From Christian dominionists in the United States to far-right Jewish nationalists in Israel to Hindu supremacists in India, theocratic movements are on the rise. For liberal democrats the stakes seem clear: on one side, reason, secularism, and Enlightenment; on the other, a new dark age. Yet consider a discomforting thought: What if this framing gets the danger all wrong? What if the very democratic systems to which theocracies are counterposed were never actually secular? What if theology has always been constitutive, in some form, of political order—if politics, no matter how modern, must rely, explicitly or covertly, on elements of religion?
That is the provocative and timely question posed by Miguel Vatter in this landmark book. For Vatter, the question theorists should ask today is not how the west might finally escape from its entanglement with political theology, but rather how to find the right one: a “democratic political theology” that can realize the values of equality and nondomination without slipping into the fetters of market governmentality or charismatic authoritarianism. To help answer it, Vatter traces this quest from its origins in Carl Schmitt to the present day, offering a dazzling and learned retelling of postwar European political thought.
Each chapter of Divine Democracy covers an astounding terrain of texts, authors, and ideas, from ancient Jewish, Christian, Hellenistic, and Roman thought to medieval constitutionalism, early modern and Enlightenment philosophy, and contemporary democratic theory. Just as remarkably, this breadth does not come at the expense of either historical sensitivity or engagement with secondary scholarship.
Consider Vatter’s reading of Schmitt. Vatter (1) masterfully shows how Schmitt developed his ideas, in reaction to Hans Kelsen’s discussions of law, representation, state “personification,” and political-theological analogies (pp. 25–35); (2) transports us back to Hobbes and early modern debates about church–state authority (pp. 35–48); (3) moves us horizontally through Schmitt’s engagement with Eric Peterson and consequent intellectual evolution (pp. 53–57); and (4) sends us forward to consider the normative implications of Schmitt’s ideas on representation for debates in contemporary democratic theory (64–65).
The same wonderful qualities—richness, nuance and attention to both historical detail and contemporary relevance—characterize the chapters on Voegelin, Maritain, Kantorowicz, and Habermas. Vatter ingeniously links Voegelin, reputed for his conservatism, to post-Marxist Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism (pp. 91–93), whereas Maritain’s analysis of natural law and democracy is joined to Alain Badiou’s “radical universalism” (pp. 122–32). With Kantorowicz, we find a fascinating exposition on Dante (pp. 172–80), as well as the concept of “reverse political theology”: a medieval “theologization of the law as a way to emancipate forever the modern state from the Church” (pp. 141–42, 160). And with Habermas, we discover—with a supporting cast including Hegel, Kant, Cohen, Bloch, Jaspers, Löwith, Derrida, and others—that there is actually a kind of messianic “condition of possibility” to democratic legitimation (pp. 202–3).
Divine Democracy does raise a few questions—not so much criticisms as invitations for further discussion. To begin with, the book’s very scope poses a conceptual dilemma. Vatter’s framing implies that it will trace how the specifically Schmittian formulation of political theology is taken up in postwar political thought. In fact, political theology is used in the book in many ways, only some of which fit with Schmitt’s usage (for the better). Schmitt’s stated aim is methodological: we can gain insights into fundamental political issues, like legitimacy, by considering whether their formulation derives from a theological analogue. Vatter impressively demonstrates how each thinker was himself responding to, or building on, Schmitt’s thought. Yet the risk remains of political theology coming to refer to almost any relation between politics and religion—of the concept becoming so “stretched” as to lose its distinctive explanatory power (Giovanni Sartori, “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics,” American Political Science Review, 64(4), 1970).
For instance, is Voegelin’s “political religion” most accurately understood as a “theologico-political treatment” of totalitarianism (p. 68)? Or, following Voegelin himself, is it a scientific analysis of how politics can take on the social-psychological elements and pathologies of collective religiosity? Voegelin, tellingly, does not refer to Schmitt directly in the New Science of Politics, and although Vatter does note some possible references (p. 73n14), and makes an intriguing case for their intellectual engagement on “representation,” this seems insufficient to conclude that Voegelin sought to “provide a groundwork for a new Christian political theology” (p. 74). Indeed, when Voegelin does refer to political theology, it is defined not in Schmitt’s sense, but in terms of the classical idea that rulership represents the cosmic order, as, for example, in ancient China, Egypt, and Babylonia.
Vatter’s response is to define Voegelin as a political theologian insofar as he believed that human order should stand for “something beyond itself…a transcendent reality” (1952, p. 54). Leo Strauss (and Plato) thus become political theologians in a similar vein (pp. 83–84), as do, for different reasons, Maritain and Habermas. To defend these characterizations, Vatter insists, fairly, that one should not reduce “the discourse of political theology to Carl Schmitt” (pp. 102,191n9). Still, are we really best off reading these thinkers as political theologians—often not only against the grain but also their self-definition? Voegelin and Strauss self-consciously placed themselves in the tradition of political philosophy, not political theology; Maritain’s political theology is actually theological, with sovereignty rightly belonging to God alone (p. 110); and Habermas, of course, explicitly rejects any religious legitimation for democracy. If all of them indeed belong under the rubric of political theology, what does the concept help us explain?
