumans comparison between nazis and campus activists are overwrought and frankly more than a little bit irresponsible what about
right-wing populist movements the case for concerning them to be political religious seems on its face to be a little bit stronger
most of these movements are built around a single charismatic leader who is idolized by his followers it's usually he of course they're not always they're
also built on an idealized vision of the common people which is typically juxtaposed to a corrupt elite or some sort of outsider group immigrants
and refugees for example they are hierarchically organized usually in political parties or movements there's a sword there can be a courtly a lead of
kind whose status is based on its proximity to the charismatic leader and populist parties often have somewhat more elaborate rituals than your typical
political party you think of a Trump rally well or don't as you prefer but if you know lots of red maggots chants of lock
her up ritual denunciations of the mainstream media right so using our typology of religion is to distinguish different degrees of political religion
as I noted earlier there's also a second we can use the four definitions to distinguish different types of religious politics by religious politics I mean a
relatively coherent vision of how religion should and should not enter into politics the best starting point for such a typology I think is the
fourth definition of religion that is the definition in terms of elites and institutions so here I've just proposed that you imagine religion politics the
way that most sociologists of religion tend to do namely as separate spheres and let's further imagine the relationship between these spheres is
having both a vertical and a horizontal dimension sort of two-dimensional on the vertical axis religion can be subordinate to politics politics can be
subordinate to religion or they can be in a relationship of parity with each other on the horizontal axis the two spheres can overlap completely they can
overlap partially or they can be completely separate okay and you do this you'll wind up with the typology that looks something like this with nine
different cells in it the ones that are I think of interest for us this evening the top that the four in the upper left in particular the near neighbors of
political religion Claire what I'm calling clerical authoritarianism and religious nationalism and here's a bi sort of clumsy attempt at a at a graphic
that maybe helps to sort of give you that the visualization here a little bit a little bit more clearly so as I'm presenting here political religion means
the subordination of religion and also it's complete or near complete absorption into politics to be honest I'm not sure that a political religion
of this sort has ever really existed in the modern world except perhaps as an aspiration that the Jacobins remained in power for several generations had they
been able to complete their program of D Christianizing France if they made their cult of reason into the religion of France but it's not clear to me that
regimes such as these could have survived for long enough to institute a political religion I suspect that political religion may actually be a
self-limiting and self undermining phenomenon consider Jacobins and succumb to its own radicalism it eat its children as the saying goes and one
could tell a very similar story about not Nazi aspirations to found a political religion perhaps it could only have survived by routinize
institutionalism bureaucratize themselves in which case they would no longer have been political religions one could perhaps argue that this is what
happened in the Baathists regimes of Syria and Iraq which were as we know partly inspired by European fascism it's arguably also what happened in communist
Russia and China as Leninism gave way to Stalinism and Maoism to reformism but what about the fascist regimes of Mediterranean Europe or Franco Spain
Mussolini's Italy or the Romanian Iron Guard am i reading they are actually closer to the type of clerical authoritarianism there was never really
any serious talk of abolishing the established churches in these countries nor was there widespread resistance to fascism from within the churches either
on the contrary there was active support for fascist rule in many quarters and passive acquiescence in most now what about contemporary populist movements
where do they fit into this typology as yet I do not see any serious aspirations to establish a political religion of a totalitarian sort the self-proclaimed
goal of these movements is typically to defend Western its Western Christian civilization or Islamic civilization of when thinks of Turkey's
air21 not to replace it with a non-theistic or non-christian cult nor have these movements given way to the elaborate rituals that are typical of
fascism or to the kind of systematic ideology that defines communism on the contrary many scholars argue that it's precisely the lack of a coherent
ideology that it's the defining feature of populism so it's not clear what a populous religion would look like Magga hats and a little chanting Twitter
tirades and reality TV so just what is the relationship between populism and religion I think this is a very important intellectual and political
question at the moment I would argue that it's better captured by these other two categories of religious nationalism and clerical authoritarianism now what
