Many have since written about this case, including myself. In my work, I’ve detailed how hisba is less a deviation from secularism than an expression of the underlying power that makes secularism possible—including the state’s fundamental right to decide the proper place of religion in social life. Here, however, I focus on something else: how hisba became not only an object of general suspicion, but also a particular modality of suspicion as a result of court litigation and state legislation. This modality of suspicion, exercised by the state, is intimately tied to the defense of religious freedom, and I suspect that it is shared across seemingly very different secular polities. To see this, consider the following passage from the Abu Zayd judgment:

The Court notes that there is a difference between apostasy, which is a material action with its basic elements and conditions….and belief (i`tiqad). Apostasy is necessarily comprised of material acts that have an external being. Such acts must make manifest, in a manner undeniable and without dissent, that one has called God Most High a liar, and the Prophet, peace be upon him, a liar by denying what he has brought to Islam….Belief, however, differs clearly from apostasy. For apostasy is a crime whose basic material elements are presented before a judge to decide whether it exists or not….But belief concerns what is in the interior of a human being’s self, belonging to his domain of secrecy. It is neither a matter of judicial probing, nor of investigation by people, but is to do with the relationship between the human being and his Creator. Apostasy is a breach of the Islamic order, at its highest degree and most valued foundations, through manifest, material actions. In positive law, it comes close to a breach of the order of the state or high treason. Apostasy is investigated by the judge or the mufti. However, the punishment for assaulting religion through [an act of] apostasy does not contradict personal freedom. This is because freedom of belief (`aqida) requires that one be a believer (mu’minan) in his words and acts, and that he possess a sound rationale for his abandonment of belief. But a breach of Islam can only be due to corruption in thought or the lure of material, sexual, or other worldly purposes. To combat this category [of desire] is not considered combat against freedom of belief, but rather the protection of belief from such vain, corrupt passions.

In distinguishing between apostasy as an “outer” material act and belief which occurs in an “interior” forum, the Court defines its jurisdiction over the determination of apostasy and justifies its approach in making that determination. On the basis of this distinction, the Court took only Abu Zayd’s written work into account, without probing into his personal views—his “interior” relationship with his creator. Taking statements from his written work at face-value, the Court compared them with statements designated within the sharia as indicating apostasy; finding them to be similar, it pronounced him an apostate.

Many commentators on the judgment have discussed how it separates private belief from public act/expression. No one, however, has discussed the seeming contradiction it presents just a few lines later, where it reconnects private belief and its public manifestation in the context of a defense of religious freedom. Importantly, the Court does not see religious freedom as simply a right to believe what one wants. It also includes maintaining the conditions under which religious belief can be sustained and cultivated. For the Court, this entails that belief be protected from the motives of worldly power that might corrupt it. This, in turn, requires the Court to pronounce what those motives are—as it did with Abu Zayd. Acts and expressions of belief are therefore objects of especial suspicion, to be put under particular scrutiny, for potentially harboring ulterior, corrupting motives. Such scrutiny might be seen as a kind of vigilance against power and its potential abuse. (Indeed, part of the Court’s concern was that Abu Zayd was also teaching his books to university students.) In other words, outer act and inner belief, though initially divided, come to be reconnected through a suspicion of motives of material interest or worldly power. In the context of the freedom of religious belief, it becomes imperative to determine whether acts or expressions of belief are genuinely religiously motivated. This presumes the power to pronounce upon and, if necessary, probe into the character of one’s private convictions. Here the defense of religious freedom promotes a distinctive form of suspicion.

This suspicion is not exclusive to Egypt. Strikingly similar versions of it are found in seemingly very different secular states.

For example, Winnifred Sullivan has highlighted two central criteria in U.S. jurisprudence on religious freedom. They parallel those of the Abu Zayd case. The first criterion was whether religious acts or expressions were sincerely held to be essential to one’s religion. This conflicted with the second, often prevailing, criterion: whether these acts and expressions were authorized and mandated by orthodox religious texts. In U.S. courts, there seemed to be a disposition to presume the sincerity of litigants’ religious belief—which may be due in part to a traditional American respect for individual belief rooted in a particular Protestant history. Nevertheless, as legal theorist Kent Greenawalt writes, “when the state offers exemptions based on people’s convictions, it cannot avoid all inquiry into sincerity.” The Court thus retains the prerogative to determine and investigate this sincerity in the context of defining and defending religious freedoms—a prerogative it has exercised. More, this determination and investigation purveys a suspicion of motives of material interests or other worldly purposes. To quote Greenawalt again:

Another category of religious claims that should not count as spiritual are schemes cloaked in religious language in which the incentive to participate is financial self-interest and not spiritual development. … A finding that a claimant is sincere should be easy if one cannot discern any secular advantage from a person’s engaging in the behavior she asserts is part of her religious exercise.

But whether it is preferable for the Court to actually investigate sincerity or simply make presumptions about it without an investigation has been historically difficult to decide.

A similar situation is found in France. Anthropologist Mayanthi Fernando describes the dilemma veiled Muslim women faced in opposing the banning of the veil in public schools. If, on the one hand, the veil was deemed an obligation mandated by religious authorities, then it could be construed as potentially coercive and an impingement of religious freedom. The French state was therefore very concerned to ascertain that there was no external coercion or pressure to wear the veil—a concern that entailed knowing about the circumstances of people’s private lives and convictions. But if, on the other hand, the veil was construed as a matter of personal belief—a choice—then it was not mandated by orthodox religious texts and therefore inessential to the practice of one’s religion. Banning it was therefore not necessarily an impingement on religious freedom.

But even as a personal belief and choice, the veil was still construed by the state as an essentially religious, and fundamentally Islamic, sign. For state officials, it indicated a will and a desire to manifest Islam. Some saw it as potentially indexing a rising Islamism, one that degraded women in ways incompatible with the French republic’s fundamental values. It was thus a will and a desire that the state sought not to encourage, lest those values become undermined. Thus, in his analysis of the state’s investigation, Talal Asad notes that,

…not only [do] government officials decide what sartorial signs mean, but …they do so by privileged access to the wearer’s motives and will—to her subjectivity—and this is facilitated by resort to a certain kind of semiotics. A governmental commission of inquiry claims to bring private concerns, commitments and sentiments to the public sphere in order to assess their validity for the secular Republic, but it does much more than that. It constitutes meanings by drawing on internal (psychological) signs or external (social) signs, encourages certain desires and emotions at the expense of others.

So even though the veil was construed as a choice, indeed, precisely because it was, it could be deemed a suspicious and potentially dangerous act.

That the determination of genuine religiosity in terms of ulterior motives is a practice of suspicion becomes fully evident when it comes to Muslims in Europe and the U.S., with the near paranoid quality of the public debates about the building of mosques and minarets, the potential usage of sharia law, the teaching of Arabic in public schools, the donating to Muslim charities, and the wearing of veils. While there are complicated historical and political reasons for this near paranoia, my point here is to emphasize a central element of the structure it takes. And this is the constant attempt to unmask ulterior motives of material interest and worldly power behind a range of otherwise ordinary (in this case, Muslim) practices and expressions of belief, in order to defend those freedoms, including especially religious freedom, that are seen as constitutive of the ways of life the state is supposed to guarantee.

These examples, then, reveal a distinctive structure of legalized suspicion. On the one hand, private belief and public act/expression are made separate, but on the other, they are brought together in order to define and defend religious freedoms. In this case, private belief becomes framed within a complex of motives, will and desire—one that becomes suspect to the extent it expresses material interests or drives towards worldly power. As such, it can become subject to investigation and disciplining, which means probing into the details of private life and conviction. This structure of suspicion, shared by the U.S., France and Egypt, brings together under the pretext of religious freedom two central aspects of liberalism and secularism respectively. The first is a distinctively liberal vigilance against power and its abuse, and the second is a characteristically secular desire to draw a line between religion and material power. What this suggests is that, under a liberal secular legal regime, suspicion of religion is the flip-side of the freedom of religious belief.

The Abu Zayd judgment cited above poignantly highlights this contradictory structure of suspicion. At one level, the Court took Abu Zayd’s written statements at face-value—to say what they mean—and found them to contradict orthodox doctrines literally construed. The Court thus declared him an apostate. But when it came to religious freedom, his words were paid extra attention, meaning more than what they said, as having ulterior worldly motives against which the freedom of belief—to cultivate belief and have it flourish—had to be defended. In this case, the Court simply presumed and pronounced upon Abu Zayd’s motives, without investigation. This shows that the suspicious attribution of motives does not depend on an investigation, even though it enables one to be done at the discretion of the judiciary.

Hisba, through and under the law, has come to embody this structure of suspicion and the discretionary power that comes with it. It therefore enables the assertion of the sovereign power of decision into the intimate domains of everyday life. This becomes clear when we remember that hisba was placed in the hands of the General Prosecutor, with his ambiguous status between judiciary and executive power and his nearly unfettered investigative authority. For now it is the General Prosecutor who is responsible for bringing a hisba case to court. He must therefore conduct an investigation to decide whether a potential case merits further litigation. That means he might have to scrutinize the motives behind statements of religious belief. If, however, such scrutiny seems to intrude too much into a person’s private life or interior forum, the General Prosecutor has another option at his discretion: to take these statements at face-value, as saying what they mean, as the Court did with Abu Zayd. A focus on literal statements, however, may fail to capture the complexity of people’s private religious lives. As with the U.S. and France above, it is unclear here which is preferable: to investigate how genuine one’s religious motives are, or to make presumptions about how genuine they really are.

This tension between intruding into a private, ostensibly protected, domain or taking statements too literally is reminiscent of another tension upon which modern legal legitimacy both rests and continually founders: between the enactment and the appearance of justice. The more zealously an official investigates, the more abusive of justice he might seem to be. If, however, he relies strictly on procedure, this might make a mockery of justice. Hisba now partakes of this dilemma too.

To conclude: I cited the Abu Zayd judgments to show how hisba, in its contemporary legalized form, embodied a distinctive structure of suspicion. Through the judgments, hisba potentially undermined an entire domain of private rights. In restricting hisba’s uses, the state transformed it into a modality of suspicion only it could exercise. This modality of suspicion, enabled to defend religious freedoms, nevertheless undermined the crucial distinctions on which they relied. More, it became ensconced within another dynamic of suspicion, the tension between the enactment and the appearance of justice. This tension is even further compounded because, as I show elsewhere, it remains irresolvably indeterminate whether hisba is still an Islamic and thus primarily religious principle, or, as an expression of public order, it has become an essentially secular principle. The example of hisba therefore not only confirms Winnifred Sullivan’s thesis that religious freedom as a legally enforceable right is impossible to attain. It also shows how such religious freedom will never appear to be fully achieved, being entangled in its entirety within the dynamics of law’s suspicion and secular/religious ambiguity.

We should not, however, take the impossibility of religious freedom to mean the failure of secularism. For that would reduce an analysis of secularism to an assessment of whether it fulfills the promises it makes. Secularism as a historical phenomenon is certainly more than its promises, if only because it so consistently and demonstrably falls short of them. We might consider instead how this sense of a continual failure is built into the historical grammar of secularism, and its consequences. In this case, the constant disjuncture between religious freedom as a secular aspiration and the secular means of achieving it constitutes a space of a continual striving, one which works to expand and entrench the suspicion and potential for intervention that provoked it in the first place. Within this space, religion is given to continual politicization, political theological claims acquire plausibility and force, and critique becomes a seemingly indispensable capacity that one must sustain and tirelessly cultivate. As a result, the question of religious freedom, as a central secular stake, remains poignantly alive, drawn into a seemingly unavoidable and incessant cycle of provocation, critique, and intervention. That is, the modalities and dynamics of suspicion outlined here help sustain the problem-space of secularism, its constitutive questions and stakes, the critical dispositions it induces, and the propensities toward sovereignty it displays. We remain bound to this problem-space through the incessant suspicion it provokes.

