Introduction: the return of ‘political religion’

Renewed interest in the concept of ‘political religion’, especially as a way of characterising the unanticipated political departures of inter-war Europe, gathered force during the 1990s and shows no sign of letting up. To some extent it has accompanied attempts to dust off the concept of ‘totalitarianism’, also a way of characterising those departures, and especially any common features in the Italian fascist, German Nazi, and Soviet communist experiments. Indeed, a significant journal, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, was launched in Britain in 2000 and continues to draw contributions from around the world. An important three-volume set of papers on totalitarianism and political religion, edited by Hans Maier, a leader in the renewal of both categories, first published in German, is in process of publication in English translation.Footnote ¹ One of the most significant recent books on political religion, Emilio Gentile's Politics as Religion, originally published in Italian in 2001, was published in English translation by Princeton University Press in 2006.Footnote ² Along the way, such leading anglophone scholars as Roger Griffin, Michael Burleigh and Stanley Payne, who had already made essential contributions to our understanding of generic fascism or Nazism, have come to embrace the category. Indeed, Burleigh has published two substantial books on political religion with Harper Collins, indicating that at least one major trade publisher is persuaded of the topic's wider currency.Footnote ³

Still, ‘political religion’ has been and remains controversial. Such leading students of fascism and/or Nazism as Hans Mommsen, Ian Kershaw and Roger Eatwell question it, although for somewhat disparate reasons that we shall consider in detail. For now let us simply note that Kershaw dismisses ‘political religion’ as ‘a currently voguish revamping of an age-old notion’.Footnote ⁴

The charge that the concept is old-hat does not deter proponents like Gentile and Burleigh, who frequently invoke earlier authorities – the political agents themselves, who sometimes characterised their departures in religious terms, but especially contemporary analysts and critics, from Don Luigi Sturzo to Eric Voegelin to Raymond Aron, who found something like ‘political religion’ the best way to get a handle on the era's political departures, including the new, more overt use of rituals and symbols.Footnote ⁵ It is certainly true that categories associated with ‘political religion’ were used fairly widely by the 1930s and even into the early 1950s. But as current proponents are quick to recognise, such testimony was largely marginalised thereafter, even as such subsequent scholars as Norman Cohn, Augusto Del Noce and Jean-Pierre Sironneau, in a book published as late as 1982, continued to analyse one or more of the three cases by means of religious categories.Footnote ⁶ Insofar as this line of interpretation was marginalised prematurely, we must ask what change in our framework enables us to grasp, as most of our immediate predecessors did not, the pertinence of those earlier usages.

At issue, first, is the place of liturgy, ritual, symbol and myth, but then also, more deeply, the sense of world-historical mission, the framework of ‘millennial’ expectation, that seemingly characterised the three departures. It is the whole package that proponents claim to encompass through the term ‘political religion’. Gentile offers a four-part definition that, reduced to its essentials, includes (i) the primacy of a secular collective entity; (ii) a code of obligations binding every individual to the sacralised entity; (iii) a community of the elect with a mission that will benefit all humanity; and (iv) a political liturgy, which includes the worship of a personifying individual and the mythical and symbolic representation of the movement's sacred history.Footnote ⁷

Although Gentile and most proponents take care with definition and distinction, ‘political religion’ is used in varied ways, a fact that especially complicates assessment. Michael Rißmann notes that some focus on single ‘religious’ elements and others treat ‘political religion’ as an ensemble, whereas still others link the notion to totalitarianism, sometimes as a complement, but sometimes as a replacement.Footnote ⁸ At the same time, even the most avid proponents do not claim that the dimensions encompassed by ‘political religion’ exhaust the field; none takes the category as a panacea, explaining everything and rendering other categories irrelevant.

A favoured tack is to claim simply that ‘political religion’ has heuristic value, focusing questions and stimulating research. Griffin stresses the heuristic value of a tripartite approach, in which ‘political religion’ is brought to bear together with ‘fascism’ and ‘totalitarianism’.Footnote ⁹ In the same spirit, Gentile warns against the indiscriminate use of ‘political religion’, which, he insists, ‘is one element of totalitarianism, not the principal element and not even the most important in defining its essence’. As he sees it, in fact, the nature of totalitarianism ‘remains a wholly open question’.Footnote ¹⁰ So even granting the import of faith, belief, myth, ritual and the like, it must be asked how they came together with whatever else was at work.

In some cases the quest for political religion yields merely a catalogue of parallels or resemblances. In discussing ‘Communism as Religion’, for example, Marcin Kula delineates a series of undeniable similarities between communist practices, in both the early Leninist and the later Stalinist phases, and traditional religious usages. But because he offers little beyond that catalogue, the explanatory dimension is thin and the heuristic value not obvious.Footnote ¹¹ However, such proponents as Gentile and Griffin clearly posit something more, a syndrome, with cohesion as a syndrome of a certain sort, addressing a particular subset of human needs in a characteristic way. Taken as such a syndrome, ‘political religion’ seemingly might deepen our understanding of the originating aspirations at work. However, we must also ask, conversely, what the lens of ‘political religion’ might lead us to obscure, marginalise or neglect. For although the merely ‘heuristic’ use of the category seems almost self-recommending, ‘political religion’ might conceivably yield a kind of false positive, providing answers that initially seem convincing, perhaps especially insofar as new questions have opened, but that in fact cut us off from more fruitful lines of analysis.

Some such sense of the limitations and pitfalls surely has contributed to the peremptory dismissal of ‘political religion’ on the part of some. But such reaction may lead critics to miss or to play down unduly aspects of the regimes in question. Indeed, the category's almost inherently controversial nature seems to have promoted a tendency toward polarisation damaging to the overall discussion. In this article I hope to clarify the uses and disadvantages of the concept. I shall focus exclusively on Italian fascism, German Nazism and Soviet communism, for although the wider culture seems to demand categories providing a short-cut understanding of everything from ‘skinheads’ to ‘Islamofascists’ to ‘lone wolves’ such as Timothy McVeigh, those three European regimes from the era of the two world wars remain archetypal, and only when we get a better handle on the applicability of ‘political religion’ to them can we determine its wider relevance.

Basic uses, conceptual complications, and questions of definition

Assessment is difficult partly because, even limiting ourselves to these three cases, there remains much disagreement about classification and grouping, whether around ‘generic fascism’ or ‘totalitarianism’. So how political religion might come into play would seem to depend at least in part on how we position ourselves on what can be conceived schematically as a three-tiered scale of possibilities.

1. 1. Some insist on a kind of nominalism – the singularity and the distinctiveness of each case.

2. 2. Others lump together two of the three, opposing them to the third. Indeed, we might plausibly invoke any one of three 2:1 axes. The most obvious, taking the left–right difference to be fundamental, pits generic fascism – linking Italian fascism and German Nazism – against Soviet communism, with its roots in Marxism and its putatively universalist aims. But Hannah Arendt and others posited a different axis, linking Soviet communism (or at least Stalinism) with Nazism, characterising both as totalitarian, as differentiated from Italian fascism, taken to have been merely authoritarian. This familiar axis, however, has come to seem less appropriate as ‘political religion’ has returned to currency. Featuring those dimensions that seem most to warrant ‘political religion’, Gentile insists convincingly on the applicability of totalitarianism to the Italian case, despite its well-known differences from the other two.Footnote ¹² Finally, although the third axis has never been as prominent, there are grounds for linking Italian fascism and Soviet communism vis-à-vis Nazism, especially in the light of two major considerations: the fact that Italian fascism had evident roots, as Nazism did not, in the revision of Marxism; and the fact that ‘race hygiene’, encompassing biological racism and eugenics, was central to Nazism as it was not to the other two.

3. 3. Still others play up the elements of convergence among all three regimes, finding those elements not merely superficial but central to all we seek to understand. Although it has long seemed problematic, ‘totalitarianism’ has remained the favoured term to characterise whatever the three had in common. To lump the three as totalitarian does not preclude taking the other axes, and even singularity, as decisive for certain questions.

With this three-tiered set of possibilities in mind, we can begin to consider why ‘political religion’ has recently returned to currency. Obviously, the end of the cold war, which had channelled questioning in certain ways, and the turn to ‘postmodernism’, which has made ‘modern’ no longer honorific but problematic, have invited new lines of questioning. And the use of ‘political religion’ has been bound up with an increasing willingness to view fascism as in some sense – to paraphrase Stanley Payne – ‘revolutionary in its own right’, as opposed to a mere ‘historical negativity’, a longstanding interpretive tack well characterised by Gentile.Footnote ¹³ For such students of generic fascism as Griffin and Philip Morgan, fascism was not some revolt against modernity but the quest for an alternative modernity.Footnote ¹⁴ So ‘political religion’ might help us make sense of fascist aspirations earlier explained away in reductionist terms through reference to bourgeois reaction and the resentments of ‘petty-bourgeois’ types being marginalised by modernisation itself. At the same time, taking fascism seriously as revolutionary, even as the quest for an alternative modernity, seems to entail transcending certain of the bases for the longstanding emphasis on the left–right axis.

