The Distinction between Theology and the History and Anthropology of Religions

I wrote Sovereignty and the Sacred in part to work through my own very visceral dissatisfaction with the modern, secular, and disenchanted constitution, which, by rendering everything “sedate, cool, and silent” (60),Footnote ¹ has made life rather dull. It has also disabled modern scholars from framing an adequate understanding of human nature, which is rather more unruly than many post-Enlightenment disciplines, with their paradigms of rational choice and aspirations of scientific prediction, have made out. I wrote the book as a polemic, an attempt to intervene in the scholarly status quo by breaking down certain rather tall walls that still (!) separate the religious from both the political and the secular to free up whatever energies might be released by this act of intellectual deconstruction, which is not at all the same as sabotage or vandalism. I am grateful to the colleagues who contributed to this forum for responding so charitably to what remains, after all, a polemic and a provocation, even as they note certain points where my argument may stumble or where real intellectual disagreements may exist between us. I offer my reply in the same spirit.

The normative divide between the secular and the religious is reflected by the still common neglect of religious traditions, including the Bible and the history of Christian thought, in scientific disciplines such as legal studies. This secularist bias has impoverished the archive of data, cutting off access to the very materials needed to question rationalist assumptions while simultaneously rendering theoretical models less powerful and narrower in explanatory reach. Fortunately, the prospects for ameliorating this situation are improving, as signaled by the relatively new subfield of political theology, which recognizes an intimate connection between religion, politics, and law. Together with related approaches such as the economics of religion, political theology is beginning to open a path to renewed relevance for religious studies as a field that engages with the foundations of social order and participates in dialogue with more scientific, core, or prestige disciplines, such as jurisprudence, political theory, and economics. This is a positive development, one that promises to benefit both sides of the dialogue, while also challenging both to change and grow. Scholars of religion stand to gain new perspectives on their data. For example, they will be able to read their ancient texts differently, in a way that refreshes them for another generation, thereby escaping the trap of antiquarianism. And scholars of law, politics, and economics stand to be enriched by a wealth of new material that, at the same time, will allow them to broaden, refine, or alter their hypotheses and escape presentism or cultural parochialism.

The risk in any discipline is that first principles or axioms will turn out to be merely restatements of cultural assumptions and biases. That risk is too great in the case of secularism, which has misrecognized the intimate relation between the religious and the secular even as it has reified these categories and their opposition. The fact that “disenchantment” turns out to have originated as a Christian trope underscores this danger (see chapter 2).Footnote ² The most effective antidote against such misconceptions is to measure our hypotheses against the archive, both historical and ethnographic. Are our theoretical models adequate to the data, or are they not? The comparative study of cultures is supposed to help us address such issues. That is why I argued in defense of a history of religions that works in two directions simultaneously: historically, by interrogating the genealogy of our categories, many of which still bear the traces of their origins in Christian theology and which may therefore be unreliable as guides for cross-cultural analysis although they are invaluable for comprehending our own situation; and anthropologically, by reforming and adapting these categories through testing them against evidence drawn from other cultures. By combining these two methods, it should become possible gradually to approach the twin goals of (1) identifying the spectrum of human behaviors and expressions in all their variety and (2) locating ourselves on this spectrum as a particular manifestation of the human condition. Of course, this goal is an ideal—attainable only rarely and in part.

