This post sketches out some of the ways the events of 9/11 altered time-consciousness and temporal rhetoric in the public sphere and follows how the attacks continue to frame the subjective experience of temporality. Beginning with the lexicon of the war on terror—with its temporally overdertemined rhetoric of “the homeland,” “preemption,” “fundamentalism,” and, of course, the name-date “9/11” itself—I consider a few cases of what I call 9/11 chronomania—the obsession with time and temporal disruption that characterizes representations of 9/11 across a variety of media forms. In the case of the 9/11 Commission Report, by refashioning disaster as chronology, the narrative aims to replace victims with knowers—first, by establishing an authorial subject in command of its perceptual, technological, and temporal fields, and second, by attempting to shape personal and collective understandings of 9/11 by securing events unfolding in multiple locations and witnessed in myriad ways on a single, immanent timeline. The goals of such a narrative are clear: the chronometric novella that begins the 9/11 Commission Report is in part a hook designed to catch a national audience primed by thrillers like the television series 24, but it is also an attempt to incrementalize and disaggregate horrific events into an easily understood linear plot as part of a self-professed attempt to salve the wounds of collective trauma.

From my perspective in literary studies, I am interested in the ways the seminal speeches and policy documents of the post-9/11 era—among them President George W. Bush’s address on September 20, the Quadrennial Defense Review of 2001 conducted by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the National Security Strategy (NSS) of 2002—frame September 11 as a temporal event and cast the problem of understanding or responding to the attacks in terms of the clash between multiple conceptions of time. Many of the early responses to September 11 in the Anglophone media compensated for the collapse of geographic distance that had long separated the United States from its enemies by emphasizing the temporal distance between the “medieval,” “barbarous,” and “fundamentalist” perpetrators of the attacks and the putative modernity of its victims. The dichotomies of the war on terror depend in large part on dualistic notions of cultural conflict between Western modernity and the archaic forces of a fundamentalist Islam, as cultural critics Edward Said, Judith Butler, Bruce Holisnger, and many others have argued. Neomedievalist rhetoric dusts off old Orientalist tactics to police the boundaries between “us” and “them,” in part by denying what anthropologist Johannes Fabian describes as the “coevalness” of the two parties in question. The medievalization of Islam—or, for that matter, of American foreign policy, as with President Bush’s telling use of the term “crusade” as a synonym for the war on terror—is not, however, my subject here. Indeed, the denial of coevalness between “Islam”and “the West” serves in part to obscure the more complex temporal logic of the war on terror. Though a vast quantity of critical ink has been spilt on the laws and policies of the Bush era, much more can be gleaned by examining the temporal logic of the war on terror, in which time is not experienced and narrated as homogeneous, but rather as uneven, saturated, multiple, and neither as secular nor as hegemonic as has previously been maintained.

In his September 20 address to a joint session of Congress, the national public, and beyond it a global audience, President Bush set out to reassure a stricken nation, name its antagonists, and outline the parameters and goals of a militarized response. “Without a story,” Naomi Klein observes in The Shock Doctrine, “we are intensely vulnerable to those people who are ready to take advantage of the chaos for their own ends. As soon as we have a narrative that offers a perspective on the shocking events, we become reoriented, and the world begins to make sense.” The narcissistic evasions of the rhetorical question at the heart of President Bush’s September 20 speech (“Why do they hate us? … They hate our freedoms”) and the broader Manichean drama between good and evil that would come to characterize the rhetoric of the war on terror tell a simple, easily weaponized story of precisely the kind Klein had in mind. But despite sustained attempts on September 20 and in other speeches to gloss the events of September 11 within the familiar nationalist topoi of freedom, heroism, and justice, the speeches and policy documents of the Bush-era constitute less of an orienting metafiction than a tangled web of analeptic and proleptic leaps that provoke and maintain a state of crisis rather than prepare the ground for its resolution. While this and other speeches attempt to channel the affective response of a wounded nation, they do so precisely by maximalizing and marshalling traumatic rupture to shatter any preexisting historical order, particularly one based on linear temporality.

Beginning with his brief statement on September 11, Bush-era speeches and policy documents enmeshed the terrorist attacks in a discourse of temporal rupture. As the President intoned on September 20, “All of this was brought upon us in a single day, and night fell on a different world.” The binary metaphor of day and night, established here with a keen emphasis on the “fall” that defines their separation, pervades Bush’s lexicon in the aftermath of the attacks. The elegant and formally complex September 20 speech, arguably the most important rhetorical moment in what would become the war on terror, deploys a series of catachrestic claims that underscore the way the attacks both constitute and trigger temporal dislocations: “tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom” because, he argues, “we face new and sudden national challenges” presaged by unprecedented acts of terrorism (my italics). Lending rhetorical force to these claims with a chiasmus that echoes the earlier crossing of day and night, the speech reaches its climax in the moment when Bush declares, “whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.”

For its victims and for the billions around the world who watched, paralyzed, as disaster unfolded on television, the coordinated strikes of September 11 came as a cataclysmic shock. Within hours on a beautiful but otherwise ordinary Tuesday morning, four commercial jetliners had been hijacked and the World Trade Center’s signature towers and a large section of the Pentagon, symbols of America’s economic and military might, had been reduced to smoking rubble. It is difficult to think critically about the rhetoric of surprise without seeming to lend support to the ranks of September 11 conspiracy theorists, but for national security experts and administration officials, the idioms of surprise must be weighed against the repeated warnings and public pronouncements of impending terrorist attacks in order to understand its ideological value. Beyond their obvious utility in denying culpability for failing to disrupt terrorist networks prior to the attacks of 2001, claims regarding the epochal nature of September 11, particularly those emphasizing suddenness and rupture, begin to translate the experience of surprise and shock into a politically mobile idea of the attacks as an atemporal event whose force severs the causal and epistemological relationship between the past that came before and the future yet to come. In a carefully argued analysis of the President’s September 20 address, literary critic Donald Pease argues that the speech was “designed to lessen the events’ traumatizing power through the provision of an imaginary response to a disaster that could not otherwise be assimilated to the preexisting order of things.”  It seems to me, however, that something of the opposite is the case; while this and other speeches attempt to channel the affective response of a wounded nation, they do so precisely by maximalizing and marshalling traumatic rupture to shatter any preexisting historical order. A better trope than assimilation would be peripeteia: the sudden reversal from mourning to violence enacted in Bush’s September 20 address (“our grief has turned to anger, our anger to resolution”), which embodies the temporal instabilities of the war on terror.

The Quadrennial Defense Review, the primary public document that outlines national military strategy, published on September 30, 2001, is unsurprisingly devoted to the “new era” of national security inducted on September 11, and it is here that the emergent Bush Doctrine fully articulates the ontology of temporal rupture. By tradition a highly narrative genre, the QDR of 2001 attempts to tell the story of 9/11 and its implications for national security in such a way as to forge consensus, if not actually to blunt the edge of defense policy. One of the most striking aspects of the 2001 QDR conducted by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is the way the surprise attacks precipitate uncertainty: “A fundamental condition of our circumstances,” Rumsfeld maintains, is that “the United States cannot predict with a high degree of confidence the identity of the countries or the actors that may threaten its interests and security.” If the past can no longer be used to predict the future, the military must “establish a new strategy for America’s defense that would embrace uncertainty and contend with surprise.” In other words, the disappearance of history at the heart of chronomania denies the narratives that would consider the role played by American policies in creating the material conditions out of which 9/11 arose and substitutes for them dystopian imaginings of greater violence yet to come.

