We’ve invited a small handful of scholars to comment on the increasing influence of anti-immigration and anti-Islam ideas and parties across Europe and to offer their thoughts on how best to accommodate minority claims (especially those involving Islam) in a democratic and liberal Europe.

Our respondents are:

Sindre Bangstad, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

Keith Banting, Professor of Political Science and Policy Studies and Queen’s Chair in Public Policy, Queen’s University; Will Kymlicka, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy, Queen’s University

Rajeev Bhargava, Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

Jocelyne Cesari, Research Fellow in Political Science and Director, Islam in the West Program, Harvard University

Grace Davie, Professor of Sociology, University of Exeter

Ruby Gropas, Visiting Scholar, CDDRL, Stanford University and Research Fellow, ELIAMEP

Elizabeth H. Prodromou, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Boston University

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Sindre Bangstad, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo

The breaking down of the cordon sanitaire surrounding right-wing populism is in fact not as recent a phenomenon as we like to think in Europe.  The political impulse to declare multiculturalism a dead letter—even where it never existed—seem to relate to the fallacious understandings of what multiculturalism might conceivably have meant prevailing among many European politicians. Critiques of multiculturalism are, these days, often used as rhetorical proxy for critiques of Islam and Muslims in Europe.  Anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiments need to be unpacked, analyzed, and responded to primarily at the level of particular nation-state histories and imaginaries. There is also an unprecedented level of co-ordination between various populist right-wing movements and activists across Europe. So much so that rhetorical tropes concerning Islam and Muslims travel seamlessly across the continent.  Right-wing populism in contemporary Europe also feeds on a liberal-secular nationalism of sorts, on anti-elitism, anti-intellectualism, and legitimate concerns over the future sustainability of European welfare states. Under the sign of democratic technocracy, across Europe we are witnessing a failure of political leadership and of intellectual vision, articulated in a conception of politics in which poll ratings and pandering to the shifting popular sentiment have become more important than the ideals and principles one espouses. This is a failure of both the mainstream political Left and Right. It requires a monumental intellectual effort by mainstream political parties to formulate more positive and less defensive narratives about the increasingly multicultural societies in which we happen to live; it is an effort still to be pursued in any systematic manner. Muslim minority claims are not necessarily the ‘special cases’ they are often made out to be; pragmatic approaches offer the best way forward.

Europe has a particularly dark history regarding its treatment of religious and ethnic minorities, and with that follows a burden of moral responsibility. It is a burden that must be shouldered even in the bleak and challenging times we are living in at present.

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Keith Banting, Professor of Political Science and Policy Studies and Queen’s Chair in Public Policy, Queen’s University

Will Kymlicka, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy, Queen’s University

In interpreting contemporary debates about multiculturalism in Europe, it is critical to distinguish between political discourse and government policies. At the level of discourse, there is a widespread perception that multiculturalism has ‘failed’ and that governments that once embraced a multicultural approach to diversity are turning away, adopting a strong emphasis on civic integration. This reaction, we are told, “reflects a seismic shift not just in the Netherlands, but in other European societies as well.” However, focusing on the level of government programs brings a very different pattern into view. New evidence from our Multiculturalism Policy Index (MCP Index) tracks the strength of multicultural policies for European countries and several traditional countries of immigration at three points in time (1980, 2000, and 2010). The results—available here—paint a different picture of contemporary Europe. While a small number of countries, including most notably the Netherlands, have weakened established multicultural policies during the 2000s, such a shift is the exception. Most countries that adopted multicultural approaches in the later part of the twentieth century have maintained their programs; and several countries have added new ones. Indeed, for Europe as a whole, the average score on the MCP Index went up, not down, between 2000 and 2010. This suggests that civic integration initiatives are often being layered on top of existing multicultural programs, leading to a blended approach to diversity. Moreover, as we argue elsewhere, more liberal forms of civic integration can certainly be combined with multiculturalism. It is the more illiberal or coercive forms that are incompatible with a robust multicultural approach.

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Rajeev Bhargava, Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

Securing individual freedoms has been a strong point of Europe; handling diversity has not.

As is well known, the process of confessionalization in the early 16th century created religiously homogenized political units. Confessional dissenters were exterminated or expelled. A large majority of Jews were forced to immigrate to Poland. There were virtually no resident Muslims left in any part of Europe. This has changed in the 20th century. Cultural and religious diversity is precisely what characterizes Europe now.

Writing in the sixties, when Christianity was adapting to the intellectual hegemony of a scientific rationality, Wilfred Cantwell Smith wrote that the challenge posed to Christianity by science would be a cake-walk compared to the challenge of emerging religious diversity. Years later, writing specifically about Islam, Smith warned that few in the West realize how their perpetual reservations about Muslims and the generally negative perception of Islam follow a pattern set during the Crusades. More than a millennia of animosity between Christians and Muslims survives in the collective memory of both and so too does the urge to compete and settle old scores—not everywhere, not in everyone, but with sufficient strength to adversely affect us all.

In order to accommodate minority claims involving Islam, these virtually invisible background conditions need to be altered. The collective memory of mutual hatred has to be addressed head on. The European Left needs to see multiculturalism or religious pluralism as an integral part of its ideology, not as an enemy or a conservative ideology merely to be tolerated. Religious diversity must be rescued from the conservatives.

It will help if liberals and democrats shed their individualist bias and learn to make a distinction between ‘communitarian’ and what we in India call ‘communal’—between those who see themselves as belonging to a community and those who view their communal affiliation as necessarily antagonistic towards other communities. Such a distinction exists at least implicitly in the European constitution. Therefore, the salvation of every single European country lies in a proper European union. The ills of Europe can be rid only by more of Europe.

Finally, it would not do right-thinking people any harm if they introduced a mixture of prudence and ancient wisdom into their universe of moral principles. Without all this, minority claims do not have much chance of being met in Europe. And this failure would be a big disaster for the entire world.

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Jocelyne Cesari, Research Fellow in Political Science and Director, Islam in the West Program, Harvard University

The recent victory of socialist François Hollande in France’s 2012 presidential election was certainly a turning point for the social and economic politics of France. Unfortunately, this is less true when it comes to immigration, race, and culture, evidenced by Hollande saying he would firmly support France’s ban on niqabs, or face-covering Islamic veils, and his stance against Turkish accession to the EU.

François Hollande has made clear that he will address the material conditions and worries of French citizens. But he has been quite silent on questions pertaining to cultural diversity and social cohesion, for the simple reason that he shares with Sarkozy the same conception of French national identity, defined as an abstract community of citizens bound together by principles of equality and liberty. In these conditions, the cultural and religious background of citizens is not part and should not interfere with civic solidarity and public life.

However, such an ideal has been increasingly difficult to uphold when Muslims, among other cultural and regional groups, are claiming their right to express their specificity in public space, which has in turn raised the anxiety and fears of a lot of French citizens. These fears have been the main reason for the long-standing political success of the National Front, from its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen to his daughter Marine, the current leader of the party . At the same time, Muslims of all colors and stripes keep asserting that there is no contradiction between being French and being a Muslim.

Nations or groups need to exist in opposition to an ‘Other,’ and in today’s national imagination, Islam plays that role. It may be impossible for societies to completely rid themselves of this polarizing rhetoric.

That said, societies differ in how much their political imaginations are subjected to open critical discussion. Accordingly, it is necessary for French politicians across the political spectrum to explicitly reject economic and social issues being linked to cultural issues or the ‘Islamization’ of Europe. It is also imperative for policymakers to change the dominant narrative of French national identity by including Islamic culture and history.

Such a change would involve a new education project where, from history to arts and culture, Muslims are not described as the Other. It means acknowledging the cross pollination of philosophical and scientific ideas as well as the multiple encounters of artists, merchants, clerics, and migrants from medieval times to the immigration waves after WWII. Most Muslims already acknowledge France as their home and have made numerous artistic and cultural contributions to the French ‘patrimoine.’ The challenge is to reshape French imagination so Muslims can be seen as legitimate fellow citizens.

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Grace Davie, Professor of Sociology, University of Exeter

Two things are happening at once in European societies. On one hand the process of secularization continues, at times remorselessly; on the other religion has returned to the public sphere. The combination is difficult to handle. Continuing secularization has led, amongst other things, to a marked decline in religious literacy. At the same time complex religious questions make new demands on the knowledge and sensitivities of the actors involved. Hence an uncomfortable paradox: at precisely the moment European populations need them most, they are losing the vocabulary, concepts, and narratives that are necessary to take part in serious conversation about religion. The result, all too often, is a debate that is ill-mannered and ill-informed.

A debate that is ill-mannered denotes a lack of respect for both people and issues. Even more serious is the lack of regard for religion as such. Those for whom religion means little are unable to imagine the damage that is done by the public denigration of faith, be it Christian or other. Legitimate claims, frequently those of minority faiths (such as Islam), are lost in the confusion.

A debate that is ill-informed means that European populations are increasingly susceptible to error and exaggeration. An excellent example can be found in the wildly exaggerated statistics concerning immigration in general and Islam in particular. Astute politicians know this and—at times—overstep the mark. Unfortunately, acute economic uncertainty will make matters worse.

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Ruby Gropas, Visiting Scholar, CDDRL, Stanford University and Research Fellow, ELIAMEP

Over the past two decades, surveys have consistently noted a clear message: European citizens are anxious about immigration and its impact on society. Throughout this time, mainstream political parties and European political elites have attempted to respond to these trends: demonstrating the economic and demographic benefits of immigration; encouraging and promoting multicultural initiatives; consolidating and institutionalizing an anti-discrimination framework through EU directives, regulations, and national legislation; and adopting an inclusive discourse promoting the value of diversity, cultural exchange, toleration, and pluralism. They have also become increasingly detached from their base through the professionalization of politics. Throughout this same period, populist and extremist parties have done precisely the opposite. Positioning themselves as representatives of the ‘simple, average citizen’ they have been speaking out about the ‘real and everyday’ threats posed by ‘uncontrolled,’ ‘illegal,’ ‘massive’ immigration and of the ‘incapacity’ or ‘unwillingness’ of Muslim communities to integrate. They have gradually moved from underdog parties on the fringes to actually framing and conditioning pre-election debates and changes in citizenship and migration policies. Moreover, they have built an active presence at the neighborhood and local levels. The lower middle classes, skilled and unskilled working class citizens who increasingly find themselves in conditions of economic insecurity—whether due to the pressures of globalization, the eurozone crisis, or economic recession—have been identifying with the latter’s discourse, finding resonance and comfort in the statements of right-wing populists. Economic grievances, induced by insecure job prospects and shrinking wages and the perception of unfair competition over increasingly scarce social goods such as social housing, health, and pension coverage, are being coupled with strong feelings of cultural threat and the opinion that Muslim migrant communities pose an evident threat to national identity, civic values, and the country’s overall way of life. What is even more disconcerting is that this is taking place against a wider backdrop of dissatisfaction with the functioning of the country’s democratic governance and with falling trust in the mainstream political parties, exacerbated in many cases by corruption and mismanagement scandals.

