Religion and Politics: Power, Legitimacy, and Resistance

Every argument about religion and politics tends to arrive with its conclusion already packed. One side says religion is the ancient engine of tyranny, finally being retired. The other says religion is the last defense against the state’s appetite for everything. Both narratives are selective in the same way: they take one of religion’s two political functions and mistake it for the whole.

Religion legitimates power, and religion resists power. These are not opposing camps within a tradition. They are usually the same tradition, using the same texts, sometimes in the same generation. Any account that cannot explain how the Exodus story funded both American slaveholders’ theology and the spirituals sung against them is not describing the phenomenon.

What Legitimation Actually Buys

Coercion is expensive. A regime that must physically compel every act of compliance will spend itself into collapse. What rulers want is not obedience under threat but obedience that feels like the natural order of things, and religion has historically been the most efficient supplier of that feeling.

The forms vary more than the function. In Egypt, kingship was itself divine, and the pharaoh’s job included maintaining ma’at, the cosmic order that made agriculture and justice the same subject. In China, the Mandate of Heaven made legitimacy conditional and therefore auditable: a dynasty ruled by heavenly warrant, but floods, famine, and rebellion could be read as the warrant’s withdrawal—an idea that justified the incumbent and, in the hands of the next claimant, justified overthrowing him. In medieval Europe, the divine right of kings did comparable work with a different theology, and the coronation liturgy made it visible: a bishop puts oil on a man and he becomes something a soldier with more troops is not.

The interesting thing about all three is the conditionality. Sacralized power is rarely absolute power, because the sacred standard the ruler is measured against is not fully under the ruler’s control. Someone else administers the ritual. Someone else reads the text. This is why sacred legitimacy is a double-edged instrument, and why so much political history is the story of rulers trying to capture the machinery that certifies them.

Two Swords, One Kingdom: The Structural Problem

Christian political thought spent a millennium on a problem it partly created. The New Testament’s Jesus is executed by the Roman state and declines to organize a rival administration; the earliest Christians are a persecuted minority with no ambitions on the throne. Three centuries later, Constantine’s Edict of Milan (313) legalizes Christianity, and within a lifetime the persecuted body has become the state’s preferred cult. The theology built for the catacombs now has to run a court.

Augustine’s City of God, written after Rome’s sack in 410, is the classic response. He separates two loves and two cities—one organized around love of God, one around love of self—and insists they are intermixed in history, distinguishable only at the end. The political consequence is deflationary. No earthly regime, including a Christian one, is the Kingdom. States can secure a limited, real good—peace, order of a rough kind—and should not be mistaken for anything more. That deflation has been used by quietists to counsel patience under bad rulers and by radicals to deny any regime the halo it wants.

The medieval West then spent centuries litigating jurisdiction. The Investiture Controversy, running from the 1070s to the Concordat of Worms in 1122, looks technical—who invests a bishop with the symbols of office, pope or emperor?—and was in fact a fight over whether spiritual and temporal authority had separable domains at all. The answer that emerged, messily, was yes: two authorities, two jurisdictions, permanent friction. Historians of political thought have argued that this unresolved dualism, more than any doctrine, is what eventually made a secular political sphere thinkable in the Latin West. It was not a plan. It was a stalemate that became a structure.

Other civilizations solved the problem differently and got different results. In Sunni Islam, the classical arrangement located religious authority in a scholarly class, the ulama, that was institutionally distinct from the caliph or sultan without being organized as a rival church; rulers needed the scholars’ certification and the scholars needed the rulers’ protection, producing a durable and often uneasy interdependence. In Theravada Buddhist polities, the relationship between sangha and king was mutual sponsorship: the king protects and purifies the monastic order, the order’s flourishing testifies to the king’s merit. None of these arrangements is the “religion in politics” of contemporary polemic. Each is a specific institutional settlement with its own failure modes.

Separation Is a Family of Arrangements, Not a Single Idea

Modern states are described as secular as if that word named one thing. It does not.

The French laïcité codified in the 1905 law of separation is a strong programmatic secularism: religion is confined to private life, and the state maintains a deliberately religion-free public sphere, an arrangement forged in a specific fight against the political power of the Catholic Church. The American First Amendment arrangement forbids an establishment while protecting free exercise, and the resulting public square has been noisily religious for its entire history. Indian secularism was designed for a society with no religious majority behaviorally analogous to Europe’s, and commits the state to equal treatment of multiple communities rather than to abstention—a model that involves the state deeply in religious affairs precisely in the name of evenhandedness. The Turkish republic under Atatürk pursued something closer to state supervision than to separation, subordinating religious institutions to a government directorate.

Talal Asad’s work makes the underlying point sharply: “the secular” is not the neutral residue left after religion is subtracted, but a positive formation with its own history, which among other things had to decide what would count as religion in the first place. When a state adjudicates whether a practice is religious—and therefore protected, or exempt, or restricted—it is doing theology with a legal vocabulary.

Meanwhile the sociological prediction embedded in mid-century secularization theory has not held. José Casanova’s Public Religions in the Modern World (1994) documented what he called deprivatization: from the 1970s onward, religious traditions across several continents refused the private berth assigned to them and re-entered public argument—Solidarity in Poland, the Iranian revolution, Latin American base communities, the American Christian right. Casanova’s argument was not that secularization theory was wholly wrong but that it fused three distinct claims—differentiation of institutions, decline of belief, and privatization—and only the first has clearly held. The longer arc is traced in this site’s piece on secularization and revival.

