Crediting God: Sovereignty and Religion in the Age of Global Capitalism

Introduction: Crediting God with Sovereignty

i n t r o d u c t i o n Crediting God with Sovereignty Miguel Vatter The rise of religious fundamentalism in the closing decades of the twentieth century continues to have enormous repercussions not only for politics , but also for the disciplines of the human sciences, philosophy, and theology. The sociology of religion, perhaps the paradigmatic achievement of the discipline of sociology, has been dealing with the effects of the crisis of its theories of secularization. The so-called deprivatization of religion has forced on the table the old-age question of the relation between God and society, or faith and the constitution of community, with the added complication that the community at stake nowadays is a global one.1 Political economy, whether one takes a Marxist or Simmelian approach, is structurally dependent on the idea of credit, which in turn is also ultimately rooted in an understanding of trust and faith, which are difficult to disentangle from theology.2 Philosophy, for its part, is coming to terms with an intuition already prefigured by Hermann Cohen, and now voiced by such diverse thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Hilary Putnam, among others, that no philosophical (‘‘scientific’’) foundation of ethics can hope to capture the full grammar of justice (which thus seems to call upon resources that are to be found only in religious experience).3 Furthermore, the deconstruction of metaphysics initiated by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and the shadow it has since cast on the status 1 2 Miguel Vatter of scientific knowledge, has brought to the fore the continued resilience of webs of belief, pre-predicative linguistic structures and practices, that must be taken on credit by our propositions if they are to make sense, with the result that many no longer see any point in accepting the Cartesian exchange of truth for certainty, and with the discontent with the modern project of epistemology, the path is once again being opened for a return to classical and medieval ontology, to Platonism and Aristotelianism in their manifold versions, and with that to a vision of the world that is more compatible with revealed truths.4 Given this context, where old modernist certainties have been recalled into doubt, it appears that no master narrative and no one disciplinary perspective are now capable of doing justice to the complexities of the new relation between religion and politics in the context of global capitalism.5 Why has religion, more so than politics or law, been able to capitalize on the processes of globalization? The question itself invites to approach the search for answers through a comparative perspective and a pluralistic methodology, which in any case has been the norm in the study of religious phenomena since at least Mircea Eliade’s path-breaking works after World War II. To understand the ‘‘return’’ of religion in the public sphere one can hardly ignore the reality of what has recently been called ‘‘alternative modernities,’’6 and its corollary: the plurality of Enlightenment projects . Last, but not least, the phenomenon that has recently been termed a ‘‘clash of fundamentalisms’’7 has opened up history in a way that the fall of the Berlin Wall had seemed to preclude. Derrida’s well-known refutation of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘‘End of History’’ thesis by way of reviving the category of the messianic contains a fundamental paradox for our times, namely: history has reopened in and through the various religious ways of rethinking the ‘‘end’’ of the saeculum and the renewal of the temporal categories of eschatology and apocalypse.8 All of the essays in this collection demonstrate their affinity to one or more of the above methodological commitments: they evidence comparativist and pluralist approaches to the phenomena of the theologico-political , and they indicate a consciousness of the peculiar paradox that the new historical open-endedness is achieved in and through an experience of the ‘‘end’’ of secular temporality. The collection owes its genesis to an international conference held at the Center for Humanities of Northwestern University in May 2005 entitled ‘‘Theology, Faith, and Politics,’’ organized by Robert Gooding-Williams and myself. Many of the papers given at the conference are presented here in revised versions, and some new papers have been solicited in order to provide coherence to the volume’s 3 Introduction: Crediting God with Sovereignty purpose. The conference intended to bring together an interdisciplinary...