HENT DE VRIEScommentator to state the obvious: ‘‘The next American president will undoubtedly invoke
God’s blessing on America, as American presidents have always done. But it is one thing
to ask God for blessing and guidance. It is an entirely other to believe the Almighty blesses
everything that we do.’’^133
Lincoln had already argued in hisHoly Terrors: Thinking about Religion after Septem-
ber 11that only a careful textual and rhetorical analysis of the discourses of both the
perpetrators and the president could unveil the presuppositions and contradictions of
reinvigorated ideologies on either side of the divide made up by the ‘‘war on terror.’’^134
In an example of the usefulness of historical religious concepts for such analysis, Lincoln
demonstrates in his present contribution that Bush and his speechwriters create a tense
compromise between Pauline and Hegelian perspectives on salvation, based on uncertain
individual election and on ‘‘an impersonal and inevitable process of gradual world-perfec-
tion,’’ respectively (p. 275). As Philip Blond and Adrian Pabst have suggested, this com-
promise may well subscribe to a profoundly secular logic, according to which the original
tension that early Judaism, Islam, and Christianity maintained between communal forms
of faith and worldly power—that is, between prophets and kings, imams and caliphs, the
heavenly and the earthly city—is dissolved in favor of the modern ‘‘liberal’’ relegation of
beliefs to the uncontrollable private sphere of individual conscience, while delivering the
political realm over to a blatant, cynical strife to establish Western hegemony (economi-
cally and in the imposition of its democratic model). Blair’s words ‘‘The only way you
can take a decision like that is to do the right thing according to your conscience’’ merely
confirm the extent to which a certain liberalized (interiorized, Evangelical, Protestant?)
religion has become, if not a ploy or an ideological justification, then at least a welcome
vacuum for the (external) powers that be.^135 This, these authors argue, provoked the
fundamentalist response, turning what seemed two opposite sides in the ‘‘war on ter-
ror’’—the American neocons and the leadership of Al Qaeda—into mirror images of one
another.^136
International relations and geopolitics have come to be fatefully determined by a
group of thinkers identified with the legacy of Leo Strauss (one thinks of the intellectual
agenda extensively reported in recent years inThe New York Times, The New Yorker, and
The New York Review of Books, and associated with such names as Paul Wolfowitz, Wil-
liam Kristol, Richard Perle, and Robert Kagan, but also with certain subtle dissenters,
such as Francis Fukuyama, who in his earlier writings did not always steer clear of a
certain neo-evangelical streak). In his contribution, William E. Connolly takes a reflective
step back to reassess one of the central themes and more ‘‘subtle elements’’ of Strauss’s
work, not to depoliticize, let alone justify or exculpate, Strauss’s oeuvre, but to use it to
think and engage the political—and hence also to politicize—otherwise. It is, Connolly
notes, ‘‘the only professorial movement in the United States that has attained the standing
of a public philosophy’’ (p. 278).^137
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