It is urgent that mainstream political parties re-engage with the local level. There has been a growing gap between governing parties and their constituencies. In order to counter the influence of populist extremists, mainstream parties need to engage once again with voters who feel alienated and become once again integral parts of the communities they represent. At the same time, activities that encourage sustainable and meaningful interaction between different communities at the neighborhood, at the city, and at the regional levels must be intensified. Bringing together members of different groups has always increased understanding, countered perceptions of threat, and created ties that are much needed today to maintain the civic and social cohesion of European societies.

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Elizabeth H. Prodromou, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Boston University

The success of Golden Dawn (Chrysi Avgi), a fascist party that secured 21 seats in the Greek parliament on the strength of 7 percent of the popular vote, mirrors the alarming consolidation of far-right political parties and social movements underway across the Continent since the end of the last decade.

The Golden Dawn leadership drew directly from the toolbox of the New European Right—by mixing fascistic symbols, ethno-nationalist discourse, an anti-immigrant platform, and the use of street violence—to critique the colossal governance failures of Greece’s traditional political parties (left-of-center PASOK and right-of-center New Democracy). Golden Dawn spun standard, if extremist, Euro-populist discourse to excoriate mainstream PASOK and New Democracy leaders for bankrupting Greece, and this narrative resonated with the country’s shell-shocked middle- and working-classes voters. Similarly, Golden Dawn leader Nikos Michaloliakos echoed the xenophobic chauvinism of European rightists, such as Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, and Umberto Bossi, in linking Greece’s economic travails to immigration patterns that have produced one of the most accelerated demographic pluralizations in post-Cold War Europe.

Golden Dawn, then, is not a tale of putative Greek exceptionalism vis-à-vis a norm of EU modernity, but instead points to socio-political diffusion from ‘center’ to ‘periphery’ in Europe.

At the same time, Golden Dawn diverges notably from its far-right cohort in other EU member-states. For starters, the Golden Dawn qua party is likely to be an ephemeral force in politics. Most polls predict a decline in electoral support for Golden Dawn in the upcoming national elections in June, as protest-voters turn away from the party as a credible governing option.

More significantly, there is a specificity to the extreme Right’s message in Greece, which stands apart from the Islamophobic essentialism that has come to define the New European Right in other EU member-states. Chrysi Avgi blames clandestine, external forces as the cause for Greece’s economic travails; given the likelihood that the country’s economic implosion will continue apace in the near term, the search for ‘foreign’ culprits will maintain purchase in Greek society. But anti-immigrant intolerance, as well as some racist sloganeering and violent hooliganism, in Greece have been absent the deliberately, explicitly religious—read: anti-Muslim—vector of discrimination and prejudice that orients the New Right in the aforementioned European cases. Instead, Greece’s right-wing ideologues have deployed the broad rubric ‘foreign’—immigrants, Great Powers, and historical foes in the region—in a manner designed to evoke and to amplify a historical record marked by chronic linkages between the loss of economic sovereignty, on the one hand, and conditionalized political sovereignty and territorial loss, on the other. The origins and evolution of this distinction in Greece’s version of the New European Right bears additional study and attention, as part of any efficacious response by liberal democratic forces to reinforce tolerance, civility, and pluralism in EU politics and society.

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In May of 2010, I sat down for a conversation with the legendary human rights advocate Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group. Jones and I had just come out of an intense two-day workshop at the SSRC on religion, peacebuilding, and development in Mindanao, organized in conjunction with the SSRC’s project on religion and international affairs. Participants in the workshop included scholars and peacebuilders from the United States, Mindanao, Japan, and Indonesia.

The following is a brief excerpt of the interview. Click here to read the entire transcript (pdf).

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David Kyuman Kim: This is David Kim from the SSRC’s Program on Religion and the Public Sphere. And I have the pleasure of engaging in a conversation with Sidney Jones from the International Crisis Group, in a segment for the Rites and Responsibilities series for The Immanent Frame. We have just come out of a two day SSRC workshop on the crisis in Mindanao, funded by the Luce Foundation, and part of the SSRC’s project on religion and international affairs. Sidney, before we get into your work, and because the conversations from workshop are still fresh in our minds, I’m curious to hear your perspective on and your characterization of what the Mindanao crisis is. Speak, if you would, not just as someone who’s been involved with the Mindanao crisis for some time. How would you describe the situation to someone who knows nothing about it?

Sidney Jones: I would say that, in some ways, we’re dealing with a fundamentally ethno-nationalist insurgency, but what makes it so much more complicated than many other areas is that there are several insurgencies going on at the same time, including the old Communist insurgency, which spills over into Mindanao. We have three guerilla groups that identify themselves as Moro, plus the NPA [the National People’s Army, the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines], which is still active. We also have three different peace processes going on at the same time, and any success on one track will have negative implications for the others. So, trying to fit all those things into some kind of overarching peace process is extraordinarily difficult. And on top of that, even if you were to settle all of those insurgencies, you would still be dealing with clan conflicts and structural problems of warlordism and feudalism, which would continue to account for what is currently 30 or 40 percent of the violence in Mindanao even if you got the peace processes signed, sealed, and delivered. So, that’s what the crisis in Mindanao is about.

DKK: As you know, the Rites and Responsibilities series is focusing on questions of sovereignty and authority and religion. And among the things that the folks in the workshop seemed to be wrestling with was how to account for the religious factors and influences in Mindanao. You yourself had very portrayals of the religious factors and influences, specifically, your insistence of not wanting to stick to an account in which the portrait was primarily about the disputes between Muslims and Christians. How would you describe the role that religious groups play, how religious actors play in Mindanao? What language would you use to describe them? What are the inadequacies of the characterizations that have been put forth?

SJ: There’s no question that there is a fundamental issue of religious identities involved. But it’s also true that the fundamental conflict is not religious. It’s about control over power and resources. And that control issue extends beyond Christian and Muslim communities to different ethnic identities among people who are Muslims. It also, like many of the conflicts in Indonesia, has an overlay of “indigenous-versus-migrant.” Some of these fundamental power relationships relate to people from upland areas in Mindanao who have been displaced by people from northern parts of the Philippines, who are mostly Christian, coming in and taking over land and political power from the Muslims themselves. The problem, for instance, in the agreement that failed in August 2008, which was trying to define “the Bangsamoro homeland,” was that the MILF [the Moro Islamic Liberation Front] was basically including Lumads, or indigenous people, in their definition of Bangsamoro. And the Lumads objected to this! They didn’t want to be part of the Moro concept of who was defined as a Moro. They wanted a separate identity. There were very definite ancestral land issues that were at the root of why they wanted a separate identity, and the MILF didn’t understand, or didn’t appreciate it fully. So that’s another part of the complexity of the whole process. And it’s why it’s a mistake to see this conflict as “Christian versus Muslim,” or to believe that appealing to religious leaders, such as the Catholic Church or Muslim ulama, will somehow be able to settle it.

DKK: As I hear you describe it, and also and on my reading of the white paper that Myla Leguro and Scott Appleby wrote for the workshop, there seems to be a structural problem that is fed by religion. Right? In other words, there is the structural problem that determines which groups are recognized, and which are not recognized. I think you objected at one point, in your response to their papers, saying “Well, it’s not even simply questions about conversion, but it’s claims about re-version.”

SJ: Yes.

DKK: Which is to say, it is a set of disputes over claims about original identities, originary identities. And these disputes involve appeal to religion to fortify the respective claims about identity. I guess I’m a little stuck, then, on the following. It’s one thing to say, “Well, there are all sorts of mischaracterizations of and misuses of religious identities.” But there are certainly resources in religious communities and religious traditions that could be used as sources of resistance––sources that don’t have to subsumed under the broad dichotomy of “Muslim v. Christian.”

SJ: Yes, let me give you a couple of examples. We had a major massacre in Maguindanao, in central Mindanao, in November 2009, in which one clan killed fifty-seven people—actually, fifty-eight, but one victim was never identified. And there was a sense that, first of all, it was Muslim-on-Muslim violence, in that this one clan leader carried out the massacre as a way of sending a message to his political rival, who was head of another Muslim clan. But there were thirty journalists killed in the process, and most of the journalists were Christian. And some of the Muslims in Mindanao were saying, “If there hadn’t been Christians killed, this issue never would have gotten the international attention it did, because there’s a sense that Muslims are always killing Muslims. So it would have been a horrendous massacre, but it wouldn’t have gotten the same level of attention.”

DKK: There’s a difference in the moral indignation or moral valence in the global community in response to violence against Muslims versus violence against Christians.

SJ: Yes! And then, afterwards, I was talking with the Archbishop of Cotabato, who was saying that there was a sense among his parishioners that the massacre intensified stereotypes of Muslims as violent.

DKK: Hm.

SJ: And therefore it would intensify resistance to any peace agreement that involved power-sharing with the Bangsamoro. So, in that sense, there was definitely a religious element, and stereotypes, involved, and it suggested that there was a role for the church, for example, to try and diminish the force of those stereotypes.

DKK: Yes.

SJ: But it was also true that there was a clear issue of clan rivalry among Muslims that wasn’t necessarily going to be able to be addressed by Islamic ulama. One of the people at this workshop was saying last night that he is a victim of one of these blood feuds among Muslim clans, or between two Muslim clans, I asked him if there was any way that the ulama could play a role in settling those feuds. And he said “No, because the ulama are all situated within the clans. And they wouldn’t accept somebody coming in from outside the clan.” So where is the role of religious leadership in settling that aspect of the violence in Mindanao? And it’s a critically important part of the violence, because the clan structure perpetuates it.

DKK: But when you say “religious leadership,” do you mean local religious leadership? Do you mean transnational religious leadership?

