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The Concepts of 'Religion', 'Political Religion' and the Study of NazismAuthor(s): Stanley StowersReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Jan., 2007), pp. 9-24Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30036425 .

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Journal of Contemporary History Copyright @ 2007 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol 42(l), 9-24. ISSN 0022-0094. DOI: 10. 1177/0022009407071628

Stanley Stowers

The Concepts of 'Religion', 'Political Religion' and the Study of Nazism

What would a historian of religions in the academic field of religious studies make of the way that the concepts 'religion' and 'political religion' have been prominently employed in recent scholarship on National Socialism?' What follows is one scholar's attempt to address this question in the hope that thinking from a field that focuses on the category of religion might be of help to another area in the academy. I will first provide an initial analysis of the concept and then argue that it draws on unworkable and discredited approaches to the study of religion.

The concept of political religion has been used in a number of ways, but a substantial body of publication shares a family of conceptions.2 One example comes from Uriel Tal who almost 20 years ago wrote: 'One of the major issues addressed in this volume is the dynamics of political religion in the Nazi era. Politics, essentially a secular phenomenon in modern society, was sanctified; while religion, essentially a sacred phenomenon, was secularized. The Jew seems to have been caught in the middle.'3 The formulation of the issue clearly stated in the second sentence seems to go back to Eric Voegelin.4 The concept trades on the idea that politics and religion are essentially separate, different or incommensurable. Tal's qualification regarding the essential secularity of politics by 'in modern society' undermines the idea of an essential characteristic and saves the basic premise of the concept 'political religion' from being flatly false. In the many thousands of cultures that anthropologists and historians of religions have studied, politics and religion are, with the exception of recent

I should like to thank Susannah Heschel and my colleagues Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Matthew Bagger for their helpful comments on this article.

1 This is the field of religious studies as it has developed in secular universities in North America since the 1960s. 2 For an overview and bibliography, see Philippe Burrin, 'Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept', History and Memory, 9, 1-2 (Autumn 1997), 321-49; Klaus Ekkehard Barsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Munich 1999); Hans Maier (ed.), 'Totalitarismus' und 'politische Religionen'. Konzepte des Diktaturvergleichs, 2 vols (Paderborn 1996-97); Michael Ley and Julius Schoeps (eds), Der Nationalsozialismus als politische Religion (Bodenheim 1997). 3 Uriel Tal, 'Aspects of the Consecration of Politics in the Nazi Era' in Otto D. Kulka and Paul R. Mendes-Flohr (eds), Judaism and Christianity under the Impact of National Socialism (Jerusalem 1987). 4 Eric Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen (Vienna 1938; Stockholm 1939); most recently trans. and ed. by Manfred Henningsen, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 5 (Columbia, MO 2000).



10 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 42 No I

western modernity, almost always intricately intertwined. As the recent revi- sion of classical theory of secularization shows, this supposedly natural separation of the religious and the political is even debatable as an essential characteristic of modernity.' From the perspective of the world's history and cultures, it seems more reasonable to view post-Enlightenment attempts to separate religion and politics as contested departures from the historical norm. One central historical question, then, for assessing the thesis of political religion should be: did National Socialism break down the wall that modernity had recently erected between the secular domain of politics and the domain of religion to a degree that was wildly aberrant in view of the modern norms? Did its leaders, members and supporters view it as a secular or as a religious or quasi-religious movement? I will suggest that it was primarily opponents of National Socialism who characterized it as religious or a religion.

A related issue concerns the use of the abstract term 'religion' in Tal's example and other writing on political religion. As I will argue, 'religion' ought to be a second-order category, an abstraction created for the use of scholarly enquiry. But historically it always comes in particular traditions, varieties and types. The overwhelmingly dominant varieties in Germany were Christian, Protestant and Roman Catholic. Precisely why does the political religion thesis pose the question as one of religion versus politics instead of Christian religion in Germany versus politics? In fact, the concept of political religion regularly stands in opposition to the concept of (genuine) Christianity. In other words, it implies a normative valuation that is often not out in the open and clear. So, for example, political religion is said to be syncretistic with an implied opposition to genuine Christianity which is pure, unmixed.6 Or it is Ersatzreligion, a substitute religion. Again, the implied opposition is to the genuine religion of Christianity for which it is a substitute.7

Furthermore, those who practised political religion often did so deceitfully. They were opportunistic and did not have the kinds of belief, commitment and piety that would be required to make the practice of religion genuine. Deceit is certainly a historical human phenomenon that can sometimes be treated by the historian, but venturing into the realm of determining what constitutes genuine Christian belief and piety is a tricky business. While those who operate from within Christian traditions often have normative conceptions of orthodoxy that posit a basically unchanging essence, it is widely agreed by historians of Christianity that what is considered acceptable has varied greatly over the course of time and depending upon who one asks within the tradition.8 5 J.A. Beckford, Social Theory and Religion (Cambridge 2003), 30-72. 6 E.g. Burrin, op. cit., 332-3; Emilio Gentile, 'The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Inter- pretations and Reflections on the Questions of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism', Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 1, 1 (Summer 2000), 33. 7 E.g. Eric Voegelin, 'Religionsersatz: Die gnostischen Massenbewegungen unserer Zeit', Wort und Wahrheit, 15 (1960), 1-28. 8 Walter Bauer, Rechtgliubigkeit und Ketzerei im iiltesten Christentum (Tiibingen 1934); Michael Williams, Rethinking 'Gnosticism' (Princeton, NJ 1996); Karen King, What is Gnosti- cism? (Cambridge 2003).



