Are we facing a global religious war? Or is this an opportunity to reestablish the relationship between revolutionary politics and religion? Paweł Mościcki is a professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the author of numerous books and a blog: pawelmoscicki.net as well as substack pawelmoscicki.substack.com Cross-posted from Pawel’s Substack The war waged by the US and Israel against Iran, now in its second month, has prompted an increasingly vocal chorus of commentators who liken the conflict to a religious war. The escalating exchange of blows is portrayed as a clash of messianisms, a kind of ideological total war. Gordon M. Hahn even wrote that, given the ideological beliefs of the warring parties, one can speak of a “ poisonous apocalyptic-eschatological soup” in which, whether we like it or not, we are all slowly being boiled.
Indeed, in the current climate of intensifying war and a looming global economic, political, and humanitarian crisis, it is difficult not to think of the end times. All rational data regarding the likely course of events indicate that we stand on the threshold of something our imagination cannot fully grasp. It is therefore no wonder that we are easily convinced that the parties to the conflict are thinking in similar terms.
According to this interpretation, politics in the Middle East has transformed into the mysticism of holy war. Strategic calculations are thus giving way to extreme submission to the Cause. In the United States, groups adhering to dispensationalism—a nineteenth-century branch of Protestantism developed by John Nelson Darby—have gained influence within the administration. According to this doctrine, biblical prophecies—contained primarily in the Books of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation—must be interpreted literally, that is, as foretellings of actual historical events. Key in this case is Chapter 38 of the Book of Ezekiel, which speaks of the conflict between the people of Israel and the Persian nation as a foreshadowing of the coming of the end times.
As is well known, the portion of Donald Trump’s electorate influenced by Evangelical churches is strongly linked to the Israeli right wing, for whom Zionist prophecies form the basis for “lobbying operations” that influence the White House’s decisions on foreign policy. The connections between the settler movement in Israel itself and this model of merging politics with religion are obvious. In both cases, we are dealing with a strong alliance of prayer and business, lofty historiosophical visions and lobbying by the arms and energy industries, calls for a final reckoning with Evil, and the subordination of decisions to stock market cycles. This peculiar synthesis consequently brings about both the complete corporatization of politics and the complete instrumentalization of the world in the service of a religion reduced to the notion of pure power. Here, God becomes the supreme patron of unrestrained violence. An illustration of this new formula of collective frenzy is Paula White-Cain, the Trump administration’s advisor on religion, who in one of her sermons, in a style characteristic of televangelists, called for “strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike until you achieve victory over Iran.”
On the other side of the war front, in Iran, however—commentators argue—there prevails a no less dangerous form of Shiite messianism, also known as Mahdism. According to this belief, the twelfth imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, from the 9th century did not die but merely entered a state of concealment, or occultation, to return at the end of time and establish divine justice on earth. After the Islamic Revolution in 1979, this theological tradition became part of the official state ideology, and American think tanks report that within the ranks of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, “the destruction of Israel is increasingly presented (…) not as a geopolitical goal, but as a religious duty linked to eschatological hopes. ”
Of course, reality is, as usual, more complicated, and the messianic message intersects with the political influences of various factions of society, ideological tensions, and a rational calculation of national and class interests. I am not concerned here with untangling these threads, for which I lack both the space and the expertise. I would, however, like to reflect on the very conceptual framework we use to understand the relationship between politics and religion, and how we use it to interpret current events. Political Theology, Theological Politics There are many problems with this perspective. This is especially true of its more simplified versions, which, unfortunately, tend to take deeper root in the collective consciousness. First, it is based on the tacit assumption that it is possible to create a completely sterile, secular political order, in which any interference from religion would constitute a foreign body that is easy to remove. Second, this way of thinking automatically equates all forms of persistent political engagement, viewing their excessive ideologization as a sign of messianic excess. Taken to its extreme, this perspective would fail to distinguish between a death squad officer wearing the inscription Gott mit uns on his belt and condemned prisoners praying in their final hour, with rifles already aimed at them. For they all disrupt the secular order in the same way. Third, when all “messianisms” blend into a single “poisoned soup,” the presumed ideal of politics effectively becomes post-politics, in which the public sphere, purged of all “fundamentalisms,” is reduced to technocratic management. The problem is that any strong moral conviction is regarded as an extremism in this order, because it violates the assumed ideal of secular rationality. Fourth, establishing such a permanent separation of religion from politics and regarding it as the most important, if not the only, criterion for evaluating the latter ignores the reality of their manifold connections and mutual borrowings, which have abounded throughout actual history.