As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argued in prepared testimony for the 9/11 Commission, “on September 11th, our world changed … we cannot go back. The world of September 10th is past … we cannot go back to thinking as we did on September 10th. For if we do—if we look at the problems of the 21st century through a 20th century prism—we will come to wrong conclusions and fail the American people.” For Rumsfeld, pre-9/11 epistemologies—forensic evidentiary paradigms based on retrospective analysis—have little place in the altered world of the twenty-first century, a world in which analyzing the past to predict the future will generate, as he opined, the “wrong conclusions.” If the Cold War policies of deterrence and containment operate with a fundamentally reactive logic, the war on terror claims the necessity of preemption. The National Security Strategy (NSS) of 2002, the first such document prepared by the White House after September 11 and a radical departure from its predecessors, aggressively consolidates the imperatives of preventative war. The seminal characteristic of the “new thinking” advocated by the White House and Department of Defense in the National Security Strategy and elsewhere is the proleptic temporality that emerges to govern the War on Terror. Because the goal of anticipatory action is to prevent the very terrorist strikes whose execution would have substantiated the need to strike in the first place, the proleptic futurity of the war on terror depends, paradoxically, on the public’s ability to maintain the violence of September 11 in the continuous present. “The hour is coming when America will act,” President Bush avowed messianically on September 20, confident in America’s redemptive agency.

At the same time as the logic of preemption and the temporality of trauma were deployed to sever the continuity of cause and effect, the rhetoric of temporal rupture within halts calendrical flow, and in the resultant temporal rift opens new connections between the nation’s mythic past and its present. In his major post-September 11 speeches, the President forged a series of opportunistic contiguities between America’s two great twentieth-century foes, communism and fascism, and its new enemies in the twenty-first century. Bush described al Qaeda on September 20 as “the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century,” insisting that “they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism.” In his prayer service remarks at the National Cathedral on September 14, a day consecrated to prayer and remembrance, crisis connects the present with a cyclical pattern of heroism: “In every generation, the world has produced enemies of human freedom. They have attacked America because we are freedom’s home and defender, and the commitment of our fathers is now the calling of our time.” In the Bush administration’s telling of “history,” one strikingly similar to Francis Fukuyama’s, “the great struggles of the twentieth century ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.” With time itself torn asunder by the attacks, temporal instability facilitates analeptic leaps into the nation’s mythic past that conjoin 9/11 with an unlikely array of historical moments in public and political discourse.

By examining narratives of state power, we can begin to see how the war on terror, far from being disabled by chronomania, integrates nonlinear time into the very fabric of the national imaginary and the seminal legislation of the post-9/11 period. In the dominant academic account, modernity conceives of history as unfolding in what Walter Benjamin influentially called homogeneous empty time. Indeed, the idea of modernity is constitutively rooted, as literary critic Matei Călinescu argues, “within the framework of a specific time awareness, namely, that of historical time, linear and irreversible, flowing irresistibly onwards.” In Benedict Anderson’s influential account, “the idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which is also conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history.” In this way, modern states can be understood as fundamentally chronopolitical entities. But, as I have been arguing here, after 9/11 we no longer live in this time, if “we” ever did.

I began this essay with a series of observations about how the 9/11 Report asserts temporal mastery over unpredicted events by constructing a timeline, a chronometric form that attempts to move readers away from affective responses surrounding victimhood toward those of agency. At a very basic level, such a process deactivates the kairotic rupture triggered by the war on terror by drawing readers through the time of catastrophe and, figuratively, out the other side. While such a narrative form might seem inherently aligned with state power and the homogeneous empty time of modernity—and thus easily summoned to the service of militarized patriotism—in the context of kairotic governmentality, the stopwatch-driven narrative of the Report can be seen in a different light. When I asked Philip Zelikow, the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission and the person most responsible for the Report’s form and tone, about this chronometric approach to history, he described how the cultivation of what he called the Report’s “House Style,” a voice free of polemic and, to the extent possible, of interpretation, was one of the primary goals for the final document he established during his first meeting with Commission chairman Thomas Kean and vice-chair Lee Hamilton. With a “dry, unadorned style designed around a rigorous substructure of time and narrative,” Zelikow aimed to focalize what people knew at particular moments in history and clarify how individuals understood their choices in the moment, rather than succumb to what he termed “the blinding force of hindsight.” The precise temporal measurements characteristic of the Report find their analogue in the operational complexity of al Qaeda’s attacks, which depended on similar, distinctly “modern” temporal logics. In other words, the Report’s chronometric narrative restores the coevalness of terrorism’s victims and perpetrators.

Before championing some kind of return to the secular, however, one must acknowledge the empty formalism of the 9/11 Commission Report’s approach: after all, one gains little useful knowledge in the confidence that the first plane struck at 8:46:40. On a pragmatic level, identifying the kairotic power of September 11 reflects an astute recognition within the Bush administration that the terrorist attacks afforded a unique opportunity for political action—not only in its immediate aftermath but in any of its citational presents. In the new, multidimensional temporality of the war on terror it is not, as Benjamin feared, time deployed as chronos that presages oppression, nor does time’s messianic cessation necessarily constitute the hallmark of revolutionary praxis; instead, in the proleptic and analeptic constellations of September 11, technocapital and state power have subsumed what Charles Taylor—following the apostle Paul, who used the term to denote messianic time—calls the kairotic time of the religious imaginary.

Ten years after the attacks, the multiple temporalities of the war on terror pose something of a conundrum, particularly for thinkers on the left who believe that to effectively contend with state power and its dominant ideologies, one must begin with a critique of its chronopolitical underpinnings: namely its hegemonic secular temporality. When “destabilization” has long served the critical community as a synonym for subversion, what happens when rupture becomes the status quo?

Kahn wants to show the relevance of this view to American politics, which requires making room for dimensions of politics slighted by liberal theory and theories of justice. Domestic or international, politics in the “state of nature”—that is, still awaiting rational regulation—is not, or not simply, defective, since politics, as Schmitt points out, is never purely a matter of following norms. It’s also a matter of will and of “existence.” This existential dimension will always privilege exception over norm, as long as the existence of the people or the nation is at stake. Or perceived to be at stake.

On the level of the “facts,” this diagnosis is hard to dispute. A very good illustration can be found in recent American foreign policy. Like Kahn, I’ve defended (in a paper called “Vers un droit international d’exception?” and in my book Penser l’ennemi, affronter l’exception) the idea that the USA could be seen as a de facto sovereign in the current international situation, at least in Bodin’s sense: they “have nobody above them.” As the Bushian “War on Terror” shows, every international norm, including the norms of the Geneva Conventions, can be suspended as long as this “sovereign“ decides that it faces a state of exception that gives it “emergency powers.” This practice and view have been supported by Bush administration lawyers such as John Yoo, who has deployed arguments very close to those used by Carl Schmitt during the Weimar and Nazi periods in order to defend the presidential prerogatives or the extensive rights of the Führer, the “source of every law.” But even disregarding analogies to Schmitt’s support of the Nazi regime, the question is: what value should we grant to this, to the “fact” that a “sovereign” can indeed see himself as “above” every norm as long as he states that national security is at stake? Should we accept this view of sovereignty  and concede that it is legitimate or inevitable that “sovereigns” can suspend the norms of the Geneva Conventions, treat their prisoners as “alien enemies” and deprive them of most of the basic rights which have been granted to war prisoners during the twentieth century, because, following 9/11, we are all in a “exceptional situation?” Should we admit, as the Bush administration suggested in one memorandum, that torture itself should be accepted as a legitimate means “in exceptional circumstances?” Or should we struggle against this logic, not, of course, in the name of any “political theology” or Schmittian concept of non-liberal democracy, but in the name of our view of what a democracy should be, even in times of “exception?”