Civil Religion: Sacred Forms Without a Named God

Robert Bellah’s 1967 Daedalus essay “Civil Religion in America” named something most citizens of modern states practice without a term for it. Nations develop their own liturgies: founding narratives with sacred documents, martyrs whose deaths are redemptive, pilgrimage sites, sacralized time, and rites of purification and renewal. Bellah read presidential inaugurals and found a consistent invocation of a deity generic enough to be nobody’s denomination and specific enough to underwrite national obligation.

The category explains why fights about flags, monuments, oaths, and school ceremonies generate a heat that their practical stakes do not justify. These are contests over the choreography of a people’s sacred time, and the participants sense that even when the argument is conducted in the language of policy. The concept of civil religion also carries a warning that Bellah himself pressed: the same civic liturgy that can hold a diverse polity together can sanctify its wars and erase its minorities, and it has done both.

Carl Schmitt made the harder version of this claim in Political Theology (1922): that the significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, the omnipotent God having become the omnipotent lawgiver, with sovereignty’s power to declare an exception standing where the miracle stood. Schmitt’s own politics—he joined the Nazi party and lent it juridical cover—are a permanent argument against treating the insight as harmless. But the insight has outlived its author’s disgrace, and thinkers with no sympathy for him have used it: modern political forms may be less a departure from theology than a translation of it.

The Prophetic Turn: Religion Against the Regime

The resistance function is not a modern liberal graft onto religion. It is old, textual, and structurally available in the traditions most often accused of servility.

Israel’s prophetic literature is the template: figures with no army and no office who confront kings on the treatment of widows, laborers, and the poor, and who read national catastrophe as judgment on injustice rather than on ritual failure. That literature has been picked up repeatedly by people the kings would not have recognized as heirs. It fed abolitionist preaching, the American civil rights movement, South African resistance to apartheid, and it is doing work in each case that no secular vocabulary was doing as effectively at the time.

Latin American liberation theology gave the pattern a systematic form. Gustavo Gutiérrez, who coined the phrase in a 1968 lecture and expanded it in Teología de la liberación (1971), argued for a preferential option for the poor and for theology as reflection on praxis rather than as a body of doctrine applied afterward. The movement drew fierce criticism—from the Vatican’s doctrinal office in the 1980s over its use of Marxist social analysis, and from within Latin America over whether it romanticized the poor it claimed to speak for—and drew fiercer repression from states that shot its priests. Its intellectual reach outlasted the political conjuncture: comparable liberationist readings emerged among Black, feminist, Dalit, and Palestinian theologians, and the wider question of what religions think we are being saved from is taken up in this site’s essay on salvation and liberation.

Islamic political thought produced its own resistance vocabularies, from anticolonial mobilization across the Muslim world to the ideological ferment preceding 1979 in Iran, where the doctrine of velayat-e faqih—guardianship of the jurist, developed by Khomeini in lectures given in exile—converted a scholarly class’s traditional independence from the state into a claim to constitute the state. That case is a useful corrective to any simple reading: the same institutional autonomy that let scholars criticize rulers for a millennium became, once inverted, a warrant for clerical rule. The trajectory is traced further in this site’s article on Islamic revivalism.

Why the Same Text Cuts Both Ways

The recurring puzzle is how one scripture funds a slaveholder and an abolitionist, a nationalist and a pacifist. Three mechanisms account for most of it.

First, canons are large and internally plural. A body of scripture assembled over centuries contains conquest narratives and prophetic denunciations of conquest, submission texts and liberation texts. Selection is where the politics enters, and selection happens before interpretation.

Second, interpretive authority is distributed and contested. Who is entitled to say what a text means—an ordained hierarchy, a consensus of scholars, a charismatic individual, a congregation, a court—determines which readings become binding. This is the question examined at length in this site’s piece on religious authority, and it is a political question in its own right before it is applied to any political issue.

Third, the direction of fit runs both ways. Religious commitments shape political interests, and political interests shape which religious commitments get emphasized, funded, taught, and inherited. Treating either direction as the only real one produces bad history: the crude materialist reading that makes theology pure epiphenomenon cannot explain why anyone accepted martyrdom, and the crude idealist reading that makes doctrine the sole driver cannot explain why doctrine so reliably tracks the interests of whoever is paying the clergy.

Reading the Present Without a Script

A few habits keep the analysis honest.

Distinguish religion in politics from religion as politics. A voter whose commitments are formed by their tradition is doing something ordinary and unavoidable; a movement that treats control of the state as the tradition’s central obligation is doing something different, and only the second is what most people mean by theocracy.

Watch what the sacralization is doing to accountability. Sacred legitimacy that keeps a standard above the ruler—the Mandate can be withdrawn, the prophet can walk into the throne room—works differently from sacred legitimacy that identifies the ruler with the standard. The first is auditable. The second is not.

Notice when the religious label is a proxy. Conflicts routinely described as sectarian frequently track territory, resources, or ethnic patronage networks, with confession serving as the boundary marker; and conflicts described as purely material frequently have genuine theological stakes that outside observers cannot see because they have no vocabulary for them. Both errors are common, and they are made by opposite kinds of analyst.

Finally, resist the assumption that secular politics is the neutral baseline from which religious politics deviates. Modern states run on founding myths, sacralized documents, martyrs, and rites, and they demand sacrifices that no one justifies on a cost-benefit basis. Whether one calls that religion or something else is partly a definitional choice—the difficulty is examined in this site’s article on defining religion—but it is not a choice that gets made from outside the phenomenon.

Religion and politics have never been separate departments that occasionally trespass. They are two names for the ways human communities settle who has the right to command, what may be demanded of a person, and what a common life is for. The arrangements differ enormously. The questions do not.