Emilio Gentile - Politics as Religion

Wikipedia – Emilio Gentile:

Emilio Gentile (born 1946) is an Italian historian and professor, specializing in the history, ideology, and culture of Italian fascism. Born in Bojano, Gentile is considered one of Italy’s foremost cultural historians of Fascist Italy and its ideology. He studied under the renowned Italian historian Renzo De Felice and wrote a book about him.

Gentile serves as Professor of History at the Sapienza University of Rome. He considers fascism a form of political religion. He also applied the theory of political religion to the United States in the essay Politics as Religion (2006) regarding the sacralization of politics in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. In 2003, Gentile was awarded the Hans Sigrist Prize.

Princeton University Press:

Emilio Gentile, an internationally renowned authority on fascism and totalitarianism, argues that politics over the past two centuries has often taken on the features of religion, claiming as its own the prerogative of defining the fundamental purpose and meaning of human life. Secular political entities such as the nation, the state, race, class, and the party became the focus of myths, rituals, and commandments and gradually became objects of faith, loyalty, and reverence.

Gentile examines this “sacralization of politics,” as he defines it, both historically and theoretically, seeking to identify the different ways in which political regimes as diverse as fascism, communism, and liberal democracy have ultimately depended, like religions, on faith, myths, rites, and symbols.

Gentile maintains that the sacralization of politics as a modern phenomenon is distinct from the politicization of religion that has arisen from militant religious fundamentalism. Sacralized politics may be democratic, in the form of a civil religion, or it may be totalitarian, in the form of a political religion. Using this conceptual distinction, and moving from America to Europe, and from Africa to Asia, Gentile presents a unique comparative history of civil and political religions from the American and French Revolutions, through nationalism and socialism, democracy and totalitarianism, fascism and communism, up to the present day. It is also a fascinating book for understanding the sacralization of politics after 9/11.

An excerpt from “Politics as Religion” – Chapter 1 titled, “A Never-Never Religion, A Substitute for Religion, or a New Religion?” via Library of Social Science:

At the end of the nineteenth century, Gaetano Mosca, one of the founders of political science, provided us with a classic formulation of what we could call the crowd manipulation interpretation of religion and the sacralization of politics perceived as a mere expedient and artifice made up of seemingly religious myths, symbols, and rituals that are consciously adopted for propagandistic and demagogic reasons. In The Ruling Class (original title: Elementi di scienza politica, 1895), Mosca discussed churches, religious sects, and political parties in the same chapter, and put founders of religions and founders of sociopolitical schools within the same category. He observed that the latter “ultimately are quasi-religions stripped of the divine element.” According to him, religious sects and political parties operate in the same way, and “as long as their followers are loyal to the flag, they cover for and excuse their worst villainies.” As far as they are concerned, whoever wears the habit immediately becomes someone quite different. Mosca believed that the ritualistic, symbolic, and fideistic aspects of political movements were a secular form of Jesuitism used to dupe and beguile the masses:

One notes, on close inspection, that the artifices that are used to wheedle crowds are more or less alike at all times and in all places, since the problem is always to take advantage of the same human weaknesses. All religions, even those that deny the supernatural, have their special declamatory style, and their sermons, lectures, and speeches are delivered in it. All of them have their rituals and their displays of pomp to strike the fancy. Some parade with lighted candles and chant litanies. Others march behind red banners to the tune of the “Marseillaise” or the “International” All religions and all parties which have set out with more or less sincere enthusiasms to lead men toward specified goals have, to varying degrees, used methods similar to the methods of the Jesuits, and sometimes worse ones In our day sects and political parties are highly skilled at creating the superman, the legendary hero, the “man of unquestioned honesty,” who serves, in his turn, to maintain the luster of the gang and brings in wealth and power for the sly ones to use.

No further studies or consideration into the nature of a civil or political religion are required for those who share this interpretation: it is simply a demagogic expedient to gain the support of the masses. The historian Alphonse Aulard applied this interpretation to the religious manifestations of the French Revolution, such as the cult of the Goddess Reason and the Supreme Being. He argued that the revolutionary cults were only stop-gap solutions that were imposed by the war and dreamed up to promote patriotism among the masses and to incite them to fight against the Revolution’s enemies at home and abroad.19 Similarly, Guglielmo Ferrero in 1942 interpreted the sacralization of politics as the legitimization of power by surrounding it with “an almost religious fervor that exalts it and confers a transcendent virtue upon it”:

This exaltation can only be perceived through an emotional crystallization of admiration, gratitude, enthusiasm, and love around the principle of legitimacy that transforms its imperfections, limits and lack of common principles into something that is absolute and inspires devotion. This fervor and this total, sincere, joyful but partly illusory acknowledgment of the superiority of power causes legitimacy to achieve its complete maturity and highest degree of effectiveness, which then transform that legitimacy into a kind of paternalistic authority.

