Robert A. Yelle's Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion explores the apparent convergence between “the central categories of politics and religion respectively, based on their shared qualities of rupture, singularity, and antinomianism” (18). Contemporary secular political economy rests, he argues, on something like religion. But to make good on this claim, Yelle must confront a challenge: modern polity and economy seek to legitimate themselves through the disavowal and erasure of precisely those antinomian impulses on which, according to Yelle, they in fact depend. Sovereignty and the Sacred is thus also a polemic against false consciousness and ideological mystification, a sustained critique of the impoverished historiography of what might be called methodological secularism. However, it does not fully escape the frame of reference Yelle explicitly rejects, for the history of religions inherits a secular understanding of its subject matter. Like Max Weber's account of charisma,Footnote ¹ which Yelle analyzes as a secular mytheme (see chapter 2), the category of religion has functioned historically as part of a supersessionistic strategy to displace and contain the antinomian. My aim in this essay is not to reject Yelle's argument, but to push it further, toward a reflexive consideration of its vantage point.

Early in the book, Yelle remarks that the sacred may constitute a “mode of sovereignty” and that his “interest is in exploring the analogy between the two categories” (13). He develops this analogy partly through a comparison of Rudolf Otto's account of the sacredFootnote ² and Carl Schmitt's account of sovereignty.Footnote ³ Both, Yelle notes, involve states of exception, moments of rupture in which the prevailing order is suspended. These states of exception can be found, on Yelle's account, in moments of Sabbath, Carnival, and Jubilee and in paroxysms of founding or revolutionary violence.

The point, for Yelle, is not to valorize the Dionysian at the expense of the Apollonian, but to insist that every polity, every social order, requires both. These irruptions are something not so much to be celebrated—they can be dreadful—as to be acknowledged and responsibly managed. “If every economy appears bound to contain its moments of antinomianism, of return to primal chaos, then the ethical question becomes one of how to direct such moments” (185). The brunt of Yelle's critique is thus directed not against structure per se, but against accounts of that structure, such as those provided by social contract and rational-choice theories, that fail to acknowledge or render invisible the vital role of what the anthropologist Victor Turner famously called anti-structure.Footnote ⁴ While his primary task is elucidatory, Yelle can nevertheless be read as a critic of secular modernity, including the capitalist market. Insofar as a “secular age” is characterized by what Charles Taylor calls “nomolatry”Footnote ⁵—the exceptionless application of rules—Yelle suggests the need for exits, openings to what exceeds and disrupts the “stale habitus of calculation and the oppressions of social, financial, and spiritual debt” (169).

Although Yelle is not the first scholar to make these points, his approach to them in Sovereignty and the Sacred is distinctive in two ways. First, he broadens the scope of political theology beyond an analysis of “the state” to include political economy. At the center of Yelle's approach is an analysis of modes of production and exchange. Building upon classic work by thinkers like Georges Bataille and Thorstein Veblen,Footnote ⁶ Yelle places sovereign violence within the context of what Bataille called general economy, an understanding of exchange based on excess, as opposed to scarcity.Footnote ⁷ Second, Sovereignty and the Sacred is notable for its historical breadth and cross-cultural erudition. Rather than limiting himself to the present or even to the influence, say, of Christian theology, as has tended to be the norm following Schmitt, Ernst Kantorowicz,Footnote ⁸ and Giorgio Agamben,Footnote ⁹ Yelle takes an encyclopedic approach, drawing upon, inter alia, his own earlier research on the religions of India.

While the contemporary landscape of insurrection, apocalypticism, and religious nationalism would seem to provide ample grist for the mill, Yelle's preferred methodology is not simply the academic study of religion, but the tradition known as history of religions. Where the former, anxious to demonstrate its relevance, has been largely shaped by a “relentless turn toward the study of contemporary phenomena,” history of religions—a tradition of comparativism for which Yelle's alma mater and publisher, the University of Chicago, remains famous—draws upon a deeper archive of examples and seeks to situate the present within an account of its conditions of possibility (186). “In the end, the goal of a history of religions that has advanced beyond antiquarianism must be the understanding of human nature, and of the present as a function of that nature” (186). What we call religion belongs to these human conditions.

