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| Political theology | |
|---|---|
| Name | Political theology |
| Region | Global |
| Period | Antiquity–Contemporary |
| Notable ideas | Divine right, caesaropapism, covenant, social contract, messianism, liberation, civil religion |
| Notable thinkers | Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Niccolò Machiavelli, John Calvin, Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Martin Luther King Jr., Gustavo Gutiérrez, Walter Benjamin, Reinhold Niebuhr, Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida |
Political theology is the study of the ways religious ideas, institutions, texts, and actors shape authority, legitimacy, sovereignty, and public order across history and cultures. It examines interactions among religious traditions, legal charters, imperial structures, ecclesiastical institutions, and revolutionary movements to explain how sacralized claims inform policy, law, and conflict. Scholars draw on sources from ancient inscriptions to modern constitutions to trace continuities and ruptures in sacral-political imaginaries.
Political theology analyzes how religious doctrines from sources such as Hebrew Bible, New Testament, Qur'an, Bhagavad Gita, Talmud, Nicene Creed, and Confucian Analects inform political authority in institutions like the Holy Roman Empire, Ottoman Empire, Qing dynasty, Byzantine Empire, Papacy, and Caliphate. It situates thinkers such as Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Thomas Hobbes, and Carl Schmitt alongside movements like the Protestant Reformation, Catholic Reformation, Islamic Golden Age, Bhakti movement, and Soviet Union to map claims about sovereignty, law, and covenant. The scope includes canonical texts, liturgy, hermeneutics, institutions such as the Church of England, Eastern Orthodox Church, Sunni Islam, Shia Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism and practices in contexts like the American Revolution, French Revolution, English Civil War, and Indian independence movement.
From antiquity, temple polity in Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Assyrian Empire, Babylon, and Persian Empire linked rulership to divinity, while texts like the Code of Hammurabi and the Achaemenid inscriptions framed royal law. In classical antiquity, debates in Athens, Sparta, and among Roman Republic elites intersected with cults and the imperial cult of Augustus. Medieval syntheses in the Carolingian Empire, Feudalism, and the investiture conflicts between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire produced doctrines such as the divine right of kings and caesaropapism. Early modern ruptures—Protestant Reformation, Council of Trent, English Reformation—reconfigured authority, leading to confessional states like Habsburg Monarchy and secularizing theorists in the wake of the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia. Enlightenment critiques from figures linked to Glorious Revolution, American founding fathers, and philosophers associated with French Revolution reshaped sovereignty debates, while twentieth-century crises—Russian Revolution, Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, Chinese Revolution, decolonization—fostered new syntheses in liberation theology in Latin America, politico-religious movements in Iranian Revolution, and constitutional experiments in India and South Africa.
Themes include sovereignty as articulated by Thomas Hobbes, Jean Bodin, and Carl Schmitt; natural law traditions represented by Thomas Aquinas, Francisco de Vitoria, and Samuel Pufendorf; covenantal frameworks in John Calvin and American founding fathers; sacramentality and kingship in Gregorian Reform and Henry VIII; messianism in Jewish messianic movements and Christian millenarianism; jihad and caliphate theory in Ibn Taymiyyah, Al-Farabi, and Al-Ghazali; dharma-ruler relations in Manusmriti and Chanakya; and secularization theses debated by Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and A. N. Whitehead. Concepts such as divine right, caesaropapism, civil religion articulated by Robert Bellah, liberation articulated by Gustavo Gutiérrez and Leonardo Boff, and just war theory from Augustine of Hippo and Aquinas recur across traditions.
Christian theological-political modalities feature Augustine of Hippo, whose interpretations of City of God address empire; Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica theorized law and kingship; reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin reframed church-state relations; modern realists like Thomas Hobbes and Niccolò Machiavelli secularized sovereignty; modern critics and analysts include Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Hans Blumenberg. Islamic political theology includes jurists and philosophers like Al-Mawardi, Ibn Khaldun, Al-Farabi, Ibn Taymiyyah, Al-Ghazali, and modern figures in Pan-Islamism and Islamic Republic of Iran debates. Jewish political-theological voices such as Maimonides, Baruch Spinoza, and modern thinkers connected to Zionism expand the field. South Asian contributions include Kautilya (Chanakya), Adi Shankaracharya, and movements tied to Bharat’s constitutional debates; East Asian modalities involve Confucian thinkers like Confucius, Mencius, and statecraft in the Qin dynasty and Han dynasty. Liberation and postcolonial traditions feature Gustavo Gutiérrez, James H. Cone, Frantz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha, and Edward Said.
Religious legitimation appears in coronations like that of Charlemagne, legal charters such as the Magna Carta, canon law in the Council of Trent, constitutional texts like the United States Constitution and Indian Constitution, and ideological manifestos tied to Revolutionary France and Jacobins. Movements including Anabaptists, Puritans, Black Liberation Movement, Solidarity (Poland), Liberation Theology in Latin America, Iranian Revolution, Hamas, BJP (India), Wafd Party, and African National Congress illustrate praxis across electoral politics, insurgency, and social reform. International institutions like the League of Nations, United Nations, and European Union confront religious claims in human rights jurisprudence and treaties like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Treaty of Westphalia legacy cases.
Critiques arise from secularist advocates such as Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, and John Rawls on neutrality and public reason; Marxist critics linked to Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg denounce religion as ideology; postcolonial critics like Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak interrogate missionary and imperial entanglements; feminist and queer theologians such as Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Judith Butler contest patriarchal sacralizations. Debates center on pluralism defended by John Locke and Isaiah Berlin, the role of jurisprudence in cases like European Court of Human Rights decisions, and political theology’s implications in controversies involving Sharia law adjudication, blasphemy statutes in Pakistan, and secularism in France.
Contemporary scholarship engages phenomena in the United States—evangelical political mobilization, court decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, and debates over the First Amendment—and global intersections such as religious nationalism in India, Russia, Turkey, and Israel; clerical governance in Iran; Christian democratic parties in Germany; Buddhist monk activism in Myanmar and Sri Lanka; and Pentecostal politics in Brazil and Nigeria. Interdisciplinary dialogues involve scholars from Princeton University, Harvard University, University of Oxford, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, American University of Beirut, Pontifical Gregorian University, and Jawaharlal Nehru University and inform policy at organizations like the World Bank and United Nations Development Programme. The field engages legal cases, electoral trends, and social movements from MeToo movement intersections to climate justice campaigns linked to faith-based NGOs and transnational networks such as Caritas Internationalis and Amnesty International.