From secularisations to political religions*

ABSTRACT

In European culture the sacred and the secular have existed in a dialectical relationship. Prodi sees the fifteenth-century crisis of Christianity as opening up three paths that eroded this dualism and tended towards modernity: civic-republican religion, sacred monarchy, and the territorial churches. Important counter-forces, which sought to maintain dualism, included the Roman-Tridentine Compromise, and those forms of Radical Christianity which rejected confessionalisation outright. During the Eighteenth Century, all these phenomena tended to contribute to one of two tendencies: towards civic religion, or towards political religion. The former preserved a distinction between conscience and law; the latter comprised a state religion which sought to perfect all of human nature. It was civic religion which become embodied in the early USA, alienating God from worldly power, but leaving him as the guarantor of agreements between humans. Back in Europe, Prodi tracks the relationship between the Catholic Church and the new national states. He then turns to the political religions of the Twentieth Century. Prodi concludes by emphasising that this dualism of sacred and secular power lay at the centre of Western modernity, and expresses his fears about the collapse of civic religion into political religion, especially in the USA.

1. Premise

In this paper, I wish to present the conclusion of a course of research begun here at Trent (more precisely in much-regretted forum of Villazzano, then seat of the Italian-German Historical Institute), on the occasion of the conference organised in 1985 on the theme of ‘Christianity and Power’, and which then found its published expression in the volume edited by Luigi Sartori and myself the following year.¹ On that occasion we had also invited Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, who was not able to attend (detained by his work as a constitutional judge), but who sent his paper ‘The formation of the State as a process of secularisation’ to us, which was and remains central for our reflections then and now. I think that it would be useless to recall the steps of the journey which I have taken since then, both personally and with groups of colleagues, from The Sacrament of Power in 1990 to A History of Justice in 2000 and in other minor essays. Naturally, I must make some cross-references in order to make myself intelligible, but I must take for granted the documentary base and the different chronological and sectoral approaches.² A second necessary specification is that it is not my intension, nor would it be possible in the space of this intervention, to synthesise a theme upon which scholars continue to write thousands of pages every year.³

But I must be clear that I cannot share the distinction between secularisation and laicisation as two different forms of modernisation.⁴ I think that one can understand from my approach that I see secularisation as a process which includes in itself the elements of laicisation and I have chosen the plural (secularisations) in order to underline the complexity of a phenomenon which is never a one-sided process; the modern state tends to sacralise itself in so far as it inherits the functions of the Church via a process of osmosis.

If then this is a good time to indicate why I speak in this place, apart from the opportunity to accept a kind invitation, I must specify that perhaps the thing that is new is the consideration that has been reinforced in me over the years, until it has now been transformed into a profound conviction: power is always connected to the sacred, and the greatness of the West has consisted above all in the enclosure of the sacred, not in the expulsion of it, as though it were a demon. This has permitted the disenchantment of the world, and the birth of politics as technology, according to the celebrated vision of Max Weber. To make myself understood, I would like to return to the New Testament parable of the expulsion of the demons:

When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it wanders through waterless regions looking for a resting place, but it finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ When it comes, it finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings along seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there; and the last state of that person is worse than the first. So will it be also with this evil generation. (Matthew 12:43–45)

So it is generally for the demon of power and for the sacred: the West in its history has learned to control the sacred without driving it out, and this is our conquest of laicism, a conquest now in danger from the double attack of fundamentalisms and of the new political religions. To speak and polemicise about laicism only in the traditional terms of the relationships between Church and State seems useless and perhaps misleading at a moment in which the traditional powers are displaced and have assumed new forms.

2. The roots of dualism

The major lacuna which, in my view, impedes contemporary historians and political scientists from gaining a full comprehension of the phenomenon consists in their lack of long-term vision. In the past, I have sought to write about the roots of dualism from diverse perspectives. Here I would like to limit myself to indicating the readings which were for me, at various stages, fundamental: they are very well-known and celebrated texts, but precisely for this reason I wish to make explicit my debt to a shared course of research which perhaps before the 1980s was not thinkable, and which in my opinion has completely changed the historiographical vision of the problem.

As far as regards the first step, which is a process of detachment from Pharaoh and the birth, with the Old Testament covenant, of a God who identifies himself with a people, but not with its governors’ exercise of power, the studies of Jan Assmann were fundamental. In the Jewish world, beyond some very differentiated events in the different stages of the construction of the state, a great novelty was introduced compared to the theo-politics of ancient Egypt and of the other Middle-Eastern kingdoms in which the divinity itself was identified with power. In Israel for the first time, justice, the ‘Law’, was subtracted from power and rested in the sphere of the transcendent: with the idea of the Pact, of the Covenant, which involved him in the first person, Yahweh became directly the guarantor of justice in the social and political sphere. While Pharaoh incorporated justice in the socio-political sphere under his own sovereignty, by contrast in Israel justice was subtracted from the political sphere in order to be moved into a theological sphere depending directly on God: sovereignty and the sacred were separated rendering possible not only resistance to abuses of power – a power which could be wicked – but also the search for an earthly place of justice different from those same halls of power.⁵ Naturally this approximate synthesis should be defined in the times and modes of complex Jewish statal construction, but it seems that the character of the novelty derived from the experience of the history of Israel cannot be placed in question. Man had an alternative forum, with respect to the forums of political power, from which to clear himself of blame or to incriminate someone else. This innovation had as a consequence the first separation of the concept of ‘peccato’ as a fault with regard to God, from that of ‘reato,’ as a violation of the positive law imposed by power.

For the second step, which is the birth of the Church as institutionalised prophecy, I think that Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of the Redemption might still be regarded as the basic text which permitted a new reading of the Gospel dictum ‘Give to Caesar that which is Caesar’s’, much more profound than previous readings, which had been entangled on both the confessional and the lay side in jurisdictional controversies in the compromises and in the tensions between throne and altar, which characterised the centuries of the modern age:

And thus belief establishes that union of individuals, as individuals, for common labor which rightfully bears the name of ecclesia. For this original name of the church is taken from the life of the ancient city-states, and designates the citizens called together for common deliberation … In the ecclesia however the individual is and remains an individual, and only its resolve is common and becomes – res publica … For the Jew, the world is full of smooth transitions from ‘this world’ to the ‘world to come’ and back; for the Christian, it is organized into the great dualism of state and Church. Not without justification it has been said of the pagan world that it knew neither the one nor the other. The polis was both state and Church for its citizens, as yet without any contradiction. But in the Christian world, these two separated from the beginning. The history of the Christian world thereafter consists of the attempt to maintain this separation. It is not as if only the Church were Christian and not the state. ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's’ weighed no less heavily in the course of the centuries than the second half of this dictum. For the law to which the peoples submit proceeds from Caesar. And creation, the work of divine omnipotence, is consummated in the universal rule of law on earth … The Church is in the world, visible and with a universal law of its own, and thus not a whit more than Caesar's empire itself the kingdom of God.⁶