Reading these responses to my Political Theology has always been interesting, but not always enjoyable. Generally, I try to focus on the issues of interest and ignore misunderstanding or misplaced critiques. My interim posting took this approach. Some of the subsequent postings, however, are so disturbing as examples of intellectual exchange that they require a more pointed response. Let me dispose of these before I take up the thoughtful commentators.

Miguel Vatter has lots of advice on the book I should have written to “advance the discussion of the theme of ‘political theology’ in Schmitt.” I don’t think I could have been clearer that this was not my project. Quoting me, Vatter characterizes my work as an “exegesis” of Schmitt’s text. What I actually said was “This work is neither an exegesis of [Schmitt’s] text, nor an intellectual history.” Remarkably, Vatter rewrites this sentence to read, “Kahn says at one point that he is doing ‘an exegesis of his [Schmitt’s] text, not an intellectual history.’”

Jean-Claude Monod agrees with my “diagnosis” of the facts of American political life, but criticizes me for deploying political theology in defense of American policies of torture. His critique is rooted in my “defense” of the Israeli Supreme Court’s torture decision and my failure to criticize the ticking time bomb argument. Both points are frivolous. First, I have no reason to defend the Israeli Court. Rather, my point was about how difficult it is, even for a court, to adhere to the legal rule of no torture, as if stating the rule were the end of the matter. I described this resurgence of the exception even within a decision declaring the absolute character of the no torture rule as a “paradox.” For what it’s worth I would never say what Monod attributes to me: “Even if it is an illegitimate practice, it can be made legal by virtue of a political decision.” That view is sophomoric. The point of my work is to explore the double nature of a political commitment to law and sovereignty, not to reduce one to the other.

This problem of managing the incommensurable has been the point of my work with the ticking time bomb hypothetical. I am frankly amazed by Monod’s description of my work on this point as uncritical. I don’t think anyone has devoted more time to trying to unpack the way in which the ticking time bomb argument actually works than I did in Sacred Violence, which devotes an entire chapter to the problem. Of course, one cannot do everything everywhere, but I do provide the references to the essential debate on this issue, including my prior work.

With Vincent Pecora, we move from the merely sophomoric to the outrightly offensive. His strategy is first to state the obvious and then to taint me by association with the Nazi theorist Otto Brunner. On the obvious, who would deny that the differing attitudes of contemporary Europeans and Americans on the use of force is in large part to be accounted for by their different experiences of violence in the twentieth century? And who would claim that sacrifice is a unique possession of the West? Pecora seems not to understand the meaning of the “American exceptionalism” that I explore, which has nothing to do with the idea that every nation is “somehow unique.” Rather, American exceptionalism has to do with the way in which American law and legal institutions place themselves with respect to foreign and international law and institutions. Pecora doesn’t see this because he believes there is something “unfortunate” in the legal mind. At least it can hold on to some distinctions: for example, that the United States is committed to both the rule of law and popular sovereignty. The puzzle is to understand how this constitutional double actually works in our law and politics, both now and in the past.

Jason Stevens does a little better. Much of his long “detour” on Schmitt and Blumenberg rehearses points with which I agree but that are not at issue in my work. Most of what he says about the operation of religious categories in American political history simply illustrates my argument. My point is not about a single possible use of these categories, but about how they offer an imaginative frame, and thus conceptual resources for the multiple, contesting parties. When he actually comes to my work, he seems so bent on finding a point of disagreement that he turns to an article I wrote some ten years ago critiquing the idea that popular democratic deliberation is likely to be an effective method of responding to moral atrocity around the world. Stevens makes the leap of saying that my suggestion of presidential leadership on such foreign policy matters “follows from Kahn’s argument, in Political Theology, that the President play a Christological role when mediating the sovereign presence and committing it to sacrifice.” What I actually said was:

If we are concerned with deploying the immense military power of the United States for good in the world as we confront the twenty-first century, then we need to appreciate opportunities for presidential leadership. More than Congress and more than the public, the president is subject to the demands of international organizations and the pressures brought to bear by civic and political leaders from around the world. If we want the United States to stop genocide in places like Rwanda, we need to reject arguments that every risky deployment of U.S. forces requires a Congressional declaration of war and advance democratic approval. We should do all that we can to encourage international policing, military deterrence, and the threat of real intervention against those who would commit mass atrocities. We should encourage U.S. participation in such deployments of force. The Constitution was not designed for such a task, nor is Congress likely to assume it. Intervention is, however, demanded of the United States by much of the world. They are right to make this demand, and I do not believe that the structure of the Constitution undermines the morally compelling response.

This was an argument about morality, law, and the pressures of foreign policy on different institutions of government. There was no claim for Christology or sacrifice. My point from 2002 has recently been quite precisely illustrated in the American intervention in Libya, which was not about sacrifice but did require presidential leadership.

In Political Theology, Christology comes up in exactly one sentence when I am considering the locus of the actual power to decide with respect to issues of national security. Historically, I note, the Court has been reluctant to get involved, and power has been successfully claimed by the President in “moments of national crisis”—not at all the topic of human rights intervention considered in the earlier article. After pointing out that the President’s power in this respect seems to be weakening, I go on to say that it would be useful to think about his claim to embody the nation in such instances, not in terms of a sovereign act of creation, but in terms of the imaginative frame of Christology—an individual subject embodying the whole of the community. Understanding the nature of power is not the same as approving of its use.

The rest of the essays are thoughtful engagements with the book, from which I learned a good deal. They pose serious questions of two sorts: those about which I can say something and those about which I wish I could say something. In the latter category, I particularly place Ward Blanton’s beautifully written plea that I transform my political tract into a “political experience” by giving name to “the phenomenon of a new beginning.” I have never claimed to have a prophetic voice, nor to be able to found a new “Us,” although I don’t think that the depth of our estrangement is quite as bleak as this question might suggest. I can offer two sorts of response to Blanton.

First, when I described my ambition in the book as phenomenolgical, not normative, part of my ambition was to speak of the American political imaginary in a way that reminds the reader of just how powerful its claim has been. I want the reader to recognize that this constellation of popular sovereignty, sacrifice, and rule of law is still doing considerable work. We must be careful to understand exactly what is at issue. The political imaginary to which I am trying to give voice can be at work among those who believe that government is failing and that law is no longer representative. The question is what sorts of values do they hope to see realized in political experience. Similarly, the domain within which the imaginary works is hardly limited to our actual political institutions. One has to look, as well, at the many fictional and historical representations of contest and success, of struggle and resolution. My work has tried to explore that archetypical presence in legal opinions, institutional structures, political rhetoric, public memorials, historical narrative, film, and other expressions of popular culture.

Second, when I am not writing about politics, I am often writing about love—and often about the intersection of the two. The experience of a new beginning for which Blanton longs, and which I have called the point at which being and meaning coincide, has not disappeared from our experience, even if the sacred has withdrawn from our political experience. One of the problems with liberal political theory has been its “privatization” of the family. I understand the love of the family, and particularly of the child, as world creating and world affirming. It is not about justice or representation, but about that longed for new beginning that gives meaning to the world. What Blanton really wants to know, I suspect, is what forms of erotic community will emerge in the social order as the state is increasingly dislocated from the center of our experience of meaning. He rightly observes that to answer that question is to move beyond theory and speak from a position in thrall to the sacred. I can’t do that, but what I can still affirm, or at least hope, is that our deep and abiding commitment to love suggests that we do not live in a disenchanted world. Love will continue to draw us forward into new social formations.

Several commentators challenge my claim that popular sovereignty offers an imaginative framework within which a politics of ultimate meaning moves forward in America. I don’t deny that this entire imaginative structure may be passing. When I say my work is not normative, I mean that I take no position on whether such a passing would be good or bad. Yet, it is too soon to declare its death. Most of the critical points the commentators bring up strike me as more supportive than critical of my views. I hardly take it as a point against my argument that there is very substantial dissatisfaction with government today, that many express frustration and disappointment with the government and laws that we have, and some even make extreme threats—the last a point brought up by several commentators. What is interesting in so much of the critique is the way in which the concept of popular sovereignty is invoked. The unsettled place of the popular sovereign is a part of the account I too would give. Precisely my point is that the popular sovereign is not measurable, not reducible to a process or a vote. It is a resource put to work to make particular claims. Those claims will be contested—mostly peacefully, but sometimes violently.

Similarly, the fact that America has a long history of injustice with respect to exclusion of different groups from the popular sovereign is not a challenge to the imaginative force of the idea of popular sovereignty. Precisely because the concept is understood as the point of origin of an ultimate meaning that cannot be reduced to representational form, the varieties of American racism have often played out as an issue of what I have elsewhere called the “material cause” of the popular sovereign. This is the question of which bodies can support the weight or meaning of the sovereign. Groups seen as incapable of taking on that meaning were in a difficult and dangerous position from which law could not easily protect them. To be seen as “incapable” meant, in part, that they could not be seen as embodying the state in and through sacrifice. For this reason, extension of the corpus of the sovereign has so often in American history been linked to sacrifice at war. The proof text of instantiation of the body politic has not been a theory of justice, but a common experience of sacrifice.

Several commentators take issue with my terminology. Politics, they insist, is not necessarily about ultimate meanings, freedom can be located in negative liberty as much as in authenticity, and meaning can be located in the mundane as well as the sacrificial. Of course, all of this is true. If we mean by politics the institutionally organized, public life of the community, then politics goes on as a legal, bureaucratic formation all the time. Many national communities don’t want any other form of politics because of a history that associates a politics of ultimate meaning with authoritarianism, injustice, and violence. I make no claim that they are wrong or that somehow they fail at the essential form of politics. The same can be said about freedom in its positive and negative forms. My book, however, is not a catalogue of political conceptions or a survey of different theories. I am using these terms for rhetorical as well as analytical purposes: not to convince the reader to do anything, but to draw his or her attention to certain imaginative formations. I’m hoping for a certain resonance in this rather violent taking possession of terms from our everyday experience.

This is probably the source of the accusation that I am an “absolutist” or an essentialist. These are difficult claims to make out in a work that puts at its center contingency and the necessity of the decision. The driving point of the book is to make vivid an idea of freedom that begins in the creative act of the discursive engagement, moves from there to law, and then to sovereignty. It strives to provoke in the reader a sense of wonder and respect at the endless fecundity of the imagination. It tries to shift attention from reason to imagination, from causes to actions, from rules to decisions. It offers itself as an example of the free, and therefore surprising, conversation that it theorizes. Accordingly, I react with a certain disappointment when some of the commentators reject out of hand the idea that a discourse with Schmitt can be an inquiry into freedom. My project might not persuade, but its point is not about Schmitt. The aim is to see what we might discover about ourselves through the discursive engagement.

This brings me to the question with which Peter Gordon ends his thoughtful commentary. He asks whether it is right to look to sacrifice as the point at which we find the highest or authentic meaning of a life. First, let me clear away a possible confusion. I am not suggesting that we either do or should seek a sacrificial moment as the point at which we achieve some sort of authentic existence. People are not generally hoping for an opportunity to sacrifice themselves, although I have no doubt that exceptions arise. Second, I am not arguing that a politics of sacrifice is better than one without. That political life has been the locus of a practice of sacrifice is, from the perspective of my work, entirely contingent. There are historical reasons for this, but I am not claiming that there is something about human nature that demands of us sacrificial politics.

How then does sacrifice continue to operate? It stands for the point at which an incommensurable value breaks through our ordinary calculations of interest. Imagining sacrifice, we imagine that possibility, that is, we acknowledge the possibility of such a claim upon ourselves. Sacrifice is for this reason linked to love. Indeed, love absent the imagination of sacrifice is a problematic idea—one better described as desire, interest, or satisfaction. Love is characterized by the awareness that there is a value outside of myself that stands to everything else as a sort of transcendent claim. Sacrifice is another way of speaking of this experience of ultimate value outside of ourselves. How and where we find this value changes through time. That sacrifice has taken a particularly violent form in politics tells us something about the nature of our political formations, not something essential about ourselves. There is nothing necessary about state, religion, or even family as the locus of the experience of such a claim.