On Yelle's account, every social order has its religion. “Religion,” on this view, denotes “a function, namely the function of transcendence within a total social order” (14). This transcendence can be understood to underwrite the social order, but it also threatens it. The sacred destroys as well as creates: “Indeed, the history of religions could be written in terms of such acts of transgression: the starving Buddha, crucified Christ, paralyzed Socrates (possessed by his daimon); Tantric libertines, orgiastic rites, Bacchantes, the self-mutilated devotees of Cybele; various movements of iconoclasm (Egyptian (Akhenaton), Jewish, Islamic, Byzantine, Protestant); Carnival and other moments of social license when the hierarchy is temporarily inverted or abolished; and a host of millennial and apocalyptic movements” (13). While religious violence has been the subject of criticism “particularly, in the wake of September 11, 2001,” it has “rarely been the focus of a general theory of religion” (13). Yelle aims to remedy this by providing an account of religion, and more broadly of polity and economy, to which the antinomian is central. Though troubling to certain modern sensibilities, religion promises relief from the secular, hinting, like an exit sign, at possibilities beyond the mundane.

At times, however, it is unclear whether this characterization of religion is historical or transcendental. Consider, for example, Yelle's list of religious examples in the quotation above. Together they would appear to suggest a compelling empirical generalization: religion is suffused with violent and irrational antinomianism. But suppose we pause and ask: By virtue of what do these otherwise historically disparate phenomena all qualify as religion? Does the list show that religions possess a transgressive quality, or that only things that possess this quality come to be counted as religions? Is this, in other words, an empirical claim or a definitional stipulation? And, if the latter, what function does it serve?

One of Yelle's aims is to situate the antinomianism of what we call religion within a wider “spiritual economy,” a “complete, self-contained system, defined in significant measure by the relation between sovereignty and legality” (35). What initially appear as contrasting categories—such as sovereignty and law—come, in Yelle's analysis, to be recognized as opposite sides of the same coin, inextricably connected. Indeed, although Yelle does not put it in quite this way, he shows, through various examples, how myths of secularization rely upon a chain of bifurcated concepts—potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata, miracles and laws of nature, charisma and bureaucracy—that function according to a supersessionistic logic of displacement. In each case, the first term in the dichotomy functions to contain antinomianism within limits, relegating it safely to the past, and the second term is defined by the absence of sovereign caprice. This splitting and hiving off are fundamental to the self-understanding of “modern” secular authority, itself a particular configuration of sovereignty, a spiritual economy. Although Yelle labors impressively to rejoin what had been sundered, his disciplinary vantage point within the history of religions means that he, too, operates with a split field of vision identified by the key terms of the book's title, which Yelle refers to as “the central categories of religion and politics” (9).

Near the end of the book, Yelle perceptively notes that “the sacred” may be another name for sovereignty (184), but that this point needs to be made is itself notable, and it is in some apparent tension with his earlier claim that the former is analogous to the latter. A relation of analogy is not, after all, one of identity: a thing is not merely analogous to itself. Yelle is, in my view, right when he concludes that the relation is more than just a similarity, but he misses an opportunity to drive the point home by not engaging a parallel body of literature on the cultural history of the category “religion.”Footnote ¹⁰ Supplementing his history of religions with a history of “religion” would also allow him to historicize what otherwise function as structural categories of his analysis—religion, the sacred—and thus to locate the encyclopedic history of religions on which he draws within a particular modern narrative—a narrative that itself belongs to the superstructure of secular sovereignty.