SJ: When I talk about religious leadership in Mindanao, I’m talking about local leadership—except that there’s a big difference between the Islamic and the Christian leadership, or at least the leadership within the Catholic Church. And I think it’s also important to underscore that inasmuch as we’ve been talking about Christians, we’ve only been talking about Catholics. There is also the whole issue of Christian evangelicals, which is a growing community within Mindanao, and their impact has been completely ignored. But when we talk about Catholic leadership, we’re often talking about priests or bishops who come from outside the community. The Catholic Church has a way of posting priests where they’re not necessarily native sons. But within the Islamic clergy, if it’s fair to use that term, there’s no tradition of having anybody from outside the community. And not only that, but one’s sphere of influence is much, much more limited than that of the equivalent role of a priest in the Catholic Church, because the priest, by definition, is part of a broader hierarchy. One of the problems I often see is that Catholics tend to view their Muslim counterparts in their own image, and to assume that Muslim leaders have the same ability to exercise this hierarchical chain-of-command structure, down to the village level, that the Catholics do. It’s a huge mistake to see it in those terms—and it’s one of the weaknesses of the Bishops-Ulama Conference—because they’re not equivalent.

To continue reading, click here for a complete transcript (pdf).—ed.

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.

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.

Each country in Western Europe is a secular state and while each has its own distinctive take on what this means, there are, nevertheless, two main historical strands of secularism, a main and a lesser strand. The latter is principally manifested in French laïcité, which seeks to create a public space in which religion is virtually banished in the name of reason and emancipation, and religious organizations are monitored by the state through consultative national mechanisms. The main Western European approach, which I call moderate secularism, however, sees organized religion as a potential public good or national resource (not just a private benefit), which the state can in some circumstances advance—even through an “established” church. Its public benefits can be direct, such as a contribution to education and social care through autonomous church-based organizations funded by the taxpayer; or indirect, such as the production of attitudes that create economic hope or family stability, or that contribute to conceptions of national identity, cultural heritage, ethical voice, and national ceremonies.

Western Europe has often been a site of struggle between historical public churches and political secularists, yet during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially during the latter and especially in Protestant-majority societies, this has not been deeply conflictual and has taken the form of various shifting compromises. The compromises consisted of a successful accommodation of an expanding number of Christian churches within the actual and symbolic workings of the state, yet were marked by a gradual but decisive weakening of the public and political character of the churches. From the 1960s through the end of the century, there was a particularly strong movement of opinion and politics in favor of the secularists. In Western Europe, the cultural revolution of the 1960s has been broadly accepted; not only has there been no major, sustained counter-movement, but it has expanded beyond north-western Protestant/secular Europe into Catholic Europe. So, for example, the national system of ‘pillarization’ in the Netherlands, by which Protestants and Catholics had separate access to some of the state’s resources, emerged in the nineteenth century, declined sharply in the middle of the twentieth, and was formally concluded in 1983. The Lutheran Church in Sweden was disestablished in 2000. In the UK, disestablishment of the Church of England was embraced in the early 1990s by key sections of the center left. Catholic countries—Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland—in the 1980s and 1990s rapidly showed signs of the secularization characteristic of Protestant Europe.

There is no endogenous diminution of secularization in relation to organized religion, attendance at church services, and traditional Christian belief and practice in Western Europe. Whether the decline of traditional religion is being replaced by no religion or by new ways of being religious or spiritual, neither mode is inspiring an attempt to connect with or reform political institutions and government policies. There is no challenge to political secularism there.

This is the context in which non-Christian migrants have been arriving and settling and in which they and the next generation are becoming active members of their societies, including making political claims of equality and accommodation. As the most salient post-immigration formation relates to Muslims, some of these claims relate to the place of religious identity in the public sphere.

It is here, if anywhere, that a sense of a crisis of secularism can be found. The pivotal moment, 1988-89, of this “crisis” was marked by two events. These created national and international storms, and set in motion political developments which have not been reversed, and they offer contrasting ways in which the two Western European secularisms are responding to the Muslim presence. The events were the protests, in Britain, against the novel The Satanic Verses by Sir Salman Rushdie; and, in France, the decision by a school head-teacher to prohibit entry to three girls unless they were willing to take off their headscarves on school premises.

The Satanic Verses was not banned in the UK, so in that sense the Muslim campaign clearly failed. In other respects, however, it galvanized many to seek a democratic multiculturalism that was inclusive of Muslims. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) was established and has been very successful in relation to its founding agenda. By 2001, it had achieved its aim of having Muslim issues and Muslims as a group recognized apart from issues of race and ethnicity and of itself being accepted by government, media, and civil society as the spokesperson for British Muslims. Another two achieved aims were the state funding of Muslim schools on the same basis as Christian and Jewish schools and getting Tony Blair—in spite of ministerial and civil service advice to the contrary—to insert a religion question into the 2001 Census. This meant that the ground was laid for the possible later introduction of policies targeting Muslims to match those targeting groups defined by race, ethnicity, or gender. The MCB had to wait a bit longer to get the legislative protection it sought, yet by the time New Labour left office in 2010, it had created the strongest protection against religious discrimination in the EU, including a law against incitement to religious hatred, the legislation most closely connected to the protests over The Satanic Verses, though there is no suggestion that the novel would have been banned by the legislation. Indeed, the protesters’ original demand that the blasphemy law be extended to cover Islam has been made inapplicable as the blasphemy law was abolished in 2008—with very little protest from anybody. These developments have taken place not only with the support of the leadership of the Church of England, but in a spirit of interfaith respect. (Given how adversarial English intellectual, journalistic, legal, and political culture is, religion in England is oddly fraternal and little effort is expended in proving that the other side is in a state of error and should convert.)

That is one path of development from 1988-89. It involved the mobilization of a minority group and the extension of minority policies from race to religion in order to accommodate the religious minority. The other course of development, namely, that which arose from l’affaire foulard, was one of top-down state action to prohibit certain minority practices. From the start, the majority of the country—represented by the media, public intellectuals, politicians, and public opinion polls—was supportive of the head teacher who refused to allow religious headscarves in school. Muslims either did not wish to or lacked the capacity to challenge this dominant view with anything like the publicity, organization, and appeal for international assistance that Muslims in Britain brought to bear on Rushdie’s novel. The threatened ban against the headscarf was passed with an overwhelming majority by Parliament in February 2004. A few years later, the target of secularist and majoritarian disapproval was focused on full face veils that leave just the eyes showing (the niqab or burqa), as are favored by a few hundred French Muslim women. This was banned in public places in April 2011. Belgium followed suit in July 2011 and Italy is in the process of doing so. Similar proposals are being discussed by governments and political parties across Western Europe.

Another example of this broad anti-Muslim coalition is the majority that voted in a referendum to ban the building of minarets in Switzerland in 2009. Analysis of this majority has explained that it ranges from individuals whose primary motivation is women’s rights to those “who simply feel that Islam is ‘foreign,’” who may have no problems with Muslims per se but who are not ready to accept “Islam’s acquiring of visibility in public spaces,” or who generally did not vote “out of a desire to oppress anybody, but because they are themselves feeling threatened by what they see as an Islam invasion.” So, prejudiced or fearful perceptions of Islam are capable of uniting a wide range of opinions into a majority, including those who have no strong views about church-state arrangements, as indeed has been apparent since Muslim claims first became public controversies.

This means that the current challenge to secularism in Western Europe is being debated not just in terms of the wider issues of integration and multiculturalism but also in terms of a hostility to Muslims and Islam based on stereotypes and scare stories in the media that are best understood as a specific form of cultural racism that has come to be called Islamophobia and is largely unrelated to questions of secularism.

The crisis of secularism is best understood, then, within a framework of multiculturalism. Of course, multiculturalism has few advocates at the moment and the term is highly damaged. Yet the repeated declarations from the senior politicians of the region that “multiculturalism is dead” are a reaction to the continuing potency of multiculturalism, which renders obsolete liberal takes on assimilation and integration with new forms of public gender and public ethnicity, and now public religion. Muslims are late joiners of this movement, but as they do so, it slowly becomes apparent that the secularist status quo, with certain residual privileges for Christians, is untenable as it stands. We can call this the challenge of integration rather than multiculturalism, as long as it is understood that we are not just talking about an integration into the day-to-day life of a society but also into its institutional architecture, grand narratives, and macro-symbolic sense of itself. If these issues were dead, we would not be having a debate about the role of public religion or coming up with proposals for dialogue with Muslims and the accommodation of Islam. The dynamic for change is not directly related to the historic religion nor to the historic secularism of Western Europe; rather, the novelty, which then has implications for Christians and secularists, and to which they are reacting, is the appearance of an assertive multiculturalism which cannot be contained within a matrix of individual rights, conscience, religious freedom, and so on. If any of these were different, the problems would be other than they are. Just as today we look at issues to do with, say, women or homosexuality not simply in terms of rights but in a political environment influenced by feminism and gay liberation, within a socio-political-intellectual culture in which the “assertion of positive difference” or “identity” is a shaping and forceful presence. It does not mean everybody is a feminist now, but a heightened consciousness of gender and equality creates a certain gender-equality sensibility. Similarly, my claim is that a multiculturalist sensibility today is present in Western Europe, and yet it is not comfortable with extending itself to accommodate Muslims, nor able to find reasons for not extending itself to Muslims without self-contradiction.

Political secularism has been destabilized, and in particular the historical flow from a moderate to radical secularism and the expectation of its continuation has been jolted. This is not because of any Christian desecularization or a “return of the repressed.” Rather, the jolt is created by the triple contingency of the arrival and settlement of a significant number of Muslims; a multiculturalist sensibility which respects “difference”; and a moderate secularism, namely, that the historical compromises between the state and a church or churches in relation to public recognition and accommodation are still in place to some extent. To speak of a “crisis of secularism” is highly exaggerated, especially in relation to the state. It is true that the challenge is much greater for laïcité or radical secularism as an ideology. As many social and political theorists are sympathetic to this ideology, and in any case, being more sensitive to abstract ideas, they are less able to see that the actually-existing-secularism of Western Europe, with the exception of France, is not the radical variant. They thus mistakenly project the incompatibility between their ideas and the accommodation of Muslims onto the Western European states. Indeed, as applied to Western Europe, “crisis of secularism” is not only exaggerated but misleading. As I hope I have shown, the problem is more defined by issues of post-immigration integration than by the religion-state relation per se. The “crisis of secularism” is really the challenge of multiculturalism. Far from this entailing the end of secularism as we know it, moderate secularism offers some of the resources for accommodating Muslims. Political secularists should think pragmatically and institutionally about how to achieve this, namely, how to multiculturalize moderate secularism, and avoid exacerbating the crisis and limiting the room to maneuver, by pressing for further, radical secularism.

A longer version of this essay was first presented as the Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture, delivered in Las Vegas on August 19 at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion.

