Søren Kierkegaard lived in a small, religiously homogeneous country. In an age when Romantics on both sides of the Atlantic were exploring non-Western religions, Kierkegaard focused intently on “Christendom,” the union of nominal Christianity with bourgeois culture and political power. He exhibited little interest in religious diversity. For him, Europe's Christians had lost their passion—a problem that couldn't be solved by reading the Bhagavad Gita.
Now, Kierkegaard's native Denmark faces a different challenge. Most Danes are dragged to church only over their dead bodies, as weekly church attendance is minimal, but 83 percent of the country's deceased have Lutheran funerals. Meanwhile, religious minorities are growing more visible, and a far-right party in Denmark has enlisted Kierkegaard to advance an ethno-nationalist agenda. In their eyes, Kierkegaard is the thinker of the single individual against an undifferentiated mass of Others.
Kierkegaard is therefore an unlikely guide through present-day questions of religious diversity, but philosopher George B. Connell gamely argues that Kierkegaard has more relevance here than meets the eye. Specifically, Kierkegaard thought deeply about the conflict between particularity and universality—in matters of truth, ethics, and faith. In all of these cases, Kierkegaard calls for holding the particular and universal in paradoxical tension, rather than resolving things in favor of either the parochial or the cosmopolitan. Connell leans hard on this theme of paradox throughout the book.
For example, the central paradox of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling—that Abraham obeys the command to sacrifice Isaac while simultaneously believing he will keep his son—puts the particular call ahead of universal law in a frightening way that nevertheless stops short of condoning religious violence. It's harrowing to read Fear and Trembling in connection with al-Qaeda's 9/11 attacks, as Connell does with his students, and as I have with mine. Connell argues, against liberal universalists who want to lump Kierkegaard in with illiberal, violent forces, that the kind of certainty exhibited by religious terrorists “is unavailable to us in this life, especially on matters of ultimate concern. For [Kierkegaard], faith is a passionate, risky commitment to an objective uncertainty” (125).
Connell also hopes to save Kierkegaard's reputation from his right-wing admirers. (To be honest, I didn't know Kierkegaard had right-wing admirers until I read this book.) It's a surprisingly difficult task. Kierkegaard's taxonomy of religions goes no further than pagan-Jew-Christian. And in fact, Connell shows that in Kierkegaard's writings, both “pagan” and “Jew” are really epithets aimed at the bourgeois state church. But if that's so, then in using those terms, Kierkegaard isn't really talking about religious diversity at all.
The book is part of a series on Kierkegaard as a Christian thinker. On this topic, though, Kierkegaard has little to offer Christians. That may be just as well for our purposes today. In a post-Christian country like Denmark, is religious diversity even a theological question? Does Denmark need Kierkegaard to help it think through how to include religious minorities in its society? Would it matter to Danes that Kierkegaard was a specifically Christian thinker?
A better case can be made that the United States, even as it grows more secular and religiously diverse, is now Christendom. Despite conservative Evangelicals’ claims to being a persecuted minority, it seems plausible as I write this that the Christian maximalist Mike Pence will one day become president. In this context, the questions Connell raises are more pressing. One hopes that American Christians would indeed feel a theological need to keep universalism and particularity in tension, rather than simply mobilize ethno-religious identity in their politics.
In the United States, the question of whether Fear and Trembling justifies religious violence is indeed harrowing, but it may be more interesting to ask whether it justifies exempting a Christian business owner from a federal mandate to provide contraception coverage to employees. In the new Christendom, for however long it lasts, questions like this will be the mundane, yet still vexing, challenges of religious diversity.
