Christianity has influenced Western culture more than any factor save human nature itself, and yet its influence is now greatly diminished. Reactions to this have usually taken the form of a Hegelian affirmation that Christianity, having served its historical purpose, is no longer important in itself; a nostalgic conservatism which rejects the culture of modernity simply; or a revivalism which ignores it. An alternative view rests on an analysis of culture and the enlightenment process of secularization to which the Church reacted by closing in on itself until the Second Vatican Council affirmed the legitimate autonomy of the secular. The Church itself, partly to blame for secularization through its practical demystification of nature and attempt to coercively supplant all pre- and non-Christian religious experience, should engage modernity while giving witness to human dignity and promoting a more human culture. Such a constructive recovery of Christian culture must avoid both politicization and moralism.
THE AUTHOR ARGUES THAT IN THE MIDDLE AGES MONARCHY AND REPUBLICANISM WERE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE; HIERARCHY AND ORGANICISM WERE NOT SPECIFICALLY CHRISTIAN IDEAS AND SHOULD NOT, THEREFORE, BE SEEN AS THE CHRISTIAN ELEMENT IN REPUBLICAN THOUGHT. ONE SHOULD NOT ASSUME THAT CHRISTIANITY OR ANY OTHER HISTORICAL IDEOLOGY HAS AN ESSENTIAL CORE OF UNCHANGING CHARACTERISTICS.
A fault line in contemporary scholarship has emerged around what Gil Anidjar calls "the Christian Question," litigating Christianity's historical contributions to the creation of a profoundly unjust arrangement of global politics. On one side of the fault line stand those who argue that Christianity is ultimately abusive, and therefore should be discarded as much as possible through deconversion; on the other side are those who argue that the way out of perverse Christian products is a deeper conversion to a true, pure identity for Christianity. This dissertation wades into the dilemma by arguing that Christianity can be fruitfully understood as a technology of human beings, by which people change the world and themselves. Drawing from Paul Virilio, it suggests further that, like all technologies, Christianity contains unforeseeable accidents (e.g., the invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck), consequences that may not at first seem recognizably Christian but nevertheless descend from Christian sources. Reading Christianity through the lens of the accident, the dissertation aims to provide a method for dealing with Christianity's historical relationship to oppression and liberation, arguing that Christian technologies must be retrofitted according to a horizon of liberation. The study is organized into six chapters, bookended by an introduction and conclusion that ground the dissertation broadly in what Enrique Dussel calls philosophy of liberation, which presents an alternative means of conceiving of the role of philosophy of religion beyond postmodern approaches. The study begins by explaining how Christianity could be conceived of as a technology, engaging media theorists like Peter Sloterdijk and Vilém Flusser (chapter one). Then, the study takes Virilio as a particular theorist of technology and guide for thinking about Christianity and accidents, briefly offering the emergence of white supremacy in the United States as a case study to illustrate this theoretical point (chapter two). To better understand Christianity's historical and formative role in global politics, the study explores critical scholarship on religion and secularism, proposing to see Christianity as an infrastructure undergirding categories that may not seem ostensibly Christian (chapter three). Philosophically, these insights have consequences for philosophy of religion and the secular, which the study demonstrates by engaging Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas through critics like Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood (chapter four). With a broad paradigm in place, the study directly engages the fault line around the Christian Question, reading theologian William Cavanaugh as representative of the conversion side and Gil Anidjar and Daniel Colucciello Barber as representative of the deconversion side (chapter five). Lastly, the study puts forward the possibility of constantly retrofitting Christian technology, always accountable to the negative inevitabilities of the accident (chapter six).
