The remains of Melrose Abbey, Scotland.
Political theology, as an academic sub-discipline of political philosophy, is the study of how religious and theological ideas and systems have influenced the concept of the political. It is not "faith-based" politics as many people might think or otherwise claim. In fact, it is a discipline that is otherwise fairly secular; but one that recognizes the profound and tremendous importance of the theologico-political question as foundational for civilization itself.
One of the most important developments of the late "Enlightenment," one that Christians of all people need to understand, is the sudden and venomous attack on civilization launched by everyone from Rousseau to the German romantics -- albeit for very different reasons. Rousseau, who has been described as the "Moses of the Romantics" by historian Tim Blanning and is the spiritual godfather to the postmodern movement whose greatest representative is Michel Foucault, was the first to assail civilization as oppressive, corrupt, and based on dominance hierarchy. His solution, which might sound familiar to us today, was to tear down the edifice of civilization whereby -- in civilization's destruction -- greater equality and freedom for all would be achieved for individuals.
The German romantics, on the other hand, were much more complex in this game of civilizational struggle. The German anti-nihilist tradition of philosophy, from Hegel to Nietzsche, and Spengler to Heidegger, shared with Rousseau the concern that civilization was oppressive, sterilizing, and ultimately nihilistic (and therefore needing to be fought against). However, unlike Rousseau, they got very specific as to what the disease infecting genuine civilization was: the materialistic, hedonistic, utilitarianism of Anglo-French liberalism.
The German romantics augmented Rousseau's ideas to include that oppressive, corrupt, and domineering civilization was also nihilistic and would bring about the death of true civilization; this is the totalizing death which emerges from the end of the struggle that is life, the consummation of Hegel's "Victim" or Nietzsche's "Last Man" who lives for nothing but materialistic gain and bodily pleasure while Mars is sounding forth the trumpet of struggle. For the romantics the new dichotomy was one between authentic civilization (pure, free, and fertile) and nihilistic civilization (corrupt, decadent, and oppressive). For the Germans, unlike with Rousseau, they still wanted to defend their version of authentic civilization while Rousseau saw all civilization is bad. One might find familiar overtures in this basic dialectical dichotomy as well in the destruction of the oppressive civilization and the hopeful birth of that pure civilization in its stead.
Of course, the children of Rousseau and the romantic tradition -- the postmodernists first and foremost and synthesized Rousseau and elements of broader Romanticism -- understand that Western civilization is intertwined with that Christian inheritance from the past. But because Western civilization is oppressive, corrupt, and domineering, its destruction-which the postmodernists think will be a good thing -- also necessitates the destruction of Christianity in the process so that the new civilization to replace it does not retain any of the residue of its original sin so to speak. Part of the problem with Western civilization's societal organization, postmodernists think, is from its Christian wellspring. The true alliance between the radical left and Islamists is that both are fighting a mutual civilizational enemy moreover than the hollow proclamation of being in favor of feminism, women's rights, and LGBTQ rights, which are really only meant for those living in this future utopian civilization built on the ravaged carcass of Western civilization and the now deceased Christianity that were the veins of Western civilization.
Islamists, from the pen of Sayyid Qutb-author of the magisterial and terrifying commentary of the Qur'an In the Shade of the Qur'an -- were also influenced by the European Romantic tradition. Qutb asserted that Western civilization was nihilistic and materialistic and represented a clear and present threat to genuine Islamic civilization (and that Christianity was the principal agent of the nihilism and materialism now permeating Western civilization and threatening Islamic civilization). Muslims could not tend the garden, as it were, and expect to be left alone. The acidic rain of Western civilization would eventually come unless it was confronted first -- which necessarily meant a confrontation with Christianity since Christianity was the corrupting agent that allowed for secularism, materialism, and nihilism to take root (in Qutb's reading).
Today, there is a wholesale assault against civilization from all directions: from the benign and "permissive nihilism" of political hedonists, libertines, and individualists who are completely blind to this struggle based on their faulty anthropology of consumeristic individualism and economic agency (homo economicus), to the revolutionary postmodernists who have embraced Rousseau's critique of civilization, and the Islamists petrified of the encroachment -- rightly or wrongly imagined -- of Behemoth unto their spatial geography. Meanwhile, Christians remain shackled and muzzled by the liberal Leviathan and told to keep their concerns "private." Which is to say that good Christians cannot be good public citizens since the good public citizen is only ever a private Christian who never brings his Christianity into the public square.
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