I elaborated on these methodological principles to clarify a difference of approach that has emerged in the responses to Sovereignty and the Sacred. Most of the responses have been quite positive.Footnote ³ That is also true of the contributions to this forum. It is gratifying for any writer to be read so carefully and appreciatively by peers. At the same time, both Richard Amesbury and William Cavanaugh have raised some fundamental questions regarding my methodological stance. Amesbury contends that my history of religions approach, despite its engagement with Christian thought and critical stance toward secularism, remains trapped in what he calls “methodological secularism,” one of the shortcomings of which is that this disables me from offering any normative account that would “endors[e] any concrete alternative spiritual economy.”Footnote ⁴ Cavanaugh is more direct regarding what is missing in my approach. He notes that “Theology, unfortunately, is precisely what Yelle does not seem willing to do,” and argues that only a theology that is grounded on “a God who is more than a human projection” can offer real escape from the “iron cage” of modernity that I also rail against.Footnote ⁵ To some extent, such critiques could be attributed to disciplinary, confessional, or even temperamental differences. It is certainly the case that I am neither a theologian nor an ethicist. Also, like Hugo Grotius, I discuss my subject as if God did not exist (etsi deus non daretur),Footnote ⁶ by treating religion as a human phenomenon and grounding my arguments, not on revealed truths nor parochial confessional claims, but on as broad and deep an empirical foundation as possible. Given such differences, it may be something of a minor miracle that we nevertheless find significant ground for engagement and even, occasionally, for agreement.

Motivating the critique may be a dispute over who owns political theology.Footnote ⁷ Although not trained as a theologian, I have found the discourses of political theology tremendously generative for my own research. Rather than offering an exegesis of key thinkers in this field, such as Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, I have instead tried to demonstrate the utility of their categories, especially of the state of exception (Ausnahmezustand) as a necessary moment in the dynamic interplay between sovereignty and legality, and between sacred and profane life.Footnote ⁸ This does not detract from, but adds to the strength of political theology as a field, by showing that it is about more than the interpretation of a set canon. I am pleased to note that none of my interlocutors has called into question this generalization and extension of the concept of state of exception to other cultures and histories.

If, as Cavanaugh rightly notes, I refrain from speaking as a theologian, then why have I embraced the rubric of political theology and tried to take the history of Christian thought seriously, both for its historical influence on our ostensibly secular categories and as valuable evidence of what it means to be human? This was not to privilege Christianity, but simply the logical result of my commitment to a complete and critical human science. Such a commitment requires the interrogation of traditional, received interpretations of biblical texts as much as it requires submitting the presuppositions of secularism to genealogical critique. In devoting so much space to the Hebrew Bible and Christian theology, I have followed in the footsteps of such giants as William Robertson Smith, Edmund Leach, and Mary Douglas in the crucial and incomplete task of explaining biblical traditions in anthropological terms. As long as biblical traditions are not placed on an equal footing with other traditions as data (while receiving due acknowledgment for the unique role that biblical traditions have played in shaping Western civilization, including our categories of analysis), there will remain an unbridgeable divide between reason and revelation. The common ground may be something like a natural theology, which recognizes the similarities across traditions. However, as soon as one tradition is granted special privilege, we have crossed over from anthropology into theology proper, meaning the defense of a confessional tradition. Such a move would be alien to my own approach. If I had the advantage of beginning from a position of certainty in the truth of my own tradition, then I could have spared myself much time and effort that was spent examining the evidence drawn from other cultures and histories.

Both Amesbury and Cavanaugh wish that I had taken more seriously the arguments of the past few decades that demonstrate that religion is an invented and historically conditioned category.Footnote ⁹ Amesbury suggests that I fall back upon an idea of religion as a universal and perennial component of human societies. Similarly, Cavanaugh argues that I have not considered sufficiently the genealogical critiques of religion, the lesson of which “is not that there is no such thing as religion. The religious/secular divide now exists, but as a phenomenon constructed in different ways in different times and places by different configurations of power. It is not a general human datum that exists in all times and places about which one can construct a general theory that covers everything from tribal rituals among the Dinka to Pentecostal Christianity to Theravada Buddhism.”Footnote ¹⁰