For the third stage, the beginning of institutional tensions in eleventh-century Europe, the point of reference was certainly Harold Berman’s The Papal Revolution. According to Berman, with Gregory VII the original dualism became an institutional dualism and plural belonging transformed itself into an open tension which placed all of European society in continual vibration: the first of the European revolutions, the mother of all the revolutions, as, desacralizing political power, it deprived it of, or at least diminished, its intrinsic sacrality.⁷ With the formation of sacramental doctrine, the birth of purgatory, the birth of canon law, the control of confession, the control of sanctity and therefore of the models of life, the Western Church formed, around the core institution of the papacy, a fence of the sacred in a certain way separate from the sphere of political power. I have sought to confront these themes in preceding researches which I will not summarise here. I wish only to emphasise, so as not to be equivocal, that this is not an irenic vision: one is dealing with a continual struggle, no holds barred, in which the Church attempted to transform itself into a theocratic power, and political authority defended its own sacrality tooth and nail.

From these readings I set out on my examination of mediaeval and modern theological, juridical, and political texts in the The Sacrament of Power and in the A History of Justice.

3. The gestation of the modern state

As I have said, in order to confront and define the theme which we place before ourselves today, and that looks to a specific period in the history of the West, we must take as our premise the pre-statal period, and the period of the gestation of the modern state, the period which immediately preceded the historical parabola which now we are abandoning and which has characterised the life of recent centuries. Pluralism of identities and of belongings was fought all through the centuries of the Ancien Régime by a tendency towards the creation of a new composite in which power and the sacred blended together along vertical lines which found in the State their point of reference.⁸ The process matured only in the second half of the Eighteenth Century with revolutions and constitutional development, but I think that in order to understand this result it is important to understand this period of gestation: if we simply accept the process as secularisation in the traditional sense, it would seem to me to compromise our comprehension of modernity in its complete cycle up to its present sunset.

When the world of mediaeval christianitas entered into crisis it opened different roads towards modernity, roads which can be schematised for convenience, while bearing in mind that one treats of realities closely intertwined during the centuries of the modern age, and that operated at the same time, not in an isolated way but always in diverse combinations among themselves, demonstrating different concrete solutions to the problem of the relationship between power and the sacred: namely, the path of civic republican religion, the path of the recovery of monarchical sacrality; the path of the territorial churches, and the Roman-Catholic path. Naturally one treats only of certain signs which can give only a vague idea of the territory to be explored.

3.1. Civic-republican religion

The first path took form in the Italian cities of the late Middle Ages under the impulse of humanism, and tended to recover the sacrality of politics through the rediscovery of the fusion of power and the sacred proper to Greco-Roman antiquity. The Italy of the 1400s resembled a laboratory in which people experimented with solutions which would be diffused all over Europe in the following centuries.⁹ Without exploring the complex dynamics of this process, I will summarise what I would like to say in the motto of an anonymous counsellor of the Florentine Republic cited by an American historian and which I placed as an initial reflection at the beginning of my two volumes on the oath and on the history of justice: ‘God is the Republic, and he who governs the Republic governs God. God is justice, and he who does justice does God.’¹⁰ Naturally we can have many declensions of this doctrine in relation to different political realities. The greatest expression came in the European republican regimes of the modern age because of the obvious necessity of substituting for the sacrality of the monarch a collective sacrality as a glue of equivalent strength for collective identity. From the Florence of the 1400s, to the Venice of the 1500s, to Holland and England in the 1600s, to its eighteenth-century diffusion: the history of republicanism was closely connected to the ideology of civic religion. Its relationship with traditional religion and with ecclesiastical institutions was very diverse: from the assimilation of worship and of models of sanctity in a symbiosis without tensions, to behaviours of the greatest contraposition even to the point of fracture. The strongest theorisation was, as is universally acknowledged, that elaborated by Niccolò Machiavelli in his Discourses against the ‘Weakness to which the present religion has brought the world’ up to the exaltation of Roman religion in chapters XI–XII of Book I:

If this religion had been maintained by the rulers of the Christian commonwealth, as it had been ordained for us by its founder, the states and Christian commonwealths would have been more united and much happier than they are. Nor can one make any better conjecture of its decline, than to see how those people who live closest to the Roman Church, head of our religion, have the least religion.¹¹

The themes of virtue and of the same reason of state as ‘mystery’ which develop in Machiavellian thought have their foundation in this approach. It seems that anti-Machiavellianism itself, aiming to demonstrate the irreligion and impiety of Machiavelli, might have been successful in presenting his thought as an opening for a secularisation in one sense: the new prince and his papal adversaries accused each other reciprocally of representing the Antichrist, symbol of a new monopoly of power.¹²

3.2. The recovery of monarchical sacrality

I do not intend this signpost to refer to the persistence in the modern centuries of the magic sacrality of the king, noted through the masterpiece of Marc Bloch, nor to recall the contribution of the theological concept of the mystical body in the construction of the impersonal figure of the modern sovereign state, that became a point of reference after the work of E. H. Kantorowicz, but to indicate a more definite process which leads to the construction of the sovereign as his subjects’ representative and temporal and spiritual point of reference. As Mario Sbriccoli has demonstrated, the law of lèse-majesté became assimilated to heresy, and faithfulness tended to have a single point of reference in the prince.¹³

A new sacrality was born with the assimilation to the interior of monarchy, in the new ideology of sovereignty, of the concepts of auctoritas and of potestas, which had been in the preceding age at the base of the ambiguous distinction between the two spheres, the religious and the political: more precisely, power, politics, became also instructio, which attempted to mould man from birth to death in his formation and behaviour.¹⁴ Using the words of Pierre Legendre, one can say that the sovereign was no longer ‘princeps legibus solutus’ of Roman memory, but he himself became the ‘final reference’ of the norm, of the law, with a path that led from the nation state to the affirmation of the party-Churches of the twentieth century as new professions of secularised faith.¹⁵

I have picked out one intersection-point of this development that seemed to me to be particularly important, in the papacy of the later 1400s, even if this model entered immediately into crisis due to the intrinsic contradiction of the figure of the pope-king, given that he demanded to exercise in universal terms and not merely territorially a power which by its nature demanded the unity of people, territory, and sovereignty. The thesis that the pontifical state might have constituted the prototype of the modern state, a thesis which appeared somewhat absurd when it was proposed twenty years ago but which has now obtained credibility, does not imply only the development of an external model imitated by other princes (an impersonal bureaucracy, specialised organs of government, etc.) but above all the fusion of spiritual power and temporal power as necessary for the new concentration of sovereignty. Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy of 1534 was clearly inspired by this model which would be for centuries the fulcrum of English politics, theorised by Thomas Hobbes in his polemic against the ‘illusion’ of the papacy. It developed from the papal Tempelstaat at the end of the 1400s to the Leviathan, though not without interruption.