One answer, following Schmitt, is what we might call political theology’s dependence thesis: that elements of political life, no matter how secular they might appear, always remain in some sense dependent on a theological analogue. Versions of this thesis appear throughout Divine Democracy, as for example in Vatter’s reading of Maritain. Maritain’s Christian political theology, he argues, provided “the basis for the internal connection between democracy and universal human rights,” a connection that found “expression,” most prominently, in a “neoliberal global legal order (p. 98). Consequently, Vatter concludes, “The legitimacy of universal human rights is dependent on a politico-theological approach to these rights” (pp. 99–100; emphasis added).
Yet what, exactly, is the nature of this dependence? Vatter makes a compelling case for both Maritain’s engagement with Schmitt and the role played by his actual theological commitments in shaping his human rights philosophy. But to demonstrate that an idea originates in theology is not enough to prove its ongoing dependence on it. More needs to be shown to prove the stronger claim: that the idea remains structurally, psychologically, or normatively bound, in some sense, to its theological origins. One suggestion Vatter proposes is that the “human” in human rights “depends on some basic level on the shared belief in the intrinsic value of human life or the sacredness of life itself” (p. 101).This might be the case as an historical thesis. But as Kant, Habermas, and contemporary moral realists might respond, even if human dignity began life in Judaism and Christianity, somewhere along the way it detached itself from these theological origins, acquiring a normative autonomy independent of religion. Today one does not need theology to believe that human life has intrinsic value.
Vatter is clear from the start that he does not intend to offer his own answer to the book’s defining question: “Does liberal democracy require a politico-theological foundation?” (p. 4). Yet in concluding, he strongly hints that his own answer is yes; and, provocatively, that this foundation should ideally not be monotheistic but pantheistic or pagan. Vatter arrives here by invoking another iteration of the dependence thesis, this time in Agamben. For Agamben, “modern democratic legitimacy still relies on the mechanisms of acclamation and glorification of the leader as Head of a mystical Body… a model of the populist acclamation of a leader who incarnates the substantive identity of a people” (p. 246). What follows is a diagnosis of democratic pathology. Although liberalism and totalitarianism might appear diametrically opposed, this is only a matter of “appearance”: both are traceable to “Christian democratic political theology” (p. 246). Consequently, we should not be surprised that liberal democracies provide a fertile ground for populist, authoritarian, or fascist figures. Such charismatic models of leadership draw on deep psychological roots—implanted by Christianity, buried in our consciousness, and transplanted into our secular age (p. 247).
One might respond to this claim empirically: What about the rise of charismatic leaders and mass movements in places that have little history of Christianity, like China? Vatter, however, chooses to address Agamben’s worry by proposing an alternative political theology. As a political metaphor, monotheism implies the concentration of power: a sovereign who, by analogy to an omnipotent deity, claims to speak for the people. For Vatter, a political theology of multiple gods actually underlies republican government. It structures the idea, associated most prominently with American democracy, of the “division of powers (pp. 255–56).Yet for Vatter the most important implication of such a pagan political theology is not institutional but interpersonal. By “abolishing all claims to absoluteness” of power (254), it allows citizens to achieve a “state of non-domination”: “everyone can look into everyone’s eyes and not have to avert their gaze” (p. 256).
This is indeed an attractive portrait of free and equal citizenship. But in concluding, I do want to raise a few concerns. First, Vatter’s proposed replacement of Christian political theology with a pagan one assumes a version of the dependence thesis. Yet the claim that human psychology must conceptualize politics in religious-cosmological terms is an empirical one. And if it is not true, or inevitably true, why do we need a new polytheism? Can’t we just talk about political order plainly, without theological analogies? Second, although checks and balances are important, there are other ways to restrain the people’s sovereign power. Tocqueville, famously, claimed that “the people reign over the American political world as does God over the universe” (Democracy in America, 2002, p. 55). Yet he also argued that in practice, their politico-theological voluntarism was checked by shared ethical practices based on Christianity and manifest in civil society.
Finally, placing politics on pagan foundations may have worrying moral consequences. Reducing political institutions to rival powers is one thing. Vatter implies, however, that this should be our ethical orientation toward one another as well. And in looking one another in the eye, a lot depends on what we see. Do we perceive merely a rival equal in power—an incarnation of one of Weber’s “warring gods” of disenchanted modernity? Or do we see instead an Other—a human being of incomparable moral worth, the subject of an indeclinable obligation, an invitation to sacrifice, hospitality, and kindness? Schmitt may be right that there is something irreducibly religious about the human psyche. But perhaps it can be channeled differently—not into polytheism’s bruising and agonistic arena, but into a new site for solidarity and ethical life.
These are questions, not conclusions. And they are dwarfed by Vatter’s remarkable achievements. Divine Democracy offers a comprehensive education in political theology, not only for students new to the subject but also for those who have closely followed its associated questions and debates. It should become a mainstay in graduate courses and will immediately provide a critical resource for anyone interested in postwar political theology or, indeed, the broader relationship between religion and democratic theory. Anyone who wants to answer the questions raised here would be well advised to begin with Vatter’s important, groundbreaking, and indispensable book.