do I mean first of all by religious nationalism as I define it here is the view that religious and political identity and institutions should be as
closely aligned as possible in the United States for example Christian nationalists believe that you cannot really be a good American or frankly
even a real American unless you're also a good Christian and vice-versa Christian nationalist ideologues
also argue that the founding fathers were Orthodox Christians and some stands and that the founding documents are based on Christian principles or in some
very extreme versions were literally handed at the founders by Christ himself I'm not making this up I can show you some illustration often now Christian
national crisp so Jupe populist and european populace are not usually Christian nationalists in quite this sense they tend to be cultural
Christians often they don't attend church or even pretend to do so they simply claim that European culture has Christian roots and that therefore
non-christians cannot really assimilate into European culture they're also secular Christians they claim that European secularism has Christian roots
and the separation of worldly and spiritual power and they argued that Muslims are therefore doubly unassimilable Muslims are not only
culturally alien and unassimilable they are also unsecure izybelle because Islam knows no separation of religious and political authority now for the other
category clerical authoritarianism what do I mean by this is I'm defining it it is the rest on a quid pro quo it arises when important factions of the clergy
ally with a secular strongman the strongman promises to protect the churches from its most hated enemies liberals humanist communists whatever he
also admits some members of the clergy into his inner circle in return the clergy Nottoli ignores that your religious beliefs and behaviors of the
strong man but proclaims him a saint and a savior even when his policies are clearly violating religious values this was the dominant type of
religious politics and Latin fascism's when sees a less developed form of authoritarian clerical authoritarianism and the
populist regimes of Eastern Europe particularly in Poland and Hungary and I would argue an incipient form of clerical authoritarianism in the United
States they're prominent evangelical and Pentacostal clerics such as Jerry Falwell Jr and Paula white not only make excuses for Trump's manifestly
unchristian behavior they not only proclaim contrary to all evidence that he is a man of deep faith they even imply that he is an agent of
divine providence and that his election was a genuine miracle some commentators have insightfully characterized these leaders as Trump's court evangelicals in
the strange alliance between evangelicalism and trumple trumpism we glimpse I think in an incipient form of clerical authoritarianism so where does
this leave us returning to the question of political religion in the contemporary world are we in fact entering a new era of political
religions is populism a political religion what about multiculturalism what's the final verdict on the political commentators I introduced at
the beginning of my talk I have to say I'm myself am of two minds first the positivist positives viewing populism and multiculturalism through the lens of
religion is revealing right-wing populist movements do resemble political religion in some respects they often apatheia size their leaders and
attributes almost supernatural powers to them recall Trump's speech before the Republican National Convention I alone can fix it I am your voice many of his
evangelical and Protestant followers compare him to biblical figures such as King David that's the adultery part
or more often to Cyrus the Great the Persian Emperor who liberated the ancient Israelites from their Babylonian captivity some of his more youthful and
thick Euler followers liken him to Napoleon or to video game superheroes it's true but neither populism nor trumpism isn't
ism in the same sense or to the same degree as they communism or liberalism both of which gave rise to systematic doctrines that justified specific
policies nor to Trump's tweets and temper tantrums in reality TV antics match in any way the carefully choreographed rituals and spectacles of
fascism and communism right-wing populism in Europe and the u.s. contained elements of religious nationalism and clerical
authoritarianism but I see little evidence thus far of any aspiration to establish a true political religion what about the radical identity politics of
wokes tourism these movements do indeed recall certain elements of religious sects they make strong claims to moral purity and truth they draw sharp
boundaries around themselves and expel those who do not conform they like to speak truth to power but are often reluctant to engage in dialogue they
have their great prophets and theologians their fuko's and butlers and they do seek to spread their gospel in the halls of power into corporate HR
departments and university admissions committees for example what is more their most zealous followers are often post Protestants or secular Jews who do
make politics into a religion of sorts that is into the primary source of their own personal values and identity so the political religion narrative does shed
some light on these movements to still the political religion label seems like a very serious mr. to me and so far as to suggest overdrawn and inflammatory