Stowers: The Concepts of 'Religion', 'Political Religion' and the Study of Nazism II

Orthodoxy is always a matter of faith, authority or both. From a historical standpoint outside the tradition, it is a matter of who at the moment has won the struggle to define authoritatively what is genuine and pious. All of this is to suggest that one of the problems with the concept of political religion is that even against the intentions of many of those who use it, the concept is too enmeshed with religious assumptions that are normative for certain types of Christianity to be analytically helpful. This normative point of view should not be surprising since the concept was prominent among certain types of Christian opponents of National Socialism in the 1930s and 1940s.9 Indeed, the charge that liberal secular politics and culture were false religion is the rhetoric of largely Christian anti-modern discourses that began to develop after the French Revolution. '

Not only does Christianity serve as the conceptual opposition, but also the use of the concept sometimes trades in a very specific way on the idea of ortho- dox versus heretical religion. This happens when political religion is said to involve taking over Christian forms while changing the content. Thus Tal writes: 'With the rise of the Third Reich, Hitler went further and formulated that Weltanschauung in forms borrowed from religion, for he believed it to be a substitute for religion, being both pragmatic and sacral.'"' As I will argue, this idea of political religion as a substitute religion can be shown to derive from certain Christian tropes about heresy and romantic theories about the innate religiousness of all humans.

Tal and others connect the form/content scheme with the expressive/instrumental opposition seen at the end of the sentence. As Philippe Burrin puts it, 'religion was instrumentalized by the ruling power'.'2 This formulation treats religion as an essentially expressive phenomenon in that it concerns belief, meaning and the symbolic in contrast to science, economics and politics which concern 'pragmatic' activities that accomplish work in the world. It has been a refrain of anthropologists that this expressive/instrumental opposition is peculiar to western modernity.'3" Both oppositions operate in close connection with another key formulation that goes back to Voegelin. Political religion consists of the sacralization or consecration of the political and the politiciza- tion of forms derived from Christianity. The form/content, instrumental/ expressive, and sacralization/profanation distinctions derive largely from the romantic tradition and belong to a class of theories about religion commonly designated as symbolist.'4

Much of the difficulty with the idea of nazism as a political religion results

9 Hans Maier, "'Totalitarismus" und "politische Religionen": Konzepte des Diktaturvergleich', Vierteljahrshefte fiir Zeitgeschichte, 43, 3 (July 1995), 396-8. 10 Ibid., 396. 11 Tal, op. cit., 68. 12 Burrin, op. cit., 326. 13 E.g. Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever (Chicago, IL 1992), 4-7. 14 Hans Penner, 'You Don't Read a Myth for Information' in N. Frankenberry (ed.), Radical Interpretation in Religion (Cambridge 2002), 161-70.




from a lack of clarity about the concept of religion and its role in academic scholarship. First, there has been a lack of clear definition of what scholars mean by religion, and of an explicit theorization of religion. Second, studies have employed a rather bewildering variety of underdeveloped, implicit and often conflicting understandings of religion that range from folk beliefs to several modern theories of religion.

There have been two major ways of theorizing religion in the modern era widely known as the symbolist or expressive-symbolist and the rational- cognitivist or intellectualist approaches."1 In my view and the view of many others, the latter has justified itself as the best approach for the human sciences and the former is a failure with a dark legacy.16 The concept of political religion trades on expressive-symbolist theory with its romantic roots and reflects the liabilities of that approach to religion. This theory often regards religion as lacking propositional content and thus being neither true nor false. It trades on a content/form scheme. The content of religion is said to be an ineffable experience or an incomprehensible pre-rational something or social structure that is then expressed in a uniquely self-referential symbolic form. The result is pure -meaning that scholars and specialists are able to detect beneath the external form of language and symbol. Participants may say that they are praying or making offerings to a certain deity, but the scholar knows, for example, that the real object of their devotion is 'the sacred'. The idea that some ineffable or pre-linguistic experience can be the basis for religious language and activity has received withering critique on several fronts."7 This romantic understanding of religion was pervasive in pre-war Germany and is prominent in much of the religious language of nazi leaders and their opponents. Historical study needs theory that will aid in sorting out historical dif- ferences rather than merely reproducing traditional discourses.

The rational-cognitivist approach stresses that religious language is not unique or autonomous, but is ordinary language with ordinary propositional content and is subject to all of the myriads of uses to which language is put. The theory agrees with what most religious practitioners think that their religion is about. Religious practices distinguish themselves from other cate- gories of practices by referring to a class or agents and beings, e.g. gods, ancestors and other ordinarily non-observable entities.