I’ve always defended the latter view, and I was happy to see that the Obama administration reintroduced a more “democratic” view of international relations, a respect for the Geneva Conventions, a moral condemnation of torture and of the conditions of “indefinite detention” in Guantanamo, and a criticism of a certain view of American “exceptionalism.” Of course, even in this supposedly more democratic framework, the question of exception and sovereignty does not disappear, so we can say that we still have to deal with Schmittian questions—I would entirely agree with Kahn on this point. But my worry is that the philosophical approbation for political theology risks participating in a justification of an attitude that sees no alternative to conceding “sovereign rights” in exceptional circumstances.

I agree with Kahn (and with Schmitt) about the fact that political theory should leave room for decision and exception. But to me, the main question is: to what extent? Are there no principles that admit no exception? When I read Kahn, as when I read Schmitt, I don’t seem to encounter any such principles—anything like what Habermas thematized in Law and Morality as “indisponibility,” that is, rights that are not at the disposal of the sovereign. Can the sovereign decide that torture is a legitimate practice? The answer, to me, should be no without exception. Kahn would perhaps respond that even if it is an illegitimate practice, it can be made legal by virtue of a political decision. “Torture is the exception outside of law, but the state may be legally justified in defending itself,” he writes at one point in a comment on a decision of the Israeli Supreme Court, apparently persuaded by its logic. It has always been the same (and, according to me, awful) argument, used by some French military officers during the Algerian War, or by the dictators of the Near East who are today falling one after the other, in part as a result of their disregard for human rights and the norms of habeas corpus.

The famous argument of the ticking time bomb, evoked without criticism by Kahn, proves to be a failure of juridical imagination. First, by such an extreme hypothetical case, it is possible to legitimate any practice by contrasting the prohibition you want to challenge to the possibility of state, national, or—why not?—human annihilation. (It’s significant that Kahn feels the need to reinforce this pseudo-argument by saying that this bomb might be nuclear, and that, in a situation that is not specified, the use of torture could here save the state from annihilation: “Implicit in the hypothetical [of the ticking time bomb] is the idea that the bomb might be nuclear. Without an exception to torture prohibition, we face the possibility of the nuclear detonation, that is, we imagine the death of the state.”) Second, the fact is that this argument for the “vital necessity of torture” on the logic of self-preservation has been recently used to legitimate de facto torture in cases where, of course, no such threat could be alleged. Is it this kind of exception that Kahn’s political theology intends to defend? The book’s conclusion suggests that “we” are all, as western citizens, soldiers in the “war on terror”:

The contemporary war on terror represents the point at which conscription becomes truly universal. . . . Conscription can now occur to anyone at any moment: It is just a matter of finding oneself on the wrong airplane at the wrong time. At that moment, there will be no discussion, there is only the act.

In this political ontology, the war on terror is constituted as a permanent condition. But this was precisely what was so false and dangerous in the Bushian conception of the struggle against terror, which was presented as a real war—not against a state (indeed with not definite enemy) and not having a beginning or an end—but a war indefinitely “open,” in which the U.S. would be free to launch as many preventive wars as the would judge necessary.  Here Schmitt, the author of The Nomos of the Earth, could be useful in deconstructing this confusion of traditional categories of international law, a confusion that transforms the category of war, which applied to the relationship of one state toward another (two sovereigns!), into a permanent condition, with no precise enemy, no possibility of a negotiated peace. Further, we could add, echoing Agamben more than Schmitt, that the domestic consequence of this confusion is the limitation of liberties in the name of this indefinite state of exception.

Here is the last point of my perplexity: how can Kahn claim that freedom is the center of Schmitt’s thought? I put aside Schmitt’s 1938 book on Hobbes’s Leviathan, where he claims that Hobbes’s distinction of an inner faith and a external confession opened a space for freedom of consciousness, which, with “the first liberal Jew, Spinoza” and his followers Heine and Marx (!), was to become a principle fatal to the organic State. Already in Political Theology, Schmitt is radically opposed to all the theorists who put freedom at the center of their political conceptions and demands. How can one claim that a thinker who approves Joseph de Maistre’s motto, “tout gouvernement est bon lorsqu’il est établi” [any government is good as soon as it is established], puts freedom at the center of his thought? The last chapter of Political Theology is devoted precisely to defending all those Catholic antimodern thinkers (De Maistre, Donoso Cortès, Bonald) who refused to consider freedom as the key to political organization. They wished to put obedience in its place, mainly through the theological argument of original sin (coupled with historical arguments evoking the disorders of revolution). Kahn’s strange interpretation of Schmitt as a thinker of freedom can be explained when we finally grasp Kahn’s own conception of freedom, namely the freedom to sacrifice for a “sacred” authority—God or the nation-State. So Kahn calls freedom what is generally called “obedience,” self-sacrifice, or “duty.” In the conclusion of the book, Abraham’s acceptance of God’s will becomes the paradigm of freedom. But is the will to ultimate sacrifice in obedience to an absolute will a good example of political freedom?

I let the reader “decide.”

Schmitt’s basic idea, in the Theology, is that any normal constitutional order of “sovereignty” presupposes the abnormal, the exception, and the right to decide when that condition exists. Beyond the norm and the normal, then, there is no super-norm that informs all the others; there is only the lurking decision about the exception of existential emergency. That “space” becomes the overdeterminant of sovereignty. What makes this “theological” in a hidden way is that (i) actual historical developments turned Christian/religious notions into secularized concepts of the state; and (ii) those concepts, by analogy, include the premise of the miracle, here turned into the “exception.” Deism and liberalism eventually banished both God and the miracle from the proceedings, creating an agreeable façade of order, normality, rationality, science, legitimacy, and civilized conversation amongst those of requisite, recognized competence. The transcendent power is bracketed, the immanent will of the people or nation becomes constitutive.

Kahn’s riff on this is, strictly speaking, not a gloss; he has not set out to expand the contended body of Schmittiana. He wants instead to argue the case for Schmitt’s decisional exception and political theology in a contemporary U.S. liberal frame—a tall order. Moreover, he insists that such a Schmittian Ansatz inevitably serves to reveal “the sacred” element in the political. Rewriting the individual chapters of Political Theology in a dialogical (the “we”), and sometimes digressive, way, he makes many other points that I shall have to leave aside, such as his fascinating claims (to my amateur eye) about law and Hans Kelsen.

Nonetheless, I was surprised at the direction of Kahn’s argument. I had expected a reflection on the problem of sovereignty as such in the United States, viz. where it might reside. Schmitt himself invokes the well-known passages from Tocqueville to the effect that “the people” assumes the character of God, the beginning and end of all. Tocqueville, however, considered that religious element an optical trace of a moment that had, in world-historical terms, passed, whilst Kahn maintains the postulate of popular sovereignty (the premise, in a way, of the whole exercise), and thus the case for a political theology to account for it, that is, for the continued relevance of the very problem of sovereignty.

Yet this is where the U.S. itself (or, before the Civil War, themselves) famously becomes the “exception.” Who decides? “The people” is variously embodied in the United States, a purposely decentered system whose only nationally elected person/office is that of the president. It has never been obvious where the unity of the union actually lies. Massive violence in the form of a civil war, during which the great emancipator himself took the decision to suspend habeas corpus, decided the matter (if only partly). Still, the state is one thing, sovereignty another. The quasi-monarchical presidency is indeed the closest authority to embodied decision. Symptomatically, it is an authority conceived explicitly in the space of foreign relations. “We the people,” in the form of the president, have in fact decided on the exception—following from exigencies real and imagined—on many occasions, often with astonishing license and arbitrariness. This, quite clearly, is in line with the European model that forms the historical reference point for Schmitt: the advent of territorialized state sovereignties whose existential being is determined chiefly, not by domestic dangers, but by foreign ones. Let us call it the geopolitical imperative.