The import of many of the phenomena at issue – ritual and spectacle, myth and symbol – has long been recognised, but we have tended to explain them away in instrumental or propagandistic terms, as if they were all part of the package devised by the new ruling elite to beguile the masses. Explicitly tackling this issue, Gentile stresses that whereas such instrumentalism underlies political religion on occasion, this is not always the case, and he and most other proponents underscore the seriousness, even the irreducibility, of the underlying ‘religious’ impulse, at least up to a point. As Gentile sees it, to invoke instrumentalist explanations is to minimise excessively the place of the irrational dimension in mass politics – and in human experience more generally. He insists that we take seriously the need for faith and belief, especially in periods of upheaval, when established faiths are in decline and hopes for a better world become more compelling.Footnote ¹⁵

So for all its emphasis on ritual, symbol and myth, ‘political religion’ leads us to deeper questions about belief, including modes of historical consciousness. In this sense the approach points beyond the ‘culturalist’ accents of those like Jeffrey Schnapp, Mabel Berezin and Barbara Spackman, who take seriously the aesthetic and affective dimensions of Italian fascism, but who, on the basis of such accents, sidestep or dismiss wider questions about idealistic belief and/or political direction.Footnote ¹⁶ Even as they leave the earlier reductionism behind, proponents of this approach may trivialise in a new, ‘postmodern’ way.Footnote ¹⁷ Gentile justifiably bristles at any suggestion that he is to be lumped with them because he insists on the depth and seriousness of the content as they do not.Footnote ¹⁸

What drives the renewed interest in the political religion category, above all, is a sense that the package encompassing ritual, symbol, myth, mission and the like indicates that something more interesting, and perhaps more troubling, than either manipulation or aesthetic satisfaction was at work. Not only is a mode of genuine belief at issue, but ‘political religion’ specifies something of its content; these were beliefs about the very meaning and purpose of collective existence. At issue, moreover, is shared belief, a sense of common purpose, transcending the undoubted measure of hierarchical differentiation in each regime.Footnote ¹⁹ In this sense the use of ‘political religion’ seems to lead us beyond the old model of ‘totalitarianism’, assuming that top-down domination was the underlying impetus, to a more complex understanding of the relationship between leaders and led.

But the distinction between idealism and instrumentalism can be slippery. Some measure of instrumentalism is surely to be found in all political systems, and certainly religious themes can have instrumental uses. So how do we know whether or not, or to what extent, we are dealing with irreducible religious idealism? Even if only implicitly, questions about instrumentality continue to lurk in the discussion, helping to occasion the uncertainty and disagreement surrounding the ‘political religion’ category.

For Gentile, political religion was the core of an anthropological revolution to create a ‘new man’, devoted to realising the revolutionary and imperialist projects of the totalitarian party.Footnote ²⁰ But this suggests that ‘political religion’ was a mere means of carrying out projects projected by the new elite on the basis of purposes that must be understood in other terms. The difference in purpose between leaders and led might seem deeper than any shared belief or faith. But clearly we would need to know more about those projects, and their relationship to whatever shared beliefs, before we could make any such assessment.

Gentile's difficulty in placing the account of the earlier German critic Waldemar Gurian proves symptomatic. Gurian saw beyond ‘crowd manipulation’, but still traced the religious dimension to calculated self-interest on the part of the rulers, finding it one of the demagogic instruments of totalitarian control.Footnote ²¹ For Gurian, then, the underlying purposes were still instrumental, and Gentile is ambiguous as to whether we need to see beyond. To some extent the matter is surely undecidable, just as he implies. But the uncertainty on this key point suggests that we may need a more differentiated framework, that ‘political religion’ may not adequately account for and characterise whatever idealism was at work.

The scope for irreducible idealism and faith raises wider questions about the sources, content and implications of that ‘religious’ dimension. Obviously, the most basic set of questions concerns the understanding of religion itself in this discussion and what counts as authentic or genuine. We must consider such questions, although some prove less significant than they initially seem.

Are we talking about religion in general or some – surely deeply heretical – issuance from Christianity in particular? German scholars seem especially prone to contemplate the latter, although the Swiss Philippe Burrin is also prominent among those emphasising that the actual historical breeding ground of the phenomenon in question was Christianity.Footnote ²² Griffin and Gentile, in contrast, tend to think more broadly, invoking a concept of religion that encompasses ‘this-worldly’ religions such as Buddhism, for example. It is important, from their perspective, that a belief system need not be based on some divine revelation or a transcendent God to count as a religion; any such limitation would seemingly limit its applicability to our three regimes.Footnote ²³ Gentile is explicit that political religion, linking the meaning of human existence to some earthly entity, entails a relationship with the sacred, but not the divine.Footnote ²⁴

Even accepting a broad notion of religion, however, there are questions about what place is claimed for the religious dimension in the modern political phenomena at issue. A distinction that Burrin outlines with particular clarity, between phenomenological (which might better be called experiential or existential) and functionalist possibilities, seems to offer a useful starting point. The phenomenological, associated especially with Voegelin, suggests that modern political religion offers an experience fully comparable to traditional religious experience. Although obviously heretical from a Christian perspective, this form of religion stems from the same anthropological constant, rooted in the human desire for completeness, reflecting the finitude of the human condition. The functionalist understanding, derived especially from Durkheim and subsequently associated with Aron and Sironneau, rests on the weaker claim of functional equivalence.Footnote ²⁵

Such distinctions seem to raise sensitive questions about moral equivalence. But even as he insisted on the comparability of the existential experiences at issue, Voegelin was not remotely seeking to relativise or justify. From his perspective, the eruption of dangerous, even ‘Satanic’, modern political religions made it clear how disastrous modern secularisation and the death of God had been.Footnote ²⁶ From this perspective, there is no need to differentiate through such terms as ‘pseudo’ or ‘ersatz’; simply to characterise the phenomena at issue as political religions seemed sufficient to make the essential moral distinction.

To focus on functional equivalence may seem more obviously to invite relativism or to confer legitimacy. Griffin implicitly raised questions about genuineness and suggested the scope for drawing lines in choosing the provocative (and interrogative) title ‘God's Counterfeiters?’ for one of his articles. When prodded by a sceptical Roger Eatwell, Griffin admitted that he was a recent convert to ‘political religion’, having originally resisted the category because, much like Eatwell himself, he had wanted to avoid treating fascism as a modern, secularised form of millenarianism or Gnosticism and to underscore instead the theoretical gulf that should have separated fascism from all forms of Christianity.Footnote ²⁷ But, Griffin went on, Gentile and others had made him more sympathetic to the heuristic value of theories that distinguish established, traditional religion and political religion. So obviously Griffin's purpose was not remotely to make these modes of ‘religion’ equivalent, to place them on the same level. In the same vein, we note that even Gentile's usage is ultimately negative; among other things, political religion proved to be bound up with crippled, superficial modes of participation, leading to mere spectatorship.Footnote ²⁸ So to characterise these modern political phenomena in religious terms has by no means been to justify them.

Stanley Payne usefully distinguishes secular substitutes for religion (‘objects of fetishism and personal adoration’) from substitute religions.Footnote ²⁹ In doing so he is to some extent following Hans Buchheim, although the two authorities prove to spin in opposing directions. Borrowing from Hegel, who used the example of coffee and chicory in a different context, Buchheim proposed that we view the totalitarian ideologies and cult practices not as ersatz religion – which would still be religion – but as religious ersatz, just as we would view chicory as ‘coffee ersatz’. As he sees it, the belief at issue in the Nazi case was merely a religious substitute, addressing the desire for belief. But in arguing that ‘religious energies were mobilised for the sake of achieving political ends’, Buchheim points us back to mere instrumentalism, even if it was perhaps not fully conscious and manipulative.Footnote ³⁰ For Payne, in contrast, Nazism was not a mere substitute for religion, but a substitute religion, a ‘political religion’ – a category he finds essential for understanding the sources and functioning of all three regimes.

But for Payne, no more than for Griffin, is this to suggest some sort of moral equivalency. In adopting Emile Durkheim's influential, morally neutral conception of religion, which, as Payne paraphrases it, entailed ‘the organization of rites and rituals formed around a belief system aimed at buttressing social solidarity and morality’, Payne implies that moral equivalency is not at issue.Footnote ³¹ The question of whether one religion is as good as another simply throws us off. For Payne, in fact, the heuristic use of ‘political religion’ stands opposed to any claim to get at and define the core of the phenomena themselves in these religious terms. Rather than identifying the essence of these phenomena, the category merely helps to explain the character and function of the major new ideologies, and their attendant cultic practices, in a largely secular era.Footnote ³²

Klaus Vondung makes a stronger claim than Payne in referring precisely to an existential core, but he invokes religion in a more delimited way, especially because he is concerned with specifically Christian sources. Even as he stresses that the use of ‘religion’ is itself problematic and that ‘political religion’ is no panacea, Vondung embraces the category because, starting with the German case, he finds similarities with Christianity in particular. Until we have a better concept, Vondung concludes, we need ‘political religion’ to indicate the meaning and function of such similarities, and especially the equivalences in the existential core of the modern political phenomena at issue. Taken together, they might be taken as a perverted variant of Christian tradition.Footnote ³³ By implication for Vondung, then, these were not ‘ersatz’ but were rather genuinely religious phenomena on the phenomenological level. From this perspective, the question of moral equivalence cannot be sidestepped, but because the comparison is with Christianity and not religion in general, Vondung answers it by emphasising that perverted forms of Christianity are at issue.