3.3. The territorial churches

From the Fourteenth Century, in the crisis of the Western Schism, the movement towards the formation of territorial churches coinciding with the new monarchies and the new principalities is so evident that it can be read off the map of Europe by the naked eye. Naturally Gallicanism represented the most evolved and best known form of this, but the tendency was diffused everywhere; not only did the sovereign tend to free himself from ecclesiastical tutelage and become the dominus beneficiorum, controlling the economic structure and through this the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but he tended also to absorb the social and political functions previously pertaining to the ecclesiastical body. From the control over culture and over the universities, to the development of the vernacular grammars and languages up to the reorganisation of social services, the 1400s seem a great laboratory in which the confessional age was prepared as a training in identities which were at the same time political and religious, and a transformation of politics from the exercise of jurisdiction and of the administration of justice, to one of education and social modelling, of the regulation of the life of man from birth to death. In this sense, the Reformation, beyond its intrinsic theological content, became the most coherent manifestation and the extreme of a process which in Catholic territories was constrained by ambiguity and compromise. The cura religionis became one of the fundamental functions of the new sovereignty, while the cuius regio eius et religio became the principal factor for the construction of collective identity in this initial phase of the gestation of the modern state. At bottom, perhaps the most interesting phenomenon is the ideologisation of politics; a theological ideology which growing little by little became capable of divesting itself of its theological dress to arrive at the new religion of the nation. When the solution of the territorial churches entered into crisis, and the pressure of the indirect deposing power of the papacy increased, the discussion of regal sacrality found its epicentre in the England of James I in an incredible vortex of experiences, conversations, and delusions, in which many actors were involved; one might speak of irenical ambiguity or of the Nicodemism of return, but I think that the drama of these characters (we remember among others Giordano Bruno and Marcantonio De Dominis) who travelled across Europe, through states and religions in this period, was the search for a solution to the problem of the relationship between the new sovereignty and the sacred, not without a certain resort to the materials which the papacy had already prepared with regard to this question more than a century before.¹⁶

4. Opposition

The new concentration of power in the modern system of confessional states and in the state churches, came, as is well-known, very slowly and constituted an always incomplete process, not only for reason of the weaknesses of the new institutional structures (especially of the civil service and the army) and because of the persistence of mediaeval contractual traditions which in fact impeded the incarnation of the everyday reality of the new doctrines of sovereignty, but also by resistance to the new monopoly of sacrality. It is certainly not my task in this intervention to re-make the history of power in modern Europe, a history which after all has recently been drawn on a grand scale by Wolfgang Reinhard, but to indicate only the surviving forces of Christian dualism against which must be measured the new phenomenon of the sacralisation of politics which took place in the confessional states.¹⁷

It remains certain that the same plurality of confessions born out of the Reformation imposed a pluralism which was not only geopolitical but also georeligious and that the European circulation of goods and of ideas produced a situation much more fluid and varied than appears in textbook simplifications. The same progressive affirmation of the principle of religious tolerance (in so far as ‘tolerance’ implied the recognition of the coincidence of political and religious power) represented not only the success of the new humanistic and Enlightened culture, but also the inability of the new sovereigns to dominate society's deepest currents.

Here I limit myself to sketching the two phenomena which I hold most relevant for the survival of this dualism even in the moment of the strongest affirmation of the confessional states.

4.1. The Roman-Tridentine compromise

The rebirth of the papacy out of the conciliar crisis, the ‘solstice’ of 1440, is well known in its two most apparent phenomena. To save as much as possible of its universal function, it developed a centre to periphery relationship of a new type which had no longer the traditional infra-ecclesial relationship with the individual Churches as its fulcrum, but rather a political relationship with states. Its instruments were concordats and nunciatures. It was with these instruments that the popes managed to contain in vast regions of Europe, at great sacrifice, the statification of the local churches, and the conservation of a universal function.¹⁸

It seems possible to me to make the generalisation that the Roman Church responded to the formation of the confessional states and the territorial churches in two directions: on the one hand assuming in some sense the characteristics of a perfect or sovereign society in imitation of that state sovereignty, not only in the Papal State (or in the current state of Vatican City) with all the typical forms and expressions of the modern state; and on the other hand, forcing itself to create a normative dimension which did not coincide with, which might be withheld from, the positive statist dimension. We cannot follow the first line, which in any case has always been privileged in the traditional historiography, but we will attempt to follow this second development. The centre point of this controversy was power over consciences. While the path of the Evangelical-Reformed Churches set off towards an inevitable success with an institutional and ideological alliance of State and Church, an alliance destined to last until the achievement of the practical and ideological maturity of the State itself (from here arises a possible interpretation of their more intrinsic symbiosis with modern bourgeois society), the Roman Church attempted to construct a parallel sovereignty of a universal type. Failing to sustain the competition on the plane of juridical ordinances, the Church devoted all its efforts to the control of consciences. At an external level, great and continual contests were fought between regalists and curialists, the great jurisdictional controversies between Church and State about which historians have written rivers of words; at a deeper level a continual compromise was sewn and re-sewn between throne and altar, from the activities of nuncios to the minute aspects of parochial life; at a yet more profound and submerged level was the problem of the control of the souls of the subject faithful. It is on this more hidden plane that research could be useful today. This would reflect on a more properly political terrain in the affirmation of an ‘indirect’ power based on a super-state and super-national ecclesiastical body, on a new discipline of the clergy and of the souls of the faithful, in competition with legislation and state power, in strenuous defence of ecclesiastical privileges and immunities in the face of the absolutist states’ policies and law.

