ola sigurdson
there is no such thing as absolute non-interference; no action can be
perfectly self-contained, but always impinges upon other people so that
spaces will always in some degree “complexely” overlap, jurisdictions
always in some measure be competing, loyalties remain (perhaps
benignly) divided.^35If there is no neat distinction between private and public, the meaning
of politics will change. A certain kind of liberal modernity that in the
name of political consensus has strived to remove all conflict from
politics through relegating competing claims for ways of living and
thinking to a private space must give way for a more pluralistic under-
standing of public life, wherein conflict becomes a political reality and
not just a private matter of different lifestyles. This change does not
primarily have to do with religion and its return in political life as
such, but rather with the suspicion that a certain kind of liberal and
secular modernity presupposes a much-too-thin account of the sub-
jectivity of citizenship to be plausible in a world not built around the
idea of ethnically and religiously homogenous nation-states. In the
formulation of the theologian Charles Mathewes, “pluralism is a cen-
tral problem for modern states not because of pluralism, but because
of modern states.”^36 To deal with the question of authoritarianism and
violence in today’s politics in a truthful way, there is an urgent need
to leave models construed for a quite-other political situation behind
and to formulate models that will accept this pluralism as inevitable
and search for ways of peaceful rather than violent conflict. Any poli-
tics that wish to avoid religious traditions at all costs take the risk of
becoming escapist, as they try to deny the quest for more than formal
and consensual truth, transcendence and universality.
The relationship between prayer and subjectivity would be an
example of a way of thinking that might be worth exploring, as prayer
actually is a way of dealing with the problem of pluralism without
reducing everything to the same. In the relationship to a God that is
- John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture, Oxford/
Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997, 281. - Charles Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life, Cambridge Studies in Christian
Doctrine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 155. One may here also
think of such political philosophers as Chantal Mouffe or Slavoj Žižek.