Whereas ‘political religion’, as heuristic, might seem especially a way of accounting for common features, it can also lead in the opposite direction, helping us to make distinctions or even deepening our understanding of singularity. For Burrin, in contrast to Vondung, the category serves not to identify some common essence, or even a set of common features, but enables us to approach diverse historical phenomena from a common perspective that will illuminate differences.Footnote ³⁴ Thinking in terms of our three 2:1 axes, it might enable us better to understand what distinguished whatever subset of two against the other. Even a conclusion that Nazism was too ragged, too merely improvised, to come up to the standard of a religion would not disprove the heuristic value of the category. From this perspective, we would deepen our understanding of Nazism by seeing why it does not qualify as a political religion.

As a heuristic, the category might illuminate more subtle differences as well. Burrin points towards what may be a key distinction in suggesting that the various liturgical elements had a different place in communism and fascism, entering into their respective dynamics in different ways. In the Soviet experiment, ‘ritualization emerged, historically speaking, after the accession of communism to power and increased in accordance with the intensifying confrontation with an obdurate society, in distinction to fascist phenomena, where it was prominent almost from their inception as political movements’.Footnote ³⁵ We might also note that in the two fascist regimes many individuals felt themselves to be both Christian and Nazi or Fascist, but the same would not have been true of Christian and communist in the Russian or Soviet case. The fact that the phenomena encompassed by ‘political religion’ entered into the respective trajectories in different ways indicates that the commonality suggested by the category may have been relatively superficial.

It seems especially a concern with singularity that leads Ian Kershaw to reject the term ‘political religion’ and to insist on ‘pseudo-religious’ instead, even as he argues that charismatic leadership and redemptive mission – dimensions that proponents take as central to ‘political religion’ – were essential to Nazism. He notes that ‘the quest for national rebirth lay, of course, at the heart of all fascist movements. But only in Germany did the striving for national renewal adopt such strongly pseudo-religious tones.’Footnote ³⁶ But how does the merely ‘pseudo-religious’ differ from the genuinely religious, and how, we might add, does it relate to ‘ersatz’?

Characterising the aspects of Nazism at issue, Kershaw referred to ‘this populistic exploitation of naive “messianic” hopes and illusions among members of a society plunged into comprehensive crisis’.Footnote ³⁷ This characterisation appears to bring Kershaw close to Buchheim; each seems to conclude that, despite the appearance of idealism, what we have is still mostly instrumentalism, as opposed to genuinely shared belief. So Kershaw's ‘pseudo’ seemingly converges with Buchheim's ‘ersatz’. But although there was an instrumental dimension in this as in all regimes, Kershaw certainly thinks that the leadership actually believed in Nazism's ‘holy redemptive mission’, despite his reference to exploitation. So the stakes of referring to ‘pseudo’ as opposed to ‘political religion’ prove minimal; it is merely a way of conveying the disapproval that those who use ‘political religion’ surely share. Even the sceptical Kershaw recognises that, however we characterise it, something like a religious impulse was at work in Nazism. The question of genuineness as religion proves a red herring.Footnote ³⁸ What matters is how we are to account for such impulses and whether the ‘political religion’ syndrome best enables us to make sense of the evidence.

Accounting for the impulse

If some mode of genuine, shared idealism was at work, how, in the view of proponents, does ‘political religion’ illuminate its sources and meaning? We can approach the problem by considering factors on three distinguishable layers, all of which are prominent in the discussion: (i) abiding, suprahistorical human needs and propensities, which will of course vary in degree across populations at the same historical moment; (ii) secularisation, as a ‘mid-level’ historically specific layer; and (iii) more immediate historically specific triggering mechanisms, generally to be found on the national level. That factors on all three levels were at work is undeniable. The question is how ‘political religion’ connects them with the modern political phenomena at issue.

Proponents like Griffin emphasise a suprahistorical human propensity, which the term ‘religion’ may encompass almost by definition. Conversely, to play up the role of suprahistorical human needs or propensities may especially seem to make ‘religion’ the appropriate category. Referring to three disparate critics who, he feels, failed to do justice to the ‘political religion’ concept, Griffin advocates

In the same context, Griffin cites two noted students of myth, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell, who ‘suggest that the myth of rebirth (palingenetic myth) is an archetype of human mythopoeia which can express itself in both secular and religious forms without being “derived” from any particular source or tradition’.Footnote ⁴⁰

From this perspective the historical question is not, as for Burrin and Vondung, how heretical political religions emerged from within a broadly Christian culture; it is rather how an abiding religious impulse, which earlier had taken the form of Christianity, took new form as this or that political religion. But although this difference implies two somewhat disparate research agendas, it proves secondary to any overall assessment of the uses of ‘political religion’. The key on this, our first level, is the role of some abiding human impulse, whether it emerged directly or as mediated through the prior cultural experience of Christianity.

Much like Griffin, Gentile takes the sacred to be an enduring, suprahistorical category; it takes different forms, but its wellsprings remain the same. He notes, for example, that many of those studying religious phenomena believe that we are seeing not the gradual disappearance of the sacred from an increasingly cynical world but a continuous metamorphosis of the sacred in politics and in other dimensions of human activity.Footnote ⁴¹ Although he is more overtly contemptuous, Burleigh strikes a similar note in arguing that the three regimes in question all ‘metabolised the religious instinct’.Footnote ⁴²

Of course a whole array of historically specific circumstances determine when, where, and how such abiding needs and propensities give rise to novel religious phenomena. The most obvious historically specific layer concerns ‘secularisation’, encompassing the decline of traditional religious faith. It is almost a commonplace that modern political movements and regimes have sought to satisfy, and up to a point did satisfy, emotional needs earlier satisfied by traditional religion. But although such modern political phenomena obviously presuppose secularisation, the question is whether we best grasp the relationship between secularisation and these novel phenomena in terms of ‘political religion’. It depends on what we understand secularisation to encompass.

Voegelin has returned to currency because his way of linking secularisation to spiritual disenchantment, especially as supplemented by his treatment of Gnosticism – claims to privileged knowledge by a select group of ideologues – seems to provide a kind of baseline for the essential new lines of questioning. But it is notable that Voegelin, in his later years, departed from aspects of the pioneering analysis that marked his book The Political Religions of 1938 and began to question the use of ‘religion’ to characterise the political phenomena at issue. Still, he continued to view the spiritual disenchantment bound up with secularisation as the fundamental problem of the age, and he continued to believe religious renewal to be the only solution – a notion that of course has been a staple of Judaeo-Christian thinking in the wake of the political departures at issue.Footnote ⁴³

Not that anyone, least of all Voegelin, believed that mere exhortation could restore us to the proper path. Nor, for Voegelin, was mere moral denunciation, from a position of assumed moral superiority, the key to response. It was this sense that prompted his defence against Thomas Mann's charge that he, Voegelin, had not been sufficiently condemnatory in treating Nazism in his book of 1938. Precisely in taking it as religious – even if satanically religious – Voegelin saw Nazism as too deeply challenging for any such facile response. What was needed, if there was to be any hope of addressing the challenge, was a deeper understanding of the emergence of this novel political phenomenon from within modern history. Even Voegelin's way of focusing on wider philosophical questions by the 1950s reflected his sense that the dominant approaches kept us from seriously pondering the meaning of Nazism and the other political departures. But although Voegelin's enquiry remained open-ended in one sense, we must ask whether his understanding of secularisation, grounded in a particular a priori sense of what was necessary and desirable, was open enough to make sense of the challenges, possibilities and responses at issue. Conversely, even if the specifics of his analyses do not convince, we sense that we need analysis on the same level if we are to understand how the troubling political phenomena at issue emerged from within the secularising framework.

In a series of pioneering works that helped to open the way to new questions about fascism, George Mosse noted the limits of a putatively rational liberalism for satisfying emotional needs and cementing societal bonds.Footnote ⁴⁴ Insofar as traditional religion was losing its grip, liberalism, with its emphasis on formal equality and individual rights, was too abstract to fill the void. By around 1900 an array of observers, from Emile Durkheim to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, diagnosed the problem and sought to specify the requisite supplement.Footnote ⁴⁵ But even as they did so, they remained essentially within the liberal mainstream. The situation also invited more grandiose prescriptions. Usefully recasting a long-standing notion, Burrin notes that in the light of the void left by the decline of religion, religious elements were absorbed into the totalising systems of Comte and Marx. The intoxication with the absolute, the feeling of exaltation and reverence typical of religious experience, were thereby transposed to secular objects.Footnote ⁴⁶

Burrin goes on to argue that the three subsequent political departures were products of a secularisation process that turned the political into a sphere of human action recognising no criteria of validation outside its own.Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet what is most to be understood, as he sees it, is something far more specific, their relationship with the particular religious culture that shaped the societal framework in each of the three national cases. This is to suggest two steps, two layers of the secularisation process, as the keys to understanding. But although each was of course part of the mix, this way of reading secularisation unduly restricts our conceptualisation, not to mention our research agenda. Like secularisation in general, the new conception of politics was surely a condition of possibility, but it encompasses too much – we think of Machiavelli, for example – to account for those dimensions of the three regimes that proponents attribute to ‘political religion’. The idiosyncratic national experience with religion, although also important, is too specific as a reading of the national dimension to provide what we need. Much lies between Burrin's two layers.