To offer an example, I can think of no better testimony of this process than then comparison between the concordat of 1516 between Leo X and François I of France, which left the king practically a free hand in the nomination of bishops, and the concordat or treaty between the French government and Pius VII in 1801 which conceded de facto the nomination of bishops to the First Consul and obliged the newly nominated to take an oath the clauses of which were already substantially in force during in the time of the Ancien Regime:

I swear and promise to God, on his holy Gospels, to give obedience and fealty to the government established by the Constitution of the French Republic. I promise also not to have any correspondence, not to assist in any conspiracy, not to maintain any league, whether at home and abroad, which might be contrary to the public peace; and if in my diocese or elsewhere, I hear that anything is plotted to the prejudice of the State, I will inform the Government of it.¹⁹

Another phenomenon at the centre of the process of the statisation of the Church was the formation of a spiritual jurisdiction over consciences; a system of norms, parallel to the expansion of the positive, state law and in competition with it and which was realised above all in the seventeenth century. I have already examined this process elsewhere, but here I want to underline its biunivocal character: the secularisation of morality and the ‘philosophization’ (so to speak) of the positive law constitute one of the central points in the consideration of the process of osmosis.

One can see the sunset of this experience in the mid-Eighteenth Century not only in the series of concordats which restricted to the minimum the territory of spiritual jurisdiction remaining to the Church of Rome and to the local Churches, but in the Church's massive internal compromise with the powers of the age: the decline and the suppression of the Company of Jesus (with repercussions on a planetary scale due to the Chinese rites controversy and the abolition of the reducciones in Latin America) did not represent marginal episodes or simple secularisation as in the case of other religious orders, but provisions accepted or conceived by the Church itself with a view to the confluence of the two jurisdictions in the new state. In the pamphlets which accompanied the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal and from Spain, the infamous crime, recognised throughout the same Catholic world, was that of lèse-majesté. It remains certain that the politicisation of the Church became in the eighteenth century one of the principal components which brought about on the one hand the crisis of the ecclesiastical principalities (not least the end of the same Papal State) and on the other hand to the Church’s curse of ‘mondane-isation’ which after the revolutionary storm Antonio Rosmini would place at the centre of his ecclesiological polemic.

4.2. Radical Christianity

The expression used in the England of King James I that defined the Jesuits as ‘Puritan papists’ was not a merely a witticism, but the most coherent definition of a menace which threatened the monarchical-sacral monopoly of power at the same time from below (the new sects and Churches of a communitarian stamp) and from above (the papacy). With the expression ‘radical Christianity’ one does not intend to define a homogenous movement but to indicate the totality of all those movements that had refused both the process of confessionalisation and the process of territorial church formation, and also refused the Roman proposal of the co-government of the same. From the political point of view we are interested above all in those movements, from the Anabaptists to the Quakers to the Puritans themselves, who returned to the ancient principle of the sect refusing the principle of a worldly Church, with the consequent compromises, in the conviction that it might be possible to institute on earth a society of the perfect, of the saints, in which there would be the total coincidence of the justice of God with earthly justice. The relationships between the millenarian and apocalyptic movements and the development of modern revolutionary doctrines are well-known and the bibliography is immense, but that which seems to us to remain in the shadows, or which has been placed in the shadows – I except one pioneering essay alone of recent decades – is the concrete osmosis at the level of men and of institutions in a political project which might modify human nature, a project which suggested the possibility of an historical and collective salvation which was not identified with the confessional state and with the state Church.²⁰

The importance of the radical religious minorities for the development in the West of the principles of liberty and democracy is well known from the historiography. But it is necessary to underline, in the examination of the modern theological-political utopias, the disciplinary and repressive aspect which was joined to the fundamentalist proposition: on the one hand the demand for religious liberty, liberty of conscience and of expression, for tolerance, in contrast to the official churches; on the other hand the repression of all internal deviance, and the negation of every point of distance between the political life and the religious life, between morality and the law, between conscience and collective behaviours. The contradiction evident in every century of the modern age between the request for separation of church and state and the construction of community in which the religious bond was all prevailing with respect to the political bond must be analysed in its components if one wants to overcome the dominant stereotype of a simple secularisation of that theological faith into that revolutionary one. The thesis, expressed in outline, is that in the modern age we do not have simply the secularisation of prophecy but its termination; prophecy indeed implies an alterity between the ethical command (sacred-divine) and political power, an alterity which is completely overcome in the modern revolutionary projection in which the historicisation and unification of the two commands is presumed in the popular will.²¹

5. The fork: civic religion and political religion (Montesquieu and Rousseau)

After Carl Schmitt, it is not a novelty to assert that modern politics may have its foundation in secularised theological concepts: but that which to me seems insufficiently explored is the concrete osmosis which came about between the four components which we have sought to delineate above and the concrete political life, not only at a conceptual level, in the passage from the Ancien Regime to the states governed by rule of law. The escape from the modern state with which our generation is experimenting as we traverse the millennium, and contemporary historiographical developments in recent decades, offer us the opportunity to comprehend transformations previously concealed by statist ideology and related controversies. In this way the decline of Marxist historiography, with the loss of the interpretation of the origin of the revolutionary European processes as fruit of the conflict between the new capitalistic bourgeoisie and the old aristocratic-feudal order, has in recent years left the field to interesting explorations of the religious and Christian roots of the French Revolution. It has been understood that the teeming number of creeds and political catechisms for public purposes did not correspond merely to the assimilation of liturgical habits or symbols, but to an ideological transfer much more profound upon which was founded the identity itself of the modern world, and that the same polemics and anti-Christian and anti-religious persecutions were much more comprehensible in an optic closer to that of the still recent wars of religion.²² As Michel de Certeau has said with great efficacy, the transformations which became manifest in the seventeenth and eighteenth century allowed society to pass from a religious organisation to an ethical, political or economic one.²³ I myself have sought to follow certain themes in this movement such as that of the oath and of the law; but these are still preliminary explorations which require further development.