Transposed onto the terrain of international politics, however, this secular purism inevitably becomes the specter it seeks to exorcise. Liberal messianism in the political practice of recent decades has wrought no less destruction than the most extreme “fundamentalisms” cast as the perennial threat to world order. Could it be, then, that behind today’s brutalization of politics lies a fundamental contradiction between the imagined and the actual status of liberal politics? After all, they matured in an era marked by the ordained end of grand narratives, where the very idea of emancipation or revolution was anathematized as a form of political religion.
Descriptions of today’s situation as an inevitable clash of messianisms waging a holy war against one another thus resemble the discourse on the clash of civilizations. This narrative, created by American neoconservatives, served two functions. First, it re-dramatized history in the absence of the previous chief enemy: Soviet communism. Second, it filled the void left by grand narratives with something that was easily weaponized in the interest of the sole remaining hegemonic power on the global chessboard. And just as the clash of civilizations served as a smokescreen for global class struggle, so the discourse of the clash of messianisms risks today transforming into an epigonic version of American exceptionalism. It is precisely by forcibly sustaining the post-political model that we have awakened to a reality described by a primitivized version of liberal universalism.
The problem of the ambiguous relationship between the secular and the sacred in Israeli society was addressed by Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin in his book Exile and Sovereignty . As Carlo Ginzburg wrote in the introduction, the subject of the polemic here is secular Zionism, which turns out to be “a form of masked messianism,” summed up in the sarcastic statement: “God does not exist, but he promised us this land.” It turns out, however, that secular politics can be guided by hidden messianism in a far more ruthless and fundamentalist manner than parties that openly invoke religion. In their vision, the secular and the sacred remain separate, whereas in Zionism they undergo a dangerous blending. Religious parties, however, do not replicate the gesture of liberal separation either, as they are primarily concerned with seeking forms of mediation between the two levels of collective experience.
This logic may apply not only in the specific social context of Israel, but more broadly—in the relationship between religion and politics in a (at least nominally) disenchanted world. If, then, the presence of religion in politics evokes in us a sense of fear that instead of a diplomatic approach to coexistence with others, we will be subject to a “crusading spirit” —as Paul Grenier recently noted, following Hans Morgenthau,—perhaps we should reconsider the model of the relationship between religion and politics that we employ.
The fundamental thesis Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology is: “All essential concepts in modern political science are secularized theological concepts.” The secular order is full of institutions and figures that directly correspond to elements of the religious imagination. God can be found in the lawgiver, that is, the figure of the sovereign; the state of emergency is to the legal order what the concept of a miracle is to theology. Of course, the author of Political Theology formulated his own theory based on the institutional tradition of Roman Catholicism, thereby imbuing its structure with the theoretical potential of his own insights. One can read between the lines of his reflections a suggestion that since one cannot escape theology, why not build a political order based on its principles.
In the game of analogies, is messianism the very equivalent of revolution? Does the sudden rupture, necessary to destroy the old order, not correspond to the striving for the ultimate renewal of this wretched earthly life through divine justice? It would seem that the Marxist tradition quite early on decreed the uselessness of religion to its cause, summing up its role in Marx’s formula: “Religion is the opium of the people.” However, a closer look at the broader context in which these words are spoken may introduce a certain nuance here. “ Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”—wrote Marx.
Although religion, as this passage is usually interpreted, distracts the people from the true source of their misfortunes—namely, the economic and political conditions in which they are forced to live—Marx’s description of religion contains important elements necessary to stir up dissent against the existing order. Religion is not only the heart and soul in a world without heart or soul, but it itself becomes a protest against real injustice. Indeed, it ultimately has a soothing effect, but it springs from the same seeds as revolution.