Expressive-symbolists find it difficult to explain what it means to have a symbolism that is non-rational and beyond truth and falsity. They also tend

15 For the debate, see ibid. For the rational-cognitivist case, see R. Horton, Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West (Cambridge 1993) and M. Spiro, 'Religion: Some Problems of Definition and Explanation', Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (London 1966). For the symbolist case, see J. Beattie, 'Ritual and Social Change', Man, 1 (1966), 67-74. 16 This evaluation, for instance, dominates Willi Braun and Russell McCutcheon (eds), Guide to the Study of Religion (London 2000). 17 Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley, CA 1985); Matthew Bagger, Religious Experience, Justification, and History (Cambridge 1999); R. Scharf, 'Experience' in M. Taylor (ed.), Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago, IL 1998), 94-116.



Stowers: The Concepts of 'Religion', 'Political Religion' and the Study of Nazism 13

to posit mystifying 'base' concepts such as 'the sacred'. While symbolist approaches, then, are popular and very useful for constructing contemporary religious thought and for creating theories of religion that protect religion from critical scrutiny, they are not very helpful for the kind of work widely valued by historians and social scientists.'8 This finds illustration in the fact that the fields of cognitive science and evolutionary biology, in which a great deal of recent work has been done on religion, have rejected expressive- symbolist approaches and have found a basis for rational-cognitivist theories in the structure of the human brain.'9 In such theories, religious language is rational in the basic sense of involving normal propositional content and patterns of inference. Thus, when Hitler and other nazi leaders spoke of 'the Creator' and 'God's creation', there is every reason to believe that they were talking about the Christian deity and the idea that he made the world rather than, say, a symbolic expression of the sacred or of religious experience or the 'pure play of meaning'.

In the rational-cognitivist approach, belief in reference to human-like beings and qualities of the world that are normally non-observable, and often have superhuman capabilities, is a defining feature of religion. It is important to understand what human-like means here and that these beings are often unlike the deities in Christianity, Judaism and Islam with which we are most familiar. These issues can help historians to make distinctions. So, for example, in much of the writing on political religion, characteristics attributed to religion uni- versally or broadly can instead be seen as Christian or as religious ideas from the romantic tradition. The beings in this theory can be human-like in a number of ways, but such non-obvious beings usually have attributes of mind such as purposes, will and intentions.20 They may have bodies or be bodiless and immaterial. They may be immortal and beyond every order of existence conceivable to humans or they may be mortal and rather fragile. They may be thought of as agents with whom humans want to communicate and please or they may be conceived as agents that humans want to avoid and keep at a dis- tance. It is a distinctly modern idea to think them supernatural. Even the God of the Bible is not beyond the physical and the natural order.2 The so-called Cartesian split between a natural order of cause and effect by uniform physical laws acting on qualitatively uniform matter versus an entirely other realm of the spiritual is modern and western in origin. The power of the theory, then, comes from, first, allowing for precise discriminations about what is religious

18 Russell McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers. Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Albany, NY 2001). 19 E.T. Lawson and R.N. McCauley, Rethinking Religion. Connecting Cognition and Culture (Cambridge 1990); S. Atran, In Gods We Trust. The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York 2002). 20 For discussions of the range of beliefs, see Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds. A New Theory of Religion (Oxford 1993); Horton, op. cit., 19-49. 21 Stanley Stowers, 'What is Pauline Participation in Christ?' in Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities. Essays in Honor of Ed P. Sanders (Notre Dame, IN forthcoming).




and what is not, and, second, from enabling fine discriminations about historical types of religion.

According to this view, even bracketing questions of its truth, religion is a set of human practices and behaviours that are involved in human social formations. Thus religion can reflect social structure, employ linguistic and non-linguistic symbols, and participants can be unaware of things of which the scholar is aware, but religion is not fundamentally characterized by any of these, as it is in other approaches. The scholar's theorization of religion as an object of enquiry is an analytical abstraction, but this object should not be divorced from its connections to other areas of human practice and sociality. In fact, one can only study the object, human religiosity, by analysing the ways in which religion connects to other areas, such as another abstraction, the political.

Two poles must be kept in tension in the study of religion. First, instead of defining religion as an unchanging universal essence or even a variety of particular essences and hard boundaries, the researcher ought to study what counts as religion for people in various cultures and at various times and places. This pole of the approach reveals that what counts as religion changes and varies. For example, the boundaries of what counts for us as the political and the religious have been highly contested across history and cultures in which such distinctions existed. But in addition to this first pole, the researcher must also have a working definition that is the scholar's theoretical construc- tion - a map if you will.22 Only with this map constructed for the purposes of research can the scholar usefully travel the territory of what counts as religion in the first pole. To even speak of 'what counts as religion for someone' already requires a conception of religion. For the scholar, then, a definition that serves as shorthand for a theory of religion must have priority. Working with a definition or a theorization of religion is a necessary prerequisite for any sort of useful precision in the scholar's tasks of description, comparison and explanation.