That people will continue to search for and find such an ultimate value is, in the end, nothing more than a belief on my part. I don’t know how one might go about proving such a claim. The most one can do is use the rhetorical and conceptual tools available in one’s tradition to try to invoke a recognition of this experience. This is the reason Political Theology is both a philosophical project and a rhetorical project. It is why I describe the project as “phenomenological,” but link that to persuasion. Gordon is right to point out that there are multiple theological sources in our tradition to which one could appeal. But I don’t agree that it follows that political theology should proceed by first settling on a theology and then applying it to politics. The project I pursue begins from within political and legal experience and moves back and forth between that experience and theological resources—analogies, narratives, symbols, and ideas. I tried in the book to give expression to this idea as follows: “Arguments succeed when we find ourselves operating in the world with one set of meanings rather than another. In this sense, every genuinely philosophical inquiry is autobiographical, both as a theoretical and as a practical endeavor.”

My repetition of the phrase “existence before essence” is not a claim that I have access to the facts themselves, stripped of any interpretive approach. Quite the opposite: I argue throughout that every interpretation rests on a free act of the imagination. The risk of such a project is that it can be as impossible as describing color to the blind. The rewards of such a project are when the reader comes away with a sense that something deeply important about the world in which she finds herself has been illuminated. In the end, this series of commentaries has shown me that I have had both sorts of readers.

One issue I want to raise, though, is the specter of American exceptionalism that haunts the book. Haunts, actually, may be too mild a word, since Kahn enthusiastically embraces the exceptional nature of American politics and law, and does so in absolutist terms (perhaps this is just the unfortunate sign of the legal mind at work, as is also the case in Schmitt). Of course, much of the book is devoted to pointing out how “extra-legal” America’s use of violence for political ends is, as opposed to that of Europe, while the typical right-wing elaboration of American exceptionalism tends to avoid this issue in favor of a reliance on the USA’s special, God-given dispensation to address the evils of the world wherever they occur. Even those who do not directly invoke the divinity or the duty of foreign adventurism in expressing their high regard for the country nevertheless often slip into a discourse in which the Sonderweg of the United States is dearly held. Kahn’s is a more sobering account of that Sonderweg, though it still weirdly (as Monod points out) ends up discovering a notion of freedom in Schmitt that could be appropriately applied to America’s exceptional (and exceptionally permanent, for Kahn) “state of exception” where extra-legal violence is concerned.

But it seems to me that all versions of political exceptionalism, whatever the ends to which they are put, are fundamentally wrong-headed. That is, no one would deny that each nation, even each Western liberal democracy, is somehow unique—France’s religious and courtly heritage is obviously quite different from Britain’s national (if we can call it that) Bildung. But if we are going to be historically circumspect and careful, then it does us little good to make such differences absolute. No matter how large the gap when it comes to legal or constitutional formations and predispositions (Napoleonic and codified in France, common-law to a large extent in the UK), we also need to acknowledge how far nation-state structures and geo-political exigencies create remarkable similarities (for example, France and Britain, despite chauvinist claims on both sides, ran empires with similar goals, similar legal chicanery, similar brutality, and similar denouements; both countries today attack the Islamic veiling of women in ways that would be unthinkable in the US; both are highly secular, and so on).

And yet Kahn has no difficulty speaking in absolutes about the US. “The juridification of politics is the leading idea of the Western European political order today. To the question of whether there can be sovereign action beyond the rule of law, European institutions have answered with a resounding no. All political violence is limited to law enforcement: no exceptions.” By contrast, Americans “live comfortably with their long history of citizen sacrifice in national wars,” so that popular history is the history of “violent force against enemies,” which is then “endlessly reinforced” when “Americans take their families to Valley Forge and Gettysburg, and even Omaha Beach.” (For the record, I have been to none of these places.)

I have read these passages numerous times, and I still do not get the supposed appropriateness of the contrast on page 16, the “on the one hand, on the other hand” structure that Kahn presumes is obvious to his reader. Yes, I agree, Americans do wave flags more than Europeans, and yes, as Kahn suggests, they do not see their history through the prism of the concentration camp or bombed out cities. But how the notion of “sacrifice” in war—and “sacrifice” is a crucial term in Kahn’s argument—came to be a uniquely American characteristic, one clearly absent on the Continent, remains a historical puzzle in Kahn’s book. It is as if this sense of “sacrifice” derived solely from the constitution (and I mean this in both the conceptual and legal sense) of the US, whereas its absence in Europe is also fundamentally constitutional. But this makes a hash of twentieth-century political history.

First, as should be obvious, the idea of “sacrifice” for the nation (or the city-state) goes back at least to Pericles. Second, modern European history is in many ways nothing but what Kahn (referring only to the US) calls “the long history of citizen sacrifice in national wars.” The scale on which French and German “citizens” (and they were that) sacrificed themselves during WWI alone dwarfs by orders of magnitude all American “sacrifices” in the last hundred years. We will not even begin to talk about Soviet or German “sacrifices” in WWII, or the sacrifices of Japanese soldiers in the Pacific or in kamikaze squads. Only one American war even comes close—the Civil War—and this of course was the one war not fought against foreign “enemies.” Given the level of the carnage, it is little wonder that Europeans have less of a taste for foreign adventurism than Americans do today. But even this reluctance did not happen overnight (even the Europeans, that is, learn slowly). French soldiers continued to sacrifice themselves in large numbers in Vietnam and—with a fairly enthusiastic use of extra-legal torture against their “enemies”—in Algeria in the 1950s. Of course, outside Europe, Korea and Vietnam made the sacrifice of citizens against foreign enemies something of a sacred cause. The Vietnamese were far more enthusiastic about sacrificing themselves for their nation than the disaffected Americans were between 1965 and 1973—the results prove it, I think. It would be hard to show that the Americans were more willing than the French to sacrifice themselves in Vietnam, and both were less willing than the Russians were (for a time, at least) in Afghanistan. The enthusiasm among British citizens for war in the Falklands was palpable and was far greater than Americans’ willingness to sacrifice themselves, in a comparably ridiculous war, in Granada. Had I the time or space, even a cursory discussion of Israel, where the willingness of citizens (again, in a Western European sense) to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the nation remains unabated to this day—just try throwing stones over the border—and far outstrips, say, US citizens’ willingness to sacrifice themselves in defending the border with Mexico. (Ok, in Arizona, I agree, there are some folks who may feel this way, but even big-chested Rick Perry in Texas has more or less admitted, to the dismay of the Tea Party, that he will not lay down his life to defend El Paso from Mexicans.)

When Kahn writes about the exceptional and unique nature of Americans’ willingness to sacrifice themselves, even in extra-legal circumstances, for the nation, and then traces this willingness back to the unique nature of the US’ political constitution, I cannot avoid thinking of the great Viennese scholar Otto Brunner, perhaps the most important follower of Schmitt, völkisch thinker, and Nazi-identified historian of the Third Reich. Brunner’s summa is (in English) called Land and Lordship: Fundamental Questions on the Territorial Constitutional History of Southeast Germany in the Middle Ages. Like Kahn, Brunner accepted Schmitt’s definition of the political as the opposition of friend and foe; like Kahn, he accepted the irreducibility of political theology in the liberal state, that is, the state defined by the opposition of state and society. Like Kahn, he believed that the unique political constitution (both conceptual and legal) of a particular people (in this case, the Germans) was completely unsuited to the dominant liberal nation-state juridical and political order of Europe, an order based (just as Kahn himself puts it) on the idea that the rule of law and the state’s consequent monopoly on violence (only the state’s violence is permitted, and it is only permitted when it is lawful—no exceptions) is the essence of justice. And like Kahn, Brunner argued that one people, and only one people—the Germans—were constitutionally incapable of following the rule of such a European order of nation-states, and hence needed to reclaim a sense of freedom in the extra-legal use of violence, such as could be found in feuds and clan retribution, in the sense of the sacred that binds them organically to the soil and to one another, and most of all, in the sacrificial loyalties of the medieval Austrian Reich. When Kahn writes, late in his book, that “political authenticity, as it emerges in a study of political theology, is that experience of the unity of being and meaning that marks the presence of the sacred,” Brunner would have agreed wholeheartedly. And Brunner would also have agreed with Kahn that, alas, such an “experience” could not be found among the liberal nation-states of Europe, though he certainly hoped, in 1939, that Germany would soon show Europe how it might be achieved.

Kahn surely shares little of Brunner’s rabid, expansionist, and anti-Semitic nationalism. But his critique of the modern liberal nation-state from the vantage point of political theology is of a piece with much that has appeared recently, a fair amount of it deriving from both Schmitt and Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” which rejects both the earlier natural law tradition and the positive law of the nation-state. From the work of Giorgio Agamben, for whom the inevitable denouement of the nation-state is totalitarian Nazism, to the “Red Tory” revanchist theology of John Milbank, and the delirious Christian Stalinism of Salvoj Zizek, a certain strain of academic theory has emphasized that the nation-state after Hobbes rests on an absolutist basis—a monopoly on violence—that its own constitutional presumptions must constantly disavow under the guise of “lawfulness.”  Ironically, Brunner’s own deeply conservative, National Socialist thinking is in complete agreement with such indictments. Yet what Brunner demonstrates at the same time, albeit unintentionally, is that the attempt to find a final solution to the aporia of the liberal state’s political theology—its seemingly endless and irresolvable process of secularization—may be far worse than the aporia itself.

At a moment when some of the theoretical gestures being inspired by old, new, or futuristic political theologies have become ineffective, Paul Kahn’s Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty is a book of extraordinary significance. Or, perhaps I should say that I think it might be a book of extraordinary significance, inasmuch as it bears a potential to do something which has remained impossible, not only for Carl Schmitt, but also for some important contemporary critics of neo-liberal political economy. I want to reflect specifically about the way this impossibility might become possible, strangely, by way of a new migration of Abraham into the territory of philosophies of freedom and difference.

Throughout, Kahn constructs a stage on which is presented a complex encounter between a decidedly American revolutionary heritage, a deeply European critique of liberalism, and a repeated and self-conscious reflection on Jewish traditions. In this encounter, each figure appears bathed in mutually illuminating light, a situation which is much more difficult to stage than one might think. Just for a start, it would have been impossible for Schmitt himself to conjure a similar forcefulness for his ruminations on intractable questions of freedom with these three actors. A sporadic anti-Judaism and anti-Americanism endemic not only to Schmitt’s writings in the ‘20s but also to the larger conversation about legality, freedom, and authenticity in which his work participated saw to that.

Much more pressingly, however, Kahn’s inflection of questions about freedom and political constitution through Judaism, the American experiment, and classic European critiques of liberal political economy also seems to me something that recent brushes with political theology by Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou (to name three whose importance should not be denied) have not attained either.

In this first respect my hope is that Kahn’s constellation of figures could help to save for political thought something of an American revolutionary inheritance which seems otherwise to be very effectively disavowed by the dominance of liberal political philosophy in North America, namely, the ineluctable assertion of non-juridical forces which precede or exceed the forms of self-grounding imagined by representational politics. The redemption (so to speak) that Kahn’s work might afford occurs at one level by virtue of the fact that it remains faithful to this revolutionary heritage by likewise remaining faithful to thoughts also rooted in nineteenth-century European anti-capitalist movements. Here I note simply that convincing expositions of such mutually affecting fidelities are not forthcoming from thinkers who are never (or should never be) far from Kahn’s analysis of Schmitt, namely, Agamben, Žižek, and Badiou in their recent work. Kahn’s book is extraordinarily significant, therefore, because it signals—even incites—a certain need. Are there not too many students of the American revolutionary tradition stuck outside the particular rapprochement that Kahn’s work establishes so effectively with European critiques of liberalism?  Such students remain mired—just read the signs—in awkward jokes about Stalin (cf. Žižek), defensiveness about naming atrocities under Mao (cf. Badiou), or in a minimalist form of political speech burdened by neo-Heideggerian poetics (cf. Agamben). If there is a viable North American future for these critical theorists—and this is something we should struggle for—the ideas at work in their texts need to remain nourished by a singular fidelity to the American experiment. These three thinkers have all reflected more or less explicitly about what is “worth fighting for” in the Western theological inheritance. Kahn’s book also asks more pointedly, and to better effect: why is the American Revolution worth fighting for?