One might then grasp the trajectory of the United States as a jagged line of increasing “sovereign-presidential” power, a process whose very uneveness was conditioned, up to a point, by remarkable security, or the relative absence of the geopolitical imperative. A combined, dual “abnormality,” then, marks the normality of the United States, with some punctuating exceptions, all the way up until the 1940s: a relative “lack” of geopolitically charged institutions, along with the domestic state apparatuses that usually (meaning in the European context) go with them. Most states, well into the twentieth century, are, after all, all about war or the preparation for war. Inescapable invocations of Hegel to the contrary, the kind of state (as opposed to sovereignty) that did emerge in this case was actually effective, with law, mostly as autopoetic process, serving as state. Exceptional moments were typically occasioned either by the few events, sometimes artificially created, of foreign crisis (1798, 1812, 1846 [?], 1898, 1917-20), or by the domestic incapacity to deal with states’ rights and/or slavery (e.g., the nullification crisis of 1831, the Civil War).

World War II changes everything, creating the opening for what will become, after 1947, the national security state, based on the notion of a permanent exception in the name of global cold war, a peace that is no peace but no overt war either. In a word: the imperial presidency, we-the-people as articulated sovereignty in a battle of life and death. I myself think that this was objectively over (in an abstract, Schmittian sense) by 1963, but not many agree, choosing instead to parrot endlessly the conventional formula that “the end of the Cold War” is the same as the end of the Soviet Union, in 1989-1991. We-the-people, in any case, is up for grabs because of Vietnam and the cock-ups in the sovereign name of exception perpetrated by the Nixon regime. Whatever one’s periodization, however, it is obvious that the permanent “emergency” begins to fade structurally, what with regularized great-power management and the relative stability of mutually assured destruction (which Kahn takes, to the contrary, to be the very essence of the Cold War). Two attempts at abnormality, which I sometimes imagine as irrevocably postmodern, have thence been made to regenerate the exception: Reagan’s second Cold War, in the early 1980s, and W. Bush’s “War on Terror/ism.”

The former was really pastiche, but the latter offered up some novelty from our present viewpoint. For what, seemingly, could be more Schmittian than George W. Bush’s claim to global supremacy? We, the United States (meaning “I”), have the right to decide on the exception, the state of global emergency, and what can and must be done above and beyond the existing norm: that is about as straightforward a claim to sovereignty on a global scale as one can imagine. (Schmitt has indeed been accused, anachronistically, for having provided a frame for the neocons of recent times, though his name, of course, was never invoked.) Obama’s explicit pragmatism can then be seen as a return to “normality”—the judicious weighing of pros and cons in a spirit of multilateralism—if not to the financialized normality of Clinton’s globalism.

I think this is right up to a point but ultimately wrong: Obama’s pragmatism is a departure from exceptionalism (not a term I like, but that’s another story) in that the United States appears as a product of contingent historical circumstances having nothing inherently to do with any transcendent designs or predestined functions; but, at the same time, and by the same token, it is what it is, namely, the indispensable nation, the guarantor of order in the last instance, and so on. The end result is in some ways a more interesting Schmittian condition than the posture of George W. Bush: the last instance never comes, but it still exists; it is not dominant but still overdeterminant; the exception and the right to decide on it still hover above the proceedings of pragmatic bureaucracy.

All of which is both arguable and (at least to me) of the greatest interest. Kahn, however, is only intermittently concerned with the geopolitical imperative, because his central endeavor and argument is about Schmitt and the liberal political community, the existence and existential phenomenology of “the people,” and, above all, the character of “popular sovereignty.” Schmitt is famously anti-liberal, so Kahn recasts sovereignty specifically as “popular sovereignty.” His whole effort is grounded in the thesis that this kind of sovereignty still exists (in the United States), and that, contrary to received opinion, this condition is in turn not accountable for in simple terms of reason, contract theory, or interest group politics: the kind of “normal” perspectives that find rules, norms, law, adjudication, and interests at the heart of politics but leave no space for sovereignty or the exception. Kahn thinks the popular sovereign entails an irreducibly mystical element that has to do with faith rather than reason. The state (the nation-state, in fact) can demand in the last instance that its citizens sacrifice themselves on its behalf, that one be called upon to kill and to risk death in its name. Normative communities such as churches, Wall Street firms, and what not can do no such thing: “The state remains a site of life and death; its territory remains sacred ground; its history is a narrative of the self-revelation of the popular sovereign.” Hence, theoretically and methodologically, we need a political theology rather than mere political science of the purely secular kind. The state, incomprehensible in a solely secular frame, should be approached in two conceptual ways: genealogically and analogically. The first refers to the historical “translation” of religious (chiefly Christian, in effect) categories into secular ones (viz. God/the People), while the second locates atemporal, structural identities such as that between miracle and exception. (Kahn does not use the terms, but one might see this as a combination of the diachronic and the synchronic.)

The United States, against this background, appears in sharp contrast to Europe—more precisely, to ‘‘the European Union,” which so often arrogates the continental name to itself. Whereas the popular sovereign survives in the United States, the EU has become, or was always conceived to be, a normative compound of law, regulations, and ideology without any ultimate sovereign. No one will die for the EU. It is not sacred. The United States is sacred. One reason is that, unforgettably, it was created in and by Revolution, the ultimate exception. It is a nation-state under law created by the kind of faith, decision, and sacrifice that are expressed in Revolution (the experience of creation ex nihilo, as well as destruction). Decision of this order is thus not extralegal but intrinsic to the whole operation.

Kahn, then, wants to recover, or perhaps construct anew, a particular notion of the popular sovereign by using a political-theological frame without the anti-liberal politics—a Schmittian way of doing political theory but not a Schmittian politics to go with it. Hence, he departs most explicitly from the script once he reaches Schmitt’s arch-reactionary fourth chapter. The argument has now turned to Faith and Freedom, not to mention Choice. Faith precedes doctrine and theory; faith involves decisions and the exceptional; faith therefore involves freedom, which is what Kahn—rightly, in his own terms—assumes liberalism to be about.  Sovereignty in a Schmittian frame, then, becomes a way of reconstituting the liberal community of citizens, the authoritative voice of the people, choosing in freedom amidst the ultimate, sacred commitment to, and necessity of, sacrifice. But, to use Kahn’s operative notion of rhetoric, how persuasive is this?

There is, initially, a combined archaeological and conceptual objection, or, at least, a question mark. Schmitt’s thinking is more genealogical than analogical. He wants to know how it is that liberal modernity ends up with such an anodyne theory of politics. He wants to know what it is about the translation of Christian frames and categories into putatively secular ones that renders the normative approach so pleasing and agreeable. So it is a two-pronged attack: demonstrating, procedurally, the antinomies of proceduralism (the decision on the exception is occluded, but it is nevertheless constitutive of the norm and the normal), and demonstrating, historically, how this occlusion came to be. Schmitt’s delineation of sovereignty is a polemic, most immediately against the bourgeois legalism of Kelsen and the neo-Kantians, against their timeless normativity and proceduralism. Like Hegel and Marx, he insists, against Kant, on the historical (or genealogical) as opposed to the timeless. Unlike them, however, he does so not by introducing the social, which inevitably cuts across formalism by injecting substance and actual content, but by revealing the theological origins and translations, the historical analogies, of current political concepts. The limitation of this approach is also its virtue: the relentless stringency of its peculiarly anti-sociological “sociology” of concepts. What it reveals is the typically depoliticizing and “normalizing” nature of bourgeois politics. I myself find that demasking operation useful from a socialist standpoint; but Schmitt can be useful from any number of standpoints, because his account does not take, or presuppose, a normative or ideological stand as such. Thus, while in the Theology he invokes, in the different idiom of original sin, de Maistre and Donoso Cortes, this is only one possible response—and not a necessary one—to his own genealogical diagnosis.