Neo-Darwinian biology can teach us how to use definitions without creating essences.23 In biology, a species has no essence and shades into continuity and complex relations of similarity and difference with other species and varieties that are always changing. But the lack of boundaries, the complex changing continuities and discontinuities, do not mean that we cannot usefully and rightly think of plants and animals or human forms of sociality as group- ing in significant ways - ways significant to us - across the varieties of time and place. The criteria for identifying a form of human sociality, like a species, do not need to claim universality and unblurred boundaries, but only to be broadly and reliably generalizable.24 In this light, I propose the following as a

22 Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion. Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago, IL 2004), 179-96, 197-214. 23 Daniel Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea (New York 1995); cf. Smith, ibid., 22-5. 24 On the status of generalization, see Smith, op. cit., 31, 369.




useful working specification of religion as the other pole to what counts as religion for people. Religions are the often linked and combined practices (i.e. doings and sayings) of particular human populations (e.g. imagined as cultures, societies, ethnicities, groups) that involve the imagined participation of gods or other normally non-observable beings in those practices and social formations, and that shade into many kinds of anthropomorphizing interpretations of the world. Religion is the activity (including thinking and believing) involving those practices that postulate participation with and make reference to gods, non-obvious beings and anthropomorphizing interpretations of the world.

One virtue of this definition is that it deflates a great deal of mystifying ideology about religion. For us in the modern West, gods and other non- obvious beings uncontroversially belong to the category of religion and are very often counted as essential for the category. The power of the definition derives partly from the fact that it applies to a huge proportion of cases across time and the globe that modern westerners count as instances of religion. It also allows one to see that although these practices may be completely imbed- ded in the political or in culture more generally, religious practices can be analytically distinguished as a class of practices.

If an action, practice or institution does not in some way make reference directly or indirectly to gods and similar non-obvious beings or attribute human-like qualities such as value, purpose and teleology to the non-human world, then it is best not to call it religion or religious. So, for example, if someone says, 'golf is Bob's religion', but Bob makes no connection whatsoever between golf and any gods, ancestors, spirits, the purpose of the cosmos and so on, one would conclude that the sentence means that Bob is serious about golf or it is of supreme importance to him. Seriousness and concern for ultimacy are qualities that modern, and especially twentieth-century western cultures have often thought of as characteristic of truly religious people. In this approach, one is able to see that religion like other human activities is a matter of more and less. The specification of gods and other non-obvious beings commands wide and concrete agreement as a criterion for religion. But attention to anthropomorphizing allows one to see that there are no clear boundaries at the margins for what is religious and that cases may shade off into areas usually thought of as philosophies of life, folk science, folk psychology and so on.25

In light of these two major approaches to theorizing religion, it is significant that those writing about political religion persistently describe language and practices as religious that do not make reference to the class of beings that is the criterion of religion in rational-cognitivist theory. Perhaps the central claims of those who appeal to political religion are that the phenomenon involves sacralizing the political and deifying the state. Does this mean that National Socialists believed that politics or the state were non-observable beings, kinds of deities? Clearly these scholars do not think so. They seem to

25 Well illustrated in Guthrie, op. cit.




mean that the state was considered very special, but extraordinariness does not fully explain the scholarly appeal to religious language. Rather, political religion seems to rely on the idea that religion consists of some sort of rather mysterious symbolic expression. Probably the most thorough attempt to explain sacralization comes from Emilio Gentile, who is theorizing nazism and fascism more generally. He writes:

The sacralisation of politics takes place when a political movement: (a) Consecrates the primacy of a collective secular entity, placing it at the centre of a system

of beliefs and myths that define the meaning and ultimate goals of social existence, and proscribe the principles that define good and evil.

(b) Incorporates this conception into a code of ethical and social commandments which bind the individual to the sacralised entity, compelling the same individual to loyalty and dedication to it.

(c) Considers its members an elect community and interprets political action as a messianic function aiming toward the fulfillment of a mission.

(d) Develops a political liturgy in order to worship the sacralised collective entity by way of an institutionalized cult and figures representing it, and through the mystical and symbolic portrayal of a sacred history, periodically relived through the ritual evocations per- formed by the community of the elect.26

Nazi leaders certainly did sometimes use language associated with religion regarding the Volk, Reich and so on, but scholars in the political religion tradition from Voegelin to Gentile have made generous use of religious language to describe the nazi movement that the nazis did not use. When a nazi used an expression such as 'our sacred duty to the Volk', analysts with approaches like Gentile's owe an explanation for why one should take the language as a religious use of the language and not a metaphorical use like 'Bob's religion is golf'. The rational-cognitivist scholar can seek evidence that the use does or does not presuppose beliefs and practices that the actors believe refer to gods and non-observable beings. Many would be metaphors without such reference. In the case given above, however, one might discover that the person who uttered the words was a Christian who believed that the Christian God had created the races and who read the extensive biblical inter- est in lineage and descent as a sign of God's sanctification of (i.e. making very special) distinct races with distinct identities and destinies. Such determina- tions might sometimes be difficult, but they at least spring from clear criteria about what makes an utterance or practice religious. Moreover, in my hypo- thetical example, it would become clear that the religious element derived from some type of Christianity and not from a substitute 'secular religion'.