comparisons with the totalitarian movements of the 20th century now for the negatives the theory of political religion claims that secularization
leads directly to the sacral ization of politics and that politics was and should be a purely profane affair all of these claims are highly contestable
hasn't politics always partaking of the sacred think of the tradition of fakir kingship yet first emerged at least five or six millenia ago conversely it is not
at all clear that a purely secular politics is even possible indeed that is one of the deepest insights of the theory of political religion it was
precisely the political movements that were most aggressively secular that were also most deeply sacral izing consider Marxism
was it the dry reasoning of Das Kapital that made it a world historical movement or was it the millenarian prophecies of the Communist Manifesto the latter of
course to the degree that a truly secular politics has ever been possible it was only because traditional religion exercised an effective monopoly over the
legitimate forms of the sacred today of course this monopoly is highly contested but not only by political movements political religions may be one possible
consequence of secularization but they are hardly the only one one could also speak of aesthetic religions for example what I have here in mind are the
stylistic subcultures that many people inhabit during their use with their Talmudic rules concerning dress diet sex and love music and art and so on one
could even speak in a sense of scientific religions here I'm thinking of the techno utopians who populate places like Silicon Valley with their
dreams of trance human apotheosis and millenarian singularities their sci-fi canons and their fantastical scriptures one could easily give still more
examples examples with sexual religions right anomic religions and this fragmentation of the sacred places limits on the stake
realization of politics - like the Temple Mount many different faiths must share the space of the sacred today indeed in retrospect one could even
argue that the political religions of the 20th century were not solely or even primarily a consequence of secularization as such whether they were
the consequence of a unique historical conjuncture between secularization on the one hand and statism nationalism and imperialism on the other the reason that
state nation Empire rushed in to fill the god-shaped hole left by secularization is because they were filling everything in this period if so
than contemporary prophecies about the return of political religion are probably overblown Humpty Dumpty can't be put back together again what we are
witnessing today is not the return of political religion so much as the fragmentation of the sacred note that this is not the same thing as
secularization of that term it's usually understood in the Orthodox version of secularization Theory the withering of religion goes hand-in-hand with the
growth of Reason that seems to me like a badly mistaken reading of modern history outside of certain knowyour Western and cosmopolitan no your religion is not
waning at all and even within those new year it is not giving way to reason so much as to new forms of the sacred some including myself have therefore proposed
that the present age is not a secular age so much as a post secular age and the specific way the shy and yogi had proposed this is not to say that we are
returning to a pre secular age in which organized religions claim to monopoly over the legitimate forms of the sacred and with a great
deal of success as Weber rightly recognized over a century ago the present age has in many ways more in common with pre-christian at antiquity
with its multiple in competing gods an age in which monotheism can only triumph in alliance with state power the post secular condition is not one in which
scientific rationality replaces revealed religion so much as an age in which monotheism gives way to polytheism or let theologically in which cultural
monism gives way to cultural pluralism and hybridity I know of no better summary of the personal and political promises and perils of the post secular
condition than these wise and witty words spoken by the late novelist David Foster Wallace in the day-to-day trenches of adult life there's actually
no such thing as atheism there's no such thing as not worshipping everybody worships the only choice we get is what to worship and the compelling reason for
maybe choosing some sort of God or spiritual type thing to worship be it JC or all a biga way or the wicked mother goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some
enviable set of ethical principles is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive if you worship money and things if they are
where you tap real meaning in life you will never have enough never feel you have enough it's the truth worship your body and beauty and sexual
lore and you will always feel ugly and when time and age starts showing you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you on one level we all
know this stuff already it's been codified at myth Proverbs cliches epigrams parables the skeleton every great story the whole trick is keeping
the truth upfront and daily consciousness it's a trick we all do well to practice today thank you very much
[Applause] thank you thank you very much for this wonderful thought-provoking an inspiring