Notably, that response does not center on sacrifice and the sacred. In fact, this problem is not Schmitt’s. His opus contains no elaboration of it. Kahn thinks, by contrast, and almost by slippage, that all political theology presupposes the sacred. (His overlapping interlocutor here is Giorgio Agamben, whose take, however, goes in other directions; René Girard, meanwhile, is oddly absent, as, incidentally, are Hardt and Negri.) The obviousness of this connection strikes me as dubious. Natural law in the Thomasian tradition certainly presupposes sacred authority; but is the sacred/sacrifice its constitutive feature? In any case, Kahn’s account is less genealogical and more analogical: his political theology is one of contemporary identity, synchrony, its rhetorical aim being to assert the contemporary relevance of sovereignty and the sacred nature of politics. The focus on sacrifice and the sacred fits his phenomenological and existentialist orientation (ultimately with Kahn, we are in the realm of “experience”). A different kind of political theology, that of original sin or Hobbesian dastardly deeds, makes no sense to Kahn in the contemporary world, at least in the context of popular sovereignty. This dismissal may well be a little hasty, what with a Commander-in-Chief who likes to invoke Reinhold Niebuhr (not mentioned in Kahn) and the inevitable moral ambiguities of politics. The enabling uses of “ambiguity” and notions of ever-present “shortcomings” in moral fortitude and epistemological command have been well-known since the heyday of the Cold War, in the 1950s. Our current “pragmatics” are, from that angle, eminently theological in a Niebuhrian sense, though the rubric “Christian Realism” has predictably gone out of fashion.

One is confronted, then, by the liberal Kahn exalting the sacred nation/community as popular sovereignty, while the reactionary Schmitt says nothing at all about it. Schmitt’s preoccupation, seemingly a perfectly coherent Catholic one, is in fact not the nation, whether in its conservative, organic form or its liberal, popular one; it is the nature of the political and the sovereign, wherever. Arguably, part of the exercise of bringing sovereignty to the fore is precisely to unsettle notions of “the people” in any shape or form, and especially the kind that Kahn advocates. Kahn then complicates the picture. He recognizes that the postmodern condition—what he also refers to in quotation marks as a “post-epochal age”—militates against any Grand Analogy. Nevertheless, he insists, as he must, on the last instance of the sacrifice and the sacred, a last instance that actually comes or might very well come: the exception, our popular-sovereign decision to put our lives on the line.

I am sympathetic, in a way, to that argumentative impulse, but life (or “experience”) in the United States has gone in a very different direction since the 1960s. The ever-present notion of sacred territory corresponds inversely, one might say, to the willingness to sacrifice on its behalf. Ritualistic evocations of “America” (where else would politicians of all ilks end their perorations with the equivalent of “God bless America”?) and the deep-seated sense that somehow the United States is sacrosanct space—war, by definition, taking place elsewhere—are ways of being toward the world that mask an overwhelming desire, sometimes ferocious, to avoid all sacrifices: professionalized (class-based) military, ridiculously low taxes (especially for high earners), lax popular engagement, minimal obligations, a dislike for central authority bordering on hatred. The “exception” was extended into the 1950s by means of the Cold War (which was in fact the intention), but the last time the sacrifice was generally accepted was indeed the last: Vietnam. From then on, the geopolitical imperative has looked different. Accepting the globalism of the U.S. in one form or another is one thing; sacrificing for it is an altogether different one. Sovereignty, the right to decide on the exception, has thus typically resided in the geopolitical imperative, and it has been experienced on the outside. Few foreigners make any mistake about the importance of U.S. geopolitics and the “right” that it seems to embody.

Kahn is right not to see political theology as an attempt to read politics as a theologian (along the lines of Schmitt’s favorite reactionary, Donoso Cortes) but to insist on its analytical place in any account of the U.S. as a political entity. It is impossible to grasp the United States without a (genealogical) account of its secularized Christian frame. The United States is radical Protestantism writ large. To me, however, destinarianism, chosenness, messianism, covenantalism (to name but a few of the most obvious tropes) seem more pertinent than sacrifice and the sacred. I also agree with Kahn about the conceptual myopia of “the normative metaphysics of liberal political theory” as regards the non-secular. Permit me a personal anecdote, about a seminar talk on “European integration,” a perennial model-building topic of political science. A senior scholar in the field told us why his particular model explained it and others failed. Eventually, trying to be historical, I made bold and asked whether the model could account for the fact that the founders of what would become the EU were Catholics with a pronounced, postwar devotion to the civilizational and integrational precepts of a neo-Carolingian “west.” Nervous laughter ensued, intimating that this irrelevant comment was nothing less than a breach of etiquette.

Political theology, that being said, is never the whole. And Kahn recognizes this. When it comes to the whole, however, I must ultimately place myself, contra both Schmitt and Kahn’s own Rousseauian sovereignty, in line with the Hegelian-Marxist insistence on the centrality and determinacy of class and capitalism.

Johns, Jasper (b. 1930) © VAGA, NY

Flags. 1968. Lithograph, printed in color, irreg composition: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″; irreg sheet: 34 5/8 x 25 7/8″. Gift of the Celeste and Armand Bartos Foundation. (291.1968)

Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY (ART193346)

To be totally upfront: my title is taken from a chapter in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. A passage therein captures my attention. He writes:

The Bill of Rights tells us, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” Yet we don’t need to agree on what values underlie our acceptance of the First Amendment’s treatment of religion. Is it religious tolerance as an end in itself? Or is it a Protestant commitment to the sovereignty of the individual conscience? Is it prudence, which recognizes that trying to force religious conformity on people only leads to civil discord? Or is it skepticism that any religion has it right? Is it to protect the government from religion? Or religion from the government? Or is it some combination of these, or other, aims?

Appiah is not discussing how the courts interpret the religion clause. To the contrary, his point is that Americans don’t have to hold to some narrowly defined, agreed-upon value or claim upon the clause for us to honor it. “We can live together without agreeing on what the values are that make it good to live together,” he writes. “We can agree about what to do in most cases, without agreeing about why it is right.”

Here’s an “old thing” which relates, I think, to President Obama and the debate about civil religion—the primacy of practice.

Usually in presidential inaugurations, civil religion is framed largely as a watered-down Judeo-Christian consensus, covering over the rough edges of existing differences in theology and custom. George W. Bush’s Inaugural Addresses stand out for their sectarian evangelical Christian tone, which rightly sparked a chorus of dissident voices. But this past January we saw a president in his Inaugural Address openly and honestly wrestling with the nation’s diversity—a “patchwork,” as he described it, “of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers.” Non-believers? Their inclusion in the same breath with religious communities, especially on civil religion’s holiest of days, unsettled some, inspired others. Clearly, Obama would like to defuse this tension. More than just carefully chosen words, his was a performative act aimed at uniting believers and non-believers in a common citizenship.

The gigantic gulf separating these two is unbridgeable in the deepest ontological or philosophical sense. Historically, as Robert Bellah has so eloquently described, God symbolism has been “a point of articulation between the profoundest commitments of Western religious and philosophical traditions and the common beliefs of ordinary Americans.” But is this God symbolism expandable? And what would its reformulation look like? During the Vietnam years when old national myths were collapsing and disputes over America’s relation to the rest of the world were reaching crisis proportions, Bellah encouraged the incorporation of a “vital international symbolism” into the nation’s civil religious canopy; doing so was essential, he argued, for a “successful negotiation” of our sacred symbolism.

Obama is comfortable speaking of God in personal and public life, yet he is also a pragmatist. His vision of democracy is that of an on-going, highly deliberative enterprise, of responding to challenges and then re-inscribing practices to fit the circumstances. It appears to be a vision much of the nation supports. Fifty-six percent of Americans in a recent Capps Center/Lichtman Poll (The First 100 Days) agree with his “vision for the country,” sixty percent giving him high marks for his “leadership.”

