Political Religion Beyond Totalitarianism

The Sacralization of Politics in the Age of Democracy

J. Augusteijn, P. Dassen, M. Janse, J. Augusteijn, P. Dassen, M. Janse, J. Augusteijn, P. Dassen, M. Janse

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137291721
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea

The success of fascist and communist regimes has long been explained by their ability to turn political ideology into a type of religion. These innovative essays explore the notion that all forms of modern mass-politics, including democracies, need a form of sacralization to function.

Part I
Definition

Religion and Politics: In Search of Resemblances

Herman Paul

As unlikely as it would have sounded a generation ago, historians of modern Europe have rediscovered religion.¹ Apart from being increasingly attentive to the various social, cultural and intellectual roles played by its so-called ‘traditional religions’ (Judaism, Christianity and Islam),² growing numbers of historians employ ‘religion’ as a key concept in the study of phenomena not conventionally associated with religion. Thus we hear about the ‘religion of nature’ practiced by eighteenth-century travellers and writers who perceived an unspoiled wood or wilderness as reaching beyond itself³ or about the ‘religion of history’ professed by those nineteenth-century historicists who believed that historical inquiry would tell them who they were by showing where they came from.⁴ We are told about a ‘religion of science’ that made its appearance among nineteenth-century scientific entrepreneurs and, in rather different form, entered school books in the atheistic German Democratic Republic.⁵ Likewise, in the field of political history, we find scholars discussing ‘liberal religion’, the ‘religion of socialism’ and, most notably, ‘political religion’.⁶ Perhaps Stanley Fish was right after all to predict a couple of years ago that religion would succeed ‘high theory and the triumvirate of race, gender and class as the centre of intellectual energy in the academy’.⁷

Yet, amidst all this creative employment of the term religion, one cannot help but wonder, What does religion mean? How exalted must one’s language be or how sublime one’s feelings of wonder and awe for such to count as religious? What is religious about the ‘political religion’ that contributors to this volume detect in totalitarian and even democratic political regimes? In this chapter, I try to respond to the last of these questions (while briefly addressing the other ones along the way). After a brief overview of how political religion entered scholarly discourse in the 1920s and 1930s, I focus on the frequently raised but rarely answered question whether political religion must be understood as an analogical or an essentialist notion. In more practical terms, Was Fascism a political religion because it resembled traditional religions such as Italian Catholicism, at least in certain crucial respects, or rather because the Fascist movement itself met the definitional requirements of religion?⁸ Based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘family resemblances’, I argue that this is a falsely construed dilemma. Given that every attempt to specify what religion ‘is’ draws on what religions ‘look like’, there is no escape from analogical reasoning. Accordingly, historians can be spared the difficult task of identifying the essence of (political) religion. They are better advised to specify, with some degree of precision, which political and religious ideas, rituals or practices they perceive as resembling each other.

This does not only hold for political religion, the subject matter of this volume, but also for such scholarly constructs as ‘religion of science’ and ‘religion of history’. In all of these cases, historians have to ponder whether or how they can employ the term religion, analogously or otherwise, in realms outside synagogue, church and mosque.

Political Religion: A Brief History

Although the genealogy of ‘political religion’ can be traced back to at least the seventeenth century,⁹ the expression gained wide currency only in the Interbellum, after the establishment of a Communist regime in Russia and the emergence of Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany. Worried about the totalitarian aspirations of these new regimes, great numbers of philosophers, theologians and political scientists almost simultaneously began to speak about ‘political religion’, a term they used to refer to the religious aspirations that the political realms under Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler began to display. The German Jewish philosopher of religion, Hans-Joachim Schoeps, for example, observed that Hitler presented himself as a messiah, although ‘not as a king of peace and even less as an anointed of the Lord’. He noted that Mein Kampf served as a catechism of the new religion, that Horst Wessel was its principal martyr and that Jewish citizens such as Schoeps himself were increasingly regarded as heretics deserving excommunication or death.¹⁰

Whereas Schoeps highlighted the similarities between the political liturgies of the Nazi movement and those known from such ‘traditional’ religions as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, other scholars employed the term political religion to indicate a relocation of religion in the modern era. A case in point is Eric Voegelin’s famous 1938 book, Die politische Religionen, which argued that ‘inner-worldly religions’ (innerweltliche Religionen) such as nationalism and socialism increasingly occupied places previously reserved to ‘trans-worldly religions’ (überweltliche Religionen). Whereas in the Middle Ages God had served as the most real being – what philosophers called the ens realissimum – this most real being was increasingly identified with such secular things as nature, science, the state or the nation. So, in Voegelin’s view, people have a religion as soon as they elevate something, either in or outside the world of human affairs, to the status of most real being. ‘Wherever a reality discloses itself in the religious experience as sacred, it becomes the most real, a realissimum.’¹¹ This, in turn, suggests that, for Voegelin, political religions, understood as those inner-worldly religions which treat the state or nation as most real, were not twentieth-century inventions. Attempts to sacralize the state had already been made by Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. Accordingly, what the Communist, Fascist and Nazi regimes brought to light were rather the consequences of a gradual centuries-long process in which God had increasingly been replaced by Leviathan (the sea monster that in Hobbes’s philosophy had lent its name to the secular state).¹²

