religious revolution now 249
It may at fi rst seem that the secular versions of the struggle with the
world demonstrate that these conditions are unnecessary to the worldly
success of a religion. In fact, in the secular versions of the struggle with
the world— the programs of po liti cal and personal liberation— all three
conditions have oft en been satisfi ed to one degree or another: the ven-
eration of foundational texts (if not of a sectarian program like Marxist
socialism, then of a national project such as American democracy and
its constitutional arrangements), the or ga ni za tion of believers (in the
form of a po liti cal party), and the link between creed and nation (af-
fi rmed in the marriage of nationalism to ideology.) Whenever and wher-
ever these conditions have failed to be fulfi lled, the secular religion has
lost a distinct identity and the capacity to renew itself through confl ict
with its real or imagined rivals.
Th e religion of the future prefi gured in the arguments of this chapter
is, however, by the character of its message, hostile to each of the three
conditions. It carries to the hilt, in a naturalized and historical form,
the idea of the prophetic power of all believers. It must reject the view
that our capacities for religious innovation are concentrated in isolated
prophets or in a single historical turning point: the moment when the
teacher appeared in the world and supplied a defi nitive model for the
combination of visionary teaching with exemplary action. Consequently,
it cannot accept any textual canon, the authority of which is necessarily
derivative from the teacher, his teaching, and the moment in which he
speaks and acts.
By insisting on a program that includes both the po liti cal and the
personal, while repudiating theocracy as well as legalism, it denies itself
any ready- made institutional vehicle. A single agent empowered to or-
chestrate change ranging from the institutional arrangements of society
to our beliefs about the possible and desirable forms of human asso-
ciations would enjoy a power to which no Savonarola ever presumed.
Even a distant approach to the exercise of such a power would represent
a form of tyranny, at once po liti cal and spiritual, more terrible than any
that we have yet experienced. It would contradict the forms of life and
of thought to which a religion of the future aspires.
Its identifi cation with a people is equally inconceivable. Th e people
invoked as the subject and object of the religion of the future is the hu-
man race. Th e adoption of contrasting comprehensive approaches to