In light of the claims of Gentile and many others, it is relevant to point out that Hitler and other leaders explicitly rejected the idea that the NSDAP was a religion or a sect and repeatedly affirmed the secularity of the movement. This rejection, detailed by Richard Steigmann-Gall and ignored in the political religion interpretation, illustrates the symbolist tendency to overlook what

26 Gentile, op. cit., 22. Italics in the original.



Stowers: The Concepts of 'Religion, 'Political Religion' and the Study of Nazism 17

participants say about themselves and to claim that only the scholar can iden- tify the 'real meaning' behind the outward forms of language and action.27 The expressive-symbolist approach requires some special theory of experience, language, symbol and meaning. As the passage from Gentile illustrates, those who use the concept of political religion are not usually claiming that nazi language and practice referred to God or non-observable beings, but that religion somehow inhered in the symbolic expression of their language and practices.

A typical expressive-symbolist explanation claims that the substance is a special pre-linguistic religious experience and that certain symbols/language have the ability to represent this experience. Symbolic meaning is causally related to experience. The unexaminable ground or meaning lies in the experience that is beyond social and linguistic conditions. Thus language is not part of the constitution of the experience and the symbolic form and the experien- tial content are essentially separate. Eric Voegelin and others explicitly employ this theory. Others suggest this theory such as Philippe Burrin, who writes of nazism that 'feelings and attitudes of exaltation, fascination and reverence, typical of the religious experience were transposed to secular objects'.8 Burrin seems to posit inherently secular objects from the sphere of politics and that religion is about certain emotional experiences. But exaltation, fascination and reverence are pervasive in politics, for example, in connection with the German monarchies. Ritual and myth-making have persisted in politics even in the modern West. Is there such a thing as an essentially secular object that is secure from reactions of exaltation, fascination and reverence? Is there an essential experience or set of emotions that is unique to religion? The romantic and expressive-symbolist traditions have tended to cast religion as being about the extraordinary and the unique. The rational-cognitive approach tends to cast religion as a matter of ordinary human thinking, emotion and activity that posits relations with non-observable beings. If the latter is true, there are no essential religious emotions and even distinctively religious beliefs and activities draw on normal human thinking about human-like agents.

A related theory also expressed by Voegelin holds that religious experience is both the cause and vehicle of symbolic meaning, and that symbols, including religious doctrines, have an essential aspect of their meaning in the expression of emotion.29 Thus Michael Burleigh writes that nazism 'realized that only something similar [to Christianity] would obliterate it, namely what has best been described as "a kind of destructive mimesis"' and further, regarding Christianity, that 'the fundamental tenets were stripped out, but the remaining diffuse religious emotionality had its uses'."3 In my view, and that of others,

27 Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich (Cambridge 2003), e.g. 59-61, 109, 158. 28 Burrin, op. cit., 326-7. 29 K. Keulmann, The Balance of Consciousness. Eric Voegelin's Political Theory (University Park, PA 1990), 80-4. 30 Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich. A New History (New York 2000), 256.




these theories of symbol and experience/emotion are incoherent.3' In either theory, emotion and other sorts of experience can float free of the propositional content of beliefs and tie themselves to beliefs that are somehow foreign to the emotion. But an experience is always an experience of something and emotions are partly constituted by beliefs connected to reasons. Part of a fear is a belief that a particular something, say the world-wide Jewish conspiracy, threatens to harm you. Nazi fears and beliefs were in no way justified, but it only mystifies their behaviour to underplay their reasonings and beliefs, and to attribute their behaviour to emotion-gone-wild.

The belief that emotion characterizes religion has been quite prominent among those who apply political religion to nazism. One scholar frames the issue of National Socialism as a political religion by focusing on the mobiliza- tion of emotional enthusiasm and appeals to Emile Durkheim's idea of effervescence.32 Another writer uses Max Weber's concept of charisma to explain the nazi 'emotional sense of community'.33 He describes the nazi ritual and rallies using Durkheim's phrase 'a kind of Pentecostal congregation'. There are Burrin's 'feelings and attitudes of exaltation, fascination and reverence, typical of the religious experience', already noted. Unfortunately for this theory, the idea of religion as essentially emotional has no more history than some Enlightenment critics of religion and nineteenth-century romanticism. Durk- heim's effervescence and Weber's charisma have been soundly critiqued as hangovers from nineteenth-century psychologism and as among the weakest parts of their theories. Thus Catherine Bell writes: 'Despite his attempts to stay focused on "social" phenomenon, one of the critical problems of Durkheim's sociology is his own recourse to rather psychological descriptions of effervescence as the key experience at the heart of ritual'.34 In spite of our romantic prejudices, one simply cannot show that emotion is any more characteristic of religion, including Christianity, than any other area of life, including the political. For every instance of religion that encourages emotionality, one can find another that deems the emotions spiritual diseases. Buddhism and older forms of Christianity have treated emotionality as a spiritual disease to be sup- pressed. It is true that for some contemporary Germans what counted as religion was epitomized by emotionality and thus nazi ritual could seem to have a religious aura. But the second critical pole of my theorizing can rob this observation of its inevitability, an inevitability that is a central feature of functionalist and many expressive-symbolist approaches to religion.

The issue of religion and emotion often gets confused with the issue of the rational justification of religious belief. These issues are in fact distinct. Some

31 See notes 17 and 18. 32 Michael Burleigh, 'National Socialism as Political Religion', Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 1, 2 (Autumn 2000), 1, 7. 33 Wolfgang Hardtwig, 'Political Religion in Modern Germany: Reflections on Nationalism, Socialism, and National Socialism', Bulletin of the German Historical Institute (Washington, DC 2001), 10-11. 34 Catherine Bell, Ritual. Perspectives and Dimensions (New York 1997), 25.