Engaging with this genealogical literature would help bring into view that the construction of the modern understanding of religion as something irrational was bound up with the rise of the early modern state and a constituent part of its political theology. What William Cavanaugh has called the “myth of religious violence” belongs to its ideology of legitimation.Footnote ¹¹ Cavanaugh's point is not that religion is not violent, but rather that the effort to quarantine violence and irrationality within the domain of something called religion enables the naturalization of other forms of sovereign violence, including those associated with the state (and, one might add, the market). This analysis of religion can be seen as analogous to Yelle's account of Weber's thesis of the routinization of charisma, which he reads as a secularization myth. In much the same way that Weber participated in a long history of attempts to relegate antinomianism to the past, so, too, the invention of religion served to quarantine sovereign violence at a safe spatio-temporal remove. By the time Schmitt drew his famous analogy between the theological and the political, he was thus already well downstream from the critical move—namely, distinguishing religion from politics. This distinction is what creates the perception that the similarities can be grasped in terms of analogy—that political concepts are secularized theological concepts. Though illuminating, this view is inadequate, operating within the secular imaginary it seeks to interrogate.

That it takes a book like Yelle's to help us recognize that sovereignty and the sacred are different names for the same phenomenon is a testament to just how entrenched the secular has become, how naturalized our modern category of religion. But if religion is a secular category—if, in other words, the secular is not simply the “other” to religion but the epistemic regime within which it becomes possible to single religion out as one thing among others, to hold it conceptually at bay—then it is not enough simply to identify religion, as Yelle sometimes seems to, with those antinomian impulses that resist closure, offering exit signs for off-ramps. Rather, what needs to be appreciated is that this view of religion is itself a product of the phenomenon it is here being invoked to analyze. Far from religion being a human universal, necessary to any political order, what is striking is that the category that defines the historical archive is relatively rare within it. Our political economy requires religion, because it legitimates its authority by distancing itself from it. Religion is what makes us secular. Attention to the genealogy and politics of religion would help to make the history of religions more reflexive, revealing that it too is an historical artifact, entangled with the will to sovereign power and reliant on contingent developments for the categories of its structural analysis.

Although his book seeks to rescue the sacred from displacement by secular-capitalist political economy, it is notable that Yelle stops short of endorsing any concrete alternative spiritual economy. Coming to see religion as a form of sovereignty “discloses an opening in the system,” but “[w]hat lies on the other side is anyone's guess” (187). This, I suggest, is an unavoidable limit to the history-of-religions approach. Within the secular imaginary, religion possesses an interestingly ambivalent quality and function: it appears to provide alternatives to the prevailing order, but these imagined alternatives operate simultaneously to reaffirm that order. Just as, on Turner's analysis, feasts of misrule function as release valves for energies that might otherwise threaten social norms, religion seems to provide off-ramps that are also on-ramps. If religion is structure-affirming anti-structure, the Carnival of secular sovereignty, then it may not provide a genuine exit.

That this should be so may be explicable on the view that what we call religions are the domesticated rivals of our present political-economic order, erstwhile sovereignties that can be tolerated because they are seen to have been defeated. Reframed as religion, they now belong within the regnant order, rather than providing meaningful alternatives to it. In Naomi Goldenberg's phrase, religions are “vestigial states.”Footnote ¹² Yelle's book reminds us that they are also vestigial economies. This pattern of reclassification has been documented in European colonial encounters, where Indigenous communities were discovered to “have” religions only after conquest. As David Chidester notes, “When a frontier closed, as indigenous resistance was broken or contained, and European hegemony was more or less established, a religion, or a religious system, was discovered that could be defined and inventoried.”Footnote ¹³ By the time religion comes to be recognized as such, it is thus no longer sovereign, offering at best a nostalgic vision of missed opportunities, the object of secular, colonial velleities. However impressive, the gods are seen as if in a museum.

The critique offered here is intended not as a refutation of Yelle's thesis but as an extension of it. If the history of religions has been constructed to contain and redirect those transgressive, antinomian impulses that hint at alternatives to the present social order, then it is not surprising that it is to this history that he turns for data. An archive of what might have been, the history of religions is indeed useful in calling attention to the contingency of what is, thereby unsettling the present and its claim to inevitability. But as Yelle rightly notes in his conclusion, what might be still lies ahead, unconstrained by the limited categories of secular bourgeois capitalism. When an alternate spiritual economy arises to confront our own, we will not recognize it as a religion.