Compared to George W. Bush’s invoking of old myths of divine favor and the nation’s innocence, Obama’s honesty and candor about our very real problems combined with optimism about America’s strength to build a more perfect union is refreshing. This comes through very pointedly when in the Inaugural Address he observes that, when confronted by serious challenges—the civil war and segregation, historically—the nation emerges stronger, more united. Something of this same hope for bridging differences in views having strong religious overtones was apparent when he judiciously addressed abortion and stem-cell issues at the University of Notre Dame. Implied in each instance is the primacy of practice, that is, in forging new, expanded solidarities, democracy reinvents itself. In his own inaugural words, “we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon disappear; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.”

Might this be a moment when, as Bellah would say, we need once again a serious civil-religious negotiation? What is called for is less a radical re-symbolization, which would hardly serve the nation well, than a broadening of the rhetoric—both God language and secular heritage language—with social practices affirming the latter as much as the former. “Good Americans” can speak in either voice or some mix of the two, which, except for the greater normative freedom renegotiation would allow, isn’t all that different from what many of us actually already do.

By practices I have in mind what Tocqueville, MacIntyre, Bellah and others have long emphasized: deeply embedded cultural “habits” that sustain fundamental values, democracy as a case in point. Dispositions and behavioral norms like voting and civic engagement rest not on agreement for whom to vote or the specifics of how we should become publicly engaged, only that people assume such responsibilities. To this phrasing, Jeffrey Stout rightly emphasizes that such habits should be “capable of giving rise to recognizable forms of human character.”

What more I would underscore is the need at this time for an intentional and creative effort—a “praxis” of sorts—aimed at moving the country toward a more conscious, genuine bonding between believers and non-believers. Charles Taylor is especially helpful here: “…people can also bond not in spite of but because of difference. They can sense, that is, that the difference enriches each party, that their lives are narrower and less full alone than in association with each other. In this sense, difference defines a complimentarity.”

Might it be possible even within this sensitive realm of belief and non-belief that we could come to appreciate the other, maybe even discover that in engaging the other we come to know ourselves better?  That our lives achieve fullness not separately but together? That the veil between belief and non-belief in everyday life is far more porous than the rhetoric of each suggests?  For sure, in exploring this complimentarity we’d learn again what it means to be an American, and possibly a better sense of how to describe and celebrate the transcendence that really holds us together.

[See David Kyuman Kim's introduction to "These things are old," a conversation about Obama, civic virtues and the common good at The Immanent Frame.]

A recent report on the State of the Law concerning the President’s Faith-Based and Community Initiative, published by the well-respected and non-sectarian web-based reporter on the initiative, The Roundtable on Religion and Social Policy, summarizes the changes that have taken place over the last eight years:

At its core, the FBCI guarantees a “level playing field” that allows FBOs to compete for social welfare funding on equal terms with non-religious organizations. This guarantee is remarkable in two respects. First, it reflects a decisive shift in the law of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause, away from a regime that excluded “pervasively sectarian” entities, and toward one that permits a far greater range of partnerships between government and FBOs. Second, the guarantee is remarkable because of the scope of administrative change it required. The prohibition on funding of “pervasively sectarian” organizations had been deeply imbedded in federal agency rules and practices, but the FBCI has succeeded in transforming that administrative structure to reflect the law’s wider acceptance of public aid for FBOs.

The report goes on to detail how this transformation was accomplished. As with other executive policies, when the President was unsuccessful in implementing his vision through legislation, he turned to executive orders:

Very soon after he took office in January of 2001, President George W. Bush issued two Executive Orders that set in motion the Faith-Based and Community Initiative. These Orders established Centers for the FBCI in the White House and core federal agencies, and directed the agency centers to identify barriers that prevented faith-based and community organizations from competing on an equal basis for federal social welfare funding. A year later, following a comprehensive survey by the agency FBCI Centers, the President issued another Executive Order, directing federal agencies to remove such barriers and guarantee equal treatment for faith-based and community organizations in federal grants and contracts. By the end of 2004, virtually all federal agencies had complied with the President’s directives. New regulations, covering the full range of federal social welfare funding programs, prohibited agencies from discriminating against FBOs based on their religious character, and ensured FBOs that they could retain their religious identity while providing publicly funded services.

While open legal issues remain, particularly with respect to the right of faith-based organizations to discriminate in hiring, there is no question that it is a remarkable accomplishment, one that would have seemed incredible to many First Amendment scholars ten years ago.

A parallel shift has occurred in the foreign policy arena with the embedding of religion in the State Department after the signing into law of the International Religious Freedom Act in 1999. The act mandated the establishment of an Office of International Religious Freedom within the Department of State, headed by an Ambassador-at-Large that acts as the principal advisor to the President and Secretary of State in matters concerning religious freedom abroad. It also mandated the establishment of the independent, bipartisan United States Commission on International Religious Freedom and a Special Adviser on International Religious Freedom at the National Security Council. An annual report is produced detailing the state of religious freedom in every country in the world—with the exception of the U.S. The President is required by the Act to punish countries that are found not to be sufficiently free. Ten years later these policies reach deep into U.S. foreign policy at every level.

Where do the new President and the Democrats stand on these questions? After the 2004 election, Democrats were widely understood not to have gotten it right about the importance of religious values for Americans. Potential candidates were supposed to learn how to talk about religion. Some tried and sounded awkward, but both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton understood this need and both spoke naturally about their respect for religion and about their own religious commitments in their campaigns. Both embraced the notion that religion belongs back in politics. On July 1, 2008, then-candidate Obama gave a major speech endorsing government partnership with faith-based organizations and promising to beef up President Bush’s efforts with the creation of a new Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. President Obama has defended his opposition to gay marriage on religious grounds. When she accepted Obama’s nomination as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton spoke of American faith in every person’s “God-given” right to live up to his or her potential. Examples could be multiplied.

Understanding Americans to be fundamentally religious is now deeply embedded in government and in our public culture. That is the default position. Not secularism. Chaplaincies are proliferating across the U.S. to serve Americans in the military, in hospitals, in colleges, in the workplace—and in crisis situations. While President Obama is careful to speak always with respect for people who are not religious, all the evidence suggests that we are still a faith-based nation.

In the Muslim world, as in Europe and much of the world, Obama is welcomed as an internationalist president. His Kenyan father, early schooling in Indonesia, race and name symbolize for many a unique internationalist presidential profile, one that contrasts sharply with his predecessor. Indeed, he is seen as the antithesis of George W. Bush-internationally informed, experienced, aware and sensitive, a measured and articulate statesman-not, as Bush is often regarded, as a swaggering Texas cowboy.

Obama’s foreign policy will be expected to be all the things that many in the Muslim world saw as lacking in the Bush administration, which was viewed as neo-colonial, unilateral, arrogant, militant and interventionist. Therefore, an Obama administration will be expected to be multilateral, favor diplomacy first over military threats and intervention, and avoid what many believe was a neo-colonialist American foreign policy whose verbal commitment to democracy promotion and human rights was hypocritical. Obama’s administration cannot, like Bush’s, fail to walk the way it talks.

Despite its democratic rhetoric, the Bush administration continued to look the other way in its relations with authoritarian Muslim allies. It refused to accept the election of HAMAS. America condemned Hizbollah, but sat on the sidelines as Israel carpet-bombed Lebanon, destroying much of its infrastructure in a war whose victims were overwhelmingly Lebanon’s civilian population. Many Muslims today expect Obama to live up to the principles of self-determination, justice and human rights that they associate with America and break with the Bush administration’s (and for that matter, previous administrations’) double standard in not promoting democracy and human rights in the Middle East.

Given the legacy of past American policies that engaged in what Ambassador Richard Haass, a senior State Department official in George W. Bush’s first term, called “Democratic Exceptionalism”-its equation of America’s national interest in security, stability and access to oil with uncritical support for authoritarian regimes and Israel-Obama will face a formidable challenge of sharply rising expectations. It will be further complicated by the fact that some Muslim rulers, in contrast to their populations, preferred McCain, believing that he would continue the Bush policy (and indeed that of Bush’s predecessors) of supporting their regimes in exchange for their cooperation and what were regarded as America’s national interests.