Let's leave aside the irony of a theologian questioning the universality of religion; should not such doubts apply also to the truth-claims of Christianity and the universal mission of the church? The critical religion literature prompted my analysis, not by motivating me to write yet another book of that sort, but by way of reaction. First, such arguments have persuaded me that no definition of religion in essentialist terms can ever succeed. Instead, only a systems-theoretical or structural approach might allow us to model more adequately the function that we name religion in a total social order. This is why I moved toward a study of the dialectical interplay between a normative order and deviations from that order (that is, exceptional states). I even moved away from the category of religion itself, by substituting another term, sovereignty,Footnote ¹¹ as a way of avoiding the trap of treating religion as sui generis. The category of religion is, in my analysis, not isolated, but related: first by analogy to sovereignty, and second by the function it fulfills in a dynamic order. Whether this ultimately dissolves the category of religion, by merging it with sovereignty (or politics), I left an open question (20).Footnote ¹² Amesbury acknowledges “That it takes a book like Yelle's to help us recognize that sovereignty and the sacred are different names for the same phenomenon,”Footnote ¹³ but nevertheless suggests that I may have embraced unwittingly the common reification of the category of religion as the “other” of secularism. Partly this is a problem of language; it is very difficult to speak of anything at all without using words derived from natural language, at least when one has the goal of being intelligible to an audience. Amesbury and I agree that the inherited category of religion is tendentious and unreliable: a power grab by a supersessionist Enlightenment. This is precisely why I began with such excluded forms as miracles, revelations, and sacrifices, which constitute the repressed contents of the unconscious of secular modernity. We do not need to define religion when it has already been defined in such terms for us by its opponents; we need only break down the gesture of exclusion and repression that prevents us from acknowledging our ongoing kinship with such forms. To do this much is hardly to repeat the mistakes of Eliadean perennialism.

The second way in which I have responded to such genealogical critiques of the category of religion, is by taking up the neglected yet necessary work of redescribing the data. Deconstructing the category of religion is only a first step. The fundamental task of developing new theoretical models to account for the historical and anthropological data remains. Sovereignty and the Sacred represents a down payment on this larger task, a step toward reconstruction in a future study of religion that understands itself to be part of a total science of the human. Philosophy and theology alone cannot do this work, not least because they too often restate the biases of parochial cultural traditions.Footnote ¹⁴

Although I use the words religion and the sacred in the book quite often, it is with the intent of translating them into other categories, such as sovereignty or the political. I do not intend to fetishize or essentialize the category of religion. The real disagreement, I think, is over the possibility of a general anthropology, meaning a science of the human that conceives of social systems as integral, dynamic entities that exhibit certain structural commonalities amenable to cross-cultural analysis. As Marcel Mauss put it, what is of interest to such an anthropology is the “total social fact” (fait sociale total):Footnote ¹⁵ what we sometimes inaccurately pick out as “religion” is only ever a part of a living whole.

In her insightful review article on my book, Nancy Levene advances some criticisms similar to those advanced by Amesbury and Cavanaugh, which only reinforces the importance of the methodological point under discussion. While recognizing that my “aim [is to] . . . revive—or perhaps create—a history of religions uncorrupted by the distortions of disenchantment and its modern, Christian-esque presuppositions,”Footnote ¹⁶ a science that would contribute to a general “anthropology” or account of “human nature,”Footnote ¹⁷ she also questions the feasibility of this project, specifically its pretensions to transcend any merely theological position.Footnote ¹⁸ Levene ultimately concludes that such a view from nowhere, of a place to stand that would be “outside a particular structure, metaphysics, and history,” is impossible: “Yelle has not given us a history of religions because it cannot be given. . . . There is no history of religions outside a religion's concept of history.”Footnote ¹⁹ Not only have I as an individual failed, but success is in principle impossible. This is a strong claim, with which I must take issue.

Consider what the alternatives to such a comparative study of religion would be. The implication of the methodological restriction articulated, in different ways, by Amesbury, Cavanaugh, and Levene is that a single tradition is not only the starting point, but also the necessary ending point of our analysis; that it is not possible, finally, to escape the confines of one's tradition and, with this, of a particular conception of the deity and of the human. My concern is that this stance disables the very project of a human science. If we are bounded by our own traditions, how are cross-cultural understanding and translation even possible? Or change and synthesis within and across traditions? What would be the point of the genealogical critique of one's tradition if that tradition itself is the ultimate measure of what counts as valid? And how could we adjudicate disputes among competing truth claims grounded in different traditions? Or are all theologies equally valid and incommensurable? Thomist, Puritan, and Hindu? What would even be the point of a dialogue among traditions if that were the case? While eschewing the empirical methodology pursued by a comparative history of religions on the grounds that it is impossible to get outside of a particular theological tradition, my colleagues create even more intractable problems of method. Can it be argued seriously that a theory is stronger when it derives from only one tradition—from a received canon, settled interpretations, and authorized opinions—rather than having been tested against many different traditions? I cannot say whether this would be good theology, but to me it appears bad science.