In substance, I think that one could say that one is not dealing with a generic secularisation of theological concepts, but with their metamorphosis which kept alive the diverse paths which had developed in the preceding centuries; in the course of the Eighteenth Century statal religions and state forms developed corresponding to the typologies and intertwinings which we have schematised above. We have for this reason several Enlightenments and several revolutions, which we will be able to understand in their concrete reality only if we abandon the general category of secularisation and consider instead the survival of these roots from which they were generated. Although I am wary of conflating historical reality with the thought of the great intellectuals, whose greatness consists, in my opinion, above all in having understood the signs of the times, I think that one might catch sight clearly for the first time of this fork in the mid-Eighteenth Century in the reflections of Montesquieu on the one hand, and of Rousseau on the other.²⁴

The balance of powers, which Montesquieu defined inside the State, had its roots in the dualism between conscience and law; it presupposed a double level between the sphere of moral norms and the sphere of positive law inherited from the tradition of the Churches remaining in the orbit of the Roman papacy and of the English Commonwealth. One must not stop at the Montesquieuian stereotype of the division of powers inside the state, but understand the foundations of his thought: the path of modernity and the growth of liberties do not consist so much in the institutional mechanisms of the division of powers, as in the dialectic between the state and society, between positive norms and superior norms, ethical and religious, along a path which will brings us to the present day, in the coexistence inside society of many normative sources in competition with one another: those of a statal origin, and those of a sacral-religious origin. He theorised natural law no longer as an abstract body of laws, but as the ‘spirit’ of the laws, which incarnated themselves in various countries and in various peoples, and in this way he opened the path to a new constitutionalism and to the civic religion as its support.²⁵

The transition which came to be theorised by Rousseau was completely different, less in the ambiguous concept of the Social Contract’s ‘general will’, than in, above all, The Constitutional Project for Corsica and in the Considerations on the Government of Poland, as a project of true Church-States, in which emerged in an odd way traces of radical Christianity with regard to the possibility of constructing the kingdom of God on earth and which would become embodied in the Jacobinism of the following years. The state religion, derived from the fusion of the principle of civic religion with that of the sect, took its absolute superiority from its affirmation of the possibility of reforming human nature by rendering it good and virtuous through its institutions. Political authority formed a single body with the sacred, the new political credo coincided with the old confession of faith, the oath absorbed the religious vow, individual conscience became absorbed in the collective conscience of the nation, and the systems of law and ethics were founded in a single reality.²⁶

With this fork, or with the opening of this new phase, these two paths can be distinguished. On the one side there is a religion which we can call ‘civil’, in which God was guarantor of a political pact which men swore in their constitution, on the other side a politics which tended to absorb religion into itself, constructing the new divinities of nations, of class, and of race. Therefore, two paths are delineated: one which we could define as the path of the ‘civic religions’, the other which we could define as that of the ‘political religions’. It is not a matter of dealing with two separate paths, rather of two routes to some degree interwoven, particularly in the history of theological thought, in political thought, and in constitutional theories, but I think that such a basic distinction can help us better to understand our current dramas.

6. Civic religion and the American experience

It has been noted of the American Revolution that a covenanted society of mediaeval origin survived, inside of which, in the different colonies, natural rights became concrete in an integrated system of constitutional statutes which rendered American man the lawful heir of the European Middle Ages. The thesis of Walter Ullmann, according to which it was from this ‘compost’ that was made the most fertile ground for the birth of modern citizenship, seems to me indisputable.²⁷ The process of constitutionalisation which brought into being the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the American Constitution appears still strongly rooted in theological and political principles derived from tradition, contrary to the French declaration of 1789 which would incorporate these rights into itself as self-created.²⁸

In the weakness of the American statal component the religious component grafted itself into the new associationalism as a foundational element of the new democracy. The American constitutional process did not bring about the exclusion of the God of Judaic-Christian tradition, but rather his alienation from the struggle for power and to his metapolitical definition as guarantor of agreements between humans. The United States was a country born from religion, not a country in which religion was cultivated in the service of politics. From the fathers of the struggle for Independence to Abraham Lincoln, God assumed the figure of a ‘moral governor’, and religion stood at the foundation of constitutional agreement and at the foundation of the observance of the constitutional laws of the country, a civic religion bearer of a shared, republican public ethic, but not of a political religion.²⁹

Naturally, especially after the painful experience of the Civil War, the dialectic between religion and politics remained very strong, and still in the 1930s Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted, on his return from a journey to the United States:

The secularisation of the Church on the continent of Europe arises from the misinterpretation of the reformers’ distinction of the two realms [of church and society]; American secularization derives precisely from the imperfect distinction of the kingdoms and offices of church and of the state, from the enthusiastic claim of the church to universal influence in the world.³⁰

This comparative reflection between the European situation and the American one brings us to consider two works written in the years immediately following 1830, each very different to the other, but it seems important to me to involve them both in this discussion: The Five Wounds of the Church by Antonio Rosmini, and Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. The first, taking as his rationale the decadence of the Church due to the politicisation of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, from feudalism to the present service of lay power, exclaims ‘And after which, can one wonder at the constitutional priests of France, and the monstrous system of the national Church?’³¹ The bishops had lost all autonomy with respect to the Catholic princes, with the exception of the Roman See:

saving perhaps the liberty which the Church currently enjoys in the United States of America, or in other a-Catholic regions, in which alone Catholicism still breathes to some degree. I say to some degree; because everything has been done, and is being done, in order to draw into the ignominy of universal bondage even the pope of Rome.³²

The Rosminian argument should be taken up in depth, with regard to the gradual loss of the liberty of the Church during the modern age, as a result of politicisation and especially as a result of the politics of concordats. For him the ‘French and European’ revolution constituted the conclusion of an historical period in which – contrary to the constitutional tradition introduced by Christianity itself in the West to limit monarchical power – political compromise had suffocated the Church’s liberty. Rosmini’s gaze was not turned nostalgically to the past but looked to a future which would have to restore liberty to the Church:

Just one look at the ground, and the answer is provided. The awful sanction of divine providence is no longer in the shadows, can no longer be doubted. It has begun in various places in Europe and throughout the world. England and Ireland, the United States, Belgium, all have the freedom to choose their bishops; at no price will Providence refrain from redeeming to the Church such freedom for all the nations of the earth: let the monarchies be certain of it. The peoples, yes the peoples, are the rod of those who serve them.³³

These hints of the future of Christianity in the Anglophone world and in particular in the United States lead us back to the reflections which Tocqueville made in the same years on American democracy. Already in his introduction he placed the French Revolution within a continuous revolution which had characterised the life of the Christian West for centuries in a journey towards liberty and equality never previously achieved in other civilisations:

The entire book that you are going to read was written under the pressure of a sort of religious terror in the author's soul, produced by the sight of this irresistible revolution that for so many centuries has marched over all obstacles, and that one sees still advancing today among the ruins it has made.³⁴

His analysis of the civic function of religion in the American world (with an indirect but fundamental influence on the growth of democracy and freedom) confirmed him in the opinion that the growth of liberty and democracy in the New World was based exactly in this double belonging, in contrast to Europe, where the symbiosis between religion and politics had led to disastrous results on one ground or another.³⁵

