religion & politics

For most of the English-speaking audience, my first book (“Introduction to Contemporary Western Political Theology”, Serb. (“Uvod u savremenu političku teologiju na Zapadu”, Beograd, Otačnik, 2012") will remain a mystery. That is, until and if it gets translated and published in English. However, some of the ideas stated in the book will be contested as such, by no other than me, and allow me to explain why. The book was written in the specific religious, political, and geographical context of the Western Balkans, where memory plays a pivotal role in determining political narratives, often contested by the ruling elites to the extent of the frozen conflict, which would best describe the state of the current affairs in this particular South-European region.

Religion and nationalism in such a context blend in specific politicized theologies legitimized by the dominant religious and political elites. During the recent Balkan conflicts, religions were heavily involved in antagonizing the conflicting parties/ethnicities. Decades after the conflict, the same religions enforce specific ethnopolitical and victimological narratives deeply contested with each other. “Dominant theologies emerging from such viewpoints often lack critical self-reflection. It is the kind of remembrance that is rather selective, ideologically biased, and exclusive, focusing on institutional forgetting of the facts. Consequently, the western Balkan governments are stressing the particular dates that stand as symbols of victory for independence against aggressors, while the critical dimension of such memory remains out of focus, or fully neglected by the political or religious elites.”

I would describe my first monograph as a genuine cry for contextual political theology — inclusive, depoliticized, and denationalized, placing the memory of all the victims of war and reflective interpretation of the past at its very core. Such a theological framework was rather a new approach and, unlike a few notable exceptions from young scholars originating from Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant backgrounds (See works of Dr Darko Djogo, Entoni Šeperic, Alen Kristić, Blagoje Pantelić), it’s still very unique. For me, as a member of Serbian ethnicity, it was only fair to critically reflect on the atrocities committed by the Serbian people and commemorate all the victims, especially those belonging to Muslim or Croat entities.

Reflection emerging from such context was indecent and dangerous and followed the very steps of Moltmann, Metz, and Jasper’s metaphysical premises on the question of collective responsibility. Critical assertions on contemporary politics and Christian and right-wing nationalism were naturally borrowed from a theology of liberation, critical theorists like Adorno and Habermas or contemporary religious scholars like Hauerwas and Milbank and resonated with left-oriented theology. Most recent texts published in the US resonate with Christian socialism and left-biased theological concepts. Furthermore, the focus of my critique shifted from Right-wing populism in Eastern Europe to Evangelical Christian Nationalism in the US.

Then something changed, not necessarily radical, but a subtle tectonic movement was evident. We moved from Nevada to Southern California at the brink of the global pandemic. Weeks later, LA and Ventura counties were in the nation’s strictest lockdowns. Living as a believing Christian in a state that has been a ground zero of the radical left and an epitome of the left-wing socialist political experiment inevitably shifts the way society is perceived. My worldview, prevalently influenced by critical theory, has changed. Being a socialist-inclined person in a socialist state didn’t make me more socialist, but just the opposite, more devoted to questioning the principles of the Christian faith and how those ideas may be preserved, and politically articulated in the midst of the radical secular environment. Vicious minds could imply that the position I contemplate shifted from oppressed to white fragility since I write this essay from an affluent neighborhood of Greater Los Angeles, enjoying the middle-class amenities. Therefore, my reasoning could be “tempered” by the privileges I enjoy and unintentionally aiding to legitimize my power tier. However, 40 years of tribulations, socialism, dictatorship, and armed conflicts are valid reasons to state my differences.

My entire theological opus was devoted to deconstructing the political authoritarianism, populism, false victimological narratives, nationalism, power dynamics, and anti-Western / anti-American sentiment in the Western Balkans, predominantly Serbia. Living here, I found myself eye-to-eye with an emerging threat of radical left authoritarianism dangerously lurking behind state policies and what’s called modern American progressivism, a euphemism for the radical-left political agenda. It was a shocking and sobering moment that requires no less than a radical shift in theological reflection. I decided to entitle such a dialectical approach as a Radical Political Theology. Though my previous works gravitate on top of the “new political theology” of Moltmann and Metz, Hauerwas, Milbank, and Volf, the new insertion will not be a radical reversal to more legitimizing concepts of Schmidt and De Mestre. It will rather shift to an uncompromised deconstruction of liberal political tyranny of enforced policies of the radical left and will be based on principles of the Christian faith and traditional forms of society. It is radically indecent, radically disruptive, radically orthodox, radically un-conforming, and radically focused on the fundamentals of the Christian tradition.