In offering a wider framework, Gentile might seem to relate the phenomena at issue to secularisation in a more fruitful way. He notes, first, that religion and politics were mutually implicated even well before modern secularisation, and in the modern world religious elements are found widely in the political realm and not remotely confined to anti-liberal regimes. So distinctions are clearly necessary, and Gentile draws some of them with exemplary clarity in treating the modern sacralisation of politics. Distinguishing first between modern and earlier modes of relationship between religion and politics, he notes that the former began with modern democracy in the American and French revolutions, whereas the latter include forms like theocracy – direct political power by a traditional religion – that of course are still to be found in the modern world, as with the politicisation of religion characteristic of Islamist regimes.Footnote ⁴⁸

But the key for us is Gentile's distinction, within the modern sacralisation of politics, between civil religion, pioneered in the United States, and political religion, as found archetypally in the anti-liberal regimes of inter-war Europe. Even as it entails a system of beliefs, myths, rituals and symbols that confer an aura of sanctity on the particular national political entity, a civil religion is open and pluralistic, entailing, crucially, the separation of church and state. A political religion, in contrast, claims a monopoly of power and seeks to penetrate all aspects of individual and collective life.Footnote ⁴⁹

The next layer of questions is obvious: Why do (and did) some countries find themselves with political religion as opposed to the seemingly healthier civil religion? The answers, relying especially on differences in national circumstances, combined with a problematic temporal context, seem reasonably obvious as well. In the three cases at hand, the experience of the First World War interacted with longer-term national circumstances to produce a situation of particular disarray – and thus a kind of triggering mechanism. Burrin's second layer, the interface with particular national religious traditions, obviously presupposes some such layer of national idiosyncrasy, and even disarray, as a backdrop.

In treating Italy specifically, Gentile's implication has been that the political religion thrust was genuine insofar as Italy had suffered from inadequate national integration, a problem differentiating Italy from, say, Britain and France, and one addressed inadequately during the pre-fascist liberal era.Footnote ⁵⁰ By implication, then, the inadequacies of secular liberal culture were felt especially acutely in Italy. And thus, although the more general secular layer was found everywhere, Italy produced a departure from liberalism, including an attempt at a full-scale political religion, that seems extraordinary by the standards of mainstream liberal democracy.

Any such tripartite division into layers is obviously schematic, but some such combination of ahistorical human propensity, historically specific secularisation and more immediate, largely nationally specific triggering mechanism surely suggests how proponents account for modern political religion. Indeed, the three layers seem to come together neatly. That all three layers were at work is undeniable, but we have brushed up against ambiguities and uncertainties suggesting that a more differentiated array of categories might be necessary. Indeed, we begin to suspect that ‘political religion’ itself may be a distorting lens. In question, above all, is the basis of the beliefs at issue.

The problem of familiarisation and the scope for new categories

Here we reach the core issue, which concerns historical specificity and the scope for novelty – more particularly, the actual novelty of the twentieth-century phenomena in question. All proponents of ‘political religion’, including those applying it, for example, to contemporary Christian extremism in the United States, recognise that the conditions for becoming a mass movement, not to mention coming to power, are historically specific. But what of the underlying impulse, the content of the putative idealism? That ahistorical propensities are part of the mix is of course undeniable, but how rich, and how determining, is that abiding, suprahistorical layer? At what point do we say we have something new, requiring new categories, even a different mode of understanding?

The question, in other words, is the difference it makes not to see these political phenomena as new bottles for old wine, but to grasp the possibility that the wine, too, may have been different – or even that an entirely different kind of beverage had emerged. Whether this is merely quibbling over terminology depends on how deeply the historical cuts, how attentive to historical specificity we decide we must be. I suggest that ‘political religion’ leads us to inflate the suprahistorical ‘prematurely’ prejudicially, and thus to deflect us from the requisite attention to historical specificity and novelty.

In this regard, we would do well to ponder Bernard Yack's cautionary point from over twenty years ago about the dangers in repairing even to ‘secularisation’ as an explanation for novel responses. As Yack saw it, ‘secularisation’ is so easily invoked that it keeps us from thinking through the radical novelty that opened with the Enlightenment, but then also the scope for further novelty as subsequent experience, from within the Enlightenment deployment, fuelled new questions and concerns. Because, as usually invoked, the secularisation category implies that abiding religious aspirations simply took new form; it does not do justice to the novelty of the discontents and longings that became possible with the modern break itself. Yack insisted that modernity generates its own sources of discontent; thus, for example, the laments of ‘dehumanisation’ in the tradition running from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche were genuinely, radically new, as were the questions about how the humanity of human being could be realised.Footnote ⁵¹

To extend Yack's point, modernity generated not only its own sources of discontent, but also its own sense of possibility and responsibility, which cannot be understood simply as the secular equivalent of some abiding religious imperative. And although Yack himself did want to carry the argument this far, what opened up was a whole new universe of questions about the human relationship to history, about human mastery and human limits, about the relationship between individual experience and collective world-making. These were questions that had never come up before.

The problem is not with the notion of secularisation itself, which remains indispensable, but with our tendency to derive from it a too-limited sense of the universe of possibilities that opened from within the newly secular or secularising framework. And it is our tendency to inflate the suprahistorical at the expense of the historically specific that leads to this limitation. Because, in one sense, the waning of traditional religion is simply the reverse side of secularisation, we are quick to attribute to an abiding religious impulse novel phenomena that, although they look the same, prove more radically different in source and implication than we are initially prepared to recognise. We assume that, operating on the same level, those phenomena provided an alternative to the waning religious sources of meaning and self-understanding. But thus our reading of the historically specific is not rich or deep enough.

Looked at from another angle, ‘political religion’ surely seems a credible reading of the idealist content – a credible way of getting beyond the facile reductionisms of before. But therein lies the problem; because it seems credible, ‘political religion’ truncates the inquiry into the content of belief. In this sense it yields precisely the ‘false positive’ we noted as a possibility above. Indeed, ‘political religion’ proves a false heuristic because even to question the novel phenomena at issue in terms of the category proves to prejudice the inquiry by so easily giving us that false positive. In thereby making the phenomena in question more familiar than otherwise, and thus seemingly easier to understand, this interpretive tack even serves to reassure us, much as we might pound our fists in opposition or scream ‘never again’.

The dangers of this familiarising tendency are evident, for example, in Klaus-Georg Riegel's recent article, ‘Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion’, which effectively pinpoints a number of the most salient, and anomalous, aspects of Leninism-Stalinism, even as we have recently come to understand it.Footnote ⁵² In this sense, Riegel seeks to do justice to the revolutionary enthusiasm of the 1930s and the centrality of agency from below, even in such episodes as the purges and the great terror. And he offers what first seems an eminently plausible way of describing in traditional religious terms what now seem central aspects of the communist experiment. In characterising Leninism, Riegel refers to holiness, sainthood, priesthood, salvation, asceticism, purification, catechism and the Messiah. He then invokes sin, heresy, vigilance and even the role of Trotsky as a tempting demon to characterise aspects of Stalinism.Footnote ⁵³ That the Soviet practices at issue have something in common with earlier instances of confessing sin and rooting out heretics – two aspects Riegel especially features – is undeniable, but we must ask how deeply we learn, and what we neglect, if, with Riegel, we make the permanent revolutionary accountability and the modes of revolutionary enthusiasm the stuff of religion.Footnote ⁵⁴

The use of such familiar religious terms keeps us from probing whether what is most troubling in the dynamic at work stemmed more from what differentiated the mode of action from prior religious practice than from some common impulse.Footnote ⁵⁵ During the phase of Stalinism in question, it was not sufficient to have one's soul in order or even to attend to the expected ritualised practices. Participation in unprecedented new modes of collective activity was demanded, and such participation brought forth new emotions, a new sense of one's place in the world. Because, in the Soviet case, the categories of political religion prove so readily translated, they divert us from the deeper questioning that would enable us better to understand the novelty, both in what the agents set out to do and, even more importantly, in what they ended up doing.

To encompass the novelty at issue requires an expanded array of categories, even some that ‘defamiliarise’. Proponents of ‘political religion’, in contrast, tend to find confirmation of their approach in the use of religious vocabulary by agents and analysts at the time. That use is noteworthy, but not decisive. Contemporaries could only characterise the new phenomena at issue in terms of the vocabulary available. Coming later, we can see those phenomena in better perspective, and on that basis we can expand our vocabulary, our range of categories, in the light of that new experience. It is not enough merely to say that, on the basis of this set of experiences, we are expanding what we mean by religion, our sense of what religion or ‘the sacred’ can encompass.

Gentile included the influential Italian thinker Benedetto Croce among the earlier analysts who portrayed the contending forces as ‘religious’.Footnote ⁵⁶ And Croce was indeed a major anti-fascist and anti-totalitarian thinker who sought to interpret the troubling phenomena of his time in terms of his wider philosophical–historical framework. But Gentile's way of invoking Croce proves a good example of the limitations, even superficiality, in proponents’ use of such earlier figures, almost implying that their testimony proves the case.