Consider, first, Kahn’s comparison of modern democratic revolutionaries and early Protestants. To paraphrase: the trans-temporal, collective subject of the revolutionary sovereign, instantiated in every citizen, is a secularization of the mystical body of Christ, which the Protestant Reformation, in an act tantamount to “revelation,” had already transferred from the king and the sacraments to the inwardness of believers contemplating the scripture. Kahn is describing a double displacement of a mystical presence (from sacral monarch and sacerdotal forms to Protestant saints, and from Protestant saints and the Word to democratic subjects and their constitution) and then tracing a line of descent back to the sixteenth-century quarrel over the Christian concept of transubstantiation. A great deal of scholarship has been written about the Protestant legacy in American culture, and certainly the radicalization of some Protestant teachings, such as the importance of secular vocation, the internalization of religious discipline, the priesthood of the laity, and the lordship of God alone, lay the conditions for the English revolution of 1642-1651. Most eighteenth-century Americans counted themselves part of the Dissenting tradition, and they came to see their own quest for independence from the crown as continuing the Reformation and carrying forward the earlier Puritan revolution in England. (Even Tom Paine made use of evangelical rhetoric.) What they stressed, however, was not Kahn’s invented analogy to the transfer of the mystical presence but the righteousness of both religious and political resistance; both priestly power and political tyranny (whether of King Charles I or of the colonial authority) were illegitimate and deserved to be felled.

Kahn is simply invoking Protestant “legacyism” to unify his theory that revolution must involve a transfer of the sacred.  This narrowness of insight leads him to overlook (or not mention) significant facts about the Protestant Reformation (more specifically, the Puritan Revolution) that would have emphasized its modernizations rather than its atavisms. Thus, take Kahn’s assertion that the Puritan settlers imbued Americans with a permanent reverence for law. This is a statement so abstract as to mean multiple things, but the general sense, I gather, is that Americans have incurred some sort of cultural debt to the Puritans that they exhibit in their attitudes toward the Constitution and toward jurisprudence. One wonders how, for instance, decisions of the Warren court verify Kahn’s assertion: Engel vs. Vitale or Abington School District vs. Schempp (which, respectively, declared unconstitutional the formal observance of prayer and assigned Bible reading in public schools). Are these examples proof that when the Court refers to “the nation,” “national life,” or “the people” in its decisions, it is invoking a secularized theological concept? Of course, Kahn would counter that his notion of “political theology” encompasses concepts that, while not manifestly theological in content, amount nonetheless to “secularized” (displaced from their origin in) theology. The problem here, as with Schmitt’s logic, is that one can make a “secularization” of any idea by striking an analogy to a theological one if the only ground for the comparison is the analogy itself.

Consider, for instance, this statement: “The concept of sovereignty is incomprehensible if stripped of its theological origins.” Here is a case where the imperative to pinpoint an origin—a foundational point of authentic ownership—obscures a much more complex interaction of social and intellectual forces. Nathan Hatch, in The Democratization of American Christianity, has demonstrated how American national identity was “an impromptu creation” in which the past was re-written to make the Constitution its culmination. So far, this seems to support Kahn’s thesis. However, “the theological,” in this case, was not a foundation but a poly-vocal discourse in which social class defined lines of dissent over the identity of the sovereign and the limitations of the Constitution of 1787. Fears of elitism and centralization and fears of mobility and fragmentation enlisted diverse religious proponents. In the post-revolutionary period, Hatch argues, revivalistic evangelicalism posed an epochal populist challenge to the Whig predilections of Old Light Calvinism and Unitarianism. The attitudes of the moderate British Enlightenment and of the Federalists, which had their religious support in the New England colleges, were made to give way before a more radical democratic vision. Populist preachers, aligning the right to religious free conscience and egalitarian forms of worship with political liberties, gave religious credence to Jeffersonianism, and the evangelical masses laid claim to the birthright of the nation. This process was also accompanied by additional transformations in social practice that had nothing to do with religious observance and no manifest theological intention. Elected legislatures and large assemblies, Charles Taylor underlines in A Secular Age, emphasized “representation” rather than “incarnation.” These practices helped to legitimate the discourse of popular sovereignty by building on the continuity of past colonial institutions, such as elected assemblies, that had earned respect, not because they were sacred, but because they had protected local liberties against the imperial government.

Kahn’s “genealogical” technique yields no evidence persuading me that American political ideas originate in and are indebted to theological sources. Through his architectural technique, however, he does point to evidence supporting another notion of secularization: that ideas and symbols from a religious sphere of discourse can be commuted to a profane or non-theistic sphere of discourse, and vice versa, through the internal secularization of religious traditions. Religious messages, images, and stories routinely circulate in the U.S. through entertainment, mass media, literature, the arts, campaign writing and fundraising that are not under ecclesiastical control or exclusively religious in allegiance. The dissemination and transformation of religion, or the relocation of “the sacred” or “the spiritual,” through consumption, new technologies, democratic populism, and the emergence of the public sphere have been the subjects of abundant monographs in Cultural Studies and American Studies.

Unfortunately, the term “the sacred” is one of the most obscurant in our critical lexicon, and it often agglomerates phenomena that should be examined discretely. Talal Asad, in his Formations of the Secular, has criticized the common use of “the sacred”—designating a mythical, mysterious force that imposes itself upon subjectivity and space—and shown that it is constituted in the nineteenth century through misunderstandings of ancient sacramental practices. Anthropologists in comparative religion, working from the idea of “taboo,” fashioned the term “the sacred” to stand for a universal essence common to all religions. The term was subsequently taken up by theologians, and in the twentieth century it was expanded (by figures like Mircea Eliade) to designate the religious sources of all cultural and social formations. Kahn seems unaware of Asad’s criticisms and contributes to further mystification of this already abused term.

If Kahn were less devoted to spelunking the secular for its hidden “sacred” springs and more absorbed in identifying the practices of public religions, then he might have provided a more rounded account of America’s “social imaginary” and the variety of connections between theology, rhetoric, and the secular spheres that it has actually afforded. The current sociological theory of the “deprivatization” of religion is a model that does not precisely describe the U.S., since the melding of the secular and the religious has always been endemic here (though more visibly since World War II, because of the rise of the Religious Right). The interpenetration of the two has much to do with the rationale of prophecy: “an American idiom that is capacious and embraces many kinds of politics,” as George Shulman writes in American Prophecy. To borrow a term from Shulman, the mythology of the popular sovereign is a form of “vernacular theology,” woven out of the language and logic of prophecy, and many communities in America’s Biblical culture use this vernacular with different intentions. Kahn’s “architectural” technique presumes that the social imaginary produces a common, sanctified image of the sovereign, whereas in fact, as Shulman indicates, prophecy—joining the revolutionary past to an ongoing project of redemption—has frequently functioned to contest the identity of the sovereign rather than solidify it.

One such example, already mentioned, is the struggle that ensued in the post-revolutionary period between Federalists and Jeffersonians, in which populist preachers argued for the further democratization of church and polity by tracing their cause to both the revolutionary generation and the meaning of Biblical revelation. To fail in this project, as they charged of gentleman elites, was to betray the heroes of 1776 and the Protestant God who had elected them to enact His will by bringing about political and religious equality. In the run up to the Civil War, Confederate nationalists put forward a different image of the sovereign, which rejected the democratizing tendencies of the post-revolutionary populists who had carried the argument at that time. As Drew Faust has shown, in Confederate Nationalism, Southern elites justified secession as an act of “purification,” since the North, they alleged, had betrayed the sovereign and declined from the revolutionary generation’s republican virtues. Southern jeremiads framed these arguments in politicized prophetic idiom that imbued war death with providential significance, as if echoing patriotic narratives being elaborated by Northerners. Both bled and prayed, but the causes their sacrifices sanctified, the sovereign wills they obeyed, were different nations. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural straddles the dichotomy, but Kahn looks past it.

Most vividly, in our recent history, the civil rights and black liberation movements, reaching back to the legacies of abolitionism and the Social Gospel, reconfigured prophecy to unmask what James Baldwin called “the national innocence.” Most Americans, Baldwin explained in an address at Kalamazoo College in 1960, tend to envision their democracy descending uninterruptedly from an ancestor who was a “cross between a Celt and a Teuton,” who worshipped a “Puritan god,” and who bequeathed the wisdom of “New England” and the hope for high material status. To correct this misprision, social prophets in the fifties and sixties forced a revaluation of sacrifice and its soteriological relation to the problem of sin. Sacrifice can be interpreted as the price paid for sins under the judgment and wrath of God, or it can be understood as virtuous self-giving for a transcendent cause or contest with evil. Kahn tends to emphasize only the second meaning, but social prophets have often used the trope of judgment to contest the nation’s claim to be righteous and just. Pointing to God above the sovereign, they expose the exclusions and traumas—the repressed history—on which nationalism is founded. Pricking the bad conscience of Christians and democrats, who must atone for their self-deception and injustice, social prophets seek to transform the image of the national identity so that it can be more ethnically or racially inclusive. In the process, as Shulman has brilliantly demonstrated, social prophets empower disenfranchised communities by allotting to them the mission of redemptive suffering and self-sacrifice mythically attributed to patriots. Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. each called attention to caesuras in American history, ruptures between the faith of the revolutionary generation and those of its sons who have not completed but, in fact, traduced it. The cause of the founding fathers inspirited those whom the nation had sinfully, illiberally, forsworn to acknowledge as having a claim to its birthright. For King, the downtrodden’s chosen sacrifice, in the present, became the price of expanding freedom so that the promise of the nation’s founding ideals could be fulfilled. Since the sixties, liberation theology, mostly in academia, has also spoken on behalf of the silenced and the unrepresented through a prophetic discourse far more varied in its permutations than Kahn’s mono-myth of the popular sovereign. The plurality of these communities belies the uniformity of the American “We” to which Kahn repeatedly refers in his text.

