Theological and Political

People with PhDs writing about Islamic thought often begin by making the distinction between "Western" thought that makes a clear distinction between politics and religion.  As a sort of sick curiosity, I went to see the post-1980s Bernard Lewis give a talk where he cited as the defining characteristic of Western though regarding religion as "render unto Caesar."  Either ignorantly or cynically, he ignored the many historical considerations that would undercut any notion that "rendering unto Caesar" was a widespread phenomenon in Europe... y'know, ever.  And it's not just Lewis.  This seems to be one of those things that people feel the need to explain whenever talking about "Muslim politics" or "Islamic thought" or "Medieval Islamic thought about politics" or whatever.

Not only does this kind of talk seem to reify and generalize about Islam and Christianity, but it also separates the theological and the political in artificial ways.  Fortunately, this separation between theology and politics is breaking down in the humanities.  This new Taylor book (interview linked here) is something that I hope to look into when I get back.  I read Badiou's book on St. Paul last summer, which was an atheist's take on establishing a faith-based national community (rather than one based on race or history...  the Pauline idea being that faith means that there is neither slave nor free, greek nor jew, that kind of thing).  The faith, in this case, would not necessarily consist of a doxological statement but rather some unprovable statement.

The bottom line is that political thinking is theological in its structure, whether Pauline or otherwise.  Theological thinking is also necessarily political.  The result, then, is that "Islam makes no distinction between religion and politics" becomes even more nonsensical than it had been.

theological and political thinking belong to one another in some striking new ways. In other words, thinking about religious beliefs (the theological), and about power and its organization in society (the political) are being re-thought from the ground up. In contrast, political and public theology have all too often thought, “Well, we have theology, we know what it is, now we need to address some political or public issues.” We have our Christology, for example, now let’s spell out its meanings for the public order.” That’s clearly insufficiently complex for our more turbulent and tangled present, in which theology and political theory are engaging one another afresh.