Stowers: The Concepts of 'Religion' 'Political Religion' and the Study of Nazism 19

writers on political religion seem to want to say that National Socialism was an irrational and unintellectual ideology when they characterize religion and ritual as emotional. National Socialists certainly employed Lutheran and modernist Christian fideism, the belief in belief, an explicit valorization of irra- tionalism. Hitler himself is said to have asserted that it was important to believe in a higher power whatever that was, and that the important thing was the believing." Emotional episodes are or are not rationally justifiable. The fear of a Jewish conspiracy was not justified. But when scholars simply point to emotionality or to religious behaviour defined as emotional, they skip the crucial issue of rational justification.

Another assumption important to the logic of political religion is the idea of homo religiosus. According to this view, religiousness is a central part of human nature. Religion or the sacred is somehow the ground of human existence. If true religion is lost, the human need remains and it must find new objects of worship. If Germany turned away from traditional Christianity, some simulacrum of true religion had to fill the void. Thus Voegelin wrote: 'Followers of movements that want to be anti-religious and atheistic refuse to concede that religious experiences can be found at the root of their fanatical attitude, only venerating as sacred something else than the religion that they fight.'3 This thesis of the conservation of religious energy and the incorrigible universal religious nature is a metaphysical and theological assertion and not some publicly justifiable claim. It is certainly not true that all people every- where have felt it good or necessary to believe in gods and other normally non- observable beings. Voegelin's approach entails scholars and theologians who claim that religion is something other than such beliefs in non-observable beings and that these other things such as the sacred or 'the ground of being' are detectable only by the scholar.

Proponents of political religion explicitly appeal to the Protestant theolo- gian Rudolph Otto who wrote Das Heilige in 1917 and Mircea Eliade who more than anyone else popularized the ideas of the sacred and of homo religiosus.3' They also appeal to Durkheim without realizing that his idea of the sacred/profane as a system of human classification differs greatly from Otto's and Eliade's substantialist conceptions of the sacred. I agree with a recent dictionary of religion: 'In the 1990s, many scholars of religion urge the aban- donment of the concept of the sacred on both logical and empirical grounds: the concept neither makes sense nor fits the data. In addition, the concept has been used by religionists to mystify the object of religious worship and thereby

35 Adolf Hitler, trans. N. Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944. His Private Conversations (London 1953), 86-7. 36 Voegelin, op. cit., 32. 37 Gentile, op. cit., 29 (Otto), 30 (Eliade); Burrin, op. cit., n. 64 (Eliade); Maier, op. cit., 397 (Otto and Eliade); Keulman, op. cit., 6, 78-9 (Eliade and Otto); Burleigh, op. cit. (n. 31 above), 264 (Eliade); Robert Pois, National Socialism and the Religion of Nature (New York 1986), 141-2, 170 (Eliade).




keep it from being explained at all . . .'.38 It seems to me that when scholars speak of National Socialists sacralizing and worshipping the Volk, the state and the leader the move hinders rather than aids historical explanation.

By now it should be clear that some writers have used theories of religion that are quite clearly and properly particular normative religious theories rather than theories about religion. Indeed, one of the fathers of the idea Voegelin wrote from the perspective of a kind of anti-modern Christianity. His work is largely theological history based on oppositions between good religion and bad or evil religion. No one would accept a political science whose basic idea was that European hereditary monarchies were good politics and other forms bad, but scholars treat religion differently. Voegelin's is or should be an obvious case, but writers do not seem to realize that theories of religion based on the idea of transcendence, on phenomenology and on religious experience are almost always religious theories rather than theories of religion. Eliade, who centrally used all three of these plus the idea of the sacred, was associated with the Romanian Iron Guard and a supporter of fascism early in his career. To some, his later writings look like a mythology and mystification of religion that would be a good support for authoritarian politics.39 Religious theories of religion at some point usually mystify, but theories of religion for the human sciences should never do so.

Proponents also commonly appeal to functionalist theories of religion. Functionalist theories can either be combined with religious theories or stand as non- or even anti-religious theories. They share a central feature with expressivist-symbolist theories and often combine with them. Both posit that religion is about something other than what religious people think it is about and that to discover what is real about religion requires the decoding activity of the scholar. The idea that religion has certain essential or typical social functions has to mean function in maintaining the cohesion, structure or equi- librium of a larger social formation, usually described with the totalizing abstraction, society. Political religion historians say that National Socialism took over functions of religion, both social and psychological. The central idea here seems to be that such things as total commitment, ultimate meaning, the provision of a foundation for value and culture, the provision of an overall purpose and goal for life and society, and the cultivation of the strongest and deepest emotion, rightly belong to the functions of religion and not to the state or the political sphere. The approach supposes that there are organic totalities or systems called society and culture, and that these totalities have a need for these functions to be fulfilled in order to exist in a healthy state. Nazi ritual, talk of national meaning and purpose, absolute loyalty, sacrifice, emotional intensity and so forth thus seem to have been the expropriation of what