But these migrations of individuals and translations of political visions are all bound up with an equally interesting Auseinandersetzung with the figure of Abraham. Notice the call that Abraham receives within Kahn’s tableau. He is called not so much to leave his home among the nations. Nor is Abraham’s migratory passage through time and space (from inhabitant of the nations to sacrificial founder of a new community) of interest here as it was for the ancient Philo, obsessed as his text “on the migration of Abraham” was with a Platonic psychagogy from the sensuous to the ideal. On the contrary, the point of Abraham’s call in Kahn is much more focused, namely, to exemplify a founding principle, not only of a people but of all peoples. Recall Kahn’s Conclusion: no one (at least none of Us) escapes the Schmittian moment of Abraham’s sacrifice. And if, as the book argues throughout, phenomenological or existential attention to political constitution will effectively pierce the “states’s self-presentation as an efficient means of justly advancing welfare,” what Kahn’s analysis will glimpse through this phenomenological unveiling of the state form is, above all, a founding patriarch with a knife in his hand.

Kahn’s work exhorts that, “We should begin with a kind of phenomenology of the political, which is just what political theology must be today.” And, as mentioned above, in the Conclusion he suggests that, “We will not recover a theory adequate to the decision for and against life unless we turn from political theory to political theology. We must go back to the beginning and, for us, that is Abraham and Isaac.” Obviously, the We’s in question here are protreptic, open-ended, potentially otherwise. Of course, we might add, the We who must return to the figure of Abraham is plural, not one, certainly not already given in any factical sense. (This is not even to mention the multiple Abrahams we could discover back there at “the beginning.”) Kahn is certainly not unaware of any of this. He even pre-emptively responds to this pluralism throughout the book when he sometimes wonders at the multiplicity of founding irruptions of a force he nonetheless glosses under the one name of the “sacred.”

Against some of the other recent posts, however, I’d like to stir the pot by saying that the standard—even ideologically clichéd—issue of eliding difference is not really the pressing problem here. Rather, the problem for Kahn’s book is not that it will become a tyrannically limiting paradigm, eliding too many We’s who will not be interpellated by his repeated, invitational We. Nor is the issue that the Abraham to which We must return, the Abraham this We would call toward a migration into a new philosophical state, is also multiple. Is not the real issue, the real problem, precisely the opposite: whether there is—for a non-representational Us—an event which would enact a fidelity at once to the American Revolution, to European anti-capitalism, and to central figures of Jewish thought?  Is not the real issue, in other words, whether there is, for Us, something here—even a sacrifice—that We might believe in, and believe in as that which is in Us more than ourselves?

Kahn points out that Schmitt’s book had no conclusion and then appends one of his own, which asserts that contemporary political freedom cannot escape an encounter with Abraham. Fine. For the moment let’s accept what is only an invitation for thinking, after all. In reading the tale of Abraham in relation to Schmitt, Kahn even hints at the possibility of rendering God’s “I am that I am” as a kind of pressure immanent to existence rather than as a discretely transcendent substance. Good. In such a case, Abraham’s “Here am I” would be a kind of odd repetition of the biblical God’s “I am,” instead of an indication of a submission to or answer for an external other in any typical sense. Our return to Abraham could thus generate a new founding myth of repetition in which an obscurely excessive becoming emerges in Us as an affirmation that scrambles the usual calculations. This affirmation would more intimately unite what, in the biblical story, might otherwise be easily mistaken for discretely separate figures of God and Abraham, that exemplary cause-and-effect of revolution. Such an interpretive move would be comparable to Stanislas Breton’s efforts to link a radicalized Althusserian interpellation to biblical accounts of calling.

But such a conclusion would only repeat a (democratized) Schmittian aporia, whereby a grounding sovereign exception emerges like a miracle to found a new community. The return to Abraham in this way serves only to repeat the essential thematic issue of the book in a new key. What I want is a conclusion in truth, and not from Schmitt but from Kahn—or, perhaps even better, from that still opaque site of freedom that is an Us yet to come. Is there a ‘belief’, an affirming Yes, which would construct a synthesis or found a communal space in which the faithful of the American Revolution, of European anti-capitalism, and of Judaism alike would recognize themselves, even if—necessarily—transfigured? Or, to return to the Abraham story, is there a viable transformation of the current state of the neo-liberal economic order which would be creative enough as to evoke this primal scene of violence?

In this respect, Kahn, like Schmitt—and perhaps more like the biblical text than he acknowledges—elides a conclusion. After all, Kahn’s conclusion is just a repetition of the book’s basic theoretical assertion, that (at least in this tradition) new political creations occur like the founding gesture of Abraham: before the law. But, detective that I am of religion’s past and future primal scenes, I am greedy to see filled out Kahn’s concluding, and perhaps prophetic, turn back toward the biblical tale. If revolutionary creation, for a protreptical or emerging Us, will bear an Abrahamic inflection, then what shall be that collective which an energetics of creation transformatively unites across readymade identitarian lines? And if this miracle of exception, or this fragile invention of possibility, begins to cut the umbilical links it bears in relation to old states and outmoded identity formations, then who or what might end up on our altar, the site through which creative affirmation will have been voiced?

In this sense, I find a productive—even protreptical—irony in the way Kahn’s book concludes with a repetition of the theoretical state of ideas about the ineluctable necessity of a founding sacrificial event (even if this thematic repetition is provocatively repeated by way of a biblical myth). And—pace the crazy and (therefore) perennially fecund tale of Abraham—in the conclusion we are still repeating theory rather than participating in the specifics of “existential and phenomenological” intensities Kahn earlier evoked as precisely the dagger with which to pierce through theoretical or merely representational discourses on political experience. To repeat Kahn’s premise against his own conclusion (and perhaps even against his own desire not to inhabit a normative discourse), if we are to pierce through the self-descriptions of the state and its current assemblage of identities with an actual experience of the political, we will do so only when we find ourselves naming the items missing from Kahn’s concluding repetition of the Abrahamic tableau, some of which I enumerated above. To name these otherwise elided or absent terms, and to affirm these names with a vibrancy which produces Us in their very affirmation, would of course be the transformation of Kahn’s exemplary political tract into a political experience. And here, fearing and trembling as usual over the specificities of the Abrahamic tale, is where our conclusion remains a merely thematic conclusion rather than the phenomenon of a new beginning. Reverberating throughout Kahn’s book, however, are the rustlings of a subterranean “here I am,” which might just yet expose Us to (and as) an occurrence of freedom from which our states, philosophies, and religions alike are currently constructed to shield us.

This is a wonderful book. I hope it yields more than is safe, and more than we hope for, we strange children of Abraham.

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.”

Kahn’s book is fascinating, insightful, and a delight to read. But it is many things. Although its arguments are set forth in a largely holistic fashion, one can distinguish at least three distinct aims: 1) a more or less faithful and analytic reconstruction of Carl Schmitt’s 1922 work, Political Theology; 2) a meditation on the applicability of Schmitt’s political-theological insights to specific features of contemporary American political-legal practice; and 3) a bold proposal, only loosely grounded in Schmittian textual evidence, that argues for political theology as the indispensable framework for grasping the character of politics in the modern world. The first of these aims helps to explain why the book owes its title and its chapter-by-chapter architectonic to Schmitt’s original work. The second explains why Kahn not infrequently departs from the task of reconstruction by offering illustrations drawn from contemporary American law and politics. The third leads us to Kahn’s most provocative conclusion, that there is something distinctive about modern politics qua politics that can only be understood if we remain alive to the theological sources that animate this dimension of our experience. Unlike some of the other commentators, my training and interests do not lie in the sphere of contemporary politics, and most certainly not American politics. I will therefore refrain from offering any challenge to Kahn’s reconstructive or illustrative purposes and will focus my attention chiefly on the third and final strand of the book.

Kahn develops his brief for politics as a sphere of “ultimate meaning” through a stylized portrait of American political experience. Although he characterizes his descriptive method as an exercise in “phenomenology,” it is not clear what distinguishes this method from a more hazardous recourse to generalities—for instance: “America, of course, remains a land of religious faith, while Western Europe has become a largely secular society.” As a specialist in law, Kahn certainly recognizes that such generalizations obscure as much as they reveal. (Think, for example, of the German public educational system, with its compulsory religious instruction, as compared to the separation principle that in the United States disallows any such public instruction.) Still, in Kahn’s view, America remains exceptional insofar as “[f]aith in one form or another is a deep part of our political culture and of our political psychology.” It follows that we can only make sense of American politics if we make sense of the peculiar hold of religious belief on our collective imagination: “We need to understand the set of beliefs that sustain and support American exceptionalism as a practice of ultimate meaning for generations of Americans.” But the quality of religious faith that Kahn claims to find in American public life bears a distinctive character: “In our imaginations, political life remains a matter of life and death—that is exactly the meaning found in 9/11.”

Whether observations cast across such vast terrain truly permit us to understand the peculiar character of American politics in our own age is a worry I will not address here. Nor will I contest Kahn’s use of the first-person plural in phrases such as “our collective imagination,” notwithstanding the considerable risks that attend this sort of ethnographic holism, especially when speaking about a polity as diverse as this one. These are generalizations that permit Kahn to move from the analytic-reconstructive purposes of his book to its evidentiary purposes, as I noted above. What concerns me is that Kahn occasionally seems tempted by the far more ambitious possibility that his ethnographic portrait of the social imaginary is applicable not only to the contemporary United States but to all of modern experience as such.

It is this far more ambitious exercise in what one might call a generalized political phenomenology that, in my view, may come at too high a price. To be sure, at times Kahn seems willing to confine his diagnostic-interpretive observations to the contemporary United States, a political order that remains captive, he claims, to a species of mythico-religious imagery. In such moments, Kahn seems to be describing only the beliefs of what he calls “ordinary Americans,” but he often permits himself the far greater latitude of pronouncing upon the nature of modern politics as such. Here he follows the principle (also familiar from psychoanalysis) that the pathological is our best guide to the norm: “Politics,” Kahn writes “is not striving to be a perfect system of reason. Not reason but decision describes that most characteristic of all political acts: killing and being killed by the state.” To such a dictum one might reply that the limit of the political does not furnish the most instructive insight into the essence of the political. But in what register are we to access such a claim? Its truth is apparently unbounded by time or place: it extends (or so Kahn proposes) all the way back to Abraham and Isaac, insofar as it is already in the origins of biblical religion, in the paradigmatic moment of anticipated sacrifice, that the truth of politics is ostensibly revealed: “As long as we can imagine such a moment of sacrifice,” Kahn concludes, “we remain within the political imaginary.”

In such moments I detect in Kahn’s book something more than a merely methodological appeal to political theology. It may be that political theology can serve as a helpful diagnostic instrument for comprehending the pathologies of the contemporary American political imagination, but I also detect in his arguments a singular kind of political existentialism, that is, a philosophical doctrine regarding the basic character of political experience.