What I am defending, then, is not the concept of religion, which can be redescribed in other (and often better) terms, but rather the very possibility of an anthropology, which depends in turn on the existence of such a thing as human nature. Indeed, if there were just one thing I could change about the book now, it would be to add a page or two pointing to the resonances between my own approach and the anthropological discourses on sacred kingship that have revived recently, as exemplified by David Graeber's and Marshall Sahlins's 2017 book, On Kings, which I did not read until after my own book was already in print. Graeber and Sahlins highlight the antinomian dimensions of sovereignty in sacred kingship, that most perennial of political institutions: “Any . . . analysis [of sacred kingship] would have to begin with the notion of transcendence: that in order to become the constituting principle of society, a sovereign has to stand outside it.”Footnote ²⁰ The arrival of the “stranger king” from the Beyond is often accompanied by criminal or bizarre behavior. This is as true of James I of England, or of the biblical God (see chapter 2), as it is of the Polynesian and sub-Saharan African kings who serve as examples for Graeber and Sahlins. There is a striking convergence with Agamben's argument that the ruler is “intimately anomos” or antinomian, because sovereignty is defined by its ability to transgress the law (see 30–34).Footnote ²¹ Anthropology and history converge, in a manner that provides independent evidence for my own argument. It is exactly this kind of bold, historically informed anthropological theorizing that I aspire to emulate.

Transformations of Sovereignty

There are many other points raised by these rich essays. Cavanaugh is a superb theologian, and it shows in his superior knowledge of certain aspects of Christian thought that I, as a layperson in such matters, cannot contradict. For all that, Cavanaugh and I seem to agree about a great deal, including the false promises of liberation proffered by secularism and the need for some kind of exit from the increasingly restrictive systems that govern modern life. He notes that “The power of Yelle's book lies in his recasting of this antinomian impulse [of sovereignty and the sacred] as potentially liberating rather than simply irrational and violent.”Footnote ²² Indeed, one of the reasons I wrote the book was to salvage the promise of redemption expressed in such institutions as the biblical Jubilee and the modern pardon power. These are the positive side of Carl Schmitt's state of exception. It is easy to criticize Schmitt's decisionism as a bid for dictatorship or martial law. But would we want to live in a world with no hope of redemption? In Sovereignty and the Sacred I tried to draw a map that leads to forms of sovereignty that are less dictatorial or that reflect the “life” side of the sovereign's traditional power of life and death (vitae necisque potestas). That is why I begin with founding violence, proceed to the biblical ban, then shift to the more hopeful figure of the biblical Jubilee, which served as a metaphor for spiritual redemption.

Cavanaugh provides nuanced criticisms of my argument in three areas: historical, analytical, and theological. The last two have already been addressed above. Regarding the history, Cavanaugh suggests that I may have overemphasized the importance of antinomianism in the Hebrew Bible, and of nominalism as the logical endpoint of Christian scholasticism,Footnote ²³ although he allows that “At times it seems that Yelle is merely trying to correct an imbalance in the study of religion.”Footnote ²⁴ Indeed, my goal was not to develop a complete account of the medieval system, but rather to sketch how late medieval nominalism framed the background for Reformation developments referred to as “disenchantment.” Deists rejected the very idea of an exceptional deity such as had been advanced earlier by nominalists and their Reformation heirs, and they condemned the God of the Hebrew Bible for performing miracles and commanding bloody sacrifices—that is, for acting like an unruly sovereign. This was the direct historical antecedent of the modern, disenchanted condition.