There is, however, yet another, more fearsome, dimension to prophecy, also overlooked by Kahn, which might have had a bearing on his auguries about America’s prospects. The sacralizing of the American nation-state that concerns him has another dimension: messianic, millennialist, and apocalyptic. To return to Kahn’s own example—Lincoln’s sacrificial presidency—scholars have described how the North converted the president’s death and the attrition of the Civil War into a sign of redemption from sin that conferred upon the nation the divine mission of redeeming the world itself from evil. Already existing beliefs—that world salvation had begun with Christ, been continued with the Reformation, and given an earthly agent in the young republic—received a confirmation and an apotheosis. In the twentieth century, this belief in the nation’s messianic mission has coupled itself with secular liberalism’s project of universalizing human rights, by force if necessary. The rhetoric leading up to and justifying the Second Gulf War is one recent example, but the admixture of the two logics of redemption, millennial eschatology and secular teleology, has elicited valid suspicions of expansionism (markets, client states, geo-political influence) and accusations of ethically disproportional (mass destructive) means whenever the U.S. has embarked on a mission to make part of the world “safe for democracy.” During the Cold War, the realist Hans Morgenthau (who had thoroughly studied Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political) argued, in “Human Rights and Foreign Policy” and elsewhere, that the U.S. should resist the temptation to militarily impose its principles on the rest of humanity (meaning, the Third World), and Protestant realists writing for Christianity and Crisis magazine, such as Reinhold Niebuhr and John Bennett, called down the Judgment of God on what they perceived to be American hubris. After Vietnam, New Americanists such as Sacvan Bercovitch linked American neo-imperialism to the country’s Protestant eschatological idioms. One might question the motives behind certain of these critiques of messianism (as I have queried those of the Christian realists in my book God-Fearing and Free), but, notwithstanding caveats, it is a fact that America has committed political evils in the name of saving the world as well for the cause of preserving itself. And the cause has often been identified in expressly theological language as a sacred obligation.

This has implications for the prognosis Kahn has made about the future of American democracy. He is no less skeptical of the latter than he is of liberalism. Kahn is a believer in the sovereign (there is no politics without it), but he thinks the myth of popular sovereignty obscures the actual locations of power. It is institutional elites, abetted by mass media, who actually exercise the power to decide, even if they defer rhetorically to the popular sovereign. Yet Kahn does not appear to believe that a reversal of this power relationship is possible or even desirable. Certainly, he is no populist. In an essay written for Boston Review in 2002, “Democracy Won’t Help,” Kahn answers “pleas for a new American politics, one of mature deliberation among public-minded citizens who are willing to take a sober second look at their aroused passions,” by calling them utopian and misplaced. Discussion, whether in the public sphere or in Congress, will not alter the minds of the masses. Kahn believes that the U.S. has a moral obligation to use its power for the defense of strangers, to stop massive human rights violations, such as those in Bosnia, Rwanda, East Timor, and Kosovo; however, he believes the American people, by and large, are unwilling to make commitments of life and limb for something as abstract as human rights. A people cannot love a “universal,” and that, according to Kahn, is what a stranger’s humanity is. The alternative he proposes to discussion is strong executive leadership; without waiting for democratic or Congressional approval, the President can deploy “America’s immense military might,” and then mobilize the masses, pull them behind him, make them accept the exception. This recommendation 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. As this mediator, he can inspire “love” for moral right that the “universal” cannot.

Whether we live in the age of Bush or the age of Obama, reliance on charismatic presidential leadership is hardly an attractive option. The twentieth century had already seen an expansion of presidential power and a concentration on “the drama of the presidential personality,” justified by the need for the use of force and, since World War II, the assumption of a permanent war economy and wartime government (see Sean McCann, A Pinnacle of Feeling:  American Literature and Presidential Government). The president, expected to rise above particular interests and embody the popular will, invokes the messianic promise of America, recycling rhetoric of New Israel or sacrificial bloodshed. Woodrow Wilson, who took Lincoln as his inspiration, transformed the meaning of World War I into revelation, confusing the goal of multilateral peace with the world-historical destiny of the U.S. as political agent of millennial peace, an eschatological vision that, having the status, in Wilson’s mind, of a faith, may have contributed to his staunch and self-defeating refusal to compromise on the terms of Congressional ratification of the League of Nations. Wilson has often been faulted for his “idealism,” but if Wilson is guilty, his successors have no less abused his Biblical idiom and redeemer role. After committing U.S. air and naval forces, in 1950, without seeking authority from Congress, Harry Truman assured Americans, “We will win [in Korea] because God is with us.” Eisenhower, sanctified as a type of “Moses” or “Daniel” by evangelist Billy Graham, who baptized the thirty-fourth president in the Oval Office following his inauguration, led the nation in a prayer from the Capitol before committing the country to an escalated arms race, and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, author of the doctrine of massive retaliation, cited as his favorite Biblical quotation, “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose.” In John F. Kennedy’s celebrated 1961 inaugural address, he recalled Americans to “the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God” and required “high standards of strength and sacrifice” of his countrymen and allies. His frequently bellicose administration, which was committed to defeating (not containing) Communism, risked nuclear brinksmanship with Russia in defense of that civil religion. This was “God’s work,” as was the use of secret forces (JFK glamorized the CIA) to skirt public scrutiny. Allen Dulles (Director, 1953-1961), who saw the intelligence agency as the chief executive’s elite cadre, had chiseled into the marble at the entrance to CIA Headquarters “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (John 8:32).” Dulles had in mind the truth of secret channels serving a public kept ignorant for its best interests, and in his book, The Craft of Intelligence (1963), he finds the genesis of his profession in the soothsayers, oracles, prophets, and holy men who revealed the future so that the ruler could act in harmony with divine intention. Lyndon Baines Johnson, building on the mystique and mythology of Kennedy-as-martyr (the Dean of the National Cathedral called the late president’s assassination a “new crucifixion”), would use his predecessor’s legacy to justify, among other causes, increasing American military involvement in Vietnam. Johnson exhorted Americans to re-consecrate the “God-given vision and determination to make the sacrifices demanded by our responsibilities” (remarks on the National Day of Prayer, 1965). Surely the American public has often been poorly informed, distracted, or ideologically blinded about the issues at stake in these periods, but charismatic executive leadership, especially in the Christological guise, has been no reliable substitute.

Kahn’s political theology describes the pathology of the imperial presidency, but he seems to think it is our boldest alternative, liberalism being such a leaky vessel and democracy so fundamentally irrational. At stake for Kahn, it seems, is the institutional elite’s ability to recognize political evil, see its rootedness in the duality of the human will, and therefore take steps to moderate and re-direct the country’s political behavior. Schmitt rued the Enlightenment (its secularism, humanism, rationalism) for eliminating the moral drama inhering in the political by making government mundane, concrete, positivistic. Kahn also shares the desire to reinvigorate our political life by restoring a sense of its “metaphysical” dimension, intuitively grasped by theology and its sacral texts. If Kahn were to pay more attention to actual prophetic speech instead of “secularized theological concepts,” he would see how public religions can work compatibly with liberal democratic politics, as the Social Gospel, the SCLC, the Catholic Worker movement, the Fellowship for Reconciliation, the National Council of Churches,  Clergy and Laymen Concerned, and Call to Renewal have done so in the past, to affirm norms, advocate for them, and contribute to the arguments over how they should be applied. The condition of greater cooperation is a healthy and tolerant public sphere, and this condition will not be fulfilled by impugning the Enlightenment’s legacy, especially when the denigration is premised upon a critique of Enlightenment and an account of secularization as tenuous as Kahn’s and Schmitt’s. Kahn makes some well-taken local arguments about the inconsistencies between liberal theory and democratic myth-making, between popular sovereignty and the actual locations of decision-making in American life, but America has thankfully never been quite the kind of political-theological project he depicts, and that has a good deal to do with the secular, humanist, rationalist traditions that Kahn disdains. Any liberal democracy that would rely for its political conscience on galvanizing nationalistic beliefs in shared experiences of pain, sacrifice, and mythic transcendence would be as spurious as Schmitt imagined most modern Western states to be, though they would be deserving of condemnation for reasons that Schmitt, the reactionary, considered too worldly to be moral.

*  *  *

NS: Since you’ve just been in Egypt, I wonder if we can start by talking about some of your reflections on the Arab Spring. How would you characterize what has changed in the Middle East, and in the world?

TA: I wouldn’t say that I’m competent to talk about the whole world, but I think it’s an extremely encouraging development in the Middle East. The bravery and courage and idealism of the people was really something to watch and to listen to. It is quite true, as everybody says, that, whatever happens, we’ll never go back to square one in Egypt. But a lot of the other things that people want, I suspect, may not be realized. There won’t be social justice—there won’t be all sorts of reforms that the pro-democracy activists called for. Currents and forces both inside the country and out will ensure that it doesn’t proceed as many people had hoped at the beginning. It’s much more complicated than accounts in the media would lead us to believe. I’ve been trying to make sense of it myself ever since I arrived in Cairo. But, you know, I’m a pessimist about all sorts of things—politics included.

NS: What was it like to be there in the midst of a revolution?

TA: Even before my wife and I went, people kept saying to us, “Are you sure it’s safe?” Our Air France plane was actually cancelled. We were due to go on the 29th of January. We eventually left on the 12th of February, via Paris. We weren’t even able to go directly to Cairo, either. We had to go through Beirut. Then, all sorts of people starting ringing, again asking, “Is it safe? Are you sure you’ll be safe? We’ve heard all sorts of frightening things.” Remember the stories circulating early in the uprising about the prisons that had been opened and the police being withdrawn from the streets? That was what the fear was about. People wouldn’t believe me, but I was there for four months, almost, and I went all over town and never encountered any violence. I didn’t have any friends who could attribute violence to the uprisings—which isn’t to say it didn’t happen. Cairo contains eighteen million people, so it has always had its fair share of criminality. But ordinary life, actually, continued. Cafes were open, and shops, restaurants, and so on. You’d often hear that foreigners were in danger, or that ordinary life was impossible, but that is really not true.

NS: Impossible, that is, without the control of the state and the police?

TA: Exactly. There are elements in Egypt that were quite happy to circulate stories of unrest. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces talked again and again about the fact that we must have stability, which is then linked ominously to questions about the state of the economy. Since the economy suffers from the political instability in the country, they say, we shouldn’t have more demonstrations or strikes. But one of the things that emerged for me there, and which I’m trying to make sense of, was the constant flow of speculation, of suspicion, about who’s saying and who’s doing what. Why are they doing this? Are they really doing it for good reasons? Is it the army? The Muslim Brothers? Is their presence or absence significant? Do they mean what they say?—You know, that sort of thing. I can’t claim to have made good sense of it yet, but, to me, this seems very important.

NS: The fault lines of Egyptian society definitely seem to be shifting, and maybe suspicion is a consequence of that. We saw lots of images here of Muslims and Christians watching over each other in Tahrir Square, for instance.

TA: I was very pleased to see these expressions of solidarity.

NS: A lot was made of the fact that their demands were economic and political rather than explicitly religious. Did you see, or did you sense, that this suspicion was part of a novel form of secularity emerging on the streets there?