talk and we can take some questions comments your fundamental focus has been to a great extent on European the West in general at the risk of opening up a
can of worms here how would you characterize in in terms of your quadrangle for example the relationship between Shinto and the
chrysanthemum throne in Japan so I the reason I didn't stray too far from North American Western Europe isn't because I don't find these cases interesting but
of course just because I you know fear to go too far beyond my my areas of expertise and say something that's just really stupid but that's just for now in
the Q&A I'll just go ahead and do my best I I guess I like my mentor Bob Ella and then also like the late Shmuel
Eisenstaedt tend to see job Japan is a kind of a peculiar an exceptional case in some ways I mean it at least and in the you know if you accept to some
degree their argument about an axial revolution or or an axial age and you you further accept the idea that one can see a kind of an East Asian variant of
this and in Confucianism and Daoism then Japan for them constitutes a kind of exception and one of the one of the few modern
societies that has not undergone an axial revolution therefore does not have the sharp never really in any bit major religious system instituted this sharp
distinction between the transcendence and the mundane or the super mundane and the mundane so in in some ways I think the way that the Shmuel or Bob would
answer this question would be say that the chrysanthemum throne it's in some ways it's it's better compared with one of these sort of pre axial sacred forms
of kinship you know with this idea of you know of a monarch who was the literal lineal descendant some kind of world creating God or power that's a
very that's a very common idea which lives on because of the lack of an axial breakthrough and so in some ways you know Shinto you know I'm thinking now of
the kind of official state Shinto late nineteenth century you know up through the end of World War two it's a little bit difficult to categorize because I
know most of the religious nationalisms that I would think about I mean you know you really have as to sort of fully formed religious and political
organization elite apparatuses and religious nationalism is about you know attempt to sort of fusing or lying the two whereas at least my rather
superficial knowledge is that state Shinto was somewhat more of an artificial creation of the Japanese you know if the the Japanese Imperial and
then and then fascist state now that would be my best attempt at an answer is there's kind of a peculiar it's hard to map onto these categories like I
couldn't do it I that's why I asked the question yeah thank you thank you very much two short questions which I think are related and the first
is about the term religion and it appears that in a way what you just described is a wonderful way to show how the term religion fails and beneath all
the apologies and and and models and so the question is how one uses religion and thinking about Assad's claim about the appearance of religion and how it is
formed and what is the ideological use of it and the complementary question is about liberalism which seems to be the transparent agent in your talk all the
others of you actually investigated all the others of the liberal state all the people that good liberals are afraid of from the right and the left and and
civil religion was the I think the most uninvestigated the player so sure so I I think I I agree with you about the you know the
difficulties of the term religion up to up to a certain extent so I I think that the the whole discussion about the discourse of religion within religious
studies but many different histories of the way in which the term religion has been used you know first within kind of a Western
Christian theological context and then the way it was applied or misapplied outside of that context of origin I think that I think that's all been been
quite revelatory though I mean my own view is is still that there is that there is a there there that I mean there is something about religion which is not
just a discursive construct and I think the sort of the best articulation of this argument that I know of his is actually
by the late Martin V Capote so it's has a you know I won't gloss the entire book but get some very interesting examples I think one of the to me one of the most
compelling one was the degree to which what I'll call religious elites from different traditions different contacts recognized one another as somehow of the
same type so you know the way in which you know Michigan Catholic missionaries to China recognized Confucian scholars
as somehow like them to the degree that they even take on some of their garb I mean this is a kind of a common phenomenon so that I think that there is
something there limits to their to the historical construction argument the the civil the civil religion I mean that's a that's a subject of my most recent book
of course and I didn't want it to sort of repeat myself you know what by you know putting in putting in a plug for civil religion but I mean I do think
that this you know what if I were making a blog in terms of this typology I mean the way that I'm thinking about it is that it places it presumes a certain
parity between the religious and political spheres and it doesn't imagine that that the two can be fully separated I mean the idea that somehow religious