Cavanaugh's position reflects his adherence to the balance struck by the Augustinian-Thomist tradition. Coming from a different perspective, Michelle Sanchez declared the revised history of disenchantment in chapter two “alone . . . worth the price of the volume.”Footnote ²⁵ Plenty of philosophers and intellectual historians have emphasized the role of nominalism in giving birth to modernity, via the Reformation: Hans Blumenberg, Michael Allen Gillespie, and others I mentioned in the book, including Max Weber himself. Weber's argument that the idea of an all-powerful God produced disenchantment in both the Hebrew Bible and the Protestant Reformation still holds up pretty well, and it is another well-known account of the influence of nominalism on what we call the secular (see 62–67).Footnote ²⁶ Another consequence of nominalism was the rise of absolutism, which displaced the power of the church in favor of that of the nation-state, as was highlighted earlier by such scholars as John Neville Figgis and Otto von Gierke, who influenced Ernst Kantorowicz.Footnote ²⁷ If the medieval settlement was as durable as Cavanaugh suggests, how can we account for this subsequent history?

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan offers some fascinating observations in response to my conclusion that the sacred may be an anamorphosis, or a distorted image of sovereignty. She suggests that this resembles another figure, that of the mise en abyme, which can lead to the dizzying spiral of an infinite regression. This is because the attempt to model an “outside” from within the system itself may be both paradoxical and doomed to failure: the “Exit” sign in the fun house of mirrors proves to be merely a reflection, not the reality of an escape. Sullivan further suggests that it can be dangerous to contemplate the abyss. She even worries that I may awaken dead angels or monsters. I cannot say much about the work of Karl Ove Knausgård, whom I have not read. However, I have often wondered if what I offered, in the form of a model of those human cultural systems that we call “religions,” was only further proof of the final futility of the promise of transcendence that such systems offer. Religions are, as Clifford Geertz stated, both “models of” and “models for” how to live.Footnote ²⁸ But when our aim is to show how such models work, we inevitably reveal the machinery of model making, the spinning wheels and gears that are the all-too-human drivers of our daydreams and visions. This has been true from Plato's Cave to the Wizard of Oz. Knowing how all of this stuff works may make it difficult or even impossible to believe. Sullivan quotes André Gide, who cited Velazquez's Las Meñinas as an example of the mise en abyme. Another famous reading of this painting was offered by Michel Foucault, who interpreted it as a metaphor or perhaps harbinger for modernity, which has displaced classical modes of representation.Footnote ²⁹ At the center of this painting-within-a-painting, reflected in a mirror, yet otherwise unseen, was the focal point of this menagerie: King Philip IV of Spain and his queen. Figures of sovereignty. The modern subject may approach such figures obliquely, or in the mode of irony, but find it difficult to look at them directly. Or is the risk that, if we look the king in the eye, we will cease to believe in his divinity?

Dissatisfied with “the sovereign politics advocated for [sic] by Yelle,” Sullivan contends that the way to justice is through “new imaginings of community.”Footnote ³⁰ She cites Vincent Lloyd's call for a “politics of the middle,” in which “the God-like individual and the God-like state are no longer the starting and ending points for political-theological analysis.”Footnote ³¹ The quotation from Lloyd is from a forum on Sullivan's last book, Church, State, Corporation; implicitly, Sullivan is calling for more attention to be paid to such corporate forms, which would then serve as a necessary antidote to an exclusive focus on the king. While agreeing that this is an urgent necessity, I have a few responses. First, we may be done with sovereignty, but sovereignty is not done with us. The events of January 6, 2021, showed the power of leaders over crowds, and the hazards of the interregnum, which the king's mystical body (or, failing that, the ritual of the democratic process) was intended to guard against. There could be no more tangible and timely evidence for the need to understand sovereignty now. To say this much is not to advocate in favor of such events; it is instead to recognize the danger that they pose—a danger that is grounded in the attractiveness of sovereignty which, like the sacred as described by Rudolf Otto, is a mysterium tremendum et fascinans.Footnote ³² The same event showed that the focus on the masses, or their incorporation, is by no means incompatible with a focus on sovereignty. Do crowds make leaders, or do leaders make crowds? Frederic William Maitland's seminal essay, “The Crown as Corporation,” which influenced Kantorowicz, begins with an epigraph noting the dangers of an interregnum; this is why the fiction that there is no gap in sovereignty must be preserved.Footnote ³³