Other examples besides Schoeps or Voegelin can easily be found. However, the story of how an interwar generation of scholars came to interpret the Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler regimes in terms of political religions has been told so often recently that it does not need to be recounted here.¹³ For the purpose of this chapter, though, two things must be noted. One is that Schoeps’s and Voegelin’s generation did not at all agree on what exactly was religious about political religion. For them as for us, ‘the crux of the problem is how religion itself is defined’.¹⁴ Was Communism a political religion because its symbolic repertoire was indebted to the Orthodox Church? Did Nazism qualify as a ‘disguised religion’ because of its striking similarities with Christian religion, as Schoeps and, more famously, Carl Christian Bry pointed out?¹⁵ Must the term political religion be reserved to those political regimes that displayed certain functional equivalences with traditional religions, as the French philosopher Raymond Aron argued in the early 1940s?¹⁶ Or is religion rather an anthropological category and does the homo religiosus manifest itself as easily in congress or parliament as in synagogues, churches and mosques? Indeed, if ‘political religion’ in the interwar period denoted an extraordinary kind of interaction between the realms of politics and religion, as perceived by contemporaries, both the nature of that interaction and the defining features of the individual realms were open to debate.

Second, in spite of their conceptual divergences, all these authors agreed that political religion was a dangerous phenomenon which had to be analysed carefully in order to be opposed effectively. Almost without exception, they warned against the exclusive pretensions of the new religions – ‘I am Adolf, thy Hitler; thou shalt have no other gods before me’¹⁷ – and voiced their concerns about a politicization of society. Of course, the religious and ideological beliefs underlying these worries also varied. Whereas some humanist authors explained that the dignity and freedom of the individual became endangered, a more conservative author such as Voegelin argued that humanism was part of the problem, given that ‘the secularization of life that accompanied the doctrine of humanitarianism’ could be regarded as ‘the soil in which such an anti-Christian religious movement as National Socialism was able to prosper’.¹⁸

This example illustrates, moreover, that for at least some authors, political religion was more than an analytical tool for understanding the quasi-religious aspirations of totalitarian regimes. What lent a special aura of gravitas to Voegelin’s analysis was that the emergence of political religions was said to signal not only the weakened position of traditional religions but also the (politically) destructive consequences of the secularization process. In its most succinct formulation, the argument was that the death of God inevitably causes the birth of new gods, illustrated most dramatically in the political religions of the 1930s. If Western societies no longer worship the true God, they will turn the state, their leaders or some abstract ideal into an object worthy of worship. Along such lines, then, the concept of political religion could easily be assimilated in such secularization narratives as offered by Carl Schmitt, Jacques Maritain, Karl Löwith and their likes.¹⁹

What Is Religious about Political Religion?

This twofold heritage has loomed over the study of political religion ever since. In the post-Second World War period, the term political religion remained by and large reserved for totalitarian regimes, including especially German Nazism, Italian Fascism and Soviet Communism. Even though such scholars as Klaus Vondung, George L. Mosse and Jean-Pierre Sironneau increasingly came to prefer detached historical analysis over prophetic warning, they followed Schoeps’s and Voegelin’s examples by treating ‘religion’, ‘cults’ and ‘liturgies’ as features that could help explain the attractiveness of Hitler’s or Mussolini’s political styles.²⁰ Intentionally or not, this linkage of political religion with totalitarian politics reinforced the stereotypical idea that religion in the political sphere is a recipe for violence.²¹ Only recently have historians come to argue that a sacralization of politics also occurs in non-totalitarian contexts and that political religion is therefore not necessarily as evil as Voegelin cum suis assumed.

Given that this move beyond the totalitarian is discussed in several of the chapters that follow, I should like to focus here on the second issue that students of political religion have inherited from their predecessors in the interwar period: the question of what exactly constitutes political religion. Can Mussolini’s Fascism be considered a political religion because it met certain definitional requirements? Or does the religious terminology suggest itself because Fascist myths and rituals resembled those known from, for example, the Christian tradition? Just as students in the interwar period found themselves disagreeing on whether Fascism was a religion or merely looked like one, more recent generations of scholars have been struggling with definitional matters. While some have focused on resemblances between political styles and religious practices, others have advanced the more ambitious claim that Nazism and Fascism as such can be classified as religions.

Philippe Burrin offers an example of the first strategy when he argues for a textured, context-sensitive analysis of how political regimes ‘use the religious culture of their society in order to elevate the political to a supreme and all-encompassing sphere, thereby establishing an absolute mission and authority’.²² Although the second half of this sentence seems to contain a crypto-essentialist definition (with ‘absolute mission’ and ‘absolute authority’ serving as key religious features), the Swiss historian explains at some length that this is not his aim. He is rather interested in processes of how political regimes borrow, appropriate and mobilize ‘patterns, symbols, rituals, attitudes and kinds of behavior molded by their society’s religious culture’.²³ What he suggests is that historians can speak about political religion only when they specify with some degree of precision what political leaders at a given time and place derive from ‘traditional’ religions in their region, country or empire and why they do so. In other words, what matters for Burrin is not whether or not Soviet Communism can be classified as religious but what kind of symbols, ideas or practices Communist leaders or propagandists in the Soviet Union took from, most likely, the Orthodox Church. Who engaged in such processes of borrowing, at what time, for which purposes and with what effects? To what extent did Soviet Communism begin to ‘resemble’ Orthodox Christianity by appropriating some of its features?

While Burrin opts for what could be called an analogical a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Plates
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Politics and Religion
• Part I: Definition
• Part II: Religion and Democracy
• Part III: Socialism
• Part IV: Nationalism
• Part V: Religion and Revolution
• Select Bibliography
• Index