It’s a strange moment to be a scholar of political theology. Usually our work resembles the end of an episode of Scooby-Doo, as we dramatically tear off politics’ secular mask to reveal the theology beneath. But when was the last time theology put its mask on in political life? Our newly-christened “Secretary of War” touts crusader tattoos and ends press conferences by calling down divine vengeance on America’s enemies while our ambassador to Israel inspects red heifers whose sacrifice will inaugurate construction on the Third Temple and usher in the end of days. The obviousness of political theology today calls for a different approach, a more direct confrontation with the theological.
This is the approach taken, in quite different ways, by Hanna Reichel, Phil Christman, and me in our new books. Rather than rehearsing the diagnosis of political concepts as secularized theological concepts—as if we still needed to prove that sacrifice is important to politics in the age of the red heifer—our books assume this diagnosis from the start and get to work retooling those theological concepts directly. I read the differences between our books as strategic differences in this shared project of theologically confronting the problem of political theology.
If authoritarian politics—with its slogans and rituals, its hierarchies of command and obedience, its attempts to discipline the body so as to elicit a confession of true belief—involves a secularization of Christian practices of spiritual exercise, then resistance to authoritarianism must look something like Reichel’s spiritual exercises of disobedience. If nationalism—with its anxious drawing and redrawing of the boundaries of community—involves a secularization of Christian concepts like election and “the neighbor,” then resistance to nationalism must look something like Christman’s commentary on the Sermon on the Mount that reimagines those concepts toward “universal solidarity” (9). If the global right—with its increasingly violent attempts to preserve forever “Western Civilization”—involves a secularization of the Christian belief in the Church’s perpetuity, then resistance to the global right must look something like my own theological affirmation of transience.
Each of our books, by being works of theology, are thus small contributions to a toolkit for resistance to what the writer and lawyer Jake Romm calls “the burgeoning fascist-international.” This new order builds its domestic and international politics upon a foundation of theological logic: some people are chosen and others unchosen, righteousness is limited to a particular community, justification is secured through sacrificial violence, leaders are owed not only obedience but glorification. Christman, connecting political cruelty to the personal, sums all this up as the “savage economy of winners and losers” (8). Contesting this or that political maneuver requires contesting this more fundamental theological economy, which requires a kind of writing that risks being what it appears to be: theology.
I call this a risk because our books are all written with an earnest Christian commitment (we’re Protestants, after all) that might be taken for naivety. When Reichel writes, “We call ourselves Christians not because God belongs to us but because we belong to God” (49); or Christman writes, “Morality, at least for Christians, is not an add-on to the universe; it’s part of the fabric” (85); or I write, “God is what God does. And what God does is love” (35), a reader might be put off by what seems like uncritical theological speech. But if it really is the case that, as Adam Kotsko puts it, politics has “structural homologies and conceptual exchanges” with theology, then political critique might require hewing this closely to Christian language. The three of us might sound like youth pastors at times, but trust the process.
In many ways, what Christman, Reichel, and I are doing is a return to form for the critique of political theology. Those authors from the twentieth century who loom largest in our field today—Walter Benjamin, Karl Löwith, Simone Weil, Susan and Jacob Taubes, Theodor Adorno, Karl Barth, W. E. B. Du Bois—did not simply unmask modern politics as theological. They all, to greater or lesser degrees, experimented with theological writing as a way of intervening in politics, picking up and reworking theological concepts and practices to have a political effect.
Our books should be read as heirs to and developments in this experimental-theological mode of the critique of political theology. Ours aren’t the only recent books in this lineage. Kelly Brown Douglas’s Resurrection Hope, Kate Common’s Undoing Conquest, and Hannah Strømmen’s The Bibles of the Far Right pursue similar engagements with Christian political theology; three recent books by Shaul Magid, The Scourge of Jewish Nationalism, Jewish Anti-Zionism as Political Theology, and (with Zev Mishell) Jewish Anti-Zionism: A Historical Anthology, are parallel interventions into Jewish political theology. I’m hopeful this roundtable will serve as a first step in drawing works like these together as part of a shared conversation.