What are the means for achieving this fullness of legitimacy? There are many devices that can be used, but art has always been one of the most powerful. Painting, sculpture, and architecture did not just cooperate with monarchies and aristocracies of the Ancien Regime, but with governments of all times and all places, by presenting the masses with magnificent works that demonstrate the greatness and excellence of power in relation to the mediocrity of the world and people’s mundane lives We should add to these the parades, processions, military reviews, triumphal displays, warrior assemblies, great public festivals, the pomp of great religious, and civil celebrations and other such ceremonies.

According to this interpretation, the representation of politics through myths, rituals, and symbols can never be considered a religious phenomenon, but has to be explained exclusively in terms of a conscious invention of myths and ritual practices of an essentially utilitarian and instrumental nature. They are demagogic expedients needed for finding new ways to establish, preserve, and reaffirm the legitimacy of power in a mass society.

Many historical examples can confirm that this has indeed been the origin and nature of some manifestations of the sacralization of politics. On the other hand, the theory that all the manifestations of the sacralization of politics can be explained by the crowd manipulation interpretation is not very convincing, particularly if it is applied to the religious aspects of mass movements, which do not always prove to be simply a means to an end. By restricting itself to utilitarian explanations of the sacralization of politics, thecrowd manipulationinterpretation effectively attempts to resolve in an oversimplified way the weighty and complex question of the irrational dimension of faith and belief in mass politics and more generally in human experience as a whole.

. . .Finally, modernity could be a favorable situation for the birth of new religions, to the extent that it is a period of violent upheavals that destroy millennial certainties and drag humanity into a vortex of continuous change. “The entire contemporary world is again in search of a religion,” Benedetto Croce wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century. He argued that the problem of modern civilization was above all a religious problem:

Religion derives from the need for a concept of reality and life, and for direction in relation to them. Without religion and without this direction, you cannot live or you live unhappily with a divided and confused spirit. Of course, it is better to have a religion that conforms to philosophical truth than a religion based on myth, but it is better to have any religion based on myth than no religion at all. Given that no one wishes to live unhappily, everyone in their own way endeavors consciously or unconsciously to create a religion for themselves.

. . .Modern man had lost his faith in the traditional religions, but his need for religion remained very much alive. However, attempts to satisfy that need, such as the revolutionary cults or the project to establish a secular religion of humanity organized by the positivist philosopher Auguste Comte, who had taught Durkheim, all proved to be short-lived. Because of its irrepressible need, the French sociologist concluded, humankind would never cease to invent new gods and new religions.

In short, the ancient gods grow old or die, and others are not yet born But this state of uncertainty and confused agitation cannot go on forever. A day will come when our societies will once again experience times of creative effervescence and new ideas will surge up, new formulas will arise that will serve to guide humanity for a time. And having lived during these times, men will spontaneously experience the need to revive them through thought now and then, that is, to sustain the memory of them by means of festivals that regularly recreate their fruits. We have already seen how the French Revolution instituted a whole cycle of festivals to preserve the principles that inspired it in a state of perpetual youth. If the institution quickly perished, that is because revolutionary faith lasted only for a little while; disappointments and discouragement rapidly followed after the first moment of enthusiasm. But although the work was aborted, it allows us to imagine what it might have been under other conditions; and everything leads us to think that sooner or later it will be taken up again. There are no immortal gospels, and there is no reason to believe that humanity is henceforth incapable of conceiving new ones. As for knowing in advance the symbols in which the new faith will be expressed, if they will or will not resemble those of the past, if they will be more adequate to the reality they are meant to translate, this is a matter that surpasses human faculties of prediction and is, moreover, beside the point.

Today many of those studying religious phenomena believe that the modern age is not undergoing an irreversible process of secularization involving the gradual disappearance of the sacred from an increasingly cynical world, but is rather a situation in which there is a continuous metamorphosis of the sacred in politics and in other dimensions to human activity. The historian of religion Mircea Eliade has observed that the experience of the sacred is not at all foreign to the conscience of modern man who claims that he has now been liberated from ancient religious beliefs and has become “nonreligious man.” This liberation is entirely an illusion for many people, because this “nonreligious man descends from homo religiosus and, whether he likes it or not, he is also the work of religious man; his formation begins with the situations assumed by his ancestors.” Modern man rebels against his past and attempts to free himself from it, but “do what he will, he is an inheritor. He cannot utterly abolish his past, since he is himself the product of his past.”