Both America/Europe and Muslim societies need to pursue a joint effort in marginalizing the extremist fringe and building bridges between members of the mainstream. Data from the Gallup World Poll (see John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed’s, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think?), the most comprehensive and systematic poll of the Muslim world-representing the voices of 90% of the world’s Muslims in more that 35 countries stretching from North Africa to Southeast Asia-provides critical insights into the components for a new direction in American foreign policy and relations with the Muslim world. Majorities of Muslims, like Westerners, are deeply concerned about religious extremism and terrorism, not surprising since the majority of attacks and victims have been in the Muslim world. For majorities of Muslims, who admire the West’s freedoms, technologies, and rule of law, the major issues are respect for Islam and Muslims and Western, especially American, foreign policies. Many will be looking for an American administration that emphasizes diplomacy and dialogue. They will expect co-existence and constructive engagement rather than interference, intervention or dominance in America’s relations with the Muslim world; the promotion of democratization as self-determination; economic and educational assistance rather than the transfer of substantial military arms and equipment to authoritative regimes; and a more balanced policy in its approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

While agreement on a withdrawal policy for Iraq will not be easy, devising a new policy to address deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan that does not require major multi-year American military involvement will prove difficult. However, the most intractable issue will continue to be the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The obstacles seem insurmountable: the failed leadership in Israel and Palestine, prospects of a new Netanyahu-led government facing off with HAMAS, and formidable American domestic pressure  from the Israel lobby and Zionist Christian Right leaders. There seems little reason to believe that an Obama administration or the new Congress will alter a long-established tradition of American presidents (Democrat or Republican) and Congresses to equate the existence, safety and security of Israel but be gun-shy in providing comparable support for Palestinian Muslims and Christians. A review of Obama’s campaign advisers on foreign policy and community affairs as well as the list of those rumored to be appointed in his new administration do not bring an initial optimism for significant change.

The policies and legacy of the Bush administration have left Barack Obama and his new administration with many formidable political and economic challenges, some seemingly intractable. However, in relations with the Muslim world and in our joint fight against global terrorism, Obama does have a singular opportunity to signal a new era and send a new message of hope and constructive engagement across the Muslim world.

I instantly saw that a great feat in reverse discourse engineering had occurred: we had moved into the era of the “Faith-Based Economy.” Many of us had already developed a certain worry about the place of “faith” in the Bush administration’s weird form of ecumenical evangelism, which had used the idea of faith-based organizations to allow the covert infiltration of a certain brand of religion into American civic life, with a definite bias towards white, Protestant, evangelical forms rather than say, to Muslim, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu or Rastafarian forms.

But now we are in a new Weberian moment, where Calvinist ideas of proof, certainty of election through the rationality of good works, and faith in the rightness of predestination, are not anymore the backbone of thrift, calculation and bourgeois risk-taking. Now faith is about something else. It is faith in capitalism itself, capitalism viewed as a transcendent means of organizing human affairs, of capitalism as a theodicy for the explanation of evil, lust, greed and theft in the economy, and of the meltdown as a supreme form of testing by suffering, which will weed out the weak of heart from those of true good faith.  We must believe in capitalism, in the ways that the early Protestants were asked to believe in predestination. Not all are saved, but we must all act as if we might be saved, and by acting as if we might be among the saved, we enact our faith in capitalism, even if we might be among the doomed or damned. Such faith must be shown in our works, in our actions: we must continue to spend, to work hard, to invest, and, as George Bush long ago said, “to shop” as if our very lives depended on it. In other words, capitalism now needs our faith more than our faith needs capitalism.

Practically, what does this mean?  It means austerity, chosen or imposed: less insane credit-card acquisitions, less whacky mortgage seeking, less obese cars, fewer happy miles on the road, fewer “business expenses” (unless of course we are senior AIG executives). It means leaving our money in the banks and having renewed faith in the FDIC, for if we race to our banks and take our money home in cash, we shall show our lack of faith in the banks, and the banks will suffer, and if the banks suffer, the world financial markets will suffer, and if the world financial markets suffer, the volcanoes will explode, the rivers will flood, the lightning shall strike, and all of us will be reduced to ashes, along with our melted credit cards, our worthless pension funds and our homes with negative equity.

But Faith, it turns out, is not enough. Capitalism, as a master-belief system, reasonably operates on faith. But markets, especially capitalist financial markets, need something more specific: Trust. And that is the second biggest Revelation of the last few weeks. We have a trade deficit, as we all know, but much worse is our “trust deficit.” No one trusts the (financial) other anymore, we are told, and without trust no one lends and without lending the plastic ceases to work and everyday life comes to a complete halt.  This news will come as a shock to all of us on “Main Street,” who trust our friends, our neighbors, our leaders, our churches and our employers as much—or as little—as we did last year. No, trust is not a Main Street problem, it is a Wall Street problem. In other words, banks won’t lend to one another, and that problem in the high mountains of finance is melting down into the valleys and plains of our everyday lives.

Why won’t the banks, the hedge funds, the investment banks and all the other gentlemen-rogues who are part of the banking business trust one another? Have they lost their faith in capitalism? No, not quite. They still believe in the financial markets and in the rightness of the larger principles of profit, speculation and upside risk. What they no longer trust in is—each other! And they don’t trust each other because they have constructed for themselves a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma whereby they fear that each party’s self-interest lies in non-cooperation, and hence in suboptimal solutions, solvable only by a large infusion of cash from the outside to prime the Trust Pump.

The major arguments for the recent bailout still do not quite explain why the trust between banks evaporated when just a few weeks ago, the lending potlatch was in full swing, loans were being made to everyone except known felons, deportees or illegal migrants, and each of us on Main Street was receiving at least ten offers to get new credit cards every week. The banks trusted each other to a fault, and loaned money to one another as if there was no tomorrow. They became pathologically trusting of each other and were in an intoxicated haze of downstream trust-based lending. This orgy of trust was based on reversing Frank Knight’s great insight about risk and uncertainty, according to which uncertainty is what lenders should hate and risk is what they should seek to define and quantify, so they can take measurable risks to increase profits. It turns out that our banks have been pretending to know all about the risks they were taking, through devices which were mostly variations on derivatives.

For Main Street readers, let me offer the following definition of a derivative: a derivative is an instrument which is based on the risk of something happening (or not happening) to another risk, and not to another commodity. And once you do this once, you can repeat the transaction more or less indefinitely, as in risks on other risks, which are in turn risks on other risks, etc. The trust involved in these transactions in derivatives was not based on calculated risk, it was based on multiplying uncertainty, while pretending to develop and operate mathematical models that were calculating risks (ideally to the power of n). And as the uncertainties multiplied, more and more financial transactions were enabled, which allowed vast paper profits to be made as well as vast fees on these transactions, all of which were based on leveraging uncertainty rather than risk. In this vast reversal of the core principles of financial leveraging, the ultimate quarterbacks who anchored these risks (oops: these uncertainties) were the insurance companies who discovered the magical word “re,” which allowed them to insure risks on other risks. (The relationship of risk to performativity and trust is the subject of collaborative work-in-progress between Arjun Appadurai and Benjamin Lee.)

Yes, this is indeed a Ponzi scheme, but it is a Ponzi scheme with a few special twists: it required a certain number of arcane changes in the rules of accounting which allowed banks to disguise totally unspecified uncertainties as calculable (and profitable) risks; it required remarkable suspension of the elementary rules of government oversight over financial institutions; and it required a society that did not mind living with awesome amounts of debt at every level of its functioning. In other words, starting sometime in the 1980s we were already living in an FBE (Faith-Based Economy), in which no financial wannasteal really knew what derivatives were or how they worked, and each one hoped that they would be sitting on a secure chair (presumably in the Bahamas) when the music stopped. The music stopped because of the housing market (and the predictable end of the subprime lending orgy) but the game which stopped was a much larger faith-based system based on the radical replacement of risk by uncertainty.