It is this facet of his book that troubles me most of all. Kahn professes to abjure any speculative interest in pure theorizing insofar as an “authentic political theory” must be one that “stops” before the actual experience of politics. Against the merely discursive constructs of liberal theory as exemplified by both Dworkin and Habermas (toward neither of whom is Kahn entirely fair), political theology, in Kahn’s characterization, points to “an experience beyond discourse.” It rests on “faith, not argument, and on sacrifice, not contract.” But what goes unacknowledged in this contrast is that the characterization of politics as a non-rational event is already a characterization of politics according to a specific and necessarily discursive traditional schema: It is not a successful evasion of mere theory for the sake of phenomenological accuracy. Nor is it a bold rejection of intellectualist naiveté that obeys the existentialist credo, “existence precedes essence,” which Kahn often evokes as a methodological justification. The difficulty with this apparent reversal is that the attempt to escape mere theory for the sake of description ends by reproducing another highly conditional and contingent understanding of political practice. The sophisticated rejection of liberalism as a merely discursive evasion of “decision” is ultimately a decision for a different image of human experience. But this image of politics is no less conditioned by theory and interpretation than the image it is supposed to displace. Kahn’s quasi-existentialist appeal to “existence” (as against essence) is presumably meant to signal that he is not interested in anything more essential than our actual political practices. But his arguments recapitulate a familiar error of existentialism by transforming existence itself into the privileged field for revealing what is “most characteristic” in human experience.

To grasp this point we need only to consider Kahn’s highly controversial claim that the “most characteristic of all political acts” is to be found in decision rather than reason, and, more specifically, the decision to sacrifice. This is ostensibly a truth of politics (or, at least, a truth about politics in the contemporary United States: this is one of several moments in the book where Kahn strays well beyond a description of specific practice.) In any event, it is a truth that enjoys a tremendously ancient lineage, for the political-theological underpinnings of our political life have not yet emancipated themselves from the sacrificial imagery of biblical religion.

To cast better light on Kahn’s political existentialism, let me pause to consider in greater depth the Akedah, the tale of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, which Kahn mentions only in passing. It deserves mention that (pace Kahn) the Hebraic conception of this event does not typically fasten upon the moment of sacrifice itself. On the contrary, the sacrifice never comes.  One might therefore read the episode not as a call to sacrifice but as a lesson in the contractualist beginnings of collective life: The polity, conceived here as a patriarchal chain of generations who will eventually take on the burdens of the law (and, significantly, the Decalogue’s renunciation of murder) appears to find its point of origin not with sacrifice but with its annulment. The human community persists only because we are inducted into a logic of conceptual abstraction by which one particular can stand for another: the ram for the son. Although I am wary of attempts to derive political doctrines through biblical exegesis, if one felt compelled to read the biblical narrative as a lesson in political founding, its lesson might be not the indispensability of sacrifice but rather the necessity of its annulment through our induction into a symbolic order. The non-murderous collective would find its origin not in a decision to sacrifice but precisely in the readiness to forgo sacrifice. Nor should we forget that politics in ancient Israel begins not with a mystical event of divine theophany (God’s appearance to Moses) but only when this event is displaced for the sake of a legal-juridical discourse (the law). Theology itself would enter into politics only thanks to the conceptual-symbolic renunciation of God’s immediacy—a renunciation that, ironically, also inaugurates the possibility of secular law.

The theological reading I have offered above is hardly uncontroversial. Nor am I concerned here with its defense. But I presume it would be a condition for any political-theological interpretation of contemporary politics that it specify which theology it considers pertinent to its claims. Kahn does not pause to consider the many sources of the American social imaginary, its disunity and its diversity. Instead he seems to take it on faith that the theology in political theology consists in a set of ready-made mythico-religious themes—“sacrifice,” “the sovereign,” and so forth—terms whose very abstraction would appear to contravene Kahn’s statements that he prefers practice to theory and the phenomenology of felt experience to liberal-intellectualist pieties. Indeed, one explanation for the great appeal of Schmittian political theology may be that it dissolves the bewildering specificity of political experience into the gauze-like profundities of mytho-poetic discourse. Schmitt’s theological lexicon, unfortunately, is rather impoverished: If political theology were to serve as a useful device for understanding contemporary politics, one would have to provide a far more detailed anatomy of contemporary political experience, and one would have to move some distance away from the abstractions of Schmitt’s political existentialism to specify exactly which strands of our tremendously variegated theological tradition are truly of relevance today.

What troubles me in Kahn’s argument (as in Schmitt’s) is the assumption that we already know what theology is and how it speaks in today’s world. But if theology is not just a univocal preserve of themes, such as “decision” and “sacrifice,” then the movement from theology to politics already demands (or has already achieved) a certain doctrinal specification: only certain theological gestures enjoy legitimacy. It is precisely this unacknowledged moment of theological interpretation that is also at work in Schmitt’s “political theology.” When Schmitt asserts that the moment of political “decision” is analogous to the moment of divine intervention, he has already imported into theology the specific interpretation he wishes to discover. As critics before me have observed, the God that underwrites Schmitt’s illiberal species of political theology is a post-nominalist God who exercises his powers unconstrained by nature or reason. Whether this is the God of biblical monotheism is another question entirely. But it is a question that could be decided only on the basis of further interpretation, and not by appealing to some ostensibly theory-free site of religious existence. Lest I be misunderstood, I should explain that this is not an objection to Schmitt based on an objection to his politics (though it always bears repeating that his politics were abhorrent). The grave error of political theology in the Schmittian style is not the ideology it helped to support. Its deeper error is conceptual: it imports into theology precisely the politics it wants to find.

Kahn makes a strong case for political theology, perhaps especially when he entertains the startling notion, somewhat at odds with the rest of the book, that the epoch of political theology may have come to an end. I find a great deal of what he has argued both thoughtful and thought-provoking, but I fear that his inquiry has committed the same sleight-of-hand as Schmitt’s: In the name of a norm-free phenomenological “description,” it has insinuated into theology what is already an interpretation of theology, and, in analogous fashion, it has insinuated into political “existence” what is already a specific interpretation of the political. On my reading, this means that Kahn has been misled into believing that there is a non-theoretical way of pursuing a description of politics, as if liberalism could be defeated by demonstrating that it has evaded some realm of ostensibly self-evident political facts. But the notion that we can discover what political existence actually is—or, in Kahn’s language, the notion that we might disclose politics as the site of human “authenticity”—is a notion that indulges in the anti-intellectualist ideology of political existentialism. Securing its credentials from a gesture of anti-theoretical renunciation, it endorses a different but no less determinate political theory.

This recourse to political existentialism is evident most of all in Kahn’s repeated allusion to moments of crisis and decision as signposts to the nature of contemporary political experience. Though the idea has obvious origins in Protestant theology (especially that of Kierkegaard), it has been a trademark of existential argument ever since Karl Jaspers, who argued that a certain kind of Grenzsituation, or “limit-situation,” had the power of shattering the comfortable shells of everyday life so as to bring us face to face with the very core of our existence. The argument was further developed by Heidegger and acquired a starkly political meaning in the political-theological musings of Carl Schmitt. What troubles me most of all, then, in Kahn’s argument (as in much of the contemporary literature indebted to political theology) is the normative belief that such a crisis-situation really does bear a revelatory significance, that it illumines a deeper, if less comfortable truth, (or, in Kahn’s own words, a certain “authenticity”) in our experience.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, a great many editorialists casually indulged in this sort of argument: 9/11 assumed an iconic status as the Grenzsituation of our time. Kahn, too, mentions the events of 9/11 in just this fashion. He concludes his book with the surprising, and very un-Schmittian, observation that we must balance our longing for authenticity with the pursuit of justice. But the book’s denouement hardly suffices to undo the political-existentialist premises of the argument as a whole. Kahn seems to believe that the violence of those attacks tore away the veil from the comfortable illusions of liberal theory. But his gestures in this direction leave me uneasy: Is the true structure of the political best revealed only in its moments of greatest threat? Is it really the case that one can properly understand the constitutive meaning of political experience when its principles are most in jeopardy?

The old axiom of mid-century existentialism—that only human phenomena in extremis reveal our authentic condition—still survives today in much of the theoretical literature inspired by Schmitt. But even while I appreciate the need to develop theoretical insights that unsettle the pieties of American liberalism, I doubt that political existentialism is the right way to proceed. Perhaps this is because what Adorno called the “jargon of authenticity” leaves me profoundly unmoved. Or perhaps it is because I simply don’t participate in the sacrificial religion that Kahn sees at the core of American politics today. There are different sorts of political theologies. But not all of them draw their spiritual nourishment from Schmittian intimations of mortality.

I would therefore be grateful to Paul Kahn if he might explain what I take to be the two underlying premises of his argument: 1) that we still look to politics as a source of “ultimate meaning.” This already strikes me as unconvincing, or, at the very least, requires further explanation. In a lifeworld of competing value-commitments it remains uncertain how any one value-sphere might be said to enjoy preeminence. But even if one were to accept such an idea, there is still 2) the premise of political existentialism, namely,  that the highest significance of our lives is to be found in moments of mortal danger. What warrants the specific assumption that we discover such a higher sort of meaning only in the moment when sacrifice is required? After all, the establishment of politics has as its regulative ideal the establishment of an order in which danger has been brought to an end. Those who are still hoping to discover some sense of ultimacy in our collective lives would do well to consider the possibility that we will find it—and we will find the true beginning of politics—only when the angel appears and sacrifice is forbidden.

Kahn’s surprising conclusion is that political theology is fundamentally an examination of freedom. The free act of will, undetermined by law, reason or interest, appears in the decision for revolution; in the maintenance of the state through civic sacrifice in moments of existential crisis; in the judge’s decision in applying norm to fact; and in the philosopher’s free inquiry into forms of meaning. A theory, a life, or a state committed to law without exception denies the reality that law alone can never grasp the foundational act or the existential situation.

Kahn evokes an essential unity between citizen, popular sovereign, and state in the moment of sacrifice that exemplifies the free act. Working within, alongside, and at times against Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology, Kahn argues that the freedom of the decision is inexplicable by strictly “secular” categories, whether empiricist or rationalist.  That is why it is free, and why we need theology to understand it.

Thus Kahn’s political theology does not provide yet another vantage point from which to debunk the conceptions of human freedom declared by the Enlightenment, by secularism, or by liberalism by pointing to a deeper form of unfreedom at their root. It is liberalism (or secularism or Enlightenment) in itself and on its own terms—for instance, in its studied avoidance of the decision—that fails to grasp the free act. He debunks, or, rather, supplements such conceptions by pointing to a deeper form of freedom. Kahn’s, then, is not a conception that focuses on the fundamental otherness of the sovereign and the state in modern politics. Rather, Kahn largely inverts such a topography of the political: we are (potentially, ideally, and sometimes actually) the sovereign, and the sovereign, by definition, is free.

The freedom depicted by Kahn in Political Theology is certainly not a negative freedom. It is, among other things, the collective freedom of a community to found a state and to sustain it. It is, given Kahn’s emphasis on the notion of popular sovereignty, a freedom enacted through individuals’ participation in the life of the sovereign—paradigmatically through the giving of one’s own life. It is a freedom to sacrifice, to suffer an immortalizing, sacred death. It is thus the freedom to transcend the self: “Where we find that meaning [i.e., an ultimate meaning], we will find freedom.”

*  *  *

Yet precisely that which is striking and appealing in Kahn’s account—his interweaving of sovereignty, freedom and political theology—and which should serve to broaden the ambit of political theological inquiry, rather seems to confine it. For Kahn asserts the mutual exclusivity of an order committed to law and one guided by political theology: “If politics has become a domain wholly ordered by law, then there is no need for a political theology.” There is no political theology, for instance, “appropriate for the institutions of the European Union: it is politics as a fully secularized practice of reason.” Nor is it to be found in many parts of the international legal order, which are often systems set against the decision, against sovereignty, and thus, per Kahn, against freedom.

While the European Union may claim ideologically to be a sovereignty-free project, Kahn’s own analysis of the decision operative in the routine legal case suggests that there is freedom in the establishment and maintenance of a legal order. So why does Kahn draw the boundaries of the political theological inquiry in this manner? A footnote provides a good metaphor for some of the exclusions he makes: “if my arguments sound more Protestant than Catholic, that too reflects the American political imaginary.”

Even if Kahn is right to situate the “domain wholly ordered by law” beyond freedom, we may still wonder why it follows that there is no “need for a political theology.” Is freedom the only inexplicable, hence theological, feature of our political landscape?