TA: My own work has questioned the mutually exclusive categorization of the secular and the religious, and I think there is lots of evidence, empirical and analytic, to show that the way in which secularity has been thought of conventionally won’t do to understand all that has occurred in recent history. Just recently, I saw scenes on Democracy Now! of people carrying placards with slogans for the camera, in Arabic, which said, “We insist on the trial of such and such,” but which started off with “Allahu akbar!” These utterances were not seen as inconsistent. I saw this myself in Tahrir Square. Egyptians use these expressions, like inshallah—God willing—all the time. As far as expressions are concerned, there was such spillover in all sorts of ways.

NS: But does that linguistic spillover go so far as to affect how institutions are being transformed?

TA: They may, to the extent that language use carries sentiment, hopes, and fears about social changes. There is discussion about whether the new Egypt will be a secular state or not. Many among the Muslim Brothers and those who are sympathetic to them have said, of course, that they are against a secular state. But they’re not saying they want a religious state either. Instead, they’re talking about having a dawla madaneyya, which literally means a “civil state.” What that implies isn’t entirely clear yet. But the insistence by people that they want neither a religious state nor a secular one has appeared again and again in all sorts of discussions.

NS: Such ambiguity might be disappointing to some secularists watching from the West.

TA: But it isn’t a straightforward question, in any event, of unambiguous “secularism” arising in that context. What will emerge in Egypt, in terms of both practical politics and thinking about politics, and the role of religion, is still very open.

NS: Do you think something had to change in the minds of people to build this kind of movement? Take the assassination of Anwar Sadat, compared to the uprising against Mubarak. One had machine guns and grenades, and the other had millions out in the street, mostly peacefully. What accounts for the difference?

TA: Well, it isn’t as if the recent events were totally without precedent.

NS: No, there had been decades of organizing—and, of course, there was the example of Tunisia.

TA: There had been strikes and demonstrations for a long time, and there was the Kefaya movement, although it was rather limited and somewhat elitist. But peaceful protests in the past have not attracted much attention from the Western media. I do think things have changed, but I don’t think it was quite like a conversion, so to speak, nor was it all pre-arranged and carefully thought out as a revolution. In some cases, people discover that they’ve got some power they didn’t think they had—even a technique that they don’t intentionally develop, but which they suddenly find themselves with and begin to understand. Maybe one needs to think of the uprising as more than a technique for getting rid of a despotic regime, but as a mode of existence, almost. The novelist Alaa Al Aswani said in an interview with The Independent that being part of this revolution is “like being in love.” I don’t think it’s quite like that. You might say, actually, that it’s more like a religious experience.

NS: Does the sense of suspicion that you were talking about fit into those comparisons? Is it like jealousy in love, or doubt in religion? How uniquely Egyptian is it?

TA: I’ve been thinking of it as something intrinsic to revolutionary situations. If you look back even to the French Revolution, and certainly to the Russian Revolution, that’s exactly what always happens. The revolution eats its own children, as the saying goes—partly because there’s so much at stake. There are so many enemies, and you don’t know who they are or who will do what. I see it simply as part of such a situation, which can never be resolved by final answers because it is always generating new questions on one side or another. No revolution is ever finished.

NS: Can you say more about how that suspicion took form in Cairo?

TA: I had a discussion with some friends of mine just before the March 19 referendum, and all the left-wing ones were saying that they’d be voting no. I remember thinking that it doesn’t quite add up. To say no would be to say that there would be no elections in September for the national assembly as originally planned, and that the army would stay on ruling the country for another year and a half. And yet these same people had already said that they didn’t trust the army! “Yes,” they said, “but we want the army to be replaced by a committee of three civilians.” But you know that’s not going to happen, I said. So there seems to be a certain inconsistency here: one becomes so suspicious about some possibilities that where one should be suspicious one isn’t.

NS: Since coming back to the United States, have you noticed a shift in how the West perceives the Muslim world?

TA: Well, I don’t read newspapers regularly—so you might be in a better position to answer that than I.

NS: Really? Why don’t you read newspapers?

TA: It’s not that I have any sound reason for it. I haven’t read newspapers for thirty years because I find that, for some reason, they tend to break up my mind. They write about so many different things, and you’re always going from one thing to another, and then on to another, unrelated to the last. I like to read journals—weeklies. I also watch Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! and some of the news programs on Russia Today. Listening to TV newscasts is less disruptive, strangely. So I’m not sure I can adequately answer your first question as to whether there has been a change in Western depictions of the Muslim world or not.

NS: I suppose I’m thinking about the difference between the images we saw of the “Arab Street” in Tunis and Cairo and, say, those during the Danish cartoon controversy—

TA: Shouting, and the rest.

NS: Yes, shouting, and burning flags, intense violence, people getting killed and killing each other—this sort of self-immolating fury. And then, suddenly, we have this other set of images, where two dictators get knocked off in the space of a few months, in a relatively orderly and impressive way.

TA: I think one should distinguish between the cartoon affair, which mostly involved Muslim immigrants in Europe, and the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere. Western media haven’t been interested in the long history of political protests and strikes in Egypt, say, as they have been in the sexy cartoon affair. The significance of the current uprisings is not just that they are peaceful. It’s that they indicate a major unsettling of a region strategically crucial to Western powers.

NS: What do you think made the Danish cartoon incident such a crisis?

TA: I’ve written about this at length in several places a couple of years ago. I think it was partly the continuing obtuseness of liberals, especially in Europe—liberals who are almost never consistently liberal. That particular scandal was unfair to the immigrants, and somewhat hypocritical. Liberals like to say that everything should be up for criticism. But we know it isn’t. And now in the US we have a state that is increasingly invading our privacy, and there seems to be very little resistance to that from liberal intellectuals. Anyway, shouldn’t we be more disturbed by the intellectual undermining of things we think of as eminently rational and decent? We should be ready to ask ourselves whether perhaps they’re not quite as rational or decent as we thought. But instead of learning how to deal with immigrants as part of our society we think of them as invaders.

NS: It sounds like the revolutionary suspicion that you were talking about earlier—seeing enemies everywhere except where it matters most.

TA: Normally, the element of hypocrisy in itself is not terribly interesting. What interests me more is that the cartoon scandal raises questions about how we think of freedom, including religious freedom, and about the language that is used to defend some of the things we think of as most valuable, if not sacred, to us.

NS: In the case of the cartoon controversy, for instance, free speech.

TA: Yes, if you want to put it that way.

NS: What’s being asserted, then, when Western, secular liberals claim that a cartoon about Muhammad is free speech and shouldn’t be apologized for? What is encoded in that claim?

TA: I think one thing that’s encoded there is a certain attitude toward religion in general, toward Islam in particular, and also the attitude that nothing is sacred. But there is also a sense of “these wretched immigrants who don’t understand our culture.” The encoding in this whole cartoon affair was a secularist one, which categorized the cartoons as free speech, even if they were deliberately provocative—not just deliberately provocative, but insulting. Why do it? What’s the motive? I’m talking about speculation and suspicion; what is the motive for wanting to attack Muslims? Why not just say, “If you riot in the streets or kill somebody, I’m afraid you’ll have to suffer the consequences under the law”?

NS: Well, wasn’t there a principle at stake: the right to provoke if one so wishes, and to criticize religious beliefs?

TA: Yes, but why do we want to exercise that right in some cases and not in others? I’m not just after prejudice, but the morphology of our provocative choices. There was much talk, sentimental and romantic, of a duty to fight for the right to free speech. As soon as an incident like this happens, we’re immediately regaled with stories about Bruno at the stake, and the Catholic Church, and so on. One doesn’t quite have to think in these terms. Our problems are not medieval problems. The challenges are not the same. For God’s sake, let’s think clearly! All this complaining about religious dogmatism—we know very well that some of these secular critics are about as closed-minded as you can get on all sorts of issues. Even as eminent a theorist as John Rawls says that certain kinds of reasoning should not be allowed into the domain of politics because all they do is create irresolvable conflict, so that only what liberals deem rational can be allowed to enter public space. Is it the case that religion always produces conflict that can’t be resolved peacefully? Doesn’t secular provocation—“fighting words”—lead to violent conflict? Does every conflict in society have to be “resolvable”? Of course there have to be limits on provocation.

NS: What about the election in the Palestinian territories of Hamas, or even the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood right now in Egypt? There’s this incredible suspicion right now in the West, which views these factions as unpredictable and uncontrollable, and we’ve taken political measures to suppress them. Is that a kind of censorship, too?

TA: Yes, I think you’re right. The need to control and predict non-Western movements is what it’s partly about. But let me give you an example of what I think happens, mistakenly, in the explanations secularists give of the Muslim Brothers. The Brothers’ ideas are really, in many respects, in a state of flux. The younger members often contest or disobey the directives of their leaders. There are different currents within the movement itself. Their present situation is also an expression of the fact that—and most people in the West don’t know this—the Muslim Brotherhood was savagely repressed by past Egyptian governments for 60 years. They have been put in prison, hanged, tortured, exiled. I say this not because I think one should be sympathetic to them because of what they’ve suffered, but because, like so many people who have suffered, they have developed an instinct for mere survival. In my view, having talked to some of them, simply how to survive politically, as an organization, is what their leadership has learnt best over time. Their minds are focused on that aim and have become rigidified. They’re not able to think freely enough yet—about freedom of thought, speech, and action—to take advantage of the new situation.

NS: Perhaps, when repression is involved, suspicion can turn to paranoia.

TA: Yes, for both persecutors and persecuted. Because the Muslim Brothers have contradictory positions and are in many respects confused, my friends in Egypt say, “Ah, you see? They say one thing and mean another! One member says this and another says that!” What could quite reasonably be seen as fluidity, uncertainty, and disagreement on their part gets represented as speaking with a forked tongue. I’ve heard so often the remark: “This is just a game that the Muslim Brothers play.” This makes me wonder whether anybody else in politics plays games! Liberals? Socialists? Conservatives? Don’t they say one thing and then do another, or compromise on their principles for the sake of practical ends? That is, in part, how an obsessive suspicion closes off the mind to any serious attempt at understanding what’s going on. For most of my left-wing friends, the Muslim Brotherhood equals hypocrisy and the hidden determination to establish a totalitarian state. I think this a priori suspicion is wrong. I don’t think, by the way, that there’s even a danger of anything like that happening. In comparison to other groups, like Hamas and Hezbollah—with whom, I should say, I do have sympathies—the Muslim Brothers do not have a militant wing. This hasn’t been sufficiently recognized. In the past they were involved in violence, but for many decades now they’ve moved away from it toward a more or less parliamentary line—like Eurocommunism—rather than a revolutionary one.

NS: But isn’t the concern about what could happen if they were voted into a position of power over the police and the military in Egypt?