This conviction underlay also Tocqueville’s final reflection on the Ancien Régime and the revolution:

It is easy enough to see today that the campaign against all forms of religion was merely incidental to the French Revolution, a specular but transient phenomenon, a brief reaction to the ideologies, emotions, and events which led up to it – but in no sense basic to its program … It was far less as a religious faith than as a political institution that Christianity provoked these violent attacks. The Church was hated not because its priests claimed to regulate the affairs of the other world, but because they were landed proprietors, lords of manors, tithe owners, and played a leading part in secular affairs; not because there was no room for the Church in the new world that was in the making, but because it occupied the most powerful, most privileged position in the old order that was now to be swept away.³⁶

7. The French revolution and the religion of the nation

In this perspective, the problem at the centre of the half-century between about 1780 and 1830 seems to be the retreat of the principle of a double belonging which had characterised the preceding ages: a single and unique loyalty was imposed with regard to the monopoly over man's control and formation. The State emerged victorious from the contest but underwent a considerable metamorphosis, incorporating a considerable share of the sacrality of a Church confined behind an ever more restricted defensive line: the emergence of the ideology of nation state to which the individual is consecrated by his birth and therefore the transformation of Christianity into civic religion. This tendency provides the element of substantial continuity between the reformism of the eighteenth century, the revolutionary explosion, the Napoleonic experiment, and the Restoration. Naturally, such an element of continuity was rarely grasped by contemporaries, involved in a struggle which did not admit truce or neutrality and which destroyed all pre-existing blueprints of power: the monarchs who proposed themselves as guardians of the Church were not able to bear the weight of the new sacrality without resorting, as has been said, to the impersonality of sovereignty and of law, and therefore to the myth of the nation, the one force capable of sustaining the new ideology.

I certainly cannot develop these generic statements here. It will have to suffice to reprise the celebrated thesis of Tocqueville: ‘thus the French Revolution, though ostensibly political in origin, functioned on the lines, and assumed many of the aspects, of a religious revolution’.³⁷ Only recently, it seems to me, has this thesis been received as an object of excavation on the part of the official historiography, following the overthrow of the socialist-marxist mono-interpretation.³⁸ But while we have had most interesting new openings on the plane of cultural history, of the history of mentalities, and the history of symbols (from Michel Vovelle onwards), it does not seem to me that all these conclusions have been drawn on the constitutional and institutional plane. I can add only that while the struggle and the fusion of the sacred with the political appears prevalent in the epicentre of the revolutionary phenomena, taking the form of an explosion, as in the Roman Republic of 1798–99, the further that we move from the epicentre of the earthquake, the more clearly visible is the element of continuity in new forms: to make myself understood, I would like to examine the Constitution of Càdiz of 1812, starting with Chapter 2, article 12: ‘The religion of the Spanish nation is and will be perpetually the Catholic, apostolic, Roman, and uniquely truthful religion. The Nation will protect it by wise and just laws, and forbid the exercise of any other’.³⁹

It is therefore logical that the great protagonists – who reflected on those devastating changes which occurred before their eyes, on the revolution and the revolutions – could not perceive, even with the changes in their perspectives over the passage of time, this continuity, being themselves transformed into ideologues, to extend a happy expression.⁴⁰ Even among the apologists and the traditionalists like Bonald, Chateaubriand, de Maistre, or the first Lamennais we do not find any notice of the process of osmosis and convergence in action, but only of the contrast between an original and pure Christianity (often united with the Romantic myth of mediaeval Christendom), and a corruption of the state of Christianity come about as a consequence of Luther's reformation, and the development of modern ideas.⁴¹ Only in a fragment by Benjamin Constant on the struggle between the priestly and the political and military power – not in the systematic treatment of his Principles of Politics, in which he theorised the social function of religion as a font of morals – do we find a positive historical valuation of the tensions between the two powers for the foundation of liberty in Europe.⁴²

It is known that the path followed by the Catholic Church after the French Revolution up to the First Vatican Council, on the ecclesiological doctrinal plane, as on that of pastoral and political practice, was in a certain way opposed to that future foreseen by Rosmini and Tocqueville, towards a recovery of its authority and above all in the correlation between sovereignty and infallibility.⁴³ Without entering into these great themes, I would like merely to underline the continuity of a line which placed at its centre the problem of loyalty and of belonging in the always closer assimilation of Church and State as societates perfectae (perfect communities): paradoxically, it seems to me, the Church tended to take back, with an inverse osmosis, the sacral character which the revolutionary and Napoleonic period had injected into the theory and practice of sovereignty. It was on this basis that, at a very high cost, the Catholicism of the nineteenth century managed to overcome the tendencies towards fragmentation inherited from the preceding century, from Gallicanism, from political Jansenism, and from episcopal Febronianism. Here I will limit myself to some allusions to concordats and to political catechisms in order to indicate some of the traces of this continental European movement in relation to the problem of loyalty and belonging, only with an exemplary purpose, as these are sites which are still being excavated.

8. Concordats

The dialectic between religious and political power developed between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries by means of complex instruments extremely differentiated in accordance with different expressions on the European and American continents. Certainly there were common characteristics which are apprehended above all in the use, albeit differentiated, of the oath and of the continual presence of the religious rite in every manifestation of the civil life which involved the relationship between the conscience of the ruled and of the citizens with power. These rites, present from birth to death in all their solemnity, find their apex in the honour given to the fallen in war as the new ‘martyrs’ of modern times, the martyrs of the nation. Ceremonies and monuments (it is enough to think of those plaques to the fallen which flank the churches on the squares of our towns and villages) are the concrete base, the point at which the individual conscience harmonises with the political one, in all Western countries, wherever the most widespread church or religious congregation might be.

Close to this common trunk, however, we have distinguishable and different branches in continental Europe, above all between the countries in which the Roman Church maintains a certain hold, in which it seeks to conserve at least in part its age-old privileges and prerogatives, and the countries of new formation. While in the latter, the accent came to be placed on the call to the individual conscience, on preaching, on the oath (it is enough to think about the corporate sacrality which the political and testimonial oath still has in American society today), on the continent of Europe the instruments furnished by the concordats and by political catechisms prevailed.