The focus on sovereignty that Sullivan points to is not, I would argue, of my own doing. It is built into the structure of the modern nation-state, which has monopolized all power at the expense of intermediating institutions, including especially the church. This is a direct consequence of the triumph of nominalism disputed by Cavanaugh. Older histories of secularism describe this development in terms that converge with Sullivan's (or rather Lloyd's) formulation. The German legal historian Otto von Gierke argued that now “The Sovereignty of the State and the Sovereignty of the Individual . . . [became] the two central axioms from which all theories of social structure would proceed.”Footnote ³⁴ The middle was hollowed out. Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan was a sign of this development. Hobbes collapsed the church into the state even as he grounded the absolute, undivided sovereignty of the latter on the individual's submission to the social contract. As Hobbes stated, “A multitude of men are made one person, when they are by one man, or one person, represented.”Footnote ³⁵ The problem of association and the problem of sovereignty are inextricably linked, and it is false to suggest that we must choose between them.

John D. Haskell highlights some connections between what I wrote in Sovereignty and the Sacred, and certain trajectories in the contemporary field of law and religion. This makes me optimistic regarding the prospects for further conversations between legal studies and religious studies. When I left the former for the latter, after earning a JD at Berkeley in 1993, I was told that law and religion could mean only one of two things: the First Amendment or canon law. The situation has certainly changed for the better since then. And there is every reason that it should continue to improve. Both lawyers and scholars of religion are concerned with fundamental questions of social order. As soon as we move beyond the realm of legal analysis in the black-letter sense, we see that law is integrally related to other domains of culture, including especially religion. Haskell accurately characterizes my “claim . . . not that there is a complicated but distinct engagement between law and religion . . . [but] that when we drill into the history and nature of any human phenomena, we find that what we call the sacred and the profane are so entangled that any claim to logically separate their constitutions can by the very same reasoning be easily shown as an artificial divide, that they are in fact inseparable.”Footnote ³⁶ In some respects, this returns us to key insights of Henry Maine, who noted the religious origins of numerous legal systems and practiced a type of comparative law analogous to and contemporary with Friedrich Max Müller's “comparative mythology” or comparative religion. Footnote ³⁷ Although the pragmatic focus of much modern legal scholarship may limit the appeal of such an approach, the study of history and anthropology, including religion, is essential for a broader theory of law.

Haskell states that “Modernity is perhaps the arch-nemesis in the text.”Footnote ³⁸ I would prefer to put it somewhat differently: what I opposed is a certain modern tendency, particularly in rationalistic disciplines such as law, to ignore the evidence of history and other cultures, evidence that tends to demonstrate that law and religion are connected, but equally that a theory of the law is incomplete unless it can make room for sovereignty or the sacred, which represents the “outside” of law. A theory of politics requires precisely an account of the interrelation between a normative order and that which exceeds and sustains it. Law can no more be separated from sovereignty than the pouvoir constitué can be separated from the pouvoir constituant. Without the one, the other collapses. Both Amesbury and Cavanaugh note the parallel between my argument and Charles Taylor's complaint that our secular age has become too “nomological.”Footnote ³⁹ This is the reason why I emphasized the inability of existing theories to account for the antinomian dimensions of human behavior, as a partial attempt to restore the balance in our theoretical models.