TA: Yes, but the point is that they would have to get into that position of power in the first place, and the military isn’t their instrument. There’s always a possibility, of course, that they might become a dominant force in government and that they might use the police repressively, like the Mubarak regime. But would that mean a totalitarian government was imminent? For God’s sake, even in the United States the police are used to harass various kinds of movement—peace movements, ecological movements. The security measures now in place here have deeply invaded our liberties and privacy. Still, the United States is not (yet) a totalitarian state, it’s a secular state and it’s highly unlikely that its secularism will be abandoned anytime soon. In Egypt the Muslim Brothers would have to have a very substantial presence in the national assembly before they could do anything really significant, and I doubt that they will have that. In any case we don’t even know what policies the Muslim Brothers would support as members of a government, because the policies haven’t been sufficiently formulated and agreed upon yet. Let’s bear in mind the difference between the promises made by Obama the candidate and the decisions taken by Obama the president. They tell us that democracy is all about compromise and being realistic.

NS: Consider someone who would oppose a right-wing, religious party in the United States. Is there any difference between opposing such a thing in one’s own country, where one understands what’s at stake and what’s at play, and opposing an ostensibly similar party in a foreign country, just by saying, “I wouldn’t want that myself”?

TA: Yes, I can understand that—

NS: Or is there something different that we have to understand about the other society that makes the two incomparable?

TA: I can understand why many people would equate the religious right here and the religious movements there. But I don’t think that they’re directly comparable. There is a difference, and I think part of it comes from the savage repression in Egypt of the Muslim Brothers, which the religious right in the U.S. has not had to undergo. This doesn’t justify anything in particular, but it’s something that one has to think about. And, connected with that, there’s the fact that the Brotherhood is a movement that has been resisting what I would call Western imperialism, whereas that isn’t true of the religious right in the U.S., which, on the contrary, very often supports it. Now, I don’t want to be understood to be saying that simply because the Muslim Brothers oppose imperialism they’re beyond reproach. What I’m saying is that it’s more complicated. During the Brotherhood’s rise in the 1930s, it was strongly anti-British. And the United States has been constantly intervening in Egypt after the British left—even supporting Mubarak right until the very end—and that’s not going to be lost on the Muslim Brothers, although it’s still an open question as to whether they and the U.S. government will now regard each other as implacable enemies.

NS: How much does the fact of their being religious fuel the suspicion leveled against them in the West and among liberals generally? Should it?

TA: I don’t think, in principle, that just because a movement declares itself to be religious, it should be made the object of special suspicion. In my view, one shouldn’t trust anyone who hankers after state power, whether they call themselves religious or secular. The modern state is at once one of the most brutal sources of oppression and a necessary means for providing common benefits to citizens. Whether it is secular or religious seems to me much less important than the fact that it is a state. If we look back over the twentieth century and this should become obvious.

NS: How does having grown up and having been educated on both sides of the colonial divide affect how you look at situations like this? You often see colonialism where other people are blind to it, it seems.

TA: Yes, but I’m also sometimes irritated by people who would like to explain everything in terms of colonialism. That is just so crude. I also find myself resisting people who say that colonialism has nothing to do with the present situation because colonialism is dead and gone. My own feeling is that what people assert or deny is due to colonialism should be constantly interrogated. In our world, external intervention by strong powers, superpowers, or the superpower, is a fact of life. The United States has been intervening in the Middle East for a long time—it would be surprising if it didn’t!

NS: Is such intervention the same as the old colonialism? Or can it be better than that?

TA: It’s neither better nor worse, but it’s certainly not the same. I recall something Hillary Clinton said, in some conference or other, to the effect that in the end the government is concerned not with promoting democracy, as such, but with promoting America’s national interest. That would have to come first. At the same time, she said she would be the happiest of persons if the two things converged—which of course makes the ideal of democracy into an instrument, not an ideal. But I can understand that. I can see why she would say that, because power is what the modern state is about. I can see why the US would want to have what it calls “stability in the region,” a region in which the US has such immense interests—in its oil, in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in the confrontation with Iran, and so on. I can see that they would want to have, in every country, some kind of influence, if possible. I might want to attribute everything to colonialism or imperialism, but I think that won’t do. But then nor would I want to say, “Don’t blame imperialism, it’s all your own fault really!” It’s not a question of fault, it’s a question of the way in which various forces collide and intervene and shape what are regarded as national interests.

NS: It’s interesting that you seem so accepting of this interventionist order—

TA: No, I am not accepting of it, certainly not. I’m trying to see things as they really are. But, at the same time, I’m aware that this means not being able to invoke one’s own moral position very easily. Perhaps that’s why I said, early on, that I am a pessimist. I have felt for a long time now that we have gradually—and when I say “we,” I mean everybody in the modern world, and I’ll say more about that—worked ourselves into a situation that is truly tragic, in the Greek sense of having no real resolution. There are the most awful prospects before us, with the kind of technological warfare we now have, with the fantastic extension of consumerism and money, with the consequent growing gap between the very poor and the very rich, with the destruction of the environment, and with the ramifications of climate change and nuclear energy. I really hope that this is simply a sign of my being old. It may well be, because I don’t see things in the way that a younger person would, I’m sure. I see it all as being absolutely disastrous. But people will try to resist, and they should.

NS: How? I think of the Human Terrain Teams that were dispatched in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which anthropologists and other experts in local culture and language would be embedded with military units. Should an anthropologist, someone with a more textured view of what’s happening on the ground, be a part of that process of intervention so as somehow to improve it?

TA: No, certainly not—absolutely not. That’s not resistance, that’s collusion. I remember talking once a long time ago with Edward Said about empire and how it might be defeated. We were just sitting and having coffee, and at one point I responded to some of his suggestions by saying, “No, no, this won’t work. You can’t resist these forces.” So he demanded a little irritably: “What should one do? What would you do?” So I said, “Well, all one can do is to try and make them uncomfortable.” Which was really a very feeble reply, but I couldn’t think of anything else. But it doesn’t follow from a pessimistic outlook that one just has to accept things as they are and ask fellow anthropologists to do the same. In any case, I’m very much against the kind of involvement you mention, making things smoother for empire.

NS: What was it you wanted to say about the “we”?

TA: Oh. When I was a young man, I used to hear and read about the marvels of European civilization, about how Europe had achieved so much, and how the Muslim world, and others, hadn’t. Even China was nowhere then. It was Europe that led the world. People used to speak about “European civilization,” you know, at one time. Then the language gradually shifted, and it’s interesting to trace some of those shifts in language. Now, more and more, one hears people who are very sensitive to our impending disasters talking about how mankind will destroy itself, how mankind has brought itself to a position where it will destroy itself. I find that to be an interesting shift, the move from praising one’s distinctive “civilization” when one thinks of positive things, in order to be able to say to others, “You haven’t been able to achieve these things.” And then, when you’re in a bloody mess to which there may be no solution, you talk about “mankind” having brought itself to the brink of disaster.

NS: “We’re all in it together.”

TA: And in a sense we are—it’s true. But maybe we aren’t all equally responsible. People in villages in India, or Africa, or Latin America—they’re not responsible for climate change. There’s an interesting way in which one says, not only, “We’re all in this together, so let’s work together,” which is fine. But “It’s everybody’s fault”? That’s different. As one used to say in school, trying to spread the blame around, “It’s not only my fault, sir! All of us, we all made this mess!” It’s that kind of cowardly reaction I’m referring to.

NS: Whose fault is it, then?

TA: Again, it’s not a question of fault. There’s a long history of human choices that is leading us all, unintentionally, to where we shall soon be—at a dead end. Some of these choices were more momentous, affecting far more people, than other choices. Some of us now are in a more powerful position to choose than others are. “Mankind” is not an agent.

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.”

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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.

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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.

*  *  *

What does political theology describe that at the same time eludes political theory? Political theology begins with the existential, and thus pre-legal, moment of revolution and sacrifice to make sense of modern political experience; for revolution, as a form of war, entails sacrifice. That is to say, in war, sovereignty, or preserving the life of the people at all costs, is affirmed. But at the origins of political experience, life, or society, is not merely defended. In the beginning, or, in theological language, at the “Creation” of sovereignty, the community of the living is constituted, as are the structures put in place so that it can be maintained. This constituting moment is called revolution. It is the exceptional moment, the moment of the (declared) exception, the moment of (popular) sovereignty.

But is this just an example of an incomplete break from “premodern forms of religious influence on political order”? No, says Kahn: political theology argues instead for “the discovery of the persistence of forms of the sacred in a world that no longer relies upon God. [It] 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.”

Here we are at the heart of Kahn’s argument. Indeed, it is the key point that Kahn insists must be taken away from Carl Schmitt’s classic Political Theology: Four Chapters on Sovereignty, around which his own book is structured. First published in 1922, at the dawn of the Weimar era in Germany and on the heels of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which effectively subordinated Germany to England and France (its two main rival European powers) and stripped it of its colonial holdings—forcibly rendering it, as one theorist has said, “a postcolonial state in a still colonial world”—Schmitt’s Political Theology offered an account of contemporary political experience given the crisis of (German) sovereignty, or the collapse of German peoplehood. Schmitt saw this moment of political crisis as an existential crisis tantamount to death, and as a threat to which liberal political theory as such could not respond. Surrounded by perceived enemies without (its revival European and imperial competitors) and within (the Jew as abject), Germany faced an existential crisis that could be summed up in the Shakespearean phrase: “to be or not to be . . . .” Thus, Schmitt took the question of the political to be at best only secondarily a question of law or constitutionalism. It was principally a question, rather, of authenticity, of being. Hence, “the political,” as Kahn explains, “begins with the distinction of friends from enemies. This is a world in which subjecthood—who you are—makes all the difference.” Schmitt understood that the future of Europe would develop in accordance with such a concept of the political.

Kahn’s objective is to seize upon Schmitt’s deepest insights precisely at this juncture. Now, while I wish he would have done more reflection on the issue of identity (i.e., identity as subject and object, and even more, as abject, as Jews came to be figured within the political field, of which he says nothing at all; I will return to this below), Kahn is surely right to attend to this part of the Schmittian description of politics, sovereignty, and the exception in his effort “to develop a political theology for our [post-Cold War, post-September 11] time.”

When political theology takes the Western political imagination as its object of inquiry—in Schmitt’s case, post-World War I Germany; in Kahn’s and our case, the United States in the age of the war on terror—what is discovered? Kahn argues that one finds an imagination of the exception, or of exceptionalism, as a practice of “ultimate meaning.” Exceptionalism functions within a political and social imaginary fueled by a quest to secure national life by holding at bay an imagined death (think of the ticking time bomb scenario, which the television series 24 put on cinematic display) at the hands of a perpetual if undefined enemy.

