Crediting God: Sovereignty and Religion in the Age of Global Capitalism

384 Pages·2011·6.788 MB·English

by  Gooding-Wiliams, Robert;Joseph Campana Assistant Professor of English Rice University.;Miguel Vatter.;Vatter, Miguel E

Crediting God
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Crediting God
Sovereignty and Religion in the
Age of Global Capitalism
Edited by
Miguel Vatter
fordham university press
NewYork 2011
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Copyright(cid:2)2011FordhamUniversityPress
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LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
CreditingGod:sovereigntyandreligionintheageofglobal
capitalism/editedbyMiguelVatter.—1sted.
p. cm.
BasedonaconferenceheldinMay2005
atNorthwesternUniversity.
Includesbibliographicalreferences(p. ).
ISBN978-0-8232-3319-9(cloth:alk.paper)
ISBN978-0-8232-3320-5(pbk.:alk.paper)
ISBN978-0-8232-3321-2(ebook)
1.Religionandpolitics—Congresses.
2.Globalization—Religiousaspects—Congresses.
3.Capitalism—Religiousaspects—Congresses.
I.Vatter,MiguelE.
BL65.P7C73 2011
201(cid:2).7—dc22
2010039505
PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmerica
13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1
Firstedition
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contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction:CreditingGodwithSovereignty
miguelvatter 1
PartOne religionandpolity-building
1. ReligiousFreedom:PreservingtheSaltoftheEarth
freddallmayr 29
2. ANewFormofReligiousConsciousness?Religion
andPoliticsinContemporaryMuslimContexts
abdoufilali-ansary 43
3. ARepublicWhoseSovereignIstheCreator:
ThePoliticsoftheBanofRepresentation
shmueltrigano 67
4. Confucianism’sPoliticalImplications
fortheContemporaryWorld
ranjooseoduherr 83
5. ReligionandthePublicSphereinSenegal:
TheEvolutionofaProjectofModernity
souleymanebachirdiagne 102
PartTwo theendofthesaeculumandglobalcapitalism
6. ShouldWeBeScared?TheReturnoftheSacred
andtheRiseofReligiousNationalisminSouthAsia
georgesdreyfus 117
7. AllNightmaresBack:DependencyandIndependency
Theories,Religion,Capitalism,andGlobalSociety
haukebrunkhorst 142
8. TheEvangelical-CapitalistResonanceMachine
williame.connolly 160
v
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vi Contents
PartThree questioningsovereignty:lawandjustice
9. ‘‘TheWarHasNotEnded’’:ThomasHobbes,CarlSchmitt,
andtheParadoxesofCountersovereignty
friedrichbalke 179
10. NaturalRightandStateofExceptioninLeoStrauss
miguelvatter 190
11. LawandtheGiftofJustice
reginamaraschwartz 207
12. Drawing—theSingleTrait:TowardaPoliticsofSingularity
samuelweber 221
PartFour thereligionofdemocracy:tocqueville
beyondcivilreligion
13. TheReligiousSituationintheUnitedStates
175YearsAfterTocqueville
jose´ casanova 253
14. TheAvatarsofReligioninTocqueville
lucienjaume 273
15. Publics,Prosperity,andPolitics:TheChangingFace
ofAfricanAmericanChristianityandBlackPoliticalLife
eddieglaude 285
16. Conversion
thomasl.dumm 305
Notes 317
ListofContributors 373
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acknowledgments
Theideaforthisvolumecameoutoftheinternationalconference‘‘The-
ology, Faith, and Politics’’ held in May 2005 at the Alice Berline Kaplan
Center for the Humanities at Northwestern University, which was orga-
nizedbyRobertGooding-Williams,atthetimethecenter’sdirector,and
myself. I am grateful to Robert Gooding-Williams for his help, friendly
advice, and unflagging support of this editorial project in the years since.
I would also like to thank all the contributors to this volume, some of
whomwerepresentattheoriginalconferenceandotherswhogenerously
offered their texts for this project at a later stage. Last, I am greatly
indebtedtoHelenTartar,whoencouragedmetopursuethisprojectfrom
theverybeginning,andwhomIamveryluckytocountasmyeditor.
Chapter 8 is from William E. Connolly, ‘‘The Evangelical-Capitalist
Resonance Machine,’’ Political Theory 33, no. 6 (December 2005): 869–
886.ReprintedbypermissionofSAGEPublications.
vii
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introduction
Crediting God with Sovereignty
Miguel Vatter