38 Jonathan Z. Smith (ed.), The Harper Collins Dictionary of Religion (San Francisco, CA 1995), 945. 39 Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion. The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York 1997), 76, 79, 84, 88-92.




belongs to religion. But the case has been made often and well since the 1950s that religion has no distinctive social functions and society does not have needs, only individual human agents do. Stewart Guthrie is on to something when he writes that 'functionalism is one form of anthropomorphism, in that it assumes design'.40 In the literature on National Socialism, talk of the functions of religion often does not rise to the level of theory or of an explicit explanation. It seems rather to be a way of talking that implicitly attributes organic holism to society and suggests human-like needs fulfilled for society by religion. I find this language extremely interesting because National Socialism itself appealed to national and racial holism in a quasi-anthropomorphizing idiom that was clearly attractive to many Germans. In other words, the theory of the nation coming to fulfil religious functions was entangled with nazi ideology itself and contributed to its appeal.4' The prominent Catholic author Rheinhold Schneider wrote in April 1933: 'We have no myth, no religion that forcefully pervades all aspects of life; indeed we can hardly be said to have religious feeling any more . . . the national is the first, the most obvious mani- festation of destiny . . . the goal lies in unification, in heroic religion.'42

It is a commonplace in the philosophy of science and the social sciences that social functionalism was never able to meet the logical requirements of an explanation and that such attempts took the form of tautologies.43 One can understand the appeal of social functions to scholars by noting the historical situation of religion in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany. The functional approach possesses appeal because Germany had had powerful established Protestant and Catholic religious monopolies. Just because they were monopolies that dominated much of society, they encouraged and enforced cultural uniformity across society. It is not that religion has some inherent functional capacity to produce social cohesion, but that cultural monopolies allow for little pluralism and diversity.44 Religious diversity is apt to cause social and cultural division, but we do not have a theory of the inherent dysfunctionalism of religion due to examples of religiously pluralistic societies. Functionalism is caught up in a certain myth of society and religion. The liberal constitution of the Weimar Republic was an enormous shock to these monopolies. The monopolies saw the persistence of Judaism and the rise of secular ideologies as a great threat. The nazis agreed that there was a threat. The growth of religious and more general cultural pluralism at a time of eco- nomic and military disaster produced a powerful nostalgia for a mythical unity of meaning, purpose and values in many Germans. National Socialism promised such a holistic communitarian future and rightly saw that the Churches also had similar communitarian ideals. Certain kinds of religion

40 Guthrie, op. cit., 208, n. 54. 41 Hardtwig, op. cit., 8. 42 Rheinhold Schneider, Tagebuch 1930-35 (Frankfurt am Main 1983), 667-8, 670; trans. Hardtwig, op. cit., 19. 43 Hans Penner, Impasse and Resolution (New York 1989). 44 Beckford, op. cit., 204.




have at times tried to create identities in their adherents in which religious beliefs and practices play a hegemonic or totalizing role. Christianity at certain times and places has been one of those religions, but seldom is such totality of identity and social organization actually achieved. More often one finds belief in the belief that commitment, values and actions form a total unity in these kinds of religion. In talking of the absolutization of the political and the sacralization of the state some scholars wrongly attribute this totalizing socio- cultural vision shared by functionalism and nazi ideology to religion as such, and thus mystify the historically contingent.

The idea of religious functions goes hand in hand with the traditional idea of secularization. The concept of political religion as used in much scholarship on fascism and nazism presupposes a specific theory of secularization. The concept of 'political religion' assumes that politics and religion are distinct, determinate and different in essential ways. Philippe Burrin and Wolfgang Hartwig have pointed out that the classical theory of secularization that depicted a relentless decline of religion in the face of modernity has been much qualified and challenged.41 Especially in Anglo-American scholarship there has been a tendency to say that secularization is a myth of modernism. Religion did not decline but only changed with the coming of modernity. Both the new and the old theories of secularism, as well as functionalism use the notion of the conservation of religious energy. If old forms of religious authority and identity declined, then the intrinsic religious energy of society had to take another form, which in the case of Germany was the political religion of National Socialism. Again, I am highly sceptical. Instead of positing deep social and cultural structures that are impossible to measure empirically, I want to advocate an approach that appreciates struggles between human groups, ideas and practices, including those that appeal to gods, non-observable beings and anthropomorphisms, with the human interests of groups and individuals at stake. Instead of positing that only religion can 'absolutize' an idea, institution or value, I advocate studying the ways that National Socialists employed beliefs, practices and institutions that appealed to gods and so on in their struggles for power and legitimacy.

The genealogy and political tendencies of 'political religion' are clear. It adds romantic conceptions of symbol, experience and emotion to counter- Enlightenment and certain Christian criticisms of modernity and the Enlight- enment. These draw on much older Christian ideas of heresy and perennial religion. The political religion argument, for example, had already been made against nazism by Pope Pius XI's Mit brennender Sorge in 1937.46 The document allusively treats nazi policies as heretical and anti-Christian attempts to undermine the true faith. This leaves the impression of a coherent unchristian ideology that imitates the true faith in certain respects but that mixes in neo-

45 Burrin, op. cit, 326-7; Hardtwig, op. cit., 16-17. 46 Trans. and ed. S.Z. Ehler and J.B. Morrall, Church and State through the Centuries. A Collection of Historical Documents (Westminster, MD 1954), 516-39.



