Introduction to political theology: Definitions, history, and contemporary relevance

Today we’ll be talking about what political theology means and why it’s important to understand it today. This is a field that sits at the intersection of religious thought and political power, examining how theology shapes politics and how politics shapes theology. Some might wonder whether this is even a legitimate area of study—after all, don’t modern democracies separate church and state? But as we’ll see, the relationship between religion and politics is far more complex and enduring than simple separation suggests.

What is political theology? There are many answers to this question, but in this class we’ll be exploring three types of answers:

First Definition: Theology founds politics

One tradition says that political theology is a way to found a political order, to supply an answer to the question of political obligation by reference to the divine or sacred. This answer says that theology founds politics, in that it provides the answer to the question: who can legitimately rule over others, and to what end?

The Abrahamic religions that we’ll be studying in this course belong to this tradition. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, political authority ultimately derives from God. Kings rule by divine right, laws reflect divine commandment, and political communities are understood as having a sacred purpose. Political power isn’t self-justifying—it requires theological foundation.

Second Definition: Politics uses theology

Another tradition says that political theology is a way to justify a secular political order. Here politics would be self-sufficient, a completely secular affair, an affair of human beings, but human beings would use religious concepts to amplify their claims to power and rule.

In this tradition we find radical thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, and Judith Butler. For these thinkers, religion doesn’t actually ground political authority—rather, political power uses religious language and concepts to legitimize itself. Religion becomes ideology, a tool of domination. Political theology, from this perspective, is the study of how secular power appropriates sacred concepts.

Third definition: Politics Is inevitably theological

Yet another tradition says that political theology is a term that expresses that politics is inevitably theological, and that theology is inevitably political. This tradition argues that any political order, any political power, could not function if it didn’t involve some kind of element that went beyond that order or power itself.

The political is here something that’s both inside and outside politics. It’s not God, but it has qualities similar to God, like sovereignty. This represents another type of radicalism, best exemplified by Carl Schmitt. Schmitt wrote: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they are transferred from theology to the theory of the state—but also because of their systematic structure.”

For Schmitt, concepts like sovereignty, the exception, the decision aren’t merely borrowed from theology. They have a theological structure. Even in supposedly secular modern states, political authority operates according to a logic that mirrors divine authority.

Although more traditions could be mentioned, I think these are the most important and interesting ones.

Of course they overlap, and there are differences and divisions within each one. We’ll try to keep this complexity in mind throughout the course.

Why does political theology matter today? This is a more complicated question, but in my opinion there are two basic reasons: the first is historical and the second is contemporary.

The historical reason is this: insofar as we’re interested in how politics was conducted and how political entities saw themselves all the way up until the present, we have to look at the theological concepts and principles at work in politics. We can’t understand political history without understanding political theology.

The contemporary reason is equally compelling to me: religious and theological concepts continue to shape political conflicts, identities, and movements today. From ISIS to Evangelical Christianity to debates over immigration and refugees, we can’t make sense of contemporary politics without understanding its theological dimensions.

Let me develop each of these.

Ancient Greece and Rome: The unity of divine and secular

Let’s begin with the ancient Greeks and Romans. The Greek idea of politics, which the Romans inherited, consists of a pursuit of the highest good, the belief that man is ultimately rational, and that man’s political activities will tend toward the highest good and the highest rationality. At bottom, for the Greeks, there was a fundamental correspondence between the secular (politics) and the divine (theology).

If we look at their gods, we find that they’re human-like, capable of hating, loving, being petty, but somehow at the same time being the highest beings. These gods were part of everyday life and they were part of politics.

Recent research shows that when the Greeks built a new city, especially the space reserved for public decision-making, that space was simultaneously reserved for an altar to the gods and for the sacrificial fire. The gods Apollo and Hestia (Vesta in Rome) were always involved in the founding of the city, the founding of politics.

Apollo was the god of foundation, planning, architecture. Because Apollo was involved, the highest rationality and goodness of the city’s planning and foundation was secured. Hestia was the goddess of fire, the carrier of the sacrificial fire. Hestia’s fire stood for the city’s unity, its partaking in the highest good. The fire ensured that no matter what conflicts or differing issues were raised in the politics of the city, they all were bound by the highest good.

