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Crediting God: Sovereignty and Religion in the Age of Global Capitalism

Online ISBN:
9780823233212
Print ISBN:
9780823233199
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Crediting God: Sovereignty and Religion in the Age of Global Capitalism

Miguel Vatter (ed.)
Miguel Vatter
(ed.)
Department of Political Science, Universidad Diego Portales
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Published online:
10 March 2011
Published in print:
3 January 2011
Online ISBN:
9780823233212
Print ISBN:
9780823233199
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

Tocqueville suggested that the people reign in the American political world like God over the universe. This intuition anticipates the crisis in the secularization paradigm that has brought theology back as a fundamental part of sociological and political analysis. It has become more difficult to believe that humanity's progress necessarily leads to atheism, or that it is possible to translate all that is good about religion into reasonable terms acceptable in principle by all, believers as well as nonbelievers. And yet, the spread of Enlightenment values, of an independent public sphere, and of alternative projects of modernity continues unabated and is by no means the antithesis of the renewed vigor of religious beliefs. The chapters in this book shed light on a hypothesis that helps to account for such an unexpected convergence of enlightenment and religion in our times: Religion has reentered the public sphere because it puts into question the relation between God and the concept of political sovereignty. In the first part, new perspectives are brought to bear on the tension-ridden connection between theophany and state-building from the perspective of world religions. Globalized, neo-liberal capitalism has been another crucial factor in loosening the bond between God and the state, as the chapters in the second part show. The chapters in the third part are dedicated to a critique of the premises of political theology, starting from the possibility of a prior, perhaps deeper relation between democracy and theocracy. The book concludes with three chapters dedicated to examining Tocqueville in order to think about the religion of democracy beyond the idea of civil religion.

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