Theriseofreligiousfundamentalismintheclosingdecadesofthetwenti-
eth century continues to have enormous repercussions not only for poli-
tics, but also for the disciplines of the human sciences, philosophy, and
theology. The sociology of religion, perhaps the paradigmatic achieve-
ment of the discipline of sociology, has been dealing with the effects of
thecrisisofitstheoriesofsecularization.Theso-calleddeprivatizationof
religion has forced on the table the old-age question of the relation
between God and society, or faith and the constitution of community,
with the added complication that the community at stake nowadays is a
globalone.1Politicaleconomy,whetheronetakesaMarxistorSimmelian
approach,is structurallydependent ontheideaofcredit,which inturnis
also ultimately rooted in an understanding of trust and faith, which are
difficulttodisentanglefromtheology.2Philosophy,foritspart,iscoming
to terms with an intuition already prefigured by Hermann Cohen, and
nowvoicedbysuchdiversethinkersasJacquesDerrida,Ju¨rgenHabermas,
andHilaryPutnam, among others,thatnophilosophical (‘‘scientific’’)
foundationofethicscanhopetocapturethefullgrammarofjustice(which
thus seems to call upon resources that are to be found only in religious
experience).3Furthermore,thedeconstructionofmetaphysicsinitiatedby
HeideggerandWittgenstein,andtheshadowithassincecastonthestatus
1
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2 MiguelVatter
of scientific knowledge, has brought to the fore the continued resilience
of webs of belief, pre-predicative linguistic structures and practices, that
mustbetakenoncreditbyourpropositionsiftheyaretomakesense,with
the result that many no longer see any point in accepting the Cartesian
exchange of truthfor certainty, and with the discontentwith the modern
projectofepistemology,thepathisonceagainbeingopenedforareturn
to classical and medieval ontology, to Platonism and Aristotelianism in
theirmanifoldversions,andwiththattoavisionoftheworldthatismore
compatiblewithrevealedtruths.4
Given thiscontext,where oldmodernist certaintieshavebeenrecalled
into doubt, it appears that no master narrative and no one disciplinary
perspectivearenowcapableofdoingjusticetothecomplexitiesofthenew
relationbetweenreligionandpoliticsinthecontextofglobalcapitalism.5
Whyhasreligion,moresothanpoliticsorlaw,beenabletocapitalizeon
theprocessesofglobalization?Thequestionitselfinvitestoapproachthe
search for answers through a comparative perspective and a pluralistic
methodology, which in any case has been the norm in the study of reli-
giousphenomenasinceatleastMirceaEliade’spath-breakingworksafter
WorldWarII.Tounderstandthe‘‘return’’ofreligioninthepublicsphere
onecanhardlyignoretherealityofwhathasrecentlybeencalled‘‘alterna-
tivemodernities,’’6and itscorollary:thepluralityofEnlightenmentproj-
ects.Last,butnotleast,thephenomenonthathasrecentlybeentermeda
‘‘clash of fundamentalisms’’7 has opened up history in a way that the fall
of the Berlin Wall had seemed to preclude. Derrida’s well-known refuta-
tionofFrancisFukuyama’s‘‘EndofHistory’’thesisbywayofrevivingthe
category of the messianic contains a fundamental paradox for our times,
namely: history has reopened in and through the various religious ways
of rethinking the ‘‘end’’ of the saeculum and the renewal of the temporal
categoriesofeschatologyandapocalypse.8
All of the essays in this collection demonstrate their affinity to one or
moreoftheabovemethodologicalcommitments:theyevidencecompara-
tivistandpluralistapproachestothephenomenaofthetheologico-politi-
cal,andtheyindicateaconsciousnessofthepeculiarparadoxthatthenew
historicalopen-endednessisachievedinandthroughanexperienceofthe
‘‘end’’ ofsecular temporality. The collection owesits genesis toan inter-
national conference held at the Center for Humanities of Northwestern
University in May 2005 entitled ‘‘Theology, Faith, and Politics,’’ orga-
nizedbyRobertGooding-Williamsandmyself.Manyofthepapersgiven
at the conference are presented here in revised versions, and some new
papers have been solicited in order to provide coherence to the volume’s
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