Religion is a thorny subject for intellectuals on the political Left these days. Many reject it outright, seeing it as an outdated, reactive, and potentially even reactionary social formation as they zero in on those aspects and expressions of it that serve as instruments of control and domination. The essays that make up this symposium concur that religion can be a force of repression and reaction.
And their critique of religion is far from abstract: they point to the resurgence of white Christian nationalism in the U.S. as a particularly pernicious and devastating iteration of the proximity of religion to structures of repression and domination. These essays also unequivocally condemn Trump and his cynical use, abuse, and manipulation of religious ideas as he embraces and promotes structures of domination and an authoritarian agenda. They convincingly show that religion can easily ossify into a repressive ideological apparatus that lends itself to a politics of narcissism, aggression, hatred, and exclusion. They insist on criticizing religion and its weaponization, however, from a vantage point that recognizes and even embraces and beckons its emancipatory potentialities.
Interestingly and innovatively, the essays in this symposium draw on the conceptual tools made available by critical theory. Erich Fromm’s original ideas concerning the psychology of authoritarianism in particular are engaged by a few of the essays. Their multidimensional and non-reductive understanding of religion echoes Fromm’s important insight that religion can serves both humanistic-emancipatory and reactive-conservative agendas.
The essays’ reliance on critical theory enables them to tackle another controversial (and related) topic, that of charisma. While acknowledging the indebtedness of charisma studies to Max Weber’s writings on the subject and engaging with them, they move well beyond Weber by either explicitly or implicitly highlighting the limitations of Weber’s thought and articulating a unique set of concerns with respect to charisma, ones that speak to the dangers and possibilities embedded in the present conjuncture and gesture toward the need for a new, more nuanced understanding of charisma.
As is the case with religion, progressive intellectuals tend to look on charisma with suspicion, relegating it to the realm of authoritarian and manipulative politics—today charisma is generally associated with authoritarian figures like Hitler, Mussolini, and Orbán—and insisting that it has no place on the progressive end of the political spectrum. The suspicion of religion in fact intersects with skepticism toward charisma to the extent that charisma is seen as an irrational force meant to produce enchantment and submissiveness on the part of the charismatic leader’s followers. While the essays gathered here confirm that charisma can be and often is authoritarian in character, pointing to Trump as a case in point, a few of them also gesture toward the possibility of a different kind of charisma, one whose core is democratic or ethical and lends itself to experiments in liberation.
The essays tease out the differences between these two forms of charisma and their intersections with religion as they remind us that the appeal of charismatic leaders should not blind us to the fact that their charisma is dependent on a craving for charismatic authority and power in their followers, which is to say that charisma follows a bidirectional path and that grasping how it operates requires, among other things, a robust social-psychological framework.
Each of the essays presented here offers a rich and unique perspective on the complexities haunting the entwinement of charisma, religion, and politics as well as charisma’s ramifications across society. Collectively, they serve as an invitation to think through these issues and related ones unflinchingly and creatively, with an eye to clarifying that effective resistance to authoritarianism specifically and domination in general presupposes a good theoretical grasp of the myriad forces that bring them into being and perpetuate their existence.
