What Is Replacing Traditional Religion?
What Is Replacing Traditional Religion?
The Challenge of Secular Political Religion and of Religious Nationalism
Lecture by Philip Gorski
Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies, Yale University
Within the framework of the International Workshop
Post-Secular Perspectives on the Sacred:
100 years since Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige
Greetings: Prof. Shai Lavi
Chair: Dr. Yochi Fischer
Confronted with right-wing populist movements that claim to be defending “Western Christian civilization” and with campus activists who advocate “identity politics,” prominent political pundits on the left and the right have suggested that the waning of traditional religion has opened up a space for new “political cults.” In doing so, they evoke the theory of secular “political religion” that was developed to account for the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Political religion regimes include the sacralization of politics and a strong, coherent set of values, ethics, myths, rituals, and archetypes (as, for example, in the cases of Nazism, Fascism, the Soviet Union, and North Korea). Is political religion back? In his talk, Gorski argues that claims concerning the return of political religion are overwrought and underdeveloped and he reflects on the relationship between religion and politics in a post-secular age in light of Rudolf Otto’s concept of “the holy.”