With Hestia, a Greek city obtained its political authority, ensured that political decisions were made according to a certain procedure, and that they bore the imprint of divine unity. In this way, sovereignty in the Greek city—its authority—came to reside in the city itself, in its group of citizens, and not outside in a transcendental realm.

In the decision-making processes, we find the tasks of establishing the ritual calendar and determining how the gods were to be honored and celebrated. Politics and theology were unified. Which of the three definitions I mentioned earlier best fits this Greek idea? I’d argue it’s closest to the third—politics is inevitably theological, theology inevitably political.

St. Augustine: The separation of the two cities

This Greek idea was radically challenged in the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. by St. Augustine. For those who don’t know, Augustine was a major Christian thinker and Bishop in North Africa who lived in the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. Augustine is a really major figure in Christianity because his writings would establish the Christian view of politics, history, and salvation—one that would last until the Middle Ages and one that many Christians still adhere to.

Augustine was steeped in the Greek tradition of thought, which was ultimately optimistic and rationalist. But he would radically change his mind when he converted to Christianity and began using scripture to figure out a new worldview.

The problem Augustine sought to solve was this: How do we deal with the adversities, horrors, and difficulties of the world? How do we deal with humans being inherently self-interested, selfish, and base, yet capable of rationality and of conceiving the highest good?

This seemed like a paradox to Augustine which he believed the Greeks couldn’t resolve. Augustine believed he found the beginning of the solution in the Christian belief that Adam instituted universal sin, which all subsequent generations inherited. Augustine came to see human beings in pessimistic terms: as ignorant creatures, most of whom are damned. They’re damned because they willfully continue to be sinners and don’t realize that only God’s grace can save them. Only a select few will be saved by God, since only a few are able to direct their will toward placing their salvation entirely in God’s hands.

So Augustine divided humans into two types: the damned and the saved. But here’s where it becomes interesting, where the birth of a certain kind of political theology occurred that replaced the Greek type. History, for Augustine, became the ground where the damned and saved fought it out, where the story of divine justice and grace unfolded.

This battle Augustine called the battle between the City of God and the City of Man in his famous work De Civitate Dei (The City of God). Notice how he speaks of the City, in clear reference to the Greeks.

The City of Man is for Augustine basically equivalent to politics. Politics is the strictly material and earthly interests of selfish creatures with no reference to the divine. The City of God is governed by God’s will and seeks to move away from sinfulness by means of faith and grace.

But here’s the catch. Although God has foreknowledge of who will be saved and who will be damned, humans can’t know until judgment day. So although history moves toward the separation of the two Cities, humans don’t know to which they belong. Being a member of the Church is of no help here. So deep was man’s sinfulness that God, and only God, would tell if a human had fully accepted His City and His Grace.

What Augustine really did, what’s remarkable about him, was to separate politics from theology or religion. Because of man’s selfishness, sinfulness, appetite for the material, man was given the horrible gift of politics. Politics became a way to make the best of the worst possible condition man could find himself in.

Augustine painted a bleak picture, to be sure. But it’s one that would echo in a lot of political and theological thought in the centuries to come.

The idea of man as inherently self-interested and materialistic we can see at work, in different contexts, in the thought of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and others in what is called the natural law tradition. Man’s sinfulness, however it was called, became a real problem for politics and political thinkers long after the time of Augustine, and arguably it hasn’t stopped being a problem.

The Middle Ages: Divine right of kings

Between roughly the time of Augustine’s death in the 6th century and the birth of the modern era in the 16th century, a different kind of thinking emerged which challenged the Augustinian tradition. This was the Middle Ages, and during the Middle Ages we see a development sometimes called the “sacralization of kingship” or the “divine right of kings.”

Monarchs in the Middle Ages were hardly the supreme powers they would become with the advent of the modern state in the 16th century, as they had to share power with the feudal aristocracy and the Roman Church. But the theological justification for kingship became increasingly explicit. Kings were anointed, coronations were sacred rituals, and royal authority was understood as deriving from God.

This created constant tension between secular and ecclesiastical authority. Who had ultimate authority—the Pope or the Emperor? This question animated medieval political theology and generated sophisticated theories about the relationship between temporal and spiritual power.