Joseph David rightly emphasizes my dependence on Schmitt and Agamben. My book as a whole offers not so much a definition or comprehensive theory of religion, but rather a series of case studies, drawn from across different traditions, that demonstrate collectively the utility of the idea of the “state of exception” as a rubric for modeling key moments in the history of religion, or of religion as politics (and vice-versa). Of course, we must also face up to the disturbing aspects of Schmitt's legacy. One example is the apparent influence of his ideas on the scholarly discourses concerning the Männerbund: the “male band” or men's association, usually conceived as a primeval marauding group of warriors or hunters and as the oldest form of Indo-German society.Footnote ⁴⁰ In her own contribution to this scholarship, published five years after Schmitt's Politische Theologie (1922) popularized the term, Lily Weiser-Aall used the term “state of exception” (Ausnahmezustand) to characterize those liminal and festive moments in which such groups experienced their own collective effervescence, or a form of religious ecstasy.Footnote ⁴¹ Such projections of founding violence and primitive sociality coordinated with the ideology of national socialism in ways that we now recognize were dangerous in the real world.

David astutely points out that, while dissenting from Weber's thesis of disenchantment, I describe a more rhythmic and cyclical movement in which the state of exception recurs: “The turn from chaos to order, from anomie to a social life under the law . . . is not evolutionary or linear, as suggested by various contractarians, but cyclical and recurrent.” David also recognizes that this poses a series of interesting questions concerning what, precisely, secularization might mean. Because there is no linear development, but only oscillation, “In what sense is secularization in modern times unique?”Footnote ⁴² Especially if disenchantment is revealed as something like the charter myth of modernity, rather than an accomplished fact. David points to “the rise of the liberal ideas of individualism and privacy”Footnote ⁴³ as key characteristics that might help to distinguish modernity from whatever came before it. Certainly the attacks on the Catholic Church and on the collective religious life represented by the church's sacramental and ritual order, which Weber identified as a decisive step in disenchantment, articulated with the redefinition of religion as a private and interior matter: what John Locke called an “inward persuasion.”Footnote ⁴⁴ David argues that free-market individualism also distinguishes secularism from what came before it. This sounds right, although it would not make modernity nonreligious. Neoliberalism depends on its own set of quasi-religious presuppositions. David's suggestions strike me as promising avenues for further inquiry. What may be distinctive of secular modernity, as I have indicated above, is the monopolization of sovereignty by the nation-state, which enabled also the rise of the modern individual, by hollowing out intermediary forms of association, especially that of the church or churches. Although at first glance this resembles the classical definition of secularism as the decline of (institutional) religion, it also strangely involved the reabsorption of religious authority by the state. Both Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau intimated something like a return to the “civil religion” of pre-Christian paganism. All that is old is new again. This does not answer David's question regarding what might make the secular distinctive; however, it suggests other avenues of approach to answering the question.

As David notes, not only are there religious dimensions to politics, but equally “the phenomenology of the political is essential to understanding the religious universe.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This includes also the Bible, which, reread in such terms, reveals new or renewed meanings. Although Sullivan expresses skepticism regarding my “return to ancient Israel,”Footnote ⁴⁶ this is not what I see myself as doing. How would that even be possible? Yet, I would argue, the recovery of the legibility of such texts as the Hebrew Bible is the sine qua non of their relevance for us, as well as of the overcoming of our alienation from our own history. Like Michael Walzer,Footnote ⁴⁷ I think that the Bible retains its relevance, not least because we continue to read it and, in the course of doing so, to give it new meanings. Indeed, the contemporary turn to political theology somewhat resembles the movement called Christian Hebraism in the seventeenth century, during which the links of our secular constitutional order were forged, largely through a reflection on the Bible and Christian theology.Footnote ⁴⁸ Hobbes also found it necessary to frame his arguments in theological terms, and to maintain the pretense of orthodoxy. Now our traditions have become plural, which makes both the challenge and the opportunity of this moment greater. What will emerge from the current reflections on the roots of our cultural order, remains to be seen. However, the fact that we appear to be having such a moment is, for me at least, one of the signs that the post-secular age may have well and truly arrived. And that is what I hoped for while writing Sovereignty and the Sacred.