THE POLITICAL THEOLOGY OF THE NEW RIGHT
By Rolf Schieder[This article published on March 21, 2019 is translated from the German on the Internet, www.feinschwarz.net.]
Can the ideology of the New Right be considered theology? What distinguishes the New Right from the political theology of the 1960s and 1970s? Rolf Schieder analyzes the apocalypticism that generates the state of emergency.
The term “political theology” had a good sound in the blissful time after the 1968 unrest. Alongside many others, Johann Baptist Metz, Dorothee Soelle and Jurgen Moltmann urged a politically vigilant, emancipatory and ecumenical theology. This political theology understood itself as liberation theology. At that time, the people were still regarded as a revolutionary subject – not like today as a heap of xenophobic “populist” idiots. Political theology was institutional-critical and part of a movement that sought to change the dominant political, social and economic pecking order in a radical and revolutionary way. Whoever emphasized the purpose of institutions as promoting freedom and the independent dignity of the political was quickly decried as reactionary at that time. The question whether a political decision was worse or better was hardly raised in light of the pressure to fight on the side of the good or on the side of evil. Christians must be socialists, it seemed to us young political theologians. This was a question of faith, not a question of political economy and rational deliberation. The field of politics was the preferred place of the status confessionis.
Carl
Schmitt’s GrandchildrenFifty years later, we are confronted today with a political theology of the New Right. This is also radical, socially-critical and polarizing. Political compromise is not sought. Rather, the masses are mobilized in the struggle against evil elites who threaten to “corrupt” the people. Carl Schmitt wrote the screenplay for today’s political theology. His “Political Theology” written in 1922 was a reaction to Hans Keisen’s conception of the state as a constitutional state legitimated by the transparent application of laws that needed no civil religious justification. Legitimation by procedures should be enough.
In contrast, Schmitt propagated a priority of the political before the law and constitutional state procedures. “The normal proves nothing,” Schmitt argued. “The exception proves everything.” Whoever decides over the state of emergency is sovereign.” Whether a state of emergency actually exists is ultimately unimportant. The power to define a state as a state of emergency and to generate a decision –making pressure is crucial. In these
days, the American president tries to create plausibility for his declared state of emergency at the border to Mexico. Many autocrats before him used this political strategy. This political weapon remains dull and without resonance in the population. The people must be transported into a state of excitement as though they were in a state of emergency.
According to Schmitt, a theology is needed to trigger collective emotional states. “All terms of modern state theory are secularized theological terms,” we read. Schmitt emphasized the theological neediness of modern state theories. A modern state can no longer be based on developed structures and traditions. Its sovereignty rests on decisions. The modern state needs radical distinctions for its legitimation. Sharp distinctions can be drawn with a religiously-charged semantics of the extreme.
Whoever can make radical distinctions and polarizer a society in good and evil, pure and impure, believing and unbelieving, native and refugees, right and left and people and elites is sovereign. Inclusion is created through exclusion. Theological semantics is valuable. When G.W. Bush lunched the Iraq War, his advisors told him to proclaim the war of the good against the “axis of evil” or against the “evil empire.”
Religion as an Empty Meaningless Identity
In his 2016 book “Saving the People. How Populists Hijack Religion,” Olivier Roy defended the thesis that the New Right had no genuine interest in religion. “Most of these parties are only Christian insofar as they reject Islam.” The Christian tradition is only proclaimed to defend the “West.” Europe is a continent where many “rent or hire” a religion and “no one appropriates a religion anymore.”
The religion of the New Right is a mere identity marker without any recognizable religious content. The New Right instrumentalizes religion and contributes to its secularization.
This is misleading for several reasons though it sounds plausible at first. Firstly, the conventional distinction between a “secular” and a “religious” sphere is no longer viable. Secondly, Roy’s diagnosis stands in an explicit contradiction to the expressed goal of the New Right to work on a “re-sacralization of the political” as it says programmatically in the 2003 journal “Sezession.” Readiness for combat, sacrificial will and a feeling of unity could awaken in the population when the political is again understood as something sacred. Overcoming an atomistic utilitarianism and resistance against a creeping dissolution of all things through a global materialistic consumerism are impossible without faith in a greater whole.
Work on the Apocalypse
An apocalyptic interpretation of the world stands at the center of the political theology of the New Right. As everybody knows, an apocalypse reveals something hidden in the past. What does the New Right uncover? It reveals the catastrophic state of the West. Germany today is in a worse state than 1918 or 1945. What is truly demonic is that the masses do not recognize they are caught in a murderous cage hard as steel through the success of international capitalism. Isolation, impoverishment, uprooting and exploitation were praised and extolled as gains of freedom. The global elites who betrayed and deserted the wimple people are the seducers.