Perhaps, then, political theology—if understood as the construction of a secular order modeled on the hierarchy of theological concepts—should be supplemented or replaced by theological politics. Since we cannot escape religion entirely, it is worth politicizing it enough so that a response to the “sigh of the oppressed creature” can be found here and now.
For just as politics can always conceal hidden theological potential from us, so too does every religion have a situational character. One might say that this contradicts its fundamental aspirations to transcend the realm of history, but one can also see in it an attempt to rise above the misery of the conditions in which it functions.
The problem, then, is not how to perfectly separate religion from politics, but what forms of mediation to build between them so that they do not reduce each other to their most primitive and dangerous aspects. Actually existing messianism There is one more factor that liberal thinking usually fails to take into account. For several decades now, we have been living in a world organized according to a particular form of messianism: American exceptionalism. The economic, political, and cultural reality has long emulated the American dream, brutally eliminating any other tendencies or structures.
Messianism is therefore not a hypothesis of a possible political situation, but our everyday reality. The basis of an era of actually existing Americanism. We live in it, we breathe it; our morality, perception, and emotions are largely part of this never-defined—and thus unlimited—church. The current situation reveals real messianism in a state of decline, when—as Hahn writes —“the American dream of a city on a hill that others might emulate is becoming, before our very eyes, a city of arrogance, greed, pride, hypocrisy, corruption, and sin.” The problem is not merely that American messianism is, to put it mildly, in poor shape. Its very structure betrayed a fundamental contradiction, which today’s situation merely lays bare in a drastic manner.
The American Dream has always been a moralization of capitalist exploitation and a sacralization of the oligarchic system. Capital is a ruthless, antisocial, amoral God, by its very nature utterly destructive of all deeper social bonds. “Capital hates everyone,” as the title of one of Maurizio Lazzarato’s books proclaims. Today, that haunted dream has become nothing more than overt sleepwalking. We all live in a world organized by it, but no one believes in that dream anymore.
Our situation is thus aptly described by the concept of the “nothingness of revelation,” which Gershom Scholem used in his 1934 letter to Walter Benjamin. By this he meant “a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance [ Geltung ohne Bedeutung ]. A state in which the wealth of meaning is lost and what is in the process of appearing (for revelation is such a process) still does not disappear, even though it is reduced to the zero point of its own content.” 10 It is precisely this state of “validity without meaning” that defines the horizon of the currently prevailing political system. The stage of imperialist destruction in which we find ourselves is, in terms of social and ethical practices, pure nihilism, which, however, does not mean that it cannot continue for years to come.
The American formula for the sacralization of capitalism gives our daily bread a particular flavor. One could say that it is based on the identification of interest—and specifically an exclusive interest, oligarchic by its very nature—with morality. “America’s goodness became an article of faith. As a result, that which is in America’s interests merged imperceptibly with what should be done, what is good in itself. What hurts America in any way and for any reason, for that same reason must needs be condemned” – writes Paul Grenier . Of course, “America” here refers to what critics call “corporate America,” that is, a network of special interest groups. One of the defining features of American messianism is the democratization of aspirations (and thus of identification with the doctrine) while simultaneously strictly regulating actual access to the Good.
In the opinion of Alexander Schmemann, an Orthodox theologian, American Protestantism has a particular tendency to fall into sectarianism because of “its rejection of the sacramental order, in other words, its rejection of the religious nature of creation itself. Inhabiting this de-sacramentalized world are individual believers ‘obsessed with salvation,’ but now their salvation can no longer be rooted in a relationship with the world or with the kingdom of heaven.” Today’s Western messianism is thus, above all, the messianism of people devoid of roots in any real social project. It is a mysticism cobbled together on the fly in a world of growing atrophy and nihilism. The moralistic excess contained within it is merely a symptom of real desolation. Another level of misery, as Marx wrote, only this time finding expression not in a “sigh” but in the will to dominate.
The effect of such a religious order in politics is the mechanical identification of one’s own position with values: freedom, democracy, etc. The actual meaning or realization of these concepts is irrelevant, since they will “apply” anyway as the hallmark of our community. It turns out that American messianism has identity politics inscribed in its spiritual DNA as the only ethical model it can comprehend.
