4 - The Religion of Progress

Summary

Over the past few centuries, diverse political philosophers have succeeded in escaping state-policed religious orthodoxy, thereby discovering the laws that constitute the physical world and ‘demystifying’ or ‘disenchanting’ the social world. The way, however, in which this story tells itself and is being told, or rather staged, in front of a public of subjects for centuries, now resembles a repetitive opera buffa: Father Old Europe tries to marry his daughter, alias the upcoming generation, to a scion of the religious establishment. She, however, elopes with a free-thinking young man who believes only in the lessons of his own experience. The split, the rift, which this plot is glossing over is right in the middle between the words ‘religious’ and ‘establishment’, which, in line with the Trinitarian paradigm, are being (mis)taken as constituting one inseparable unit, much as if establishment and religion were only facets of the same reality that only a new general civil religion or political theology can give meaning to (i.e. the unbroken conviction of countless generations). Thus, modernity validates Trinitarianism indeed even as belief in God recedes. Here, instead of iterating the idea of a radically new civil religion or political theology that would encompass the old religion/establishment divide, we ask a more fundamental question: can we talk of Christianism as a religion of establishment that survives independently of confession, Holy Writing, even God? If so, has modernity not misrepresented ‘religion’ when it blames it for the injustices and insufficiencies of the social and public realm?

The entanglement between what has been happening during the European past, what is happening on the Western political sense-making chessboard and the related issues of religion (or post-religion) is intimidating; moreover, the vocabulary and the methodological criteria accounting for this entangled relationship offer little guidance in their present state; in turn, this persuades a majority of observers to prefer the safe haven of silence to the danger of overstatement and the associated fears provoked by talk about the ‘return of religion’ or ‘en-religioning.’ In our case, we find that this matter is far too bewildering to attribute it to ‘repression’ or ‘hysteria’.