Recontesting the Sacred: political theology as ideological method

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the contribution that political theology can make to the study of political ideologies. In foregrounding the interaction between theological and political ways of thinking, political theology traces the lingering presence of the sacred in secular politics. It refers not merely to religious doctrines but also to a variety of ways of registering the ‘extraordinary’ dimension in modern political orders. We sketch the development of political theological analysis from the sovereign-centric account famously proffered by Carl Schmitt to more recent versions that identify the sacred with a plurality of struggles against secular power. New types of ideological formation, we argue, can be interpreted as instances of this latter political theology, particularly those expressing what we call a radical politics of redemption that recontests the moral foundations of politics. Although highly divergent, these typically underscore the threat to a specified sacred source, make appeals to the lived experience of suffering and mobilize supporters as a model of communion seeking moral healing. We consider the example of contemporary populism to illustrate this redemptive mode of theological politics and recommend political theology, a method that can supplement the study of political ideology. Ideological analysis has had to come to terms with recent political phenomena that might be described as ‘post-ideological’ and that cannot be slotted easily into existing definitional categories. How to define contemporary forms of populism that have, at best, a ‘thin-centred’ ideational structure and which might be better understood as a kind of ‘performative’ politics rather than a distinct worldview? What about conspiracy theories that construct bizarre and outlandish narratives to explain social reality or antivaccination movements that combine elements from the far left and far right, and whose only unifying idea is suspicion of elites and of scientific authority? How should we think about the millenarian and apocalyptic discourses of climate justice movements? Our political space is increasingly contested – indeed disrupted – by new and ideologically heterogeneous movements and narratives that are difficult to identify as distinct ‘clusters’ of ideas and which instead work more on an affective or emotional level. CONTACT Saul Newman s.newman@gold.ac.uk Department of Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths University of London, London, England JOURNAL OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2023.2225237 © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or