This imaginary thus includes as a basic possibility the suspension of law and the use of violence. Exceptionalism, in other words, functions within an imaginary that rests, beyond the rule of law, on the sovereignty of the people, which, before being legal, is first and always existential, a sovereignty that decides who lives and who must die for the sake of life itself, or the preservation of the people. Within this framework for understanding modern political experience, sovereignty is what enables law (not the other way round) and law is shaped by sovereignty, which, as a logic of sacrifice, is invested in securing life over death—by means of death.

The experience of political sovereignty for the sake of life over death, or for the sake of the life that at all costs must stave off death, exceeds theory and discourse. It is a matter of authenticity and freedom, through which the sacred—our own sacredness—appears in history. This is what political theology describes as it looks back to the originary moment of sovereignty, and it is what liberal or political theory cannot describe, and cannot describe because of what might be thought of as its own melancholic disavowal and reinscription of its origins.

*  *  *

From my perspective as a theologian and critical theorist of religion, one of the great gifts of Kahn’s book, as a constructive interaction with Schmitt on the notion of the exception, are the possibilities that it opens up for understanding what’s at stake in the discourse of theology as a mode of humanistic inquiry into the current political machinations of our world, and of America as a state of exception/alism. With Kahn we begin to understand why theology ought not to be reduced to being the parochial or fideistic pursuit of like-minded, if at times fractious, believers and increasingly inconsequential theologians, though far too often, certainly, it is this too. As Carl Schmitt once said, in a letter to Jacob Taubes, “everything is theological, except what the theologians are talking about.” Zeroing in on the heart of Schmitt’s thinking about the political (despite that he put his insights to fascist ends), Kahn calls attention to the form of political life that is coordinated with Christian theological and doctrinal ideas. And it’s worth saying again that I speak of the Christianity that has been collapsed into the project of West. Kahn has put his finger on how the political in which we have come to “live and move and have our being,” as St. Paul put it (Acts 17:28), is a theological field, a field, as I would put it, whose deepest operations remain “Christian”  (again, as it came to be bound up with Western hegemony), though it functions between the denial and the forgetfulness of its ongoing theological being.

Political theology refuses to dwell in such forgetfulness and denial. It attends to sovereignty as the alpha and omega of modern political experience.  It calls attention to the moment of destruction and construction, the moment of apocalyptic eschatology and sovereign creation, that lies at the heart of lived political experience, an experience that also lays claim to the sacred. The political is a sacred field. Inasmuch as it is a correlate of Christian theology, it sovereignly posits itself as “a joint community of gods and men” (Cicero), the community of the God-Man. This is the moment of sovereignty, the constitutive moment of We the People.

Moreover, political theology understands that mediating between eschatology (the telos of such a community) and creation (its origin), between death (as a threat to the community) and life (as its preservation at all costs), is atoning sacrifice. Therefore, atonement is at the heart of the political. Kahn notes, “Our tradition of the theological—in both its religious and political forms has always modeled that double moment of destruction and creation as sacrifice. Sacrifice has been our tradition in the democratic revolutions of the past, on the battlefields of the great wars of the nineteenth and twentieth century, and perhaps now in the sites of confrontation with the terrorist.”

Kahn’s final chapter brings the argument home by turning to the biblical story of the sacrifice of Isaac. This story of sacrifice is the singular narrative of the preservation of the father(-land) in the person of Abraham and the appearance of the divine or the sacred in history to authorize or legitimate self-preservation. History, Kahn notes, unfolds as sovereign sacrifice for sake of the life of the people. This biblical story is at the root of modern politics. It portrays our politics as a politics of sacrifice, which is to say, as a politics that carries out a logic of atoning death to preserve the nation. It is a story in which the human is conceived of as fundamentally a sacrificial animal, a being caught within a kind of “death contract” (Abdul JanMohamed), or within a politics that is always and fundamentally a “necropolitics” (Achille Mbembe).

Theologically, this way of understanding the story of the sacrifice of Isaac eventually became a hermeneutical key for interpreting the death of Jesus Christ, who in classical Christian thought is the God-Man, the head of the ecclesial community. In this way, modern political experience, as the experience of sovereignty, acquired footing in the life of Jesus Christ (i.e., Christology) and in his death (i.e., soteriology, or atonement theory). All of this is to say that death is a most strange political gift, as we have learned from Jacques Derrida, a gift in dialectical relationship with life.

To grasp the deep architecture of the political today, therefore, is to venture into the theological domains of Christology and especially atonement, that area of theology (particularly, Christian theology) that deals with the logic of (redemptive) death. But the journey cannot be simply phenomenological in the way Kahn carries it out. Or, put differently, it may need to be phenomenological, but in a way that Kahn himself has not considered. Atonement thinking, and the “death contract” that binds politics, must, from within a different phenomenology (and therefore from within a different approach to political theology), be redirected. There must be a new future of death and the political.

*  *  *

I have only scratched the surface of Kahn’s richly provocative and, indeed, on so many levels, clarifying text, mainly in celebration of what he has accomplished in it. But I have also just suggested that we must not rest with his phenomenology of the political. I want to conclude with a few thoughts meant to gesture toward what I mean.

Earlier I mentioned that I wish Kahn would have reflected more on the issue of identity formation (i.e., the making of subjects, objects, and abjects) in the constitution and in the telos of the politico-theological field of political experience. This is an important matter, for it provokes the question of what an account of modern political experience, generally, and U.S. exceptionalism, particularly, might look like if it were tied to actual bodies in the world. It is precisely here that Kahn’s account of political theology does not go far enough.

For the most part, Kahn carries out his fine analysis of political theology from a vantage point that privileges those constituted as subjects in the political field of the sovereign We the People. What might a politico-theological examination of the political look like if it were carried out from the vantage of those constructed as “enemy,” or, moreover, (and this is what I’m most interested in) from the vantage of those deemed “abject”?

My colleague Rey Chow (see The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism), drawing on Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz, and others, notes that abject is that which is neither wholly a part of the body nor wholly apart from it. Examples of abject substances are tears, saliva, feces, and urine. In terms of political theology as a description of the field of the political, the abject is neither friend (subject) nor enemy (object). The abject exists in the zone between life (full citizenship) and death (the enemy as one who must be killed). As with tears and similar substances that are never fully expelled from the body but that it rather produces as waste matter to maintain itself as a “clean and proper body,” so too is the abject within the field of political theology. Thus, even more than the enemy, it is the abject, as that which is produced in order to maintain the cleanliness and propriety of the body politic, that might prove to be key in understanding the field of the political as a sacred field of sacrificial sovereignty.

Thus, the abject is a figure neither of life nor of death but of living death, or, as Orlando Patterson has put it, of “social death.” This space in-between is both a precarious space of brutality and a flexible space that can be the harbinger of new possibilities. Kathleen McKittrick, in her work on black women in modern social space, has called this “the space between the legs” (see Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle). It is a space that crushes, but also a space that functions as a “loophole of retreat” (Harriet Jacobs), where the project of the human is carried out in a different key. In its flexibility, it is the space of the death of death itself and the space of new human life. The quintessential figure of this political space is the figure of the slave, modernity’s abject par excellence. Could it be that this is the sacrificial figure, along with this figure’s unassimilable progeny, who actually funds sovereignty or peoplehood in the making or constitution of normalized social and political space? And could it be that this is the figure who offers an alternative site, a space “to be” politically otherwise?

Most accounts of political theology today do not approach the political from the vantage of abjection. A qualified exception—no pun intended—can be found in the work of Giorgio Agamben. Agamben, however, theorizes the homo sacer (the abject) as passive, without agency, and therefore does not consider the possibility of an agency particular to the homo sacer—an agency through death itself. Put somewhat differently, death, according to Agamben, is that which acts upon the homo sacer, and not that through which it acts to risk transforming the political structure and experience of death itself. It is perhaps this mode of “abject agency” that Frederick Douglass, to cite but one example, gave voice to in his 1845 Narrative, in which, after his fight with Covey, he declared a “resurrection” of the abject self in the transformed subjectivity of the slave with the words, “I rose.”

My point in positing this other possibility is to suggest that the political experience of abjection, as a mode of being politically otherwise, can supplement, if not reorient, Agamben’s as well as Kahn’s (and others’) work on political theology. But for Kahn to have pulled off a phenomenology of this sort, one that begins with the lived experience of abjection and incorporates the friend-enemy-abject distinction as it has been pressed into the flesh, he would have needed a different set of interlocutors. Among these could have been transnational black intellectuals (or similarly positioned figures), a number of them contemporaries of Schmitt, who in thinking in terms of their own position of abjection, and the position of black folks more broadly in the socio-political and cultural world of modernity, were themselves engaged in reflections on political theology, though many of them did not use the term “political theology” to describe what they were doing. They had to think and act from within what W. E. B. Du Bois often referred to, in an allusion to the psalmist of the Hebrew Bible, as “the Valley of the Shadow Death.”

Besides Du Bois and Douglass, in this group we find thinkers like Olaudah Equiano and Phyllis Wheatley, David Walker and Maria Stewart, and others like Richard Wright and Caribbean intellectuals Amié Césaire, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Édouard Glissant, and, contemporarily, Sylvia Wynter, Paul Gilroy, and Toni Morrison. This tradition of wide-ranging thinkers has approached the concerns of political theology, concerns over sovereignty in the creation and telos of the field of the political in colonial modernity (which of course is not apart from the field of the social and the cultural), from the sites of abjection and “social death.” Such abject sites are those of the slave ship, the transatlantic slave routes, the slave plantation, the black body itself, or what Fanon called “the lived experience of the black.” These were the sites where sacrificial sovereignty, or normalized peoplehood, was constituted—and contested—in modernity. These were sites of the death-world—the excremental sites, wastelands, archipelagoes (Wynter), and uninhabitable zones of under- and uneven development that helped maintain and regulate Western political life-worlds, worlds like the United States and the European metropoles.

In providing phenomenological descriptions of political sovereignty from the vantage point of abjection, black intellectuals of the sort just named have been involved in a project similar to the one Kahn embarks upon in Political Theology. They have been about the task of both describing and renarrating death, of trying to think toward a new future of atonement and therefore toward a new future of the political itself.

Perhaps the next horizon of political theology as a mode of inquiry is to learn from these and similar kinds of intellectuals. Perhaps it is to begin the work of political theology (understood as a phenomenology of the political) neither from the subject (the citizen) nor the object (the enemy), but from the abject (the one who is “both-and” and “neither-nor”). Until then, we have been given much to think about with Paul W. Kahn’s fine and timely book.