A sense that his culture was caught up fundamentally in a departure from traditional religion was fundamental to Croce's sense of his own role.Footnote ⁵⁷ But in seeking to specify an alternative cultural framework, he used religious language, even translated religious categories into secular terms, because ‘religion’ was the language he knew – and his audience knew. But he was especially taken with what seemed the endless novelty of the world, and he understood that he lacked the perspective to understand contemporary phenomena historically.Footnote ⁵⁸ A central part of the ongoing challenge would be to place the eruption of totalitarianism in better historical perspective, to help to provide the orientation necessary for ongoing action. Although he himself could not write the history, Croce suggested something of what would be required to do so.Footnote ⁵⁹ We constantly readjust our categories to understand novel historical experience, but the novelty in this case was such that an especially difficult re-elaboration was required. Despite his use of religious vocabulary, then, Croce's wider approach, his understanding of how we learn from historical experience, pointed well beyond, to the scope for an expanded vocabulary, an expanded range of categories, on the basis of the novel experience of the era.

Widening experience and changing concerns in a secularising world

To expand our categories and devise the essential ‘defamiliarising’ alternative, we need a deeper, more open-ended look at our own recent, supranational history, with more room for challenge to our assumptions. We must begin with the liberal democratic experience, for the responses we seek to understand were first reactions against the mainstream liberal dispensation. Proponents of ‘political religion’ certainly consider nationally specific political problems, but these tend to boil down to national weakness, perhaps reflecting longer-term problems of backwardness or waywardness, judged against some standard of ‘modernity’. We need a wider sense of the overall, supranational liberal experience if we are to assess the content of the beliefs and aspirations at issue. On that level, most proponents do not find it necessary to say very much, although some note, or simply assume, that liberal democracy did not satisfy emotional needs. Whatever the importance of such emotional dissatisfaction, other aspects of the modern political mainstream were also at issue, including, for example, a sense that the liberal premium on individual rights and interests impeded the formation of the collective will appropriate to the grandiose, history-making tasks that seemed to be opening.

Those reacting against the liberal mainstream of course fell heir to a long tradition of opposition, attempting to show the way beyond. By the 1890s Marxism had come to dominate that tradition. But at precisely that point, even as it seemed to be gaining strength within the wider society, Marxism was subject to new doubt, even a sense of crisis, bound up with wider reactions against quasi-deterministic forms of developmentalism. Hence the revision that gave us, most prominently, Bernstein, Sorel and Lenin. Looking first at the communist side, the sources and implications of each step on the path from Marxism to Leninism to Stalinism would seem crucial. Yet proponents tend to familiarise by featuring, at each step, those aspects that can be subsumed under ‘political religion’, as if the transition were seamless, with no fundamental changes in valence along the way.

Offering no analysis of the evolution from Marx to Lenin to Stalin, Gentile sidesteps the vexed question of the relationship between Leninism and Stalinism. He simply tells us that Bolshevism, as one instance of the sacralisation of politics spawned by the Great War, was fuelled by Marxist eschatological passions and by millenarian beliefs typical of Russian tradition.Footnote ⁶⁰ Via this combination, it all fits neatly together. The comparable neglect in Burleigh's account makes his use of religious themes seem forced and arbitrary; the phenomena at issue could only be instances of political religion because Burleigh is not open to the possibility of anything else.Footnote ⁶¹

Invoking political religion seems also to absolve us of any need to consider the interface between the transition from Marxism to Soviet communism, on the one hand, and the emergence of Italian fascism, on the other. It is not incidental that a number of the creators of Italian fascism, including Mussolini, came from the socialist left – the most self-questioning part of the Italian socialist left. So it would seem essential to encompass the fallout from the revision of Marxism in any attempt to account for the fascist departure, and especially for any degree of convergence with Soviet communism. Yet even in treating the Italian case specifically, Gentile does not probe these relationships. Merely to display parallels with traditional religion seems to confirm that ‘political religion’ is the level of meaning.

We noted that ‘political religion’ has been valuable in pointing us beyond the sort of concern with ‘liturgy’ and style that, while not reducing to instrumentalism, proves a warrant for sidestepping questions about the content of the aspirations at issue. What seems to proponents of ‘political religion’ to demand another step is precisely such content, but the question is how they understand it. Generally it is woven, first, around a putative ‘fanatical certainty’, most basically about the direction of history and the scope for a particular kind of qualitative change. A kind of certainty about the shape and direction of history had indeed been central to the developmentalist systems, including those of Comte and Marx that Burrin featured in a passage cited above. Such systems were teleological and often entailed utopian and/or millenarian aspects, and we may well take them as secular religions, just as Burrin suggested. The question, however, is what happened next. The perceived inadequacies of such systems fuelled further ‘secular’ thinking, and the revision of Marxism, especially, had implications for historical consciousness that must be considered.

The talk of fanatical certainty is bound up with references to palingenesis, utopianism, millenarianism, apocalypse, mission and myth, all of which suggest something of the human place in history. Proponents differ in their uses of such categories; some make distinctions that others do not.Footnote ⁶² Certain of these categories prove more applicable than others; indeed, some, properly understood, are essential to the novel political experience in question. But familiarising through the use of traditional religious vocabulary leads us to miss some crucial nuances.

Gentile fastens upon a comparison offered by Harold Laski in 1943: the communists shared with the Puritans ‘a fanatical faith in their own truth and its inevitable triumph’.Footnote ⁶³ In picking up on this bit of conventional wisdom, Gentile, like Burleigh and even Riegel, an expert on Marxism, seem unaware of the challenges to any such notion by such major scholars as Alfred G. Meyer and Moshe Lewin, who feature the deeper doubt and uncertainty of the Bolshevik/communist leadership about the direction of history and their own place in it.Footnote ⁶⁴ What was at work was precisely the breakdown of the sort of certainty that Marxian ideology had seemed to offer and the transition to a new sense of the human place in history, which any such conflation with the Puritans, as if it all stemmed from some abiding tendency toward religious fanaticism, leads us to miss.

This sort of uncertainty, based on a new sense of historical openness, characterised the frame of mind in all three cases. At work, however, was not a mere reversal from certainty to despair. Adjustment was possible, but it required new thinking about how history happens, or could be made to happen, and about the scope for collective action to shape history. In that light, we do indeed find, in all three cases, a certain hubris, but it stemmed not from a feeling of privileged access to some religious truth but from a sense of having grasped the requirements for the new history-making mode of action itself. In the light of the feeling of historical openness and uncertainty, it entailed, among other things, a sense of the need to improvise – but also a sense of the human capacity to do so. Still, the uncertainty inevitably shadowed the confidence. So mixed characteristically with hubris in all three cases was a certain shrillness, reflecting the lack of any suprahistorical assurance, the feeling that it was all up to them, acting within an unforeseeable history. No religion ever saw itself as facing this combination of earthly possibility, responsibility and risk.

In each case, gauging national possibilities vis-à-vis the modern liberal mainstream led the agents to believe that, on the basis of their privileged grasp of the historical challenge, they could leapfrog the putatively advanced democracies. The notion of palingenesis, as popularised by Griffin, tends to deflect us from this sense of the scope for leapfrogging, since palingenesis is generally linked to rebirth on the national level, in response to a sense of national humiliation and/or decadence. But the notion of mission, equally prominent in the discussion, certainly suggests the scope for a confident supranational role, depending on collective agency and pointing beyond the mainstream.

But to what extent was this sense plausible, and to what extent a myth? The answer depends, first, on our reading of the wider Western experience with both liberal democracy and mainstream Marxism to that point. This, however, is the sort of question that ‘political religion’ sidesteps. In Griffin's influential usage, ‘palingenetic rebirth’ is simply a myth. Whether or not the expectation literally comes true is not the point, so plausibility is not at issue. Yet only if we raise the question of plausibility can we gauge what else besides ‘political religion’ might have been at work. Thus, again, there is the need to back up and assess our historical experience.

Still, it is undeniable that some degree of myth surrounded the combination of palingenetic expectation and sense of mission. Indeed, ‘myth’ was central to all three cases, although it proves slippery. It was itself multivalent and, as part of the syndrome, it affected the valences of such ancillary notions as palingenesis and mission at the same time. Although myth is perfectly compatible with belief, faith and idealism, we must ask in what sense the beliefs in question were ‘mythical’, as opposed to whatever else, if we are to understand their basis.

It is true that the agents found something like a qualitative departure to be possible, and the term ‘palingenesis’ did come up among the innovators, especially the Italian fascists. Moreover, the fascists sometimes lucidly embraced myth, explicitly recognising it as myth, not for its instrumental uses in justifying the elite's power but for its uses in galvanising the essential collective action. Their interest in myth reflected their new thinking about the requirements for such action. Communism started from very different premises, but in its Leninist guise, as a mode of action, it gravitated in the same direction, as Sorel astutely noted as early as 1919.Footnote ⁶⁵ Although a residual myth of the future communist society remained, it was marginalised by the different myth that Sorel saw developing.