In the concordats of the Napoleonic era and the Restoration, after the failure of the political religion of the Revolution, the affirmation of the Catholic religion as the religion of state came to be elaborated for the first time in a full sense, as it had never been before. Apart from the lacerations about the civil constitution of the clergy – but also through this – came the realisation of the integration of the clergy in the body of the state, and the maturing of its public and political function, guaranteed by the accords between the pope and individual sovereigns. Certainly, one is dealing with a secular concordat tradition but one which finds in this post-revolutionary period (paradoxically, but not too much so, if what I have been saying up until now is true) an organic quality never previously encountered. The turning point was naturally the already cited Napoleonic concordat of 1801 where, in the preliminary declaration, it is said that the government of the Republic recognises the Catholic religion as the religion of the great majority of the citizens (‘quam longe maxima pars civium Gallicanae reipublicae profitetur’ – which for a long time the majority of the French commonwealth has professed) and that the pope on his part recognises the great advantage that religion receives from the establishment of worship in France, and from the particular declaration of it made by the consuls of the Republic (‘maximam ultiitatem maximumque decus percepisse, et hoc quoque tempore praestolari, ec catholico cultu in Gallia constituto, nec non ex perculiari ejus professione, quam faciunt Reipublicae Consules’).⁴⁴ In the concordat of 1803 with the Italian republic an extra step was taken with article 1, ‘The Catholic apostolic Roman religion continues to be (esse pergit) the religion of the Italian Republic’.⁴⁵ The concordats of the period of the Restauration no longer limited themselves to call for those sectoral agreements of a judicial type which characterised the pre-revolutionary period,⁴⁶ but based themselves, with consequences lasting almost until the present day, on this new foundation, which influenced, as we have seen in the case of Cadiz, also the new constitutions.⁴⁷ It should be noted that a parallel process occurred during the same period in a protestant country with the design of the Prussian Landeskirche.⁴⁸

One particular instrument contained in the concordats, which I can only indicate by referring to my previous publications, is the loyalty oath of bishops to the sovereign and to the state spread already in the course of the eighteenth century in all the Catholic states.⁴⁹ From 1801 this then became one of the pillars of all the concordat pacts not only in the passive sense (with the commitment to not undertake harmful acts) but also in an active sense as with co-involvement and quid pro quo recognition of the territorial Churches. Here I would like to underline just two things: in the first place the significance of these and other oaths was loaded with all those valences which the tensions and the discussions about the civic oath and about the oath of the clergy gave birth to in France during the revolutionary period and in Italy during the Three Jacobin Years.⁵⁰ Secondly, the oath of the bishops was in a way a mediated oath: it did not directly involve the consciences of the faithful, and it kept alive an ambiguous double loyalty of citizen subjects, especially in Italy.

9. Political catechisms

The development of the European countries’ political catechisms is another point which should be studied in parallel with the publications of the churches, and of the American sects. The historical literature has recently been especially successful in illuminating of the history of this instrument,⁵¹ for the formation of the consciences of the masses during the pre-revolutionary eighteenth century, from the more strictly religious field, to the civil and social field, both in France and in Italy⁵²; for the republican and utopistic pedagogy during the revolutionary decade⁵³; for the formation of the civic and moral conscience during the three Jacobin years in Italy; for the foundation of modern ideological parties in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁵⁴ That which seems to me to be less studied is the bond between these political catechisms and the religious-Catholic catechism in the Napoleonic period and the Restoration.

An interpretive history that has been illuminating for me has been that related to the exposition of the fourth commandment of the Decalogue and of the duty to obey. While the traditional exposition in the eighteenth century continued still to comprise generically, alongside obedience to parents, also obedience to religious and political authorities not without reference to the problem of justice and of conscience,⁵⁵ in the catechisms of the revolutionary decade virtue was imposed as adherence to the principles of the new society and to the law, on the pain of being declared enemies of society.⁵⁶ At the same time also in the Habsburg territories the illustration of the duties of subjects connected to the duty of obedience assumed, in the frame of the development of primary education, the dress of an autonomous treatment in which were defined: the ‘higher powers’ (the power of whom was conferred directly by God), the specific obligations of every category of subject in time of peace or war, the payment of taxes, and other things all under the sanction of mortal sin.⁵⁷ The synthesis between the political precept and the religious one took place also in the case of the Napoleonic catechism of 1806, which in the version of Catechism for the use of all the churches of Italy was printed at Milan in 1807. Its exposition of the fourth commandment merits a careful re-reading for the total overlap of the duties of the Christian and of the citizen-subject upon the ‘anointed of the Lord and of his representatives’.⁵⁸ It would be interesting to follow the development of these precepts for the Christian subject in the age of the Restoration: a preliminary exploration of the Trentino region has allowed me to note a substantial continuity from the catechisms of the kingdom of Bavaria⁵⁹ to those of the Napoleonic kingdom of Italy,⁶⁰ to the innumerable didactic and catechistic publications which characterised the new Habsburg dominion.

I cannot, in this venue, pursue these themes more thoroughly, but in conclusion I would like to underline that one tends falsely to consider these processes as diminishing in proportion to the degree of the laicity conquered by the Liberal State; in reality, if we look closely, particularly in crucial moments during warfare, the weight of sacrality was delocalised from its position compared to the previous two centuries, but it was certainly not diminished.

10. The political religions of the twentieth century

Thus opens up the topic of the political religions in the full sense, or, if we wish to speak more precisely, the political religions which were embodied in the totalitarianisms of the Twentieth Century. They were not a new invention, but a development in which weighed all the previous traditions of which we have spoken. It is certainly not the case that I am arrogating to myself the immense responsibility to speak of the political religions of the totalitarianisms from the conceptual and phenomenological point of view. I could certainly not add anything new with respect to the diagnosis which has been given in judgement on the political religions of the Twentieth Century, from the acute denunciations already advanced during the Twenties and Thirties by intellectuals (Erich Voegelin published his book Die politischen Religionen in 1938) to the great historical exposition which followed the Second World War (it is enough to think of Hannah Arendt and her Origins of Totalitarianism), to the recent volumes of Enrico Gentile. There may be different accentuations in these accounts, but common to all is the conviction that that which characterised these regimes in contrast to autocracy, to the preceding absolutisms and Bonapartisms, to the dictatorships, was the imposition of an ideology as a new ‘Belief’.⁶¹

If this osmosis existed, we cannot remain satisfied with a generalised and generic version of the political or secular religions: what is required instead is to proceed to a more detailed analysis with reference not to a generic phenomenology of the sacred, but to the concrete interweaving of the Churches and of groups of Christians with Western politics in recent centuries. This was the intuition of a great witness and protagonist of the resistance to Nazism like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the evangelical theologian already mentioned, who before his death by firing squad advanced reflections on the historical responsibility of the Christian Churches, in their diverse theoretical and institutional characteristics, in the face of the totalitarianisms, and on their function in the world.⁶² This attention to concrete religious incarnations, also through the examination of concordats and political catechisms, can offer a contribution for the deepening of the differences between Nazism and Fascism, especially through the theme of loyalty, of the oath, and of the profession of faith.⁶³

In sum, I think that one might say that the fundamental diversity between the political religions embodied in the totalitarianisms of the Twentieth Century and the present situation, lies in the fact that these were still positioned within a tradition, within a secular historical cycle, of a world still living of Western Christian civilisation, and which now by contrast we are abandoning. At their core, the totalitarianisms of the Twentieth Century can be assimilated more to a pathology internal to the body political and religious of the West in its final parabola: the national state and the churches remained its true protagonists, sometimes in epic tension, sometimes with compromises and reciprocal concessions. To project the political religions historically into our globalised world, during the crisis of their traditional protagonists, would be to introduce quite dangerous misunderstandings.

