HENT DE VRIESBefore investigating the termpolitical theologyand the reasons for its pluralization,
we should begin by asking: What in fact, in its very definition, is this phenomenon we so
easily call ‘‘religion’’? With that generic term, we not only invoke monotheisms but sup-
pose that we identify cultic and cultural objects, together with accompanying individual
and collective dispositions.^1 How should we conceptualize ‘‘religion’’—realizing that, in
order to avoid abstraction, we ought perhaps to begin by saying ‘‘religions,’’ in the plural,
given the notional, ethical, figurative, and rhetorical complexity, including the different
ideational systems, corporeal senses, and overall affects, expressed by the religious idiom
and by religious imagery? To this equation we should also add ‘‘religion’s’’ irreducible, if
often ignored, materiality, as well as its increasingly mediatized performance, that is to
say, its now troubling, then promising forms of authority, sovereignty, and empower-
ment. In other words, how should we approach such basic analytical and descriptive
categories as its words, things, gestures, and powers, which offer points of entry into this
elusive yet stunningly manifest phenomenon, which at once inspires and terrifies—even
terrorizes—civil society, that is to say, the domain of public life, as it traverses the politi-
cal, politics, and policies, whether we like it or not, for good and for ill?
More specifically, whatpre-,para-, andpost-political forms do religion and its func-
tional equivalents and successor beliefs or rituals assume in a world where the global
extension of economic markets, technological media, and informational networks have
contributed to loosening or largely suspending the link that once tied theologico-political
authority to a social body determined by a certain geographic territory and national sover-
eignty? Is a disembodied—virtual, call it transcendental—substitute for the theologico-
political body politic thinkable, possible, viable, or even desirable? Acorpus mysticum,as
it were, in a new, post-secular guise? Or might we eventually dispense with reference
to the theologico-political and the religious archive on which, in all its transformations
(including secularist ones), it continues to rely for genealogical, conceptual no less than
rhetorical-strategic, reasons? And what forms—in Emmanuel Levinas’s idiom, what ‘‘cur-
vatures’’—would its functional equivalents or structural analogues impose upon the limits
and enabling conditions of our ‘‘social space,’’ that is to say, upon the unique and singu-
larly experienced as well as the shared times of our lives, if not in community or even
friendship, then at least by way of a ‘‘living together,’’ whose contours are less fixed than
ever (as Jacques Derrida taught us in his last writings)?^2
These questions are relevant when discussing contemporary religion in the public
domain or ‘‘public religions in a post-secular world’’ (echoing Jose ́Casanova’sPublic
Religions in the Modern World), especially if one understands the termpost-secularnot as
an attempt at historical periodization (following upon equally unfortunate designations
such as the ‘‘post-modern,’’ the ‘‘post-historical,’’ or the ‘‘post-human’’) but merely as a
topical indicator for—well, a problem. In the words of Hans Joas: ‘‘ ‘Post-secular’...
doesn’t express a sudden increase in religiosity, after its epochal decrease, but rather a
change in mindset of those who, previously, felt justified in considering religions to be
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