October 7, 2019 The Nation. 35comparative politics—whether a socialist
system can thrive only in a broadly secu-
lar culture—though this question haunts
his book. His quarry is more elusive and
more philosophical, while his conclusions
are more tendentious.
This Life is a work of great originality
that dares to tackle some of the most con-
tested questions in philosophy and religion.
But for a book that tries to turn us toward
the concrete facts of this-worldly life, its
conception of religion is remarkably ab-
stract. Hägglund never truly reckons with
egalitarian movements, past or present, that
were animated by religious belief. More
troubling still, his arguments suggest a stark
choice: Either you are a religious believer
whose eyes remain fixed on eternity, to
the exclusion of all worldly things, or you
are not a religious believer (even if you say
otherwise), since what you truly value most
are the worldly attachments and material
needs that make socialism a meaningful
form of life.H
ägglund devotes a great share of his
book to readings in the history of
philosophy. His chief illustrations are
Christian: In chapters on Augustine
and Kierkegaard, he argues that both
thinkers are essentially at war with their
own better insights. They want to uphold
the value of human life but ultimately ob-
scure this value by placing their confidence
not in time but in eternity. Likewise, in sec-
tions on Marx and King, he demonstrates
the power of a secular faith that directs its
energies toward the transformation of this
world, even if King understood himself to
be acting from religious motives. Ultimate-
ly, Hägglund wants to claim that socialism
is incompatible with religion and that it can
be intelligible only as a manifestation of our
secular faith.
Hägglund begins with Augustine as the
thinker who perhaps did more than any
other to set the terms for Christian belief.
Augustine’s pursuit of salvation promises an
end to all worldly cares, and yet, Hägglund
argues, even Augustine could not resolve
the conflict between his faith in God and
his fidelity to the world. Of one friendship,
Augustine writes that it was “sweet to me
beyond all the sweetnesses of life”—a sign,
Hägglund suggests, that beneath his official
declarations of attachment to eternity, even
Augustine felt an “intense attachment” and
vulnerability to “the rhythms of time.” But
this means Augustine could not help but
betray his own teachings.
When he turns to Kierkegaard, Hägg-lund identifies an even more striking case of
the ambivalence between religious and secu-
lar faith. In Fear and Trembling, Kier ke gaard
meditates on the biblical story of Abraham,
who is prepared to obey a divine command
to slaughter his son Isaac as a demonstration
of his faith and yet believes that through this
sacrifice, Isaac will somehow be restored to
him. Here, too, Hägglund writes, we can
detect a hidden moment of secular faith.
Try as hard as he may to turn his back on
the world, even Abraham cannot wholly for-
swear the deeper if paradoxical commitment
to worldly life he seems ready to surrender.
For Hägglund, the examples of Augus-
tine and Kierkegaard show us that even the
most esteemed Christian thinkers remain
poised in indecision between their religious
and worldly commitments. Secular faith, it
turns out, has long lay coiled in the heart of
religious thinking, but Hägglund feels they
are essentially incompatible and we must try
our best to liberate the secular from its reli-
gious husk. His interpretations are dramatic
but strongly dualistic, leaving us with the
impression that only the secular deserves
salvation while religion by definition has
no love for the world. For Hägglund, as
for Kierkegaard, the biblical story about
Abraham and Isaac serves as a lesson in the
necessity of absolute belief: Inward faith
must overrule our outward commitments
to society. But the tale also contains other
lessons. When an angel intervenes to stop
Isaac’s death, Abraham is reminded that his
social commitments are sacred and should
be trusted even more than a voice from the
heavens. Read this way—from the end rath-
er than the middle—the tale appears not as
a panegyric to religious faith but rather as a
warning against fanaticism.
This is an insight Hägglund seems to
miss. Throughout its history, religion did
not need to await the arrival of secularism to
spawn its own criticism; it already contained
the kinds of challenges that would become
commonplace in the modern era—voices
that railed against moral indifference and
demanded that the pious turn their fullest
attention to injustice in this world.
To be sure, Hägglund himself wants to
interpret his chosen texts with an eye to
their inner tensions. Following the method
known as “immanent critique,” he wants
to expose contradictions by showing the
dissonance between religion’s stated normsand its actual commitments. To demon-
strate that something is wrong with the life
we currently lead, we need not invoke any
transcendent ideas beyond that life; we sim-
ply need to identify the self-contradictions.
Hägglund wields this method as a cudgel
against religion. He fastens his attention
only on those moments when religion might
appear to be in conflict with itself but fails
to see that religious traditions have often
anticipated his objections.F
or perhaps obvious reasons, when
Hägglund turns to Marx’s this-worldly
critique of capitalism, he is far more
charitable. Marx, Hägglund argues,
is an exemplar of secular faith. He
knew that there were no norms beyond his
social and historical moment to which he
could appeal to identify the depredations
of capitalism, so instead he developed his
critique by showing how capitalist society
did not live up to its own principles. Liber-
al capitalism sought to uphold the ideal of
freedom above all else, Marx noted, but ul-
timately the system it created undermined
this ideal. Overcoming the unfreedom it
has produced thus demands that we redirect
our attention toward what Hägglund calls
the “free time” that capitalism has colo-
nized. Marx, Hägglund concludes, is the
great exemplar of secular faith, awakening
us to the priority of our freedom as finite
beings. This interpretation of Marx, which
draws some inspiration from the late Marx-
ist theorist Moishe Postone, has moments
of great originality. In Hägglund’s book,
this chapter plays a pivotal role, serving as
the primary illustration as to why socialism
and secular faith belong together, and why
humanity must look past religion if we are
to find our freedom.
When Hägglund turns to Martin Lu-
ther King Jr., however, his interpretation
invites serious controversy. King poses a
challenge to Hägglund’s dualism between
religious and secular faith, since he inter-
twined worldly activism with Christian be-
lief and apparently saw no contradiction
between the two. To his credit, Hägglund
grapples with King’s example, but he does
not shy away from his boldest conclusion:
When King appeals to God in the cause
of worldly justice, Hägglund asserts, he
simply cannot mean “the religious notion
of an eternal God.” By insisting that “the
struggle for social freedom” is “an end in
itself,” King proves himself to be a devotee
of secular faith even if he sometimes invokes
an otherworldly language.
Hägglund insists on this verdict, evenThis Life
Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
By Martin Hägglund
Pantheon. 464 pp. $29.95