Political theology, conceived rather as applying in the last instance to more than freedom alone—for instance, as the examination also of a society’s supposedly sacred or highest values—might provide an illuminating perspective on the oft-asserted sanctity of humanity, of property, of reason, of nature, or of the rule of law itself. To approach such commitments and projects as forms of political theology is to underscore that they, too, rest on premises that cannot be derivative, which is to say, on a leap of faith of sorts. Perhaps, in maintaining that there is no political theology in the workings of the EU, Kahn concedes too much to the liberal self-conception that he otherwise adeptly deflates.

To follow Kahn and Schmitt, perhaps we should not call these other sacred or highest values political theological if they do not self-consciously evoke Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction or entail the possibility of human sacrifice (although they may do so more often than we would like to think). But rather than accept their “secular” self-declarations as Kahn seems to, we might have recourse to other labels (such as “legal theology,” to cite John Comaroff). On the other hand, I am skeptical of using the Schmittian friend/enemy distinction as the criterion for the political as it seems, through inversion and thus replication, to privilege the core liberal values—of life and self-ownership—over other highest values. Conjoining “political” and “theological” presents an opportunity to focus on the creation and maintenance of a cultural order more broadly—something that can take place in settings aside from the confrontation with the enemy, such in as the creation of a trade zone. Another way, then, of understanding the exclusions that Kahn makes—of the EU, and its lack of an enemy, for example—is that he emphasizes the “political” side of the conjunction more than the “theological.”

If one concern, then, is that Kahn gives up too much in terms of the self-declared secularity of substantive areas and sites of legal activity, a second fear is that by treating freedom and popular sovereignty as a kind of prerequisite for engaging the theological, Kahn excludes from its scope the experience of being unfree. That is, Kahn’s political theology consists of the internally generated, not the externally imposed or imported, political order. But to return to the examples of the sacred nature of property, trade, or humanity—such valorizations might very well be, and in fact often are, imposed by external powers. Indeed, in the postwar era, juridical sovereignty itself is the form through which many states have been governed, as much as it is the form through which they have engaged in self-government and freedom. A conception of the sovereign, accordingly, as an outsider and alien—like Marshall Sahlins’s “stranger king,” who comes from abroad and is joined to the local people through marriage and sacrifice—is still relevant. In many postcolonial contexts, though, it may be hard to decide who is the best candidate for such a designation: the estranged national elite; the global banking class; the U.S., on which Kahn focuses; or, most recently, China.

Even in the U.S., popular sovereignty is not the only conception of sovereignty. I heartily agree with Kahn that popular sovereignty merits a political theological analysis, in the U.S. and elsewhere. But in legal doctrine and state practice, governmental sovereignty often derives directly from the Crown and international law, not from popular sovereignty. (See, for example, Justice Sutherland’s remarkable opinion describing the sovereign powers transmitted from the Crown to the Union, and not derived from the Constitution. United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., 299 U.S. 304 [1936]). The exclusion of these genealogies of sovereignty is surprising in a study of American political theology, because it is from within this lineage that the United States government proclaimed itself to be sovereign. This dimension of American sovereignty is no less free, and no less theological, than Kahn contends, though it is not grounded in popular sovereignty.

And, as Kahn notes, even within the tradition of popular sovereignty it is possible, indeed common, for the manifestations of popular sovereignty of one moment to be alien to those living at a later moment. Put another way, the freedom he describes entails the power to create order for others. It may even include the freedom to present one’s own commitments to property, trade and humanity as non-political, non-theological, and universal. The experience of the recipients of such intergenerational or imperial beneficence need not be ruled out of the bounds of political theological inquiry because they do not act freely.

*  *  *

In sum, I would ask whether political theology ought not to be construed in a frame wider than Kahn allows, as a study of the continued forms and presence of the god-like within the nominally secular—whether or not they derive from free self-governance. Nonetheless, Kahn’s interweaving of popular sovereignty, freedom, and political theology is a powerful corrective to a sense of political theology as an inquiry only into unfreedom, into the condition of living in a world made by others. Documenting such unfreedom seems an obvious sense of what political theology is about, and Kahn compels us to consider additional possibilities.

Within the frame Kahn has chosen, it can be difficult to discern the status of the form of freedom that he describes. Is it actual and present in everyday life, a reading encouraged by his depiction of his project as phenomenological and almost ethnographic? In that case, he confronts factual claims to the contrary. Or is it latent, a necessary background condition underlying the creation and maintenance of the state? In fact, one can discern both senses of freedom in Kahn’s work. To my mind, Kahn’s freedom has a status similar to Habermas’s ideal speech situation. Such an ideal sacrifice situation shares something methodologically with Habermas’s construct as regulatory ideal while inverting much of its content. Kahn’s is an ideal of the potential unity between citizen, sovereign, and state in the moment of sacrifice; a unity, that is, of the body of the citizen, the ethereal, non-institutionalized popular sovereign, and the bricks and mortar of the state. Seen from this perspective, those who would critique Kahn for failing to see that we are not free at the moment, or that the state is actually a monster, take up a methodological and analytical position like that of critics who have attacked the unreality of Habermas’s ideal. They may be correct in any given instance, but perhaps they miss the main points at issue, one of which is to determine where and when such an ideal as ideal might be thought to exist.

In the American context, Kahn has identified an ideal—the sacrificial ideal of freedom—that exists both as an ideal and at times in practice. And while the U.S. is certainly his main subject, he describes an ideal of freedom that has purchase well beyond American borders. Perhaps this freedom is what we’ve seen evoked by some of the protesters in the Middle East and North Africa in recent months. And Kahn is right to draw our attention to the claim that there is something miraculous in the plausible appearance of “the people.” Conjuring the people by giving up one’s self seems to represent just the kind of freedom and popular sovereignty that Kahn has in mind. The challenge for those who accept Kahn’s ideal is how to bring the individual and the conjured popular sovereign into a sufficient degree of unity with the apparatus of government, for such is the condition of more lasting freedom. These are the directions in which Kahn pushes us, and we need not think that he is correct on a factual or phenomenological level all of the time in order to examine this ideal, to ask when and how it emerges, and to see it as something astounding and “theological.”

Kahn’s ideal might also serve a regulatory function, furnishing a critical perspective from which to view efforts by policy makers to unbundle sacrifice, the sacred and the state. For example, might we not interpret the rise of the private military contractor in the U.S. as an attempt to “outsource” sacrifice, to avoid or undermine the ideal of sacrifice that makes possible the unity of citizen, sovereign, and state? We might interpret in a similar fashion the reliance on immigrant soldiers. These policies are illustrations of the gap between Kahn’s ideal of popular sovereignty, on the one hand, and contemporary global and imperial practices, on the other. And yet, Kahn’s ideal of sovereignty as civic sacrifice is not completely evaded: contractors are now seeking out the same honors as soldiers, and contractors from Fiji killed in Iraq, for instance, have been honored by the State department for their sacrifices. Immigrants in the military become—even posthumously—eligible for citizenship.

Kahn’s perspective also helps underscore the oddity of the sacralization achieved through the terrorist killing of American citizens, who are thereby “conscripted” in the war on terror, writes Kahn. This is a sacralization and sacrifice brought on from the outside, one where the terrorist is—awkwardly and impossibly—in the position of sacrifier. Kahn stresses the essential continuity of different modes of sacrifice: “There is a direct line from the revolutionary consciousness of 1776 to the mass weapons of today.” But there is a jagged line too. Reading Kahn’s concept of freedom as an ideal made actual—and hence experienced, or phenomenologically manifested—on occasion, it can serve as one baseline from which to examine how different contexts and technologies recalibrate the distribution of sacrifice.

*  *  *

In The Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt evinces fascination with the rise of U.S. power, which potentially entails, he says, a new kind of nomos, a lived legal order, one not based on the divide between land and sea, Europe and its colonies, but that would encompass land and sea and operate through economic domination. Juxtaposing this post-World War II book to Schmitt’s interwar Political Theology provokes a number of questions—which I pose here but do not answer—that are pertinent to Kahn’s American political theology. Namely, “where” is America? In other words, who falls within—and who remains outside—its political theology, and in what way? If not defined by a territorial boundary, how is it delimited? What is the relation between the individual and collective experience of political theology that Kahn evokes and sovereignty as it is practiced?

The juxtaposition of Schmitt’s two books also raises the question of whether we might relegate his assertions about the political theology of some states to an earlier moment—before the end of World War II, as Kahn sometimes suggests, or at the time of the collapse of the European nomos, which for Schmitt was around World War I? Is it that after the Second World War the Western European states are no longer “theological,” having been secularized by the terror of war and the fact of their encompassment by America and the Soviets? Or is their apparent political diminishment not necessarily an index of a decline in their theological commitments but simply a shift towards human dignity, the rule of law, or other values?

As the colonies become formally sovereign in the decades after World War II, does each become “theological” inversely to a possible “secularization” of its former European colonial state—a kind of global zero sum game of the theological? How are the European states and their former colonies embedded within an American (and/or Soviet) nomos and political theology? If there is a new nomos—let us say one of free trade, human rights, anti-Communism, state sovereignty, etc.—is it “theological” for the U.S.? And for these others? An examination of American political theology should ask how it intersects with these transformations, since it certainly participates in them.

Kahn makes a critically important contribution in drawing attention to the “we” invoked through popular sovereignty, a move in contrast to the formulation of the sovereign as the “other.” We find both in the American tradition: self-government and a global role. Kahn helps us see the interior idealizations of that tradition, and he provokes the question of whether American political theology can interpret its own global significance. Can the popular sovereign recognize itself from the outside, or must it remain locked in an internal perspective and thus structurally unaware?

Thus, allow me, in closing, to add one additional stop to Kahn’s tour of the sites of American political theology. While conducting fieldwork in an immigration detention center in California in 2000, I encountered in the basement of the U.S. federal building a number of detention tanks holding people awaiting imminent deportation from the U.S. as well as persons just arrived. Officials had installed one-way mirrors, but they had inadvertently installed the mirrors the wrong way, such that they saw their own reflection while the detainees had a clear view of the officials. Yet the officials did not correct the mistake. Not only was it useful for occasional grooming, this inverted panopticon, to my mind, captured multiple truths about the overall situation: the desire of officials—and by extension, “America”—to be free of the awareness of those under lock and key; the desire, nonetheless, to be seen, but not to see; and the great knowledge that outsiders have of the U.S. Is this arrangement part of American political theology, or is political theology, rather, the perspective from but one (the reflective) side of the glass?  For my part, I believe the study of American political theology should endeavor to see from both sides of the glass.

To think that organized religions make a complete claim to the sacred—that is, claims title to all that is sacred—is to confuse legal categories with political phenomenology. It is an accident of history that the struggle of the state to free itself of the church was framed not as a conflict of faiths but as a conflict over the place of faith in the organization of political power. In part, this was a consequence of organized religion’s tendency to side with conservative political forces. In part, it was because these political revolutions began two hundred years after the Reformation, which did indeed use the language of the sacred against the established Church. When modern revolutionaries took up the task of translating the felt meaning of political revolution into a constitutional order of law, they thought of themselves as men of the Enlightenment using the language of reason to push religion out of the public sphere. This hardly means that they neither experienced nor relied upon the sacred. In Arendt’s classic analysis, they began by demanding legal rights but ended with an experience of the absolute character of public action. Rights as a means to private ends became a lesser theme to the experience of a kind of transcendent meaning in and through political engagement. In a crisis, it remains true today that the secular state does not hesitate to speak of sacrifice, patriotism, nationalism, and homeland in the language of the sacred. The state’s territory becomes consecrated ground, its history a sacred duty to maintain, its flag something to die for. None of this has much to do with the secular; these are matters of faith, not reason.

