Theories of religion, culture, and american politics

This article seeks to define a theoretical framework for the study of the relation between religion and the political community in the Roman world and to analyze a particular case in point. The first part reviews two prominent theories of religion developed in the last fifty years through the combined efforts of anthropologists and classicists, arguing for their complementary contribution to the understanding of religion's political dimension. It also provides an overview of the approaches of recent scholarship to the relation between religion and the Roman polity, contextualizing the efforts of this article toward a theoretical reframing of the political and institutional elements of ancient Christianity. The second part focuses on the religious legislation of the Theodosian Code, with particular emphasis on the laws against the heretics and their performance in the construction of the political community. With their characteristic language of exclusion, these laws signal the persisting overlap between the borders of the political community and the borders of religion, in a manner that one would expect from pre-Christian civic religions. Nevertheless, the political essence of religion did also adapt to the ecumenical dimension of the empire. Indeed, the religious norms of the Code appear to structure a community whose borders tend to be identical to the borders of the whole inhabited world, within which there is no longer room for alternative affiliations; the only possible identity outside this community is that of the insane, not belonging to any political entity and thus unable to possess any right.

Download Full-text

Refusal to Mourn

Postscripts The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds ◽

10.1558/post.v1i1.9 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 9-45 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Erin Runions

Keyword(s):

American Politics ◽

Psychoanalytic Theory ◽

Civil Religion ◽

Judith Butler ◽

American People ◽

Recent Book ◽

The Public ◽

American Civil Religion ◽

The Us ◽

Robert Bellah

In her recent book Precarious Life, Judith Butler points out that not more than ten days after 9/11, on 20 September 2001, George W. Bush urged the American people to put aside their grief; she suggests that such a refusal to mourn leads to a kind of national melancholia. Using psychoanalytic theory on melancholia, this article diagnoses causes and effects of such national melancholia. Further, it considers how a refusal to mourn in prophetic and apocalyptic texts and their interpretations operates within mainstream US American politics like the encrypted loss of the melancholic, thus creating the narcissism, guilt, and aggression that sustain the pervasive disavowal of loss in the contemporary moment. This article explore the ways in which the texts of Ezekiel, Micah, Revelation, and their interpreters exhibit the guilt and aggression of melancholia, in describing Israel as an unfaithful and wicked woman whose pain should not be mourned. These melancholic patterns are inherited by both by contemporary apocalyptic discourses and by the discourse of what Robert Bellah calls ‘American civil religion’, in which the US is the new Christian Israel; thus they help to position the public to accept and perpetuate the violence of war, and not to mourn it.

Download Full-text

The Political Impact of Affective Polarization: How Partisan Animus Shapes COVID-19 Attitudes

10.31234/osf.io/ztgpn ◽

2020 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

James Druckman ◽

Samara Klar ◽

Yanna Krupnikov ◽

Matthew Levendusky ◽

John B. Ryan

Keyword(s):

21St Century ◽

American Politics ◽

The Other ◽

Policy Discourse ◽

The Political ◽

The Novel ◽

Political Impact ◽

Novel Coronavirus ◽

Citizens Attitudes

Affective polarization is a defining feature of 21st century American politics—partisans harbor considerable dislike and distrust of those from the other party. Does this animus have consequences for citizens’ opinions? Such effects would highlight not only the consequences of polarization, but also shed new light onto how citizens form preferences more generally. Normally, this question is intractable, but the outbreak of the novel coronavirus allows us to answer it. We find that affective polarization powerfully shapes citizens’ attitudes about the pandemic, as well as the actions they have taken in response to it. However, these effects are conditional on the local severity of the outbreak, as the effects decline in areas with high caseloads—threat vitiates partisan reasoning. Our results clarify that closing the divide on important issues requires not just policy discourse but also attempts to reduce inter-partisan hostility.

Download Full-text