Sorel was struck by the audacity of the enterprise on which, as he saw it, Lenin had embarking in seeking to build a socialist economy in the face of Russian backwardness. The enterprise required a particular relationship between leaders and masses that drew Sorel's enthusiastic approval. The leaders had won the moral authority to get the masses to make sacrifices, to accept factory discipline and certain rules of production. Sorel particularly liked Lenin's notion that the workers would come freely to serve the state not just while at work in the factories but essentially all the time; they would thus, as Sorel saw it, be on the lookout for those who were incompetent or merely exploitative.Footnote ⁶⁶ In short, the myth of ‘creating socialism’ galvanised the essential virtues and made possible the new sort of collective will that was necessary for the ongoing action to shape history. But this was a very different sort of myth than the notions of palingenesis, utopia and/or the millennium suggest. Bound up with the new historical consciousness that followed from, among other things, the impasse of classical Marxism, it anticipated ongoing struggle, not heaven on earth.

In the light of the ‘tragic’ side of the new historical consciousness, the change envisioned in all three cases was not a leap into some perfect society. Rather, the sense of mission rested on the putatively privileged grasp of the opportunity and responsibility to act collectively in a new, post-liberal way, the better to confront a newly open future. Ongoing social Darwinian struggle was central to the Nazi vision, and Soviet communism, at least for the foreseeable future, similarly faced endless struggle, not just against a hostile external bourgeois world but also – and, on one level, still more importantly – against the ever-lurking ‘bourgeois’ principle within. It was that sense of struggle, the need to organise for ongoing struggle, that shaped practice even in the Soviet case.

In each instance, the sense of mission could have had the energising and affective consequences it did only in the light of the perceived inadequacies of mainstream liberalism and Marxism, as revealed by recent historical experience. And only insofar as we conceive the relationship between leaders and followers in the light of those energising and affective implications can we see how a common sense of purpose could have emerged, transcending mere instrumentality, even in the face of hierarchy and elite leadership.

In the light of the historical sense at issue, the departure in each case carried beyond Durkheim and his functionalist conception of religion, even though that conception had been bound up with his sense of the limitations of liberalism. Although he worried about the bases of social cohesion in modern society, the liberal Durkheim was taking societal equilibrium to be the norm. Religion cemented stability, and a more effective secular religion might be necessary to renew cohesion in the light of the disruptions of liberal modernity. But the departures at issue for us aimed not merely to restore societal cohesion; they were bound up with a new sense of the human place in history, taking as fundamental a deeper human responsibility for ongoing history-making in an ever-provisional world. This was crucial to the thrust beyond both religion and liberalism that was at work.

Another aspect of the historical consciousness at issue – the apocalyptic sense – mixes uncertainly with those above. The apocalyptic dimension in Nazism, especially, has seemed to indicate the singularity of the Nazi case, and to some extent it surely does. But as treated through the lens of political religion, this theme occasions uncertainty in treatments of Nazism and obscures a significant mode of commonality among the three departures.

Although Burrin, through the apocalyptic theme, effectively pinpoints essential aspects of Nazism, his account reflects the ambiguity at issue. Following Klaus Vondung, who has stressed the longstanding import of the apocalyptic sense in Germany, Burrin notes that

So, on the one hand, we find ‘the promise of complete renewal’, seemingly in contrast with Mussolini's vision of ‘relentless struggle’, but, on the other hand, we find ‘a cosmic, relentless, ultimate – and undecided – ordeal’. Burrin goes on to note that despite their vocabulary of a millenarian future, the Nazis had ‘a cyclical conception of time, which corresponded to their conviction that a perpetual struggle would be necessary to maintain the purity of blood and the greatness of the Volk against the constantly reborn powers of decadence’. As Burrin sees it, the Nazis adopted this pattern of thought from Christianity but ‘remodeled it in a way that far exceeded a mere process of secularisation’.Footnote ⁶⁸ There was no God, nor any guarantee of victory. Indeed, sensing the fragility of Nazism itself, the Nazis clearly felt the possibility of ultimate defeat.Footnote ⁶⁹

The necessity of perpetual struggle hardly squares with the accent on palingenesis or utopia we find in others, and hints of which we find in the initial part of Burrin's characterisation above. Moreover, although he seems to resist the implication, Burrin's recognition that this Nazi framework ‘far exceeded a mere process of secularisation’ suggests a more radical departure than the political religion category, even as he embraces it here, can encompass.

The tendency in much of the discussion is to view what we find most troubling as an eruption of an archetypal propensity or as a mere return, in the light of experience with a putatively rational secularisation process, to religious extremism. In seeking to show that the ‘religious’ side of Nazism stemmed from but transcended specifically German Christian traditions, Burrin usefully expands the range of possibilities. But tracing the frame of mind at issue to the German Christian background diverts us from the essential wider questions about the origins of this sense of the world.Footnote ⁷⁰

In the new frame of mind at issue, any residual parallel with Christianity is incidental; what matters is that the Nazis were operating from within a now-secular framework in which a new universe of challenges, possibilities, responsibilities and dangers seemed to have opened. This is to agree with Griffin, in a passage quoted above, that the orientation at issue was not ‘“derived” from any particular source or tradition’. But neither did it stem, as for Griffin, from an abiding ‘religious’ impulse. Rather, it was historically specific, manifesting for the first time one of the possibilities from within the wider, historically specific secularising framework. The feeling of fragility at issue could have been experienced only when even the possibility of religious assurance had been left behind. And the sort of ultimate defeat that had come to seem possible was so far removed from the Christian apocalypse as to be qualitatively different. There would be no extra-historical last judgment to follow.

The limits of certain objections

We are now prepared to consider the objections to ‘political religion’ by the three critics mentioned at the outset – Hans Mommsen, Roger Eatwell and Ian Kershaw. Although each makes a telling point against the category, each seems to miss certain uses at the same time. Engagement with their criticisms suggests that what we need is not merely to turn away from ‘political religion’ but to find the basis for a sort of Aufhebung, a mode of denial that leads to a higher-level synthesis.

Even if applied to but one of the three cases, ‘political religion’ may seem to impute a greater coherence than is warranted, as if the agents, thanks to a religious blueprint, actually knew what they were doing. This is the core of Mommsen's objection to the category in the German case. So much was Nazism an improvised hodgepodge that, as he sees it, it was entirely extinguished as an ideological syndrome by May 1945, having dissipated ‘like a vampire in sunlight’.Footnote ⁷¹ Mommsen's objection is surely convincing up to a point – and not only for Nazism. Characterisation as ‘political religion’ deflects us from the ad hoc, improvised quality of each of these regimes, the sense in which, even though there was a core of idealism and shared belief, the agents were making it up as they went along. The element of ad hoc improvisation was not merely a by-product but was essential to the mode of action attempted and to the overall phenomenon at issue.

Mommsen was a leader in the challenge to the ‘intentionalist’ account of Nazism, which had focused on Hitler's will, ideology and/or programme. The point was most dramatically at issue in efforts to account for the Holocaust, which, of course, has a particularly sensitive place in the ‘political religion’ discussion. Klaus Vondung finds the Nazis’ apocalyptic world-view, positing a final struggle against Jewry, to be the most poignant manifestation of Nazi political religion and the only explanation for the Holocaust – if explanation is possible at all. As he puts it, ‘the Nazi view of the world in its appearance as a political religion permeated the whole society, created a “climate of opinion”, and provided the guidelines for behavior and action, provided even moral standards’. This is to suggest that the Holocaust was prefigured in Nazi political religion. For critics, however, any such linkage would imply a too-teleological way of accounting for the Holocaust. Yet Vondung argues convincingly against Mommsen that the process cannot explain the outcome.Footnote ⁷²

Perverted though it was, an idealistic sense of mission was surely at work in the process leading to the Holocaust, and ‘political religion’, as Vondung uses it, gives us a preliminary handle on that dimension. He gets at a crucial aspect, one that Mommsen seems willing to encompass, in arguing that the Nazi world-view had permeated the whole society, creating a particular frame of mind and even guidelines for behaviour. To use ‘political religion’ in this way is not remotely to return to the old intentionalism, with its focus on Hitler. Yet it still seems to make the Nazi episode too coherent, precisely as Mommsen suggests, for just as the idealism was central to the Holocaust, so was the ad hoc improvisation that Mommsen has long emphasised.

The problem, again, is that ‘political religion’, by giving us a ‘false positive’, seems to absolve us of the need to look more deeply at the frame of mind at issue, considering, first, the sense in which it may have been not merely the latest manifestation of an abiding human propensity but the resultant of a novel, supranational but historically specific configuration. On the basis of a deeper understanding of the sources, nature and implication of the particular sense of mission, we can better understand how and why this frame of mind yielded the particular trajectory it did. On that basis we can find a place for the haphazardness Mommsen stresses within a wider, post-religious dynamic that also encompasses the sense of mission, the liturgy and all that proponents sum up through ‘political religion’.