The great separation of church and state was intended to place religion squarely within the private domain, outside of the public order of the state. Some supported this position on the grounds that it was good for faith, others on the grounds that it was good for the state, and some on both grounds. Some of our most troubling issues today arise from the crossing of this line of separation, for example, debates over the legal status of abortion or of gay marriage. These debates show us the porousness of the line, for the values we bring to public debate will inevitably reflect our basic beliefs about what it is we owe each other. Those beliefs come from all of our experience, including the ethical practices of our religious faiths. Such tensions are something we all understand. Coming from a religious tradition of monotheism, however, it is much harder to understand a multiplicity of forms of the sacred. Indeed, to speak the language of the sacred about the state suggests not just a violation of the public/private divide, but to many it also suggests a practice of idolatry. Both the religious person and the secularist may agree that they want no gods in the public space: the former because there is only one god, the latter because there are no gods.

Political theology recognizes a multiplicity of forms of the sacred. If sovereignty is grounded in sacrifice, then public life is as much about the realization of a transcendent truth of the self as it is about the maintenance of a just legal order. Political theology, unsurprisingly, has no place in the liberal conception of the state, which begins with Lilla’s great separation not as a historical fact but as a philosophical premise. This difference at the level of theory, however, does not necessarily produce any tension between political theology and the political practices of liberalism. If the political order maintains both an idea of the sacred and an idea of justice, of sovereignty and law, then the point of political theology is not to undermine a particular concept of justice but to expand the horizon within which we understand the operation of the political imagination. Liberal politics may strive to achieve a defensible idea of justice, even as liberal theory fails as an explanation of the source and character of political experience.

The interesting way in which Schmitt was against liberalism had nothing to do with his personal political beliefs and practices, which were indeed antiliberal. Rather, his theory of the political denies the fundamental premises of liberal political theory. This is an argument over the nature of political experience, not over what we should or should not do within the polity. Although Schmitt may not have thought so, one can be liberal in one’s personal political values and practices and still think that we need a theological account of political experience. This is no more difficult than practicing a politics of liberalism while recognizing the importance of revolution to the normative—and historical—foundation of the state. There is nothing liberal about revolution. The relationships at stake here are the political form of that which appears to the individual as the relationship of love to justice. The objects of our love do not earn our affection because they are just, but that does not make us indifferent to justice. We love our children and, therefore, we want them to be just. But we do not abandon our love if they act unjustly.

If we view politics through the lens of contemporary, liberal theory, we will misapprehend the nature of political experience and the meanings that citizens realize in and through their political identities. Elements of political experience grounded in faith and sacrifice will be ignored. We will always be surprised by the violence of which the state—even the liberal state—is capable. Liberalism as a theory of the political fails when political practice turns to killing and being killed, whether that violence is turned inward in the form of revolution or outward in the form of war. We will dismiss the high political rhetoric of sacrifice as dangerous, because it is unreasonable. But only according to liberal theory must the state be a “reasonable” enterprise. Political theology reminds us that apart from reason there remains faith—dangerous as that might be.

Political theology, as I pursue it here, is a project of descriptive political analysis. We are well past the era in which theology could draw upon reason to support the sacred. Indeed, that separation of reason from revelation may be a more important “great separation” than that of which Lilla writes. We will not be convinced by any logical arguments for the existence of God, whether the god of politics or that of religion. Theological inquiry today can only be a practice of phenomenology: to identify and describe the presence of the sacred, wherever it appears.

Political theology gains its critical edge when we juxtapose the products of that phenomenological inquiry to the constructions of liberal political theory. At stake is our understanding of the social imaginary by which we frame our world. There is nothing wrong with setting oneself against the values that are revealed in this account. We are not bound to our political experience as we are bound to the experience of the senses. Understanding the power of the nation does not make me a willing recruit. But unless one begins with an understanding of the character of the social imaginary, one’s oppositional political practices are likely simply to miss their targets. Just as no one will be convinced by argument to believe in God, no faith was ever defeated by argument alone. The ground of faith is in the experience of the sacred, and this works quite independently of reason.

Political theology today is best thought of as an effort to describe the social imaginary of the political. It proceeds at the intersection of constitutional law, cultural anthropology, theology, and philosophy. The inquiry is not to take us back to premodern forms of religious influence on political order, but to the discovery of the persistence of forms of the sacred in a world that no longer relies upon God. Political theology argues that secularization, as the displacement of the sacred from the world of experience, never won, even though the church may have lost. The politics of the modern nation-state indeed rejected the church but simultaneously offered a new site of sacred experience.

By describing his work as theological, Schmitt suggests that the stakes involved are existential and phenomenological. Meaning, not efficiency—experience, not justice—is the issue. While he would no doubt vigorously object to the comparison, he is in some respects not so distant from that other existential explorer of the soul, Sigmund Freud. Both saw a culture desperately looking for possible sources of meaning in the face of a modern crisis of faith. Both doubted the capacity of reason to exhaust the sources of meaning that structure a human life. Schmitt, the constitutional lawyer, differed not so much in his concerns, as in the direction of his inquiry. For him, it was not the individual soul but the soul of the polity—of man in his political, rather than his psychological, aspect—that was the object of inquiry.

Schmitt’s work invites us to develop a political theology for our time. We must pierce the state’s self-presentation as an efficient means of justly advancing individual welfare and look to the experience of the political. Metaphorically, when we put the modern state on the couch, we find a social organism that is simultaneously deeply in fear of its own death (the existential crisis) and in deep denial of the fact that it is willing to do anything at all to put off that death (liberal theory). Looking into the soul of the modern welfare state, we can still see the mysterium tremendum of the sacred, with its tremendous power for both destruction and construction.

This work must be responsive to the particular conditions of an American superpower that simultaneously asks its young people to take up the political burden of sacrifice in the war on terror and seeks to affirm its belief in the rule of law. Many of our deepest conflicts—practically and conceptually—emerge out of this double commitment to a practice of political sacrifice and a practice of law. A sense that something has gone awry was expressed in the repeated critique that the Bush Administration did not ask the nation as a whole to take up the burden of sacrifice. We simultaneously condemned the war in Iraq as mistaken but felt that we should all be sacrificing more for the larger war on terrorism. Dissatisfied as we may be with that war, the problem is not that the nation will no longer respond to a call for sacrifice.

While liberal theory has given us tools to understand the rule of law, it has pushed out of sight the meaning of political sacrifice. To understand the latter, we must turn to something like Schmitt’s ideas of exception and decision. If we imagine the decision as the result of a logical deduction, we will never leave law and liberal theory. The decision that is the act of giving up the self is never the result of logic. It is an existential choice to be—or literally not to be. We can study liberal political theory a very long time and never find this existential moment of self-sacrifice. We can turn from theory to law and still not see the plainest facts of our political life. If politics remains even in part a practice of sacrifice, then we must follow Schmitt into the domain of the theological.

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NS: Your essay at Killing the Buddha for the 30th anniversary of Archbishop Oscar Romero’s assassination was a welcome relief from the recent onslaught of news about less inspiring behavior among Catholic clergy. What provoked you to write it?

RA: This year’s anniversary of Romero’s assassination by a right-wing death squad on March 24, 1980, is an especially significant event in El Salvador. Recently, a native-born archbishop replaced his conservative, foreign-born predecessor; an FMLN candidate was elected to the presidency, breaking a 20-year grip by the rightist ARENA party; and the government announced plans to investigate Romero’s assassination and to try those involved. At the same time, El Salvador has one of the highest murder rates in Latin America and is reeling under recent neoliberal economic reforms, which have only widened the chasm between the impoverished majority and a wealthy, globalized elite. Thirty years after his death, Romero is, sadly, not irrelevant.

El Salvador’s history is closely linked with that of the United States in ways that tend to be inconsistent with the myths we tell about ourselves in this country. The result is a willful forgetfulness that has implications for U.S. policy toward Latin America and beyond. But if you visit the Parque Cuscatlán in San Salvador, you will find a “Monument to Memory and Truth,” engraved with the names of tens of thousands of Salvadorans who died in the 12-year civil war. It’s important to keep that historical memory alive, however uncomfortable it might be to acknowledge.

NS: Rather than the liberation theology of Romero’s time and place, religious communities worldwide have recently turned to another way of speaking for the downtrodden: promoting the adoption of an international framework for human rights. How do you understand the consequences of this trend?

RA: The phrase “human rights” refers both to a moral ideal and to a regime of positive law. Both ideas are important, but they exist in some tension. On the one hand, the idea of universal human rights is meant to limit the will of the majority, but of course as soon as the idea is translated from a moral aspiration into a legal framework, it is necessarily subjected to the political process—e.g., ratification by states—which in democracies is majoritarian. The legal regime is necessary to give the idea bite, but it also domesticates the more radical intuitions that bubble up in those situations in which claims about human dignity arise. Religious communities have rightly been concerned with questions having to do with human dignity; but there is a danger, it seems to me, in sacralizing human rights as law. Because human rights law is heavily dependent on states for enforcement, governments manipulate the discourse of human rights for their own purposes, as we saw in the case of the Bush administration’s justifications for invading and occupying Iraq. Human rights law is also inadequate at present for regulating non-state actors like multi-national corporations. In addition, it remains decidedly Western in its assumptions, and its production is largely driven by elites. Speaking for the downtrodden is obviously better than speaking for the privileged, but not as good as allowing the downtrodden to speak for themselves.

NS:  And that is what liberation theology, for instance, sought to do. Can the language of human rights really allow the downtrodden to speak?

RA:  I think so. In Un Día en la Vida (One Day of Life), a novel by the Salvadoran writer Manlio Argueta, which appeared the same year Romero was killed, and in which the Archbishop makes a cameo appearance, the narrator, a campesina, says, “[O]nce we learned about the existence of rights we also learned not to bow our heads when the bosses scold us. We learned to look them in the face.” At its best, the discourse of human rights empowers otherwise powerless people to see themselves, not as helpless victims who must depend on the generosity and goodwill of the powerful, but as dignified persons.

NS: What do you make of inter-religious declarations of human rights, like the 2008 Faith in Human Rights Statement and the 1998 Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the World’s Religions? Or even Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion? What prospects do they have?

RA: Although declarations of this kind purport to provide human rights with religious support, their latent function is often to construct the category of “religion” in such a way as to discourage critical analysis. I don’t for a minute mean to imply that this is what their drafters and signatories intend. Rather, it is the effect of three important rhetorical distinctions that such declarations often make—between religion and secularity, between the “world religions” and various lesser traditions, and between “genuine” religion and what is done “in religion’s name” for ostensibly non-religious purposes. The net effect of these distinctions is to place the potential for violence outside the boundaries of what is allowed to count as “true religion,” which is de-politicized and essentialized.

NS: It seems like we’re reliving lessons learned over the last 50 years in the study of religion, as scholars have tended to move away from thinking of the “sacred” as irreducible and sui generis, as Mircea Eliade and his followers held. How can scholars play a constructive role in critiquing this emerging discourse?

RA: That’s right. The most important point is that “religion” is a normative, not a purely descriptive, term. Nothing comes labeled as a “religion.” The boundaries are drawn in different places for different reasons. Scholars, clergy, government bureaucrats, and other cultural elites have played a role in shaping the discourse of “religion,” but there are many other stakeholders in the language. Claims by elites—or anyone else, for that matter—to “represent” religions should not be accepted uncritically. The proper role of a religion scholar, as I conceive it, is not the objectifying posture of a disinterested “expert,” but the engaged stance of a reflective interlocutor, a participant in the discourse one is seeking to understand.

NS: Can we really expect human rights to be universalized when different cultures can interpret them so variously? For example, how can the Western value of free expression be reconciled with the call among Muslim countries to ban the “defamation” of religion?