And it applies to everyone, regardless of whether they consider themselves conservatives or progressives. And because freedom has been reduced, as D.C. Schindler notes, to “the possession of power,” the result is deplorable. And wherever American messianism converts indigenous peoples to its beliefs, this problem will intensify.
Actually existing Americanism produces a subjectivity “so pathologically self-absorbed that its concept of the good does not even recognize reality beyond its own ideology” 13 —as Grenier writes. In this political theology, the equivalent of a priest is no longer even a legislator, but a psychopathic hedge fund CEO. And it is his morality that binds us all, because he materially shapes our world.
No wonder, then, that this ideological package also includes the permanent projection of one’s own intentions onto others. In the case of countries like Iran or China, the U.S. political class and its ideological base create a caricature of their own delusions of world domination and attribute them to nations with entirely different traditions. It then treats its own fabrication as a casus belli in its confrontation with real states in the real world.
This takes on a particularly dramatic form in Iran, of course, but it also creates peculiar ideological complications in relation to Russia. Ultimately, Russian political messianism, present in the writings of authors such as Lev Gumilyov, Aleksandr Panarin, Alexandr Dugin, or Konstantin Malofeev, is not a figment of the imagination. It is a real intellectual current in Russia, with a more or less tangible influence on the oligarchy ruling the country. In the eyes of the American ruling classes, however, this is a messianism with far greater ambitions than it actually has. Nor do they realize how effectively they themselves are amplifying its significance by pursuing a confrontational policy toward Russia.
As Gordon Hahn notes , the fundamental condition for the actual triumph of messianic tendencies in Russian politics would be the removal of Putin from power—that is, the realization of the primary goal of nearly the entire political class of Western nations. Other elements necessary for this are also on the list of priorities for the US and the European Union: the impossibility of a rapprochement between Russia and the West, and a complete defeat in the war against NATO in Ukraine. Another possible source for actually making neo-Eurasian messianism an official state doctrine would also be a decisive Russian victory, providing fuel for the ideologues of the superpower. The clash of messianisms is, in this case, a self-fulfilling prophecy. A phantasmatic projection that returns as a real conflict. Political Theology of Liberation Messianism is thus relational in nature. Material conditions, social conflicts, ideas, and beliefs are reflected and intertwined within it, resulting in a vibrant and multifaceted realm of communal experiences. They solidify into doctrine locally, while still leaving room for further evolution, mutation, and reactivation. Institutionalized messianism is most dangerous when it seeks to mechanically equate the earthly order with metaphysics, depriving both of room for growth. In both respects, it becomes, de facto , nihilism disguised as messianism.
However, since every religion—and thus every form of messianism—is situated, one should distinguish its varieties depending on the position from which they arise and the network of conflicts in which they are embedded. In that case, American messianism, stemming from the panic of political elites losing their hegemony over the world, is something diametrically opposed to the inherently defensive Iranian messianism, developed in a country that is isolated, sanctioned, and now mercilessly bombed by a global superpower. In this sense, we may be dealing not with a clash of messianisms—treated uniformly in each case—but with something akin to a conflict between different political theologies. Who knows, perhaps even a religious-political class struggle.
Here lies an opportunity for a new interpretation of the possible connections between religion and revolutionary tradition, which, incidentally, were powerfully illuminated by the history of the Islamic Revolution in Iran itself. Even Lenin wrote in 1905 that atheism should not be the party’s official program (which, as is well known, did not withstand the confrontation with reality after 1917), because religious people may prove to be allies. “Unity in the genuinely revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class to create an earthly paradise is more important to us than the unity of the proletariat’s opinion regarding a heavenly paradise,” he wrote.
And indeed, in the broadly understood Marxist tradition, the approach to religion was more nuanced than one might think. As Michael Löwy has shown , in the writings of Engels, Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Ernst Bloch, and Lucien Goldmann, one can find statements that testify more to a search for a formula to combine religious aspirations with political emancipation than to an unequivocal condemnation of “the opium of the people.” Of course, in social reality, politics and religion can instrumentalize one another; they can enter into numerous conflicts and tensions with one another. And most often, this is precisely what happens. But in Marxism, it is precisely through contradictions that every formula for shared life and shared struggle develops.
