Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World

Church, State, Resistance

Church, State, Resistance Jean-Luc Nancy 1 The separation of church and state is the French expression, linked to the dominant Catholic Church in that country, used to signify the complete differentiation between the laws [droits] and powers of the religious order (whether ecclesiatical or constituted in another way) and the political order. In any civil or public matter, the political order is understood to prevail; whereas in any religious matter—henceforth considered to be private or having to do with an intimacy of conscience —the authority exercised is defined by a religious instance to which anyone is free to adhere. Today this separation is recognized as a given of democracy, whatever the precise form in which it is enunciated in public law (even where, as in England, there exists a very particular situation that may seem to be, but is not really, one of nonseparation). The constitutional and/or institutional affirmation and imposition of a consubstantiality of religion and state contravenes the general rules of democracy and the rule of law—law being charged precisely with assuring, among other things, the independence of religions and the appropriate conditions to be placed upon this independence, in the same way that it is charged with assuring the conditions for freedom of thought and of expression. We are accustomed to consider this separation between church and state to be an achievement of modern democracy. This is not wrong, insofar as the juridical inscription of this separation is historically recent (notwithstanding certain details that we will consider later). But it is no less necessary to recall that such a separation, or at least its principle and condition of possibility, appears at the very beginning of politics: in Greece. It is necessary to recall this because, to go straight to the point, it means that the separation of church and state is not one politi1 02 CHURCH, STATE, RESISTA NCE cal possibility among others, but a constitutive element of politics as such—if we agree to give this term the sense derived from its Greek origin, rather than a vague and rarefied sense that would encompass any possible way of organizing the collectivity. 2 Though the polis, the city, has its own religion, celebrates its own rites, and also makes room for other less public or less ‘‘civic [citoyens]’’ forms of worship [cultes], it nonetheless presupposes, in its principle, its very being as polis, a fundamental rupture with any kind of theocracy, whether direct or indirect. Starting with Aristotle and even Plato, up to Machiavelli and Jean Bodin, even before the more official and modern ‘‘separations,’’ this principle is borne out: politics encompasses any kind of ‘‘cracy’’ except theocracy. Reciprocally, theocracy encompasses any kind of societal organization that rests on a religious principle, except for politics—even where the latter seems to call for a religious dimension. The stakes are considerable: in principle, religion and freedom of thought have very different implications. Religion is not a ‘‘private’’ preference; it is a mode of representing and organizing both personal and collective existence. Therefore, religion is nothing more or less than the collective or communitarian possibility other than that constituted by politics. The separation of church and state should be considered as the one true birth of politics. The polis rests, first, on the fact that it gives itself its own law [loi]. It can invoke a prescription or a divine guarantee for this law, but it is nonetheless to the polis itself that the determinate establishment, the formulation, the observation, and the implementation of law belongs. In this respect, nothing is more instructive than, on the one hand, the displacement and progressive abandonment of various forms of trial by ordeal and, on the other, the development, predating the polis (in Babylon in particular), of codes of property and exchange (trade, inheritance, etc.), which themselves anticipate part of the general auto-nomy upon which the city will be based. The political [le politique]—if we can use this term to designate an essence or principle —is autonomy by definition and by structure. Theocracy, in the sense we have just given it as the other of politics, represents heteronomy by definition and by structure. Manifestly, autonomy cannot but resist heteronomy, and vice versa. In general, we can even say that any form of political or moral resistance implies a relation between an autonomy and a heteronomy; for us its most authentic form (perhaps even its only authentic form) is the resistance...