11. The new political religions: concluding reflections

It is not a matter of instrumentalising historical reflection in service of today, but on the contrary demonstrating how a long term historical perspective can modify our diagnosis of political reality, and render it much less susceptible to political instrumentalisation and to thoughtless commentary. Perhaps there is no problem in so far as one can see clearly how from different historical diagnoses might be born divergent lines of political strategy. Above all it seems important to me to understand that, quite contrary to what is believed, history can help us to avoid falling into the error of interpreting things around us with the eyes of the past while everything around us has changed.

If we consider the present West as the fruit of an organic process of secularisation or of de-sacralisation, then Western identity can be conceived simply as a mechanism of juridical-constitutional inventions, or on the contrary and almost indifferently, as a new sacral project in which power and the sacred are identical. This explains both the development of the theories of the theo-conservatives and the behaviour much less theoretically grounded of the devout atheists nearer home.

The traditional vision, still current, consists substantially, both from the point of view of lay and confessional history writing, with some exceptions, in the consideration of a modernity born in the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century (with some anticipatory glimmers in the preceding centuries), with a process of secularisation and of the exclusion of the sacred from history; only the final judgement on the positivity or negativity of this modernity changes, but the definition of the historical process of modernity seems identical both for the lay and the confessional thinkers.

Reducing the two apparently contrary positions to their principle lines, I would say that the famous assertion now disinterred from the classic text by Hugo Grotius etsi Deus non daretur tends to coincide with the later counter-proposal veluti si Deus daretur: they are symmetrical interpretations which tend to coincide but which represent in reality a mistaken port of arrival based on the coincidence between the law of God and the law of reason as accomplished once and for all.

If instead we begin with the long term, and we place at the centre of the genetic code of the West that dualism as an historical acquisition, the picture changes completely. Between the divine or natural laws and man is history. The theological-biblical reflection which places its accent on the history of salvation as the development and path of humanity in time, as redemption which must be re-lived by every generation, is not relativism, but on the contrary an essential axis of Christian thought: to this tradition, from the Fathers of the Church to Pascal, it appears opportune for us to re-connect ourselves, rather than to the invention of an abstract and immobile natural right which is really that of a Roman law reinvented in recent centuries.

I am also, therefore, among those who hold that, based on this pure historical interpretation (without recourse to the doctrine of an abstract natural right) that our liberal civilisation has been born on the basis of the dialectic between Church and State, between law and ethics, and that this is in danger or in every case is being transformed into something else if the conciousness of that basic dualism which has determined its characteristics is lost: the distinction and the co-presence of human history and of the history of salvation, the separation of powers, sacred and political, yet before that division of powers internal to the state.

Today's problem has been determined by entry into an age in which that alterity, that dualism between political and sacred power can no longer be expressed in a Church-State relationship as has been realised during the modern age, given the institutional crisis of the State and the Church, given the loss of territorial ‘sovereignty’ both on the temporal terrain and on the spiritual terrain.⁶⁴ Paradoxically, I think that just when Christians learned at the council of Vatican II, according to the limpid expression of Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, to consider the modern, ruled-by-law State ‘in its laicity, no more as something foreign and an enemy to the faith, rather as an opportunity for freedom’, this same state entered into crisis.⁶⁵ That which has become extinguished in every case is the collective identity of the national patria as it was constructed in the modern age with the mediation of the civic religions in their different versions.

I will not enter here into an analysis of the American disturbances after 11 September 2001, deferring, also for the precedents of the relationship between religion and politics in the United States, to the fine volume by Emilio Gentile, La Democrazia di Dio: La Religione Americana nell'Era dell'Impero e del Terrore.⁶⁶ I agree with the profoundly disturbing queries which conclude that book, on the current attempt ‘to transform the American civil religion into a political religion in the American style’. I think that one could say that we find ourselves confronted by an attempt to overcome the dualism characteristic of all the experience of the second Christian millennium, and of the same American experience for a new identification of the sacred with political power. I do not think that one can speak anymore of a continuity of the American civil religion which Robert N. Bellah declared already betrayed in the time of the Vietnam War.⁶⁷ Also the ecumenism in which the fundamentalism of Bush and the ‘theo-cons’ is clothing itself, seems only to be a variant owed to the imperial nature of American politics, and to correspond to the attempt to create a new Pantheon at the centre of which will be anyway the cult of the emperor. If the American civil religion preserved – particularly with respect to the First Amendment on the absolute separation of the State from the Church – a dialectical function as religion of the nation up to the Vietnam War and to the collapse of the Soviet empire of evil, now it seems that its character as a political religion has decisively prevailed. Paradoxically, but not too much, the radical completion of the process of secularisation with the expulsion of the presence of a sacral alterity, brings with it, as I have sought to explain at the beginning of this essay by remembering the Gospel parable of the demons, a dangerous re-entry of the sacred and a coincidence of the fundamentalisms of different religions.

If there is some truth in what I have said, my diagnosis leads in a direction totally opposed with respect to that argued by Huntington: taking off from the definition of civic religion as a religion of contract, and of political religion as a monopoly of the sacred on the part of political power, I would say that whilst Europe on the basis of its painful experience of the great civil wars and of the Shoah seeks to re-acquire the religion of contract, the present administration of the United States (I will obviously not enter into an analysis of sentiments of the people, certainly profoundly disturbed by the overturning of the myth of the promised land, sung epically by Tocqueville, by the new immigrants, etc) on the contrary is on the point of losing its traditional civil religion, and reacting ever more strongly to the loss of its identity and to its fears by embracing a ‘God is with us’ who might be indifferently Islamic or Christian, but who represents the end of our Western identity.

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