The modern era: From Reformation to Enlightenment

With the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, religious authority fragmented. The unity of Christendom broke apart. This religious fragmentation contributed to devastating wars, that is, the Wars of Religion that tore Europe apart for over a century.

The response to this religious violence was, in part, the development of modern secular political philosophy. Thinkers like Thomas Hobbes argued for political authority grounded in social contract rather than divine right. Yet even Hobbes, often considered the founder of secular political theory, was deeply engaged with theology. His Leviathan is full of biblical references and theological arguments.

The Enlightenment continued this trajectory toward secularization, but here too we find that religion remains crucial. John Locke, for example, grounds his political philosophy in natural law, which for him derives ultimately from God. His ultimate political ideal aspires toward Christ-like perfectibility.

And when you look at fierce atheist thinkers like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, you find that they too dealt with religion in extensive and systematic terms. Of course, to these thinkers, religion was a detrimental force keeping the human mind or society from developing its full potential.

For Marx, having oppressed people put their fate in the hands of an invisible and immaterial God, rulers could effectively turn these people’s eyes away from what really counts—the material modes of power and production that always left them in a disadvantaged class position.

In Nietzsche, we find that the start of real history, of real man, occurred once we killed God. We realized, or would realize, that all attributes we associate with God are attributes that belong to man. Man is the creator, man is able to stand outside of nature. For Nietzsche, Christianity had hindered the development of man’s inherently divine qualities by making man pray to an abstract being which would have man think he’s a lowly creature, that he should turn away from nature and his drives to power.

Man, for Nietzsche, ought to fully follow his drives, fully remain in nature, yet always seek to become higher in the order of things—which is what is meant by the term Übermensch (overman or superman).

For Freud, the secrets of the unconscious could be found in ancient mythologies, where deep-rooted unconscious mechanisms regarding drives and relationships were represented by creation stories and the various gods’ behaviors and relationships. Freud too was an opponent of organized religion, in particular monotheistic religion, which he saw as responsible for creating a brutally exclusionary and irrational vision of society.

The examples go on and on, but you get the point.

Without religion and political theology, we can’t even think about the development of the modern state, the idea of the person in human rights, and the ideas of the major thinkers throughout history.

What about the role of political theology in contemporary life? I could go on and on here too, but let me mention quite a few examples to invoke the immense impact religion and theology still have in today’s politics.

Political Islam and the War on Terror

We have, of course, the rise of political Islam, which everyone knows about since 9/11, and which everyone fears today because of the spread of ISIS, an offshoot of Al-Qaeda in Iraq which is proving to have very different goals than Al-Qaeda.

Can we understand ISIS, Al-Qaeda, or political Islam more broadly without understanding Islamic theology, the Sunni-Shia divide, concepts of jihad and the caliphate? Clearly not. These movements are explicitly theological in their self-understanding and justification. They appeal to religious texts, religious authority, religious concepts of political order.

Immigration, refugees, and Islamophobia

In Europe, as in the US, a major issue today is how to deal with the many Muslim immigrants who have been fleeing to either the US or Europe for decades. Many people see these Muslims as a threat to Western civilization, as the harbinger of the Islamification of the West.

This Islamophobia is playing out on so many levels. From Obama being suspected as a Muslim, to some of today’s European countries like Slovakia and Poland saying they’d prefer to only take in Christian refugees, to France where Muslim girls and women were recently banned from wearing veils in public spaces.

Here in the US, I’ve learned that it’s much easier to be granted asylum if you’re, say, a Christian Egyptian rather than a Muslim Egyptian. As if this country is somehow more amenable to a certain religion.

Can we reduce these issues to purely secular politics? Or do we have to understand them as fundamentally involving religious identities, religious anxieties, religious concepts of civilization and belonging?

The Republican Party and Evangelical Christianity

You can’t understand why the Republican Party looks the way it does, devises the policies that it does, today unless you go back to the 1980s and study the relationship that was forged between the Republicans and the rising Evangelical movement.

Evangelical Christianity shapes Republican positions on abortion, same-sex marriage, education, science, foreign policy—the list goes on. The “Moral Majority,” the Christian Coalition, megachurches, televangelists—these aren’t peripheral to Republican politics. They’re central to understanding contemporary American conservatism.

