Mark NelsonCorresponding authorORCID id

Could there be an Atheistic Political Theology?

Article
26/2 – Fall 2021, pages 303-327
Date of online publication: 30 décembre 2021
Date of publication: 30 décembre 2021

Abstract

“Only a God can save us.” So says Martin Heidegger in his pessimistic assessment of merely human philosophy’s ability to change the world. The thought is not unique to Heidegger: another thinker who arrived at a similar conclusion was Heidegger’s contemporary and sometime admirer, Carl Schmitt, in his idea of “political theology.” I take up Schmitt’s version of the idea and use it to examine the New Atheism, a relatively recent polemical critique of religion by an informal coalition of English-speaking scientists, philosophers, and writers. Taking Sam Har- ris’s book The End of Faith (2005) as my test case, I ask whether the New Atheism can instructively be read as a Schmittian “political theology”, not least because of its strongly anti-liberal implications for toleration of religious belief and practice. I close by posing the question of what sort of theory would deserve to be called an atheistic political theology and whether such a theory exists, or could exist.

Keywords

Cite this article

Nelson, Mark T. “Could there be an Atheistic Political Theology?” Forum Philosophicum 26, no. 2 (2021): 303–27. doi:10.35765/forphil.2021.2602.08.

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Copyright

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License