The use of the category to treat the phenomena in question leads most proponents, even as they claim modesty, to privilege certain dimensions and to misconstrue relationships. It is this tendency that elicits Eatwell's objection. Limiting himself to the two fascist regimes, he admits that ‘political religion’ illuminates such aspects as the charismatic leadership, the redemptive language and the cult of heroes and martyrs. But, as he sees it, the concern with political religion overstates the emotional or affective side, at the expense of the more rational, modern and/or material side, in accounting for the thrust and appeal of fascism. Whatever their degree of success, he insists, the fascists were serious in claiming to offer a rational, modern third way, beyond both liberal capitalism and socialism. That way entailed significant social and economic innovation, from Italian fascist corporativism, which Eatwell portrays as a serious quest for a new productivist state, to the provision of leisure activities and images, at least, of affordable automobiles and vacations.Footnote ⁷³ Moreover, he insists, what were taken to be scientific views regarding geopolitics and race were more important than affective, pseudo-religious sentiments for expansionism and the other central policy directions in both regimes.Footnote ⁷⁴

Eatwell's argument might especially be brought to bear against Gentile's treatment of Italian fascism. Gentile showed that the liturgical elements, in tandem with the Fascist Party's role, had long been played down unduly, but his effort to reassess the proportions through ‘political religion’ led him to overemphasise certain dimensions at the expense of others. Whereas the seriousness of corporativism is essential to Eatwell's argument, Gentile comes close to neglecting the corporativist direction altogether, although it was central to the fascist self-understanding by the later 1920s. Thus, from Gentile's account, we cannot understand how corporativism interfaced, in the trajectory of the Fascist regime, with the elements he does feature. In the same way, his emphasis on political religion leads Gentile to homogenise the radical thrust of Italian fascism by associating it with the Fascist Party, with its particular, largely liturgical, role. Even in its ongoing quest for significant change, fascism was more contested, and fissured, than his account suggests.

In questioning the import of non-rational appeals, Eatwell plays down the place of myth, which is central to Gentile's conception. Even as he recognises the importance of one-time syndicalists in fascism, Eatwell convincingly features the syndicalist sources of corporativism as opposed to myth, despite the syndicalists’ debt to Sorel.Footnote ⁷⁵ He notes, moreover, that the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who provided the most sophisticated defence of fascism, did not see his task as myth-making; rather, it was to specify how to build a totalitarian ethical state.Footnote ⁷⁶ Here again, Eatwell makes an important point against a tendency to overemphasise emotional appeals or non-rational activism as opposed to, in this case, concrete institution building.

But whereas Eatwell effectively pinpoints the tendency towards a one-sided selectivity in ‘political religion’, the thrust and the appeal of fascism are not so readily broken down into rational/materialistic versus affective/idealistic terms. More particularly, myth was more central to Italian fascism than Eatwell seems to admit, even if the Italian syndicalist current was not its major source. Although Emilio Gentile sometimes invokes myth too loosely, his point about the centrality of the ‘myth of the new state’ is convincing and important.Footnote ⁷⁷ In a way, the Italian fascists, including the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, did see the totalitarian ethical state as something like a myth; even as he adopted Gentilian categories, the fascist ideologue Camillo Pellizzi was particularly explicit to that effect.Footnote ⁷⁸ More generally, Emilio Gentile nicely characterises the interplay of rational and irrational within Italian fascism, including the scope for a rational understanding of the role of the non-rational.Footnote ⁷⁹

As we have noted, however, reaction against this or that dimension of the newly secular does not have to signify a return to religion, and the fascist embrace of myth is better understood as a post-liberal response, reflecting experience with aspects of secular rationalism, than as a new manifestation of an abiding religious impulse. Moreover, myth, as multivalent, entered into the Italian Fascist regime – and, indeed, into the trajectories of each of the three regimes – in different ways at different times. So taking it as part of the ‘political religion’ syndrome misleads. It remains true, however, that in underscoring the rational, Eatwell tends to play down the role of myth in fascism unduly. So, again, the key is to transcend the antithesis.

At the same time, whereas Giovanni Gentile was not seeking to devise myths, there was an explicitly religious dimension to his prescriptions for fascism, as Burleigh points out – in his customary put-down mode. Burleigh notes that official statements of fascist doctrine, including, most prominently, Gentile's portions of Mussolini's well-known 1932 encyclopedia entry on fascism, ‘were routinely characterised by a pretentiously woolly religiosity, whose opacity (in any language) faithfully reflected the philosophical tone of the times’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Gentile's statement indeed refers prominently to fascism as a religious conception of man, to membership in a spiritual society, and so forth. But attributing these themes to ‘political religion’ as an abiding impulse deflects from any inquiry into the sources of Gentile's thought, including what he himself took to be its relationship to Western religious traditions.Footnote ⁸¹ So whereas Burleigh makes a point that Eatwell misses, Burleigh's use of ‘political religion’ in this instance does not convince either.

In playing up the rational as opposed to the affective side of fascism, Eatwell also features ‘the sacralisation of science’, and of course many have found the Nazi embrace of science especially symptomatic. But, here again, the distinction between the rational or scientific, on the one hand, and all that gets lumped into the affective dimension, on the other, proves too simple. Despite enduring undercurrents of opposition, confidence – even faith – in science was ubiquitous in the West, characteristic of secular modernity in general. But ‘sacralisation of science’ suggests something more, the still more salient role that science seemingly could play from within a particular framework – even, Eatwell's language initially seems to suggest, a ‘religious’ framework. What proves decisive in the fascist case is precisely that framework, although it, too, was historically specific and not merely a manifestation of an abiding religious impulse. What emerged from within that framework was a mode of enthusiasm and confidence that carried beyond the modern mainstream belief in science. What differentiated the three anti-liberal departures was their determination to act on the basis of science in a new way. The decisive variable was not the faith in science itself but the political departure to create this new framework for action.

Eatwell suggests that bureaucracy, combined with ‘the sacralisation of science’, was more important to the Holocaust than quasi-religious fanaticism or the politicisation of religion.Footnote ⁸² But in this instance, too, the question we face does not require an either-or answer, yet we are likely to make it either-or insofar as we take one of the two terms to be political religion, with its implication of a certain degree of coherence. Although bureaucracy and ‘the banality of evil’ have become staples of Holocaust interpretation, Saul Friedländer, especially, has pointed to something like the opposite in stressing the importance of elation, exhilaration, Rausch, stemming from a sense of involvement in a grandiose redemptive mission.Footnote ⁸³

Surely the banal bureaucratic dimension and the novel elation were both essential to the Holocaust, as was a certain momentum, tending to spin out of control, characteristic of the mode of action itself. It took all three, so the question is proportions and, above all, how all three were drawn forth and then came together from within the overall Nazi dynamic. As for the Rausch itself, it surely stemmed, to some extent, from an abiding human impulse that has also helped to fuel various religious enthusiasms. But we cannot account for its sources and meaning in terms of such an ahistorical impulse. This was new wine; this Rausch emerged, and could only have emerged, from within the framework produced by the historically specific Nazi departure and its successes to that point.

So we need a greater role for such categories as myth and Rausch than Eatwell allows, but as embedded in a new framework, not ‘political religion’. Put differently, the point is not so much to play down the elements featured by proponents of ‘political religion’ but to find a more convincing way of accounting for them and the roles they played, in interface with others. At the same time, we must recognise, as proponents of ‘political religion’ tend not to, that roles, proportions, and relationships changed as practice proceeded.Footnote ⁸⁴

Although, as we noted above, the lens of ‘political religion’ is entirely compatible with an emphasis on singularity, the category tends to have homogenising implications. Enough of the ‘political religion’ syndrome seemingly appears in each of our three cases to lead us to accent the elements of commonality or overlap, taken as stemming from an abiding human religious impulse. It was partly because of this tendency that the category provoked Kershaw's reaction.

Kershaw makes a compelling case for the singularity of Nazism – even as he recognises that, for certain questions, the German case can fruitfully be encompassed within generic fascism and/or totalitarianism.Footnote ⁸⁵ And he recognises that comparison is essential as the basis for his own or any stress on singularity. Although he admits that a preoccupation with mission and redemption was not unique to Nazism, Kershaw finds this dimension central to the German case in a singular way – and for relatively familiar reasons, from geographical position to cultural traditions, that he sketches briefly but adequately.Footnote ⁸⁶ At the same time, he argues, comparison shows that pseudo-religious notions of national salvation were weaker in fascist Italy even than in Franco's Spain.Footnote ⁸⁷ The Italians had little or no sense, for example, of being the last bulwark of Western, Christian culture against atheistic, Jewish, Asiatic Bolshevism, a sense that Kershaw finds widespread in Germany, bound up with a more general cultural pessimism. But in the last analysis, uniqueness in Kershaw's account was linked especially to Hitler's power and charismatic role. It was ultimately the combination of putatively redemptive mission and mode of leadership that distinguished Nazism.