Stowers: The Concepts of 'Religion' 'Political Religion' and the Study of Nazism 23

pagan elements. Central are the charges of deifying the secular, substitute religion and using Christian language and concepts with a transformed non- Christian meaning. 'Whoever with pantheistic vagueness identifies God with the universe, and materializes God in the world and deifies the world in God, cannot be reckoned a believer in God.'47 'Whoever transposes Race or People, the State or Constitution, the executive or other fundamental elements of human society . . . from the scale of earthly values and makes them the ultimate norm of all things, even of religious values, and deifies them with idolatrous cult, perverts and falsifies the divinely created and appointed order of things.'48 One section criticizes 'the abuse shown in speech and in writing of using the thrice holy name of God as a meaningless label for a more or less arbitrary product of human research or aspiration'.49 The Gospel admits 'no additions' or 'substitute' and 'no replacement by arbitrary "revelations" that certain contemporary prophets try to extract from the so-called myth of blood and race'. These people attempt to place mere mortals (Hitler?) beside and even above Christ."5 As in the writing about political religion, the document casts nazism as a counterfeit religion and an attempt to deify the political, and to falsely use Christian symbols and concepts. Such transgression happens 'when religious ideas are emptied of their real content and are transformed into a profane meaning'.5' Voegelin used exactly these ideas, even the same language, and added the romantic theories of experience and symbol.

The discourse about false religion in the encyclical is not just the Vatican's description of the empirical situation. Rather it casts nazism in the mould of heresy. The discourse goes back to the first extant heresiologist Irenaeus of Lyons at the end of the second century. Irenaeus invented the Gnostic heresy by casting together a heterogeneous assortment of Christian groups and teach- ers that he opposed and presenting them as a counterfeit faith.52 Certain of the characteristics attributed to heresy would persist and be repeated endlessly, down to Mit brennender Sorge. In On the Detection and Refutation of Knowledge Falsely So-Called, Irenaeus repeatedly says that heresies have the external appearance of truth, seeming on the surface to be Christian (e.g. Pref. 1; 2.14.2). He makes the charge of syncretism and jumbling the true system. Heretics act like those who take a mosaic portrait of a king and rearrange and reuse the stones to produce another picture. Yet they want to claim the truth and power of the original image (1.8.1). 'After collecting scattered texts and names they transfer them, as we said before, out of their natural meaning to a meaning contrary to nature . . .'

(1.9.4).-" Heretics use the name God, but

change the content of the word (1.22.1). 'On the outside they are sheep, for in

47 Ibid., 522. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 523. 50 Ibid., 525. 51 Ibid., 529. Examples of such profanations follow for 'revelation', 'faith' and 'immortality'. 52 On Irenaeus' invention of Gnosticism see King, op. cit. and Williams, op. cit. 53 Trans. Robert M. Grant, Irenaeus of Lyons (London 1997).



24 Joumal of Contemporary History Vol 42 No I

their external speech they resemble us since they say the same words, but inside they are wolves, for their teaching is murderous, inventing many gods and simulating many fathers, breaking up and dividing the Son in many ways' (3.16.8). Here in a nutshell is the idea of heretical/political religion as a deceptive, often persuasive, syncretistic substitute for true Christianity.

Steigmann-Gall's The Holy Reich provides a clear alternative to vague ideas about an incoherent religion of National Socialism that arose due to the spiritual vacuum of modernity and tried to replace Christianity. Instead of symbols and rituals that work in mysterious ways and language that does not mean what it seems to mean, The Holy Reich shows that the dominant portion of the nazi leadership held familiar Christian beliefs with their own distinctive interpretations of some points. The party accommodated a wide array of Protestant and even Roman Catholic belief, but possessed commonality on certain points. The most important of these were, first, that the God of Jesus Christ had created the world with distinct human races that each had its own God-given and essential species characteristics. Second, that the destiny of world history centred on the struggle of one superior race to protect itself from the depredations of another race and that this struggle had been dramatically enacted and prefigured by Jesus Christ's struggle against the Jews recorded in the New Testament. These beliefs from which the nazis drew such evil infer- ences, especially the first, were shared by many other Germans, Europeans and Americans who were not nazis. A set of beliefs can be false and have evil moral consequences and still be coherent and based on reasoning, once its assumptions are granted. According to the interpretation of National Socialism through the notion of political religion, the implied lesson is to return to traditional forms of Christian piety and authority, to see that symbols express authentic experiences, and to strictly control emotion, irrationality and eclectic cultural combinations. According to a rational-cognitivist interpretation, the lesson is to take very seriously sets of beliefs with violent, hateful and generally evil consequences. Political power must not be given to people with such beliefs.

Stanley Stowers is a Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown

University. His publications include A Rereading of Romans. Justice, Jews and Gentiles (New Haven, CT 1994). His current project is on the role of intellectual specialists and a culture of disinterestedness in

the historical emergence of Christianity.



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