Political Theology and Populist Conflict: Against Quietism and Theocracy

In recent years, Western societies have seen movements arise that criticize the established order in the name of the people. Here and in other parts of the world, populist leaders have undermined democratic norms and procedures, sometimes through physical violence. Whatever our political commitments, many of us will have wondered whether our societies can survive these fractures. Since a tangled set of issues are at stake, easy answers are not available. However, I think the study of political theology clarifies the problem of populist conflict, and it offers resources that can help us address it.

I will focus my reflections on a representative response to our recent unrest, Justice and Love: A Philosophical Dialogue (2021). The book gathers a set of conversations between Mary Zournazi and Rowan Williams from 2015 to 2019. Although Zournazi is an atheist while Williams is Christian, they both draw on religious traditions to advocate for reconciliation. Where some see religion as the cause of conflict, they portray it as a force for peace. As they describe it, sympathy and respect can overcome polarization between those who are different. In this way, they present a compelling case for the view that civility is the solution to populist conflict.

Although many people worry that contempt degrades public life, I have found Justice and Love to be distinctively helpful due to its unusual form. As a series of dialogues, each chapter is marked with the date the conversation occurred. As a result, the reader has the chance to witness two cultured and thoughtful people respond to events in real time. This experimental, episodic approach is extraordinarily sympathetic. At the same time, the book’s evolution inadvertently clarifies the virtues and limitations of an ethics of reconciliation.

The authors’ early conversations are characterized by an easy grace, but a note of unease grows over the course of the book. As they witness the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election as US president, their analysis becomes more tentative, and it turns (in the book’s Epilogue) toward the need for a structural response. This shift underlines its main failing: although the authors’ moral vision is genuinely appealing, the arc of their argument suggests that an ethics of sympathetic attention is not enough. The book’s conclusion suggests that, beyond the interpersonal generosity described in earlier chapters, this crisis requires a political response.

To clarify the place of politics, this presentation will place Justice and Love into conversation with three books that appeared around the same time - by Joan Wallach Scott, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig. While Zournazi and Williams call for peace, these theorists argue that conflict is intrinsic to politics. Where Zournazi and Williams describe spiritual practices that cultivate interior calm, Scott, Butler, and Honig affirm a wider range of affects, attitudes, and actions (including, crucially, anger). Without denying the value of reconciliation, they suggest that civility is insufficient to address the the problem of populist conflict.

In staging this conversation, I aim to suggest that political theology can incorporate the commitment to political conflict these theorists describe. Where Williams and Zournazi portray the influence of religion as a positive thing, populist movements often appeal to religious traditions - and Christianity in particular - in support of authoritarian politics. In my view, it’s important to acknowledge the ambivalence of Christian thought, its capacity to slip into theocracy on the one side and quietism on the other. At the same time, I think medieval negative theology models a third alternative.

I think Williams and Zournazi are right to imply that populism is driven by emotions that need to be addressed. Although I think the challenge is more difficult than they acknowledge, therapy of some kind is required. Honig, Butler, and Scott have helped me to see that negative theology is therapeutic in this way. In its classic form, this tradition claims that to grasp the divine is a form of self-assertion, an attempt to secure an impossible certainty. Although it is distant from our present context in many ways, negative theology addresses a similar problem.

Much as idolatry is a theological temptation, populist movements respond to social anxieties by promising the unmediated authority of the popular will. As Dionysius the Areopagite argues, to treat the contingent as if it were absolute is idolatry, and that goes equally for racist forms of nationalism as it does for explicitly religious piety. Crucially, however, a negative political theology does not require relinquishing the sacred altogether. As I will argue, it offers an alternative to the oscillation between false confidence and despairing resignation: in my account, negative theology models a hope that acknowledges uncertainty without being crushed by it.

This, I believe, is what many protest movements do - for instance, in the Movement for Black Lives and in campaigns to improve the conditions of workers. These movements appeal to the people in order to galvanize a coalition, but they do not claim to represent the people perfectly. Insofar as they acknowledge that their opponents are legitimate in principle, their claim to representation is partial and imperfect. Rather than foreclosing disagreement, their claim is contingent, allowing contestation to continue.

In this way, rather than denying or displacing negative affect, negative theology models the possibility of incorporating it within a holistic practice (which is not only corrosive). I aim to suggest that democratic politics requires affective disciplines of precisely this kind. That isn’t to say that negative theology should be directly enacted in politics. (“Apophasis!” is ill-suited to use as a political slogan.) Rather, a negative political theology is capacious enough to incorporate connection and conflict, sympathy and refusal, appreciation and anger.