In contrast, proponents of ‘political religion’ like Gentile and Burleigh find a comparable cult, even deification, of the leader in all three regimes. Gentile notes that though the sacralisation of politics is not restricted to any such dimension, the prominence of charismatic leaders and personality cults is the most conspicuous and widespread manifestation of the sacralisation of politics.Footnote ⁸⁸ In taking the contrary view, insisting on qualitative differences, Kershaw finds Nazism unthinkable without the particular role for Hitler that developed early on, well before the Nazis came to power; that role was intrinsic to Nazism in a way that Mussolini's and Stalin's roles within their respective experiments were not. Mussolini, says Kershaw, remained first among equals during his relatively brief rise to power, until 1925, and Stalin's central role was simply a later accretion within the Soviet experiment.Footnote ⁸⁹

Kershaw similarly portrays the cumulative radicalisation of Nazism as qualitatively different from anything in the other two cases.Footnote ⁹⁰ After fascism came to power in Italy, he says, ‘its élan rapidly waned’, and a normalising phase began in 1925.Footnote ⁹¹ In treating the Soviet trajectory Kershaw recognises Stalinism as a second radicalisation, but takes as the bottom line the fact that Stalinist radicalism gave way to conventional patriotism during the Second World War – before disappearing almost entirely after Stalin's death.Footnote ⁹²

All historical phenomena are singular, of course, and we could no doubt go on forever about singularity and overlap. What matters is how deep the singularity is and thus the degree to which we can treat certain features as common features without making superficial resemblances seem more important than they were. Even as he emphasised categories central to ‘political religion’, Kershaw was suggesting that in the three cases at hand the overlap was relatively superficial, that only by focusing on singularity do we get at the core of Nazism in practice.

But his determination to avoid the homogenisation of ‘political religion’ leads Kershaw to exaggerate certain differences and to preclude ways of conceiving a deeper commonality between the three cases. Although it is clear why he distinguishes between extrinsic and intrinsic in comparing the role of the leaders, he is too quick in his assessments of both Stalin and Mussolini. It was not merely coincidental that a leader enjoying cult status ended up playing a pivotal role in all three regimes. Yet the alternative to Kershaw's accent on singularity is not ‘political religion’, with charismatic leadership one component in a relatively static syndrome. Whereas something like a cult of the leader was central at some point in each, that cult, the leaders themselves and the roles they played had in each case a different place in the dynamic, and changed from within the dynamic. Yet we come to recognise the sense in which those roles were still comparable once we see how that dynamic could narrow, with the original belief tending to reduce to precisely such a leadership cult.

In this regard, we might note Martin Malia's way of tracing Stalin's changing role, even changes in his personality, to the pressures unleashed by the mode of action attempted, especially with crash industrialisation.Footnote ⁹³ Stalin differed from Hitler, to be sure, but the role of each leader was intrinsic to a comparable dynamic, consideration of which Kershaw's characterisations preclude. The challenge is to conceive the combination of idealistic mission and ensuing dynamic in ways that would not only allow for but also make sense of such changing roles and proportions.

Kershaw's way of portraying Nazi radicalisation as singular, bound up with a qualitatively different mission, is similarly based on characterisations that preclude a grasp of commonality. His references to fascist Italy suggest that he has not engaged the fundamental work of Gentile himself on the trajectory of Italian fascism. It is misleading at best to say that ‘its élan rapidly waned’ after fascism came to power in Italy or that a normalising phase began in 1925. Although Gentile does not always convince on the particulars, he surely shows that in Italy, too, an ongoing radical thrust, and even a mode of cumulative radicalisation, were central. And those, too, were wound around a sense of mission. Whereas Kershaw, in featuring the singularity of Nazism, found notions of national salvation to have been relatively weak in fascist Italy, the Italians had a different sense of mission, based first on what they took to be their superior understanding of the limits of liberalism and Marxism, but based also on their difference from Nazism, with its racial determinism. Different though it was, however, that energising sense of mission was parallel to the Nazi sense on one level.Footnote ⁹⁴ The Soviets had a still different, but also comparable, sense of mission, although it would indeed dissipate in the end.

The combination that, for Kershaw, distinguishes Nazism ultimately entailed a determination and capacity to do whatever was necessary to exercise the responsibility that seemed uniquely to have fallen to Germany. But as we noted above, we find a comparable sense of the responsibility and capacity to act in a world-historical way, leapfrogging liberal democracy, in the other two cases as well. As we also saw, however, we must back up historically if we are to grasp the basis of that new sense of opportunity and responsibility. When, after having done so, we shift our focus to the ensuing trajectory in all three cases, we find a common syndrome encompassing both a mode of radicalisation and a mode of narrowing, although that syndrome proved to be such that the modes of ending could differ.

Although he embraces ‘political religion’ as Kershaw does not, Burrin, too, makes a strong case for the singularity of Nazism, and, up to point, on the same grounds as Kershaw. The effort leads Burrin comparably to force differences and to obscure deeper elements of commonality. Nazism, he insists, entailed a much more complex and profound relation to religion than either Soviet communism, which simply mounted a frontal assault on traditional religion, or Italian fascism, which settled for a modus vivendi with the Catholic Church.Footnote ⁹⁵ That more profound relation Burrin found evident especially in the Nazi sense of an ethnically based divine mission, but Nazism also perverted and recycled religious symbols and patterns of thought concerning divine law, creation, fall, sin and redemption.

Although Burrin, like Kershaw, pinpoints an undeniable and important element of singularity, his comparisons are at best superficial as they fasten upon policy and practice but neglect deeper originating aspirations. It is only on this latter level that we might understand elements of commonality in the three ways of relating to religious tradition, including – Burrin's focus – the particular religious traditions in each country. Even on the level of policy and practice, in the Italian case modus vivendi affords only the most limited characterisation of the overall relationship between the political departure and the religious tradition. And backing up further, as we must if we are to make the comparison implicitly at issue, we note that the fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile posited a relationship between religion and totalitarian statism that, although beyond the Nazis’ grasp, afforded a comparable sense of post-religious mission. Despite the elements of singularity, a sense of assuming a historically specific, post-religious role fuelled each of the three departures. The basis was more radically novel than ‘political religion’ enables us to understand.

We have seen, then, that whereas Mommsen, Eatwell and Kershaw pinpoint significant drawbacks in the ‘political religion’ approach, they also miss dimensions that ‘political religion’ at least points us toward. Each side is missing something; hence the need for a way of transcending the antithesis, for an Aufhebung, which makes more convincing sense of the components putatively covered by ‘political religion’.

Conclusion: totalitarianism and political religion

Although we are still in the first stages, it has seemed to me that we can best devise the essential alternative through a recast notion of totalitarianism, to be understood not as a system of rule, let alone a quest for top-down domination, but as a novel mode of collective action that could only have come to seem necessary and possible in the light of certain aspects of our modern secular experience. In the three cases at hand, it entailed a dynamic that proved to overflow significant differences in originating ‘ideology’, so that the actual modes of action became parallel, although obviously not identical. From within that framework we can grasp the dynamic interaction among components and the characteristic combination of raggedness and coherence in all three regimes. And we can also do greater justice to the interplay of singularity and commonality.

In the light of their claim to be open to a variety of categories, proponents of ‘political religion’ like Gentile, Burleigh and Griffin might respond that they are more flexible because they have room for both political religion and totalitarianism. The question is whether ‘political religion’ best accounts for the aspirations that fuelled the totalitarian departures and for the frame of mind that distinguished the resulting regimes.

We have seen that ‘political religion’ has been helpful not simply in taking the liturgy seriously but especially in showing that what is at issue is not merely form or style but content, seemingly operating on the same level, at least, as religion. But although ‘political religion’ at first seems a plausible understanding of this key layer, it diverts us from the historical consideration necessary to grasp the new sense of challenge and opportunity – and thus the underlying sources of the totalitarian departure. Insofar as we find a layer of idealism and belief, we assume it must be political religion, so the approach restricts what we are prepared to grasp on the level of aspiration and purpose. Totalitarianism, as an orientation or frame of mind, had its own historically specific sources, so we better understand the originating aspirations and the resulting frame of mind through a recast notion of totalitarianism itself.

Explicitly portraying the three regimes as totalitarian dictatorships, Burleigh pinpoints some of their totalitarian features with particular force and clarity. To choose one especially effective example, he notes the importance of heroic cults such as Stakhanovism and of the new steel town of Magnitogorsk in the culture surrounding the Soviet effort at crash industrialisation during the 1930s.Footnote ⁹⁶ But was all that about ‘political religion’? Burleigh suggests as much by tracing it to the need to afford tangible images of the perfect society to be realised on earth. But although that myth surely remained, Stakhanovism and Magnitogorsk, reflecting the immediate challenge and mission, suggest something else: a specifically totalitarian dynamic with its own sources, and with a particular logic not characteristic of ‘religion’ per se. Although ‘totalitarianism’ provides Burleigh with a wider label, in this instance, yet again, the false positive of ‘political religion’ keeps us from understanding how these phenomena originated from within the historically specific totalitarian departure. Only inquiry on that level can show us how the communist experiment led by the 1930s to a stage from within which Stakhanovism and Magnitogorsk could have been so symptomatic.

In the last analysis, their way of combining totalitarianism with political religion leaves proponents like Burleigh and even Gentile little beyond the old totalitarian model of top-down total domination. To be sure, as we noted above, Gentile suggests that the nature of totalitarianism ‘remains a wholly open question’. But unless we focus more systematically on that question, the ‘religious’ dimension, even in Gentile's account, seems to suggest mere instrumentalism after all, although in a less overt form than the old reductionism entailed.Footnote ⁹⁷ Thus, again, the ‘political religion’ approach does not challenge us as deeply as the novel, unanticipated phenomenon of totalitarianism warrants. To attend more fully to novelty and historical specificity suggests that it is precisely in its difference from anything we have meant by religion, precisely in its unfamiliarity, that the recent totalitarian experience illuminates the ongoing dangers and possibilities of modern politics.