And since we live in a world where, according to Fredric Jameson’s famous formula, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, true messianism today means seeking liberation from the system of exploitation that still binds us all. Also because it fundamentally regulates access to and the conditions for spiritual experiences. Capitalism—as Walter Benjamin demonstrated long ago in his text Capitalism as Religion – is the most effectively implemented pure cult in human history, one that continues unceasingly every day.
Therefore, it seems that the only formula capable today of organizing a united front for political revolution requires a profound spiritual transformation, and conversely—no spiritual transformation will be real without a change in its socio-economic context. We are doomed to seek a new political theology. A political theology of liberation. For only the theology of liberation, historically, has recognized the material source of the birth of every political messianism, and only it has correctly identified what keeps religion itself locked in an alliance with the ruling classes. Thus, either messianism will become an anti-capitalist spirituality, or it will forever remain a supporter of exploitation and the moralism built upon it.
It has long been no secret that the ideological roots of Shiite radicalism point to what might be called Islamic liberation theology. As Hamid Dabashi noted in his book Islamic Liberation Theology , “militant Islamism” was in fact “an ideological movement of resistance against colonial modernity.” In analyzing the intellectual foundations of the 1979 Iranian Revolution—whose evolution he subjected to increasingly sharp criticism—he also pointed to social discontent and resistance to exploitation by imperialist countries. Alastair Crooke wrote similarly about various versions of radical Islam in his excellent book Resistance. The Essence of the Islamist Revolution .
Particularly interesting here is the legacy of Malcolm X, who linked the reality of the oppressed classes in the global metropolis with the resistance of the global South, creating “a transgressive bridge uniting the outcast peoples of the earth, treacherously divided by the insidious project of Orientalism (in the service of European colonialism) into two civilizational camps.” Dabashi notes that “reclaiming Malcolm X’s stance as a Muslim revolutionary is crucial for any project of Islamic liberation, which must by definition address the wounded heart of the empire.”
Catholic liberation theology set itself a similar task, only to be literally and figuratively shot down by the Vatican hierarchy led by Joseph Ratzinger and John Paul II. The demands of radical Latin American theologians included diverse and creative attempts to integrate the Christian faith into emancipatory movements aimed at earthly injustice. Thus, capitalism itself was often viewed within this framework as a form of structural sin, without overlooking the moral imperative to condemn its destructive social impact. Elements of Marxist analysis were employed to better identify the sources of the misery of colonized peoples. Efforts were made to develop grassroots political-religious communities in the places most affected by exploitation. The struggle against idolatry was equated with a critique of the power of money, state violence, militarism, etc. Finally, and most importantly from the perspective of messianism, liberation from oppression was regarded as an anticipation, a prefiguration of spiritual salvation. By creating this kind of continuum, liberation theology opened up many fields of possible transformation of reality, which today seem even more urgently needed than when the revolutionary project itself seemed far stronger.
After all, in Jewish tradition as well, theology has often served as a tool for articulating a radical project of political emancipation. In the context of the Six-Day War, Emil Fackenheim formulated a new commandment inspired by the “Commanding Voice of Auschwitz.” It read: “You shall not grant Hitler a posthumous victory,” and was intended to attest to the necessity of preserving the continuity of the Jewish community. Marc H. Ellis, author of the book Jewish Theology of Liberation , added yet another commandment, this time for a time not only “after Auschwitz,” but also “after Auschwitz and after Israel, after what Israel has done and continues to do to the Palestinian people.” It read: “You shall not murder those who resist your oppression.” It is hard not to think that the authority of this commandment reaches us today as the “Commanding Voice of Gaza.” Could there still be room for religion to stand on the side of the oppressed, rather than providing moral sanction to the increasingly degenerate oligarchies of an ever-dying capitalism? “Oppressed creatures of all nations, one more effort?” Who knows… whoknows…
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The post Pawel Mościcki – The Clash of Messianisms appeared first on Brave New Europe .