people shouldn't have any non liberal political convictions and that they should never use non liberal political language in public debate I reject that
idea and I equally reject the idea that that there is a kind of completely secular politics which is completely bereft of any sort of these transcendent
convictions I think that's also a form of a form of self-deception and so civil religion the way I'm conceiving it is is it kind of
you know middle ground or some kind of mutual recognition between people of faith and no faith is possible where a religious person can see a sort of
religious truth in a secular philosophy where our secular philosopher can see a kind of a secular truth and in a religious narrative I mean that's a very
apse of course in reality I mean you know simple religions aren't that they're very specific practices and stories and symbols and people you know
or memorialized and remembered with with within a within a particular polity is helping to define that polity but wouldn't see it at least as I understand
it is liberal not and at least in the stronger sense of that term so in some ways I even see it as sort of anti liberal or communitarian in the sense
that super religion presumed a you kind of a non-voluntary character political belonging I mean you know most of us don't choose the culture or the polity
that we live in you know we're simply born into it you know for better for worse and you know we have to make the best of that even if we feel the
contract such as that such as it is has been violated it you know and you know whatever sort of individual rights and liberties we might enjoy within the
context at that polity also depend on you know institutions and rules that may sometimes be at odds with our own personal identity or interests so in a
word I you know my understanding of civil religious more communitarian I suppose and and and in that sense sort of critical not of you know liberalism
in a sort of generic sense of left-of-centre but critical of liberalism and this stricter philosophical sense of you know
individual autonomy and social contracts you know mutual benefit and you know everything that that contract Aryan tradition gives us
well what I have is not an argument but rather an impression and the impression is that I feel a little bit uncomfortable after after your speech
because if if it is true that such thing like political religion is is a historical result of a conjunction of of secularism and nationalism as you said
then one asks whether it is helpful to use that term today at all I mean and in your arguments there were a lot of things where we we said that every
religion is political and you said that there is in secularity a religious element and then religion is a secular element so what do you mean by all these
concepts now which becomes so much confused or so near by one another that I wonder whether they are really analytical concepts anymore is it is it
useful to use these concepts in a in which way would you argue for a new definition of them of circularity or of religion or is it something well do they
represent a state of mind of other of a past situation I'm a bit confused how you're you you use the concepts because in a way they are traditional and then
your argument is that something new happens and that we have to use them in another way so well you see the problem
well I I mean I think I think they are useful as tools for both to store making historical and political judgments so historical
judgments you know with contemporary populism a political religion in the same sense that nots ISM and fascism work I don't think so
that's that's the historical judgment and that also implies a certain kind of political judgment about how we should how we should respond to those those
movements as well so those are the two ways that you know I trying to use this this typology right I mean there's this narrative that's being mobilized at
least in contemporary American political discourse about secularization giving rise to in a kind of automatic way to to political religion and I'm trying to
sort of qualify that that narrative in certain ways of whether I think that the second question is is it it's a trickier one I think what you're asking is is
something like political religion even possible anymore now I think that the implication of the talk is it's much less likely I mean nothing is impossible
you know I mean I learned that in 2016 nothing is impossible right so but it does seem to me less likely you know in part because of if I'm right in saying
that the sacred has been increasingly fragmented you know the I think it is for example incredibly interesting you may know this that one of the the key
platforms or key arenas where support for Trump originally involved was online gaming communities in particular there's probably not that I mean I'm Way too old
to have known about this if I hadn't read about but 4chan you know which is just kind of very I'm even looking at like you know
something that people I know to be no no okay anyway these these very sort of subversive irreverent online you know
very overtones of credit misogyny and and and eventually racism this becomes one of the major platforms for trumpism and this is I mentioned my talk about
you know how some some of trumps fans presented him as kind of a like a game video game superhero those are the people I'm talking about