RA: Not very easily, I suspect, although it’s important to note that the disagreement is intra-cultural, and not simply inter-cultural. For a number of years now, as you say, the U.N. Human Rights Council has annually adopted non-binding declarations against the “defamation of religions.” Likewise, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the World’s Religions claims that “[e]veryone has the right not to have one’s religion denigrated in the media or academia.” Part of what is striking about these efforts is that they employ abstract, universalizing language to express what are, in fact, highly contextual concerns. For example, the U.N. declarations against defamation are now couched in terms of “religion,” whereas they originally referred only to Islam. Insofar as one allegedly universal right is pitted against another, the debate over blasphemy differs from the earlier “Asian values” debate, which was framed as a clash between universality and particularity. Since discourse about “religion” is inherently normative, these efforts to protect religion as such beg the question of whose definition of “religion” is going to be assumed, though in reality the answer is obvious. Given that the enforcement of human rights law invariably falls to states, these declarations in effect empower governments to determine what counts as genuine “religion,” which puts religious minorities at a decided disadvantage.

NS: Some of the most forthright critics of religion lately are the New Atheists. In what ways do you see them as genuinely new?

RA: Whereas earlier forms of atheism opposed themselves to belief in God, or to Christianity, today’s atheism seems to be new partly in that it defines itself over against religion as such. Indeed, a central claim of the New Atheism is that the various religions are so many strains of the same epidemic. In its antipathy toward religion, the New Atheism has something in common—perhaps surprisingly—with conservative evangelical Christianity, which tends to reject the label of “religion.” Both movements are reacting, not only to each other, but also against an organizational matrix implicit in the structuring of much of our civic life as a nation, from which they perceive themselves to have been excluded—namely, the formation of “religion,” understood quasi-pluralistically.

NS: How does the particular context of the United States enter the equation? Even among British-born New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the battleground seems to be very much on this side of the Atlantic.

RA: The United States is a secular state, but “America” is arguably a religious nation. In other words, collective identity is often construed religiously. Perhaps the more familiar version of this imaginary is the one broadcast by the Christian Right, but theirs is, in fact, a relatively recent construction and not one widely endorsed by cultural elites. Though it projects itself backwards onto history, the contemporary narrative of “Christian America” is largely a nativist reaction to an alternative way of thinking about American identity, which began to take shape in the years following World War II. During this period, the phrase “Judeo-Christian” came into vogue, as previously excluded groups—notably Catholics and Jews—succeeded in finding space under the sacred canopy—a process that went hand-in-hand with the extension of the racial category of “whiteness” to include additional ethnic groups. Over the past sixty years or so, the American civic imaginary has expanded to include an even wider range of permissible religious options—roughly, the “world religions”—while maintaining a conceptual link between God and nation. Increasingly, American exceptionalism announces itself in the language of religious freedom and pluralism.

Atheism, however, has always been “otherized”—thanks, in part, to the rhetoric of the Cold War—as the opposite of what America represents. Like “socialism,” the term is still capable of evoking a shudder. Against this backdrop, the New Atheism can be seen in a new light—as yet another political movement for inclusion on the part of a socially excluded minority. Atheism—as distinct from religious indifference—is an identity, and the New Atheism is, among other things, a form of identity politics.

NS: Are atheists really an oppressed—or even excluded—minority in the United States? They tend to be well-educated and affluent, for example.

RA: Declaring oneself an atheist does seem to put one at a political disadvantage. Anecdotes abound to the effect that it is virtually impossible for an uncloseted atheist to get elected to public office in the United States, and researchers at the University of Minnesota found recently that that their respondents ranked atheists first in terms of groups that do “not at all agree with my vision of American society,” followed somewhat distantly by Muslims, sexual minorities, conservative Christians, and recent immigrants.

NS: And, like some of those groups, they’ve come to take on some of the trappings of American denominationalism.

RA: Yes. One way that excluded groups have historically achieved inclusion in the American nation is by refashioning themselves in vaguely Protestant form, and there is evidence of this kind of mimesis in the case of atheism too. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em! And there have already been some successes. In his inaugural address, President Obama pronounced America a “nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers,” and in January, The New York Times reported that Mayor Bloomberg had invited atheists to his annual interfaith breakfast.

Yet, it is as of now unclear what it might mean to begin thinking of atheism as a religion, since it is largely against atheism that “religion” has been defined. If atheism succeeds in achieving acceptance as another “world religion,” this will have the paradoxical effect of undermining the distinction between religion and its contrast case, which may in turn undo the “religious” basis of national identity. Alternatively, it could result in a sharpening of the boundary between atheism and secularized indifference to religion, or in a reassertion of narrower, sectarian visions.

NS: In a forthcoming essay on the historical roots of atheism, you suggest that, “ironically, the most serious damage was done not by those who denied God’s existence but by those who tried to defend it.” How have the religious contributed to the rise of this more strident atheism?

RA: Today’s New Atheism presents itself as a scientific movement. In The God Delusion, for instance, Richard Dawkins claims that “‘the God Hypothesis’ is a scientific hypothesis about the universe.” He might be criticized for presuming to pronounce on philosophical questions outside the jurisdiction of the natural sciences, except that many apologists for belief in God have offered precisely the same interpretation. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, deistic thinkers sought to free belief in God from its role in worship and religious life. This had the result of shifting the meaning and conditions of belief, the effect of which was to bring God within the purview of the emerging natural sciences, pitting theology against science in a conflict of rival explanatory theories within a common discursive space. Perhaps even more significant, though, are matters of a moral sort. The conditions that gave rise to early-modern atheism included, importantly, the wars of religion that had ravaged Europe. Similarly, today’s New Atheism seems animated in large part by revulsion at religious violence. What is perhaps inadequately acknowledged, however, is that many of the same mechanisms that conspire to produce “religious violence” operate in “secular” contexts as well.

NS: Is there something that, above all, ties together your interests in international relations and philosophy of religion?

RA: I’m interested in the significance of borders—the lines we draw between in-groups and out-groups. The concept of “religion,” like that of the nation, represents an attempt to articulate a collective “we,” in opposition to perceived alterity. In the United States—though not only here—these two ideas have reinforced and shaped each other in interesting and problematic ways. Yet, because they can be imagined differently, for different purposes, religions and nations are also sites of ongoing conflict, whose boundaries are always subject to renegotiation. The goal of a social critic, as I see it, is not to eliminate exclusions—these are inevitable—but to render the operations of power visible and contestable. The moral ideal of human rights is important to this task because it reminds us that every construction of collective identity is ultimately contingent and in tension with our common humanity.

Like the United States, Poland is a religious society, with 96 percent of the adult population declaring belief in God, and 70 percent attending religious services at least once a month.  Unlike the United States, Poland is ethnically and denominationally homogenous—it is 96 percent ethnically Polish and 95 percent Catholic.  This lack of religious pluralism has not diminished contention about the place of religion in the public sphere, an issue that has been hotly debated since the fall of communism and throughout the construction of a legitimate national state.  Should Poland be “united under the sign of the cross,” as many on the Right have argued, or should the state embrace confessional neutrality?  Should there be an invocatio Dei in the new Constitution?  Should crosses be present in classrooms, state institutions, or other broadly conceived “public spaces”?

These questions became especially salient in the debates surrounding the controversial erection of hundreds of crosses just outside Auschwitz in 1998-99. Ultra-nationalist Poles chose the cross to mark Auschwitz as the place of Polish martyrdom—as opposed to the place of the Jewish Shoah—and as a strategy to defend an explicitly Catholic vision of Polishness, which had slowly but surely been eroding since 1989.  Despite having garnered significant support from the four corners of Poland and beyond, the action backfired because most Poles no longer saw the cross as a sign of freedom and dissent from an atheist party-state and its totalitarian regime.  For Liberal intellectuals from the Left and Center, the cross now stood for the rejection of the principles of the Rechtsstaat, in which particular allegiances are relegated to the private sphere.  For liberal Catholics, the cross had become a sign of intolerance toward “Others,” used as a provocation contrary to the Christian meaning of the symbol.  For many members of the clergy and Episcopate, the crosses at Auschwitz were a shameful expression of Polish nationalism and anti-Semitism.  The Church hierarchy attempted to restrict the semantic orbit of the cross in order to regain discursive and ritual control of the symbol by emphatically promoting a “correct theology of the cross” in various venues.

That very summer, however, the Łódź court rendered a judgment on a related civil case filed a year before.  A self-proclaimed atheist had sued the city for displaying a cross at city hall, arguing that it infringed on his private wellbeing.  The suit was grounded on Article 25 of Law 2 of the 1997 Constitution of the Polish Republic, which concerns the religious and philosophical neutrality of public organs.  Yet the lawsuit was rejected, the court having ruled that the cross, as a traditional symbol in Polish culture, had been objectified to the extent that it could not constitute a threat to any individual.  The Court of Appeals maintained the regional court’s decision, arguing that in the Polish patriotic tradition, the cross expressed a specific set of moral and historical values:

Personal wellbeing cannot be understood […] without reference to the tradition, culture and historical experiences of the collectivity in which physical persons live and function. In addition to its religious meaning […], the symbol of the cross has been inscribed in the experiences and the social consciousness of the Polish Nation—as a symbol of death, pain, sacrifice, and as a way of honoring all those who fought for freedom and independence in the struggle for national liberation during the Partitions and during the war against invaders. The symbol of the cross has for centuries designated the graves of ancestors and the places of national memory. In non-religious collective behavior, [the] meaning of the cross as an expression of respect for, and unity with, the liberators of the Fatherland even has precedence [my emphasis] because other universal means to express respect have not been developed.

Moreover, according to the Court, the cross was expressly related to secular, state institutions:

In addition to its religious meaning, the symbol of the cross in Polish society expresses moral order, on which the idea of the state and society is based. Throughout history […] the cross has been, in the Polish tradition, linked with the legislative and judiciary powers. This fact does not in itself prevent dialogue among people representing different worldviews.

The symbol’s religious semantics were overshadowed in both courts’ decisions by its secular, “merely” cultural, and civic connotations.  Yet, its secularity made it no less “sacred.”

Does this case—in which the cross was deemed tolerable because it had been sufficiently secularized, and thus was not evocative of religious sentiments—suggest a diminution of the public centrality of religion?  Or, conversely, does it present a hypertrophy of religion, with the cross so omnivorous and all-encompassing as to devour the principles of the Rechtsstaat entirely?  Perhaps the cross’s religious meaning, however occluded by its “merely cultural” connotations, is the champion left standing, not only at Auschwitz, but over the nation as a whole?

Sullivan asks whether the incapacity of national symbols to replace religious ones suggests the failure of civil religion and secularization.  “Civil religion,” following the Durkheimian tradition, refers to the social sacralization of a given group’s symbols.  In the modern era, according to this view, civic, or state symbols like the flag acquire religious significance and are worshiped by citizens as totems.  The Polish case points to a different and somewhat overlooked process.  Because of Poland’s peculiar political history, it was not political ideals, institutions, and symbols that were sacralized and that became the object of religious-like devotion (following the paradigmatic French revolutionary model), but religious symbols that were first secularized, and then resacralized as national.  The cross in Poland is therefore a sacred secular symbol.  It is sacred, not only because of its Christian semantics (or even in spite of them), but because since the nineteenth century it has traditionally represented Poland.  Instead of religion yielding to nationalism or nationalism becoming a religion, here religion becomes nationalism.

In cases where national identity is experienced and expressed through religious channels, the estimation of religious decline or ascent in relation to nationalism is a quixotic mission.  When the religious is secularized and then resacralized in national form, the relationship between national symbols and religious symbols is particularly difficult to tease apart, as much for social scientists as for judges.  It may be precisely this ambiguity, or this ability to pivot in different directions, that constitutes the cross’s (and other analogous symbols’) source of “civil religious” power.

The national sacralization of religious symbols, however, is meaningful and garners consensual support only in specific contexts.  Even in overwhelmingly Catholic Poland, it has been fiercely contested since the fall of communism and the establishment of an independent state.  Such symbols could certainly be “secularized” again.  “Secularization,” in the sense I am using the term here, would mean, however, returning to a more distinctly (or theologically orthodox) religious interpretation of Catholicism in Poland.  The de-politicization of religion has indeed been the objective of many Catholic groups in the last two decades.  Ironically, this would restore the “truly” sacred status of what has become, in their view, a merely national religion. After Catholicism’s long public career, many Polish Catholics now lobby for its privatization.