In: Parliamentary history, Band 12, Heft 3, S. 287-295
ISSN: 1750-0206
The Politics of Religion in Restoration England. Edited by Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie From Persecution to Toleration. The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England. Edited by Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke. The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689. By John Spurr
The liberal enlightenment as well as the more radical left have both traditionally opposed religion as a reactionary force in politics, a view culminating in an identification of the politics of religion as fundamentalist theocracy. But recently a number of thinkers-Agamben, Badiou, Tabues and in particular Simon Critchley-have begun to explore a more productive engagement of the religious and the political in which religion features as a possible or even necessary form of human emancipation. The papers in this collection, deriving from a workshop held on and with Simon Critchley at the University of Texas at San Antonio in February 2010, take up the ways in which religion's encounter with politics transforms not only politics but also religion itself, molding it into various religions of politics, including not just heretical religious metaphysics, but also what Critchley describes as non-metaphysical religion, the faith of the faithless. Starting from Critchley's own genealogy of Pauline faith, the articles in this collection explore and defend some of the religions of politics and their implications. Costica Bradatan teases out the implications of Critchley's substitution of humor for tragedy as the vehicle for the minimal self-distancing required for any politics. Jill Stauffer compares Critchley's non-metaphysical religiosity with Charles Taylor's account of Christianity. Alistair Welchman unpacks the political theology of the border in terms of god's timeless act of creation. Anne O'Byrne explores the subtle dialectic between mores and morality in Rousseau's political ethics. Roland Champagne sees a kind non-metaphysical religion in Arendt's category of the political pariah. Davide Panagia presents Critchley's ethics of exposure as the basis for a non-metaphysical political bond. Philip Quadrio wonders about the political ramifications of Critchley's own 'mystical anarchism' and Tina Chanter re-reads the primal site in the Western tradition at which the political and the religious intersect, the Antigone story, side-stepping philosophical interpretations of the story (dominated by Hegel's reading) by means of a series of post-colonial re-imaginings of the play. The collection concludes with an interview with Simon Critchley taking up the themes of the workshop in the light of more recent political events: the Arab Spring and the rise and fall of the Occupy movement. Alistair Welchman is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at San Antonio who is interested in questions of naturalism and materialism, especially but not exclusively in relation to French and German philosophy since Kant. In addition he works as a translator, mostly of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation (for Cambridge) but also of Salomon Maimon's Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (Continuum) and has a growing interest in political questions stemming from his situation on the US-Mexico border.
Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION. The Sacralization of Politics -- CHAPTER 1. A Never-Never Religion, A Substitute for Religion, or a New Religion? -- CHAPTER 2. Civil Religions and Political Religions: From Democratic Revolutions to Totalitarian States -- CHAPTER 3. The Leviathan as a Church: Totalitarianism and Political Religion -- CHAPTER 4. The Invasion of the Idols: Christians against Totalitarian Religions -- CHAPTER 5. Toward the Third Millennium: The Sacralization of Politics in States both New and Old -- CHAPTER 6. Religions of Politics: Definitions, Distinctions, and Qualifications -- Notes
An examination of historical problems created by religion highlights claims that one's power is a direct product of a Divine Right that gives a particular nation or leader a monopoly on truth. Germany Chancellor Gerhard Schroder said he was shocked when US President George W. Bush confided that he was "driven with a mission from God." Historians recognize that the current conflicts between the West & the Islamic world are rooted in the Age of Crusades & Arabic conquests in Europe when those of one religion fought peoples of other faiths to expand their own spheres of influence. It is argued that diversity is at the core of human evolution & no one can claim a monopoly on truth. Religion is a weighty factor in today's global rivalry & confrontations over different values & development models, as well as many other urgent global issues, including the current financial crisis. Emphasis is placed on the critical need to recognize the problems created by religion's mounting impact before it is too late. J. Lindroth
In Paris in the autumn of 1989 three Muslim girls, observing their own religious custom, went to school wearing Muslim headscarves. The ensuing political storm, which continued unabated into 1990, has brought sharply into focus one of the fundamental questions related to Western democracy: the nature of the relationship between religion and the state. The 'scarves affair' was primarily a dispute between practitioners of Islam and the secular state. However, the controversy in France and similar recent controversies elsewhere have forced a general and radical reappraisal of the wide and complex.
For Gentile, the Enlightenment in the person of Rousseau, following on the division and weakening of Christianity, realized that even agnosticism or atheist humanism needed heroes, myths, symbols, and rituals in order to hold the minds and especially the hearts of the people. Gentile's analysis of totalitarianism as a 'political religion' as opposed to a 'civil religion' shows how these regimes attempted to offer the populace the Kingdom of Heaven on earth while eliminating God, or replacing God with the mythic charismatic leader.