For devoted Christians, political conservatism is not a question of choice but rather the only reasonable way to faithfully politically articulate the very principles of Christian beliefs. In times when we face the most difficult challenges, when our values are disputed and mocked, we must not be hesitant, uncertain, ambivalent, or behave like mere spectators in the middle of the ferocious political arena. It is no less than a battle between the apostles of political nihilism and people envisioned to preserve the core values of the American tradition, deeply rooted in principles that our forefathers deeply regarded and cherished. The future of our state politics could either be a horrific cry of despair — a Becket’s “Breath” or a hopeful venture to a “city on a hill”. Morality stems from a Judeo-Christian tradition and inherently from the ultimate source of authority — a monotheistic God. Human nature is not a question of power dynamics between oppressors and the oppressed, as cultural marxism is asserting, but a question of the human inclination to sinful nature. Humanity will not be redeemed by shifting the balance in the dynamics of power but by participating in redemption through Jesus Christ.

The endless struggle against the power structures and systems of repression is the very essence of the gospel’s revolutionary ethos. The notion of freedom (gr. ἐλευθερίᾳ) represents the crux of the gospel’s message, not only in terms of spiritual liberation but as an impetus for political deprivatization of contemporary political theology, confronting repression, marginalization, enslavement, exploitation, or any perfidious instance of Orwellian totalitarianism. Unfortunately, we’re not experiencing the “end of history” at least not how Fukuyama envisioned, neither the resurgence of religions as Huntington once boldly stated, but rather a demise of liberal society crushing under the weights of its delusions of freedom and decision-making which is now being transferred from people to the globalist managerial elite. As Deeden observes “liberal state expands to control nearly every aspect life while citizens regard government as distant and uncontrollable power, one that only extends their sense of powerlessness by relentlessly advancing the project of globalism” We’re not witnessing the end of history and ultimate victory of a free society but an inevitable demise of liberalism as we know it.

Deenen asserts that liberalism is rather incompatible with democracy. “Democracy requires extensive social forms that liberalism aims to deconstruct,” which becomes evident in the efforts of the radical left to denounce the established social forms and hallmarks of society, like a traditional family, marriage, relations, gender, and religion. The traditional (nuclear) family is the very core of American society, any society in fact. Any system, idea, or movement that aims to disrupt the very notion of a family is inherently anti-Christian, anti-Traditional, or anti-American.

The struggle becomes even more apparent when oppression originates from political establishments labeled as parliamentary or presidential democracies. There is little left of Lockean liberalism. It’s been replaced by the political articulation of radical secularism and far-left ideological concepts of cultural Marxism, which aim to dismantle the traditional Judeo-Christian foundations of American society. Progressive political agenda aims to “transfer decision-making from political to judicial institutions. Liberals are turning to the law to entrench values and policies for which they cannot secure democratic assent.” Liberal democracy gravitating under pretenses of progressiveness and “wokeism” is an untenable concept that inherently disrupts the freedoms and beliefs of the majority in favor of extreme political and philosophical precepts, ultimately polarizing the society to the brink of state-wide conflict. The very stage for a friend-foe (oppressed—oppressor) matrix is set and legitimized behind the concepts of equality and radical inclusiveness. The foe is everyone who dares to oppose the current “mainstream” agenda. If the task of “modern political theology” is “reflection on statecraft […] most notably: the nature and purpose of the public sphere”, then the task of radical political theology is to reflect and deconstruct the social and political trends that aim to cancel the entire system of beliefs and traditional values, therefore to obliviate society as we know it.

One of the signs of a morally bankrupt society is a decline of traditional values and a perfidious intention to dismantle the core of the nuclear family and replace it with a ‘support network’. Traditional boundaries of identity are being forcefully erased by ‘fluid’ interpretation, where everything is relative and socially constructed.

In such a matrix, Christianity becomes an ultimate obstacle, the ‘last stand’ of the world as we know it. Whether such a world will cease to exist relies solely on Christians and conservative political activists and the ultimate choice to be complacent to the rule of woke leftist ideologies or firmly stand against it by using all means the constitution has given us. This battle will be fought in schools, courts, congress, in the political as well as the social realm, and it will ultimately decide the fate of Western civilization and the United States.

To be continued…

References:

“Introduction to Contemporary Western Political Theology”, Serb. (“Uvod u savremenu političku teologiju na Zapadu”, Beograd, Otačnik, 2012"

Knežević, Nikola (2018) “Is Collective Memory Making the Next Balkan War Imminent?,” Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe: Vol. 38 : Iss. 4 , Article 3.

Available at: https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/ree/vol38/iss4/3

Patrick Deenen, “Why Liberalism Failed”, Yale University Press, 2018

John Gray, “The closing of the conservative mind: Politics and the art of war”, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2019/10/the-closing-of-the-conservative-mind-politics-and-the-art-of-war

Luke Bretherton, “Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy”, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan: 2019.