Pope Francis and Liberation Theology

We now have a lot of Catholics for the first time in a long while feeling that they have a Pope they fully support, not least because Pope Francis has explicitly taken political positions on poverty and social justice, and more concretely, helped thaw the relationship between the US and Cuba.

This makes me think of the 1960s and 1970s when liberation theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez and Johann Baptist Metz were preaching and acting for social justice based on the Bible and Marx. Liberation theology combined Christian theology with Marxist social analysis to argue that the Gospel demands a “preferential option for the poor.”

This was radical political theology—theology that justified and motivated revolutionary political action. It was condemned by the Vatican under Pope John Paul II, but it continues to influence Catholic social teaching and activism.

The new atheism

Let’s not forget the atheist intellectuals like Richard Dawkins, who claim that underlying all violence, bigotry, and stupidity in the world is religion, which is why we should all become atheists.

Interestingly, this “new atheism” is itself a kind of political theology—or perhaps anti-theology. It makes strong claims about what religion is, what it does, what dangers it poses. It’s engaged in the same debates about the relationship between religion and politics that have animated political theology for centuries, just from a different position.

Clearly, a lot is going on in today’s politics, here and internationally. So given the examples I’ve talked about, can we reduce all these issues to secular politics? Or do we have to know a little bit about religion, a little bit about political theology, to fully understand them?

I hope I’ve convinced you that political theology matters—both historically and contemporarily. Historically, we simply can’t understand the development of Western political thought and institutions without understanding theology. From ancient Greece through Augustine, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and into modernity, theological concepts have shaped political order.

Today, religious concepts, identities, and movements continue to animate political conflicts and shape political possibilities. Whether it’s ISIS and political Islam, immigration and Islamophobia, Evangelical Christianity and the Republican Party, Pope Francis and liberation theology, or Richard Dawkins and the New Atheism—we need political theology to make sense of the world we live in.

This brings us back to our three definitions. You may ask: which one is correct?

Does theology found politics? Sometimes yes—when political authority explicitly derives its legitimacy from divine sources, when religious texts and traditions provide the framework for political order.

Does politics use theology? Sometimes yes—when secular rulers appropriate religious language to legitimate their power, when religion becomes ideology masking material interests.

Is politics inevitably theological? Perhaps always—if we accept Schmitt’s argument that political concepts have a theological structure, that sovereignty mimics divine authority, that political order requires something beyond itself.

These three definitions aren’t mutually exclusive. They highlight different aspects of the complex relationship between religion and politics. Throughout this course, we’ll see examples of all three. We’ll see theology founding politics, politics using theology, and the inevitable theological dimensions of political life.

Some questions to consider as we proceed:

Should religion and politics be combined? This is both a normative and a descriptive question. Normatively, ought they be separated or integrated? Descriptively, can they actually be separated, or are they always already intertwined?

Where else do we find morality, common goals, sense of community, if not in religion? If we strip politics of religious foundations, what replaces them? Can secular humanism or nationalism or ideology provide the same integrative function?

How do we reconcile the pluralism of religious belief today? In diverse, multicultural societies, we have Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, and more. How can political order accommodate this plurality? Can there be a political theology for pluralistic societies, or does political theology inevitably privilege one religious tradition?

Is religion innate to human being – is there such a thing as a “religious impulse”? Are humans naturally religious? If so, attempts to secularize politics may be fighting against human nature. If not, religion is a historical phenomenon that might fade away—though this seems unlikely given religion’s persistence and vitality.

These are extremely difficult questions. But they’re crucial questions if we want to understand both our past and our present, both political history and contemporary politics.

Throughout this course, we’ll engage with thinkers who offer different answers to these questions. We’ll read theologians and philosophers, believers and atheists, conservatives and radicals. We’ll examine Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We’ll look at how theological concepts shape political order and how political power uses theological concepts.

My goal isn’t to convince you of any particular position. My goal is to help you understand the enduring relationship between theology and politics, to give you tools for analyzing this relationship, and to show you why it matters for understanding both history and the contemporary world.

Political theology isn’t a relic of the past. It’s alive and active in the present. Understanding it isn’t just academically interesting—it’s practically necessary if we want to make sense of the world we live in and the political conflicts that shape our lives.