One thing this experimental-theological conversation needs is new developments in form. Of our three books, Reichel’s “emergency devotional” is the most creative formal experiment. Where devotionals tend to help the reader feel more at ease in their social role (see the profusion of devotionals “for women,” “for men,” “for moms,” “for families”), For Such a Time as This reworks the genre to heighten the reader’s discontent. “Resist conforming,” one lesson enjoins, “especially in small and mundane things that signal nothing but your humiliation and moral submission” (109). (Contrast this with the advice given in The Power of a Praying Wife, Amazon’s #2 Christian Prayer Book: “Ask God to help you keep the house clean, the laundry done, the kitchen in order, the pantry and the refrigerator full, and the beds made.”) Reichel’s book is a reminder that the forms in which most people encounter theology are rarely reflected in works confronting political theology, which remain locked in the genres of the monograph and the journal article.
We could also use new experiments in rhetoric and persuasion, and here Christman’s book is especially helpful. Often critiques of political theology today are limited by the assumption that writer and reader are “on the same side.” This was not the case last century when, for example, Simone Weil used a shared theological vocabulary to pull her reactionary Catholic friends leftward. Why Christians Should Be Leftists carries forward this heritage, using a shared vocabulary of conversion, fidelity to scripture, and personal relationship with Jesus to persuade disaffected evangelicals across the political spectrum that their theological commitments bring radical political demands. Christman’s good-humored evangelical rhetoric (“I don’t believe in superstitions. I believe in Jesus, and he has told us to go and be generous.”) is certainly going to be more persuasive to more people than yet another academic doing an Agamben impression (39).
That said, our three books are limited by our being white Christians in America writing books that will probably mostly be read by white Christians in America. How important is “theological resistance,” really? Books like ours risk reinforcing white American Christians’ fantasy that they, and not those on the front lines in Gaza and Iran and Cuba, are the protagonists of the struggle against fascism. It’s clear Reichel and Christman are as anxious about this as I am, and all of our books work to dissuade the reader of this fantasy.
The models of Christian resistance in For Such a Time as This are the Danish bureaucrats working under Nazi occupation who carried out “deliberate acts of administrative inefficiency” to buy time for those directly fighting or fleeing (119). Even Christman’s book, the most sanguine about a revitalized American left, insists on the reader’s marginality to global struggle. “Your job if you’re a Christian in a rich country” toward which climate migrants are moving, he writes, “is to try to keep the lights on long enough for them to get here” (133).
“Resistance,” in each of our books, is about keeping the lights on so those doing the real work can see a bit better, something akin to Adorno’s call in Minima Moralia to “conduct oneself in private as modestly, unobtrusively, and unpretentiously as is required” if you’re one of those with air to breathe in hell (27-8). (Of course unobtrusiveness is a far heavier demand than it sounds given how every facet of American life obtrudes violently upon the world.) Maybe the most important theological tools to give white Christians wishing to fight fascism are the old virtues of humility and obedience. I think you can read each of our books as trying to instill these virtues.
I hope our books are signs that the experimental-theological mode of the critique of political theology is picking up steam. Our moment demands a more explicit ressourcement of the twentieth-century project of antifascist theological experimentation, one that engages in even more creative reworkings of form and doctrine. I can imagine a sequel to For a Such a Time as This that takes the disciplining into negativity and revolt even further, carrying forward the theological negativity of Susan Taubes or Nancy Ambrose. Or a sequel to Why Christians Should be Leftists that moves in the reverse direction, persuading committed leftists that they should be (indeed already are) engaging with theological thought and practice. The previous century gave us explosively heterodox theological texts like Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans, Kalonymus Kalman Shapira’s Holy Fire, and Delores Williams’s Sisters in the Wilderness. Our own century of genocide and global war calls for similarly heterodox theology. I hope our books are just the beginning.