So we are now officially living in a world where faith, risk and trust have completely redefined their relationship to one another.  First, while religious faith is unevenly distributed in our larger societies and worlds, with a band of old-fashioned believers, a big band of social churchgoers, and a significant minority of yuppy Pascalians (including most professional economists), we have been barking up the wrong tree in regard to the problem of secularization.  Max Weber, Durkheim and the other giants of early social science watched with concern as the march of industrial capitalism, science and the division of labor appeared to erode religious belief and we seemed to be well on the way to a “disenchanted world.” But the Iron Cage turned out to be a Pandora’s Box.

In the 1950s, sixties and early seventies, the general social science consensus was that modernization after World War II was sure to replace religion with faith in science, bureaucracy, law and education.  But the world turned out to be a perverse place and, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, it became evident that religion was not on the retreat.  Evangelical Protestantism was born again in the United States, Islam became the very paradigm of an expansive and aggressive religious ideology, Roman Catholicism was quick to fight back in its own favored climates and constituencies, notably in Latin America, Eastern and Southern Europe and in various parts of Asia and Africa. Even Hinduism and Buddhism, normally seen as quiet and sleepy, went global with a renewed energy and pushed their interests into various national and diasporic public spheres with scary effect in many parts of South and South-East Asia. As migrants began to carry their religious affiliations with them through the internet, television, telephone and the press, many world cities, from Detroit, London and Berlin, to Sao Paulo, Cairo and Seoul, began to be the sites of multiple religious movements, conversions, cults and churches, representing every variety of global evangelism and many varieties of indigenous tradition. The story of the Korean Protestant aid workers kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan recently is only the most bizarre in a worldwide drama of leveraged conversions or duelling evangelisms. And quite a large number of people seemed to be interested in being soldiers (and cleansers) in religious wars.

And capitalism itself in the last decades of the twentieth century has been observed to be tied up with numerous forms of hysteria, panic and mystery. Local entrepreneurs in sites as different as Lagos, Taiwan and Guatemala connected new forms of gambling, speculation and scam to the related languages of salvation and millennial profit. These new forms of re-enchanted capitalism have generally been tied to the capitalist badlands, where traditions of fetish, phantasm and spectre have frequently surrounded money and its reproduction. It is hardly news, especially to anthropologists, that the repressed fetishes of the commodity are always part of the lunatic edges of modern capitalism, thus giving rise to many brands of casino capitalism, evangelical entrepreneurship and proletarian life-wagering.

We are now in a position to recognize the convergence of Bush capitalism and bush capitalism. In the very belly of the beast, in the heart of capital’s empire, we are witnessing the complete remaking of the Weberian allegory of the journey from predestination, to election, to proof, to works, to rationally governed bourgeois life, to entrepreneurial risk. This was the allegory of the prefiguring and powering of Puritan risk-taking by Calvinist rectitude.

Now this allegory is repeating itself in reverse. The appetites of the beast require restoring uncertainty to its more calculable form as risk, as a first step in restoring trust between lenders, so that they will move money to yet others, so that in turn the wheels of commerce can begin to turn and our faith in the eternal mysteries of capital can be restored. Among these are the mysteries of debt as the virtuous bride of consumption, money as capable of begetting more money, and profit for the few as the key to the welfare of all. The cardinal mystery of the market, of course, verily its Spirit, is the Invisible Hand. For the Invisible Hand to move again, it needs a Helping Hand from us, the wretched of Main Street. And in lending this helping hand, in the biggest bailout in human history, we are asked to show our Faith in the Economy. For once, and perhaps for the last time, capitalism needs our Faith as much as we need its mysteries. The global economy will never be secular again.

[For more on the current economic crisis, see the SSRC "President's Question," where Craig Calhoun asks, "What do we know about the bailouts?"---ed.]

The United States committed to “moral and religious considerations”? Considerations shared with a particular religious organization, the Roman Catholic Church? This was news, or seemed to be. But then last Thursday’s joint communiqué enumerated the considerations themselves: “the respect of the dignity of the human person; the defense and promotion of life, matrimony and the family; the education of future generations; human rights and religious freedom; sustainable development and the struggle against poverty and pandemics, especially in Africa.” Even an avowed anti-clerical secularist can say yes to dignity, life, matrimony, and the family in the abstract. The communique constructed a big secular-religious tent. Not really big news after all.

Still, the high level of the Bush-Benedict concord was noteworthy. Over the course of his visit, the Pope repeatedly praised American democracy and refrained from direct criticism of the war in Iraq. Bush, for his part, showered praise on the Pontiff. “When you look into Benedict XVI’s eyes what do you see?” an interviewer asked Bush. His response: “God.” By the end of the visit, an alliance seemed to be taking shape—healthy or unholy, depending on your point of view.

In one critical respect, Bush overreached. He sought to enlist Benedict in support of his particular understanding of freedom and the US obligation to spread it around the world. For Bush, and for the wider secular culture, freedom means, primarily, political liberty and democratic government. A religious conservative, Bush further believes that the US is called by God to promote this freedom around the world—with allies, when possible, and alone, when necessary. In the January 2003 State of the Union preceding the invasion of Iraq, Bush proclaimed that “Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation.” He continued: “The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to humanity.” The day after his meeting with the Pope at the White House, Bush aligned Benedict with his approach to freedom, God and—by extension—US foreign policy. “His Holiness believes that freedom is the Almighty’s gift to every man, woman and child on Earth,” he told the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast.

But Benedict’s approach to freedom is different. There is significant common ground. Like Bush, Benedict acknowledges human rights and democratic governance as universal values. But for him political freedom is not God’s gift; it is a practical task, a way to protect and promote the inherent dignity and equality of human beings. Its advancement is a joint challenge to believers and non-believers alike, to be addressed through patient diplomacy and dialogue, not through the application of force. In his UN speech last Friday, Benedict noted “a multilateral consensus that continues to be in crisis because it is still subordinated to the decisions of a few, whereas the world’s problems call for interventions in the form of collective action by the international community.” The promotion of political freedom, he suggested, was not the calling of any particular nation but a task for the human community and international law: “It is necessary to recognize the higher role played by rules and structures that are intrinsically ordered to promote the common good, and therefore to safeguard human freedom. These regulations do not limit freedom. On the contrary, they promote it when they prohibit behavior and actions which work against the common good, curb its effective exercise and hence compromise the dignity of every human person.”

Benedict does draw a link between God and freedom, but it is more theological than political. For the Pope, true freedom is the freedom to love, serve, and obey the Creator. In contrast to political freedom, a positive good attainable mainly through human endeavor and human reason, true freedom is a gift of God made possible through faith. Benedict made the point at a Mass in Yankee Stadium: “The Gospel teaches us that true freedom, the freedom of the children of God, is found only in the self-surrender which is part of the mystery of love,” he proclaimed. “Real freedom, then, is God’s gracious gift, the fruit of conversion to his truth, the truth which makes us free. And this freedom in truth brings in its wake a new and liberating way of seeing reality.” For Benedict, real freedom can find political expression, for example in the Church’s engagement in civil society and the public sphere. But it is not the same thing as political freedom. It is a gift of a different order.

Bush and Benedict do not really see eye to eye on God, freedom, and US foreign policy. A joint communiqué is designed to underscore commonalities. But in practice, different understandings of freedom inform very different approaches to world affairs. Much hangs on how politicians and religious leaders think about God’s gifts and their implications.