Concept

Political Theology

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Political Theology

Political theology is the study of how theological concepts underwrite political ones — the claim, associated above all with the German jurist Carl Schmitt, that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts.’ Sovereignty stands in for divine omnipotence; the state of emergency for the miracle; the constitution for the created order. In Peter Thiel on Political Theology, Peter Thiel uses the frame to read contemporary politics, technology, and the Girardian account of violence through a religious grammar most secular analysis has forgotten it is speaking.

Schmitt’s core move

Schmitt’s provocation is that politics cannot be fully rationalised or proceduralised, because at its foundation sits a decision — who decides in the exception, when the normal rules are suspended — that mirrors the theological figure of a sovereign God acting outside the natural order. On this view, liberal proceduralism (rules all the way down, no decider) is not the overcoming of political theology