and you can easily find this if you do you know a Google image search I don't know it's a point maybe they're gonna get bored with Trump and they're just
gonna and there's you know I don't know the next Mortal Kombat video game comes out and they decide they'd rather spend their time gaming you know what I'm
saying I mean I think that you know there's just so many different things that people can become connected to and distracted with today that you know
they're the kind of cult life be very difficult to create the sort of cult-like devotion it's even hard to imagine assembling that many people into
some sort of gigantic mass ritual pageant of that sort I mean with that even excite a lot of a lot of these these kids anymore I don't know I'm not
so sure so I think there's I guess what I'm saying is I think that I there's a you know there's it's sort of Madisonian ism so Madison famously says that the
best you know the best remedy for for tyranny is faction and more divided people are up into little groups and more difficult it becomes to assemble
people into one massive group so I mean the one hand you you can sort of bomb on this fragmentation of the sacred but I think it does and it's to some degree
immunize us against you know really sort of radical political religion this or but speculation I don't know I mean it's a really it's a really it's a profound
question but a very difficult thank you very much okay one last question - last question ever in slow-mo the short one please but one minute
before I have a very short question you referred to secularity a few times in terms of a hole to be filled I wasn't sure if this is if you were just using
the commonly received idea of how the secular is namely a kind of empty space that is left by religion or do you think as I do because I'm French and their
security is a quasi religion do you do you think that secularity in secularism can have and do have I mean it's not only normative but descriptive actually
full existence a full you know solid ontological basis and phenomenological basis absolutely yes I do think that I really was using the you know the
god-shaped hole just it's a you know it's a common metaphor and I think it's the one that lies behind some of the commentaries that I opened that the talk
was so particularly in the French case this is very clear to me what you said the circularity of something that has real substance it's not just empty space
it seemed to me that you were maybe this is my fault but it seemed to me that this sort of moving back and forth in a slippery way between two connotations of
religion or two definitions that religion as phenomenology in other words and and then we said that jacobeans or communists etc are religious in terms of
the general phenomenology of these political movements and that's that's well accepted and then there's also religion as a historical traditional
doctrinal institution now it seems to me and it could be that I'm wrong but it's anyway researches is involved with it it seems to me that we're seeing when I was
interested particularly in your definition of religious nationalism where you said it's its collective identity and and it's seeing national
identity in religious terms by which you meant or at least the Israeli case and from what I understand the European case today the populist nationalist European
case is seeing national identity in terms of traditional institutionalized historical doctrinal religion whether Christianity in one form or another
whether Orthodox Judaism in one form or another light not light etc here in Israel now do you think that if that's a new phenomena that we're defining
nationalism in these received religious terms or do you think it's always been with us or do you think that something's going on I'm just curious about about
about your thoughts about that yeah so I have this I I think somewhat unorthodox view among students of nationalism that this is something which has been with us
for a very very long time so just speaking you know to to the American case my own view is that religious nationalism in more or less
its current form is already there in the second generation of Puritanism no it's already there in the in the 1670s in 1680s it arises in the context of
those are bloody struggles between the native peoples and and the Puritans and so what I see is both it's sort of two core elements are a certain apocalyptic
interpretation of Biblical prophecy and you know a sort of understanding of of kind of manichaean struggle between good and evil that's already there in the
second generation of Puritanism I am also of the the somewhat unorthodox view that that Western European that the the germ cell for Western European
nationalism in general is found in a particular Christian reception of the Hebrew Bible and an appropriation of the notion of chosen us and the triptych of
land autonomy people so I'm not one of these people think that nationalism started with the French Revolution or around that time nor am i one of these
people who thinks that nationalism somehow replaces religion it can be that there are secular form you know secular forms of religion but those to me are
not they're the root form and and not even the most relevant form and the US and probably not in Israel either thank you very much
[Applause] [Music]

Zum Nachlesen

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