Political Theology can also be Democratic: On Miguel Vatter's Divine Democracy

In Divine Democracy, Miguel Vatter argues for political theology as a way of approaching political theory because our world requires a new understanding of the ways religion and politics are intertwined in democracy. Can political theology be democratic? This interrogation is pertinent insofar as the man who coined the term for twentieth-century political theory, Carl Schmitt, seemed to associate it with sovereignism. In fact, the book that inaugurated the discussion on political theology in the twentieth century, Political Theology, was published in Berlin in 1922. Henceforth, many scholars have associated the phrase "political theology" with the advent of National Socialism in Germany. Vatter considers that, while political theology as a research method is still valid, an anti-Schmittian "democratic turn" in its orientation is needed. And this is exactly what he attempts to do in this superb book.

This democratic orientation, however, cannot simply consist in being anti-sovereignist, but has to show a positive face. It needs to show how the transposition of certain theological concepts and doctrines can be transferred into the realm of democratic law and politics. In his words: "Christian political theology after Schmitt displaces sovereignty by pivoting on the idea that legitimacy is a function of the political unity of a people achieved through its political representation, as befits its Christological doctrinal structure." (p. 7) In fact, he shows how the concepts of representation, universal human rights, government and public reason, as well as sovereignty, have theological roots. God's presence in the secular world no longer hinges on hierarchical figures as was the case with the Catholic church, the empire or the nation, but now asserts itself through the political practices and institutions of modern democracy.

The idea of representation takes on enormous importance in the book. Indeed, the tension between the idea of legitimacy and the idea of representative democracy is the terrain in which political theology operates. One could almost say that the main thesis of the book is that political theology is synonymous with representation, understood as the articulation of popular power, always plural in a unity of action. If there is no articulation or mediation, then we are in the terrain of anarchy, but anarchy does not found community, since it lacks the strength to unify a concrete political order.

To demonstrate these theses, the book transits through modern to postmodern political thought. Most of the authors to whom Vatter gives voice are modern, but in each case, he establishes their connections with other postmodern authors. Not all of the authors included can be considered representatives of political theology, rather only a few. Political theology hence is used by Vatter as a method for observing the conceptual drifts of their texts––i.e., to enquiry into the theological provenance of the political concepts used by each author. In any case, the aim of the book is not to determine the authors' thought, but their conceptual derivations in relation to the democratic theological-political possibilities.

The first chapter begins by questioning Schmitt's approach to political theology in relation to the concept of sovereignty; he does so in dialogue with Kelsen and Hobbes on the one hand, and Peterson on the other. In this way, Vatter's critique of Schmitt is not a straightforward anti-authoritarian one, but acquires richer nuances. The second chapter uses Eric Voegelin to show the theological-political possibilities of the concept of representation. Through Voegelin, Vatter defends a conception of representation that is not only existential, as in the case of Schmitt's idea of representation, but also symbolic. At the end of the chapter, he discusses the relationship between Voegelin, through whom "the Jewish question" is introduced in the book, and Laclau, the theorist of populist reason, a quirky pairing that is nonetheless well argued. By confronting Laclau with a theory of representation, the difference between a representationalist left that is propositional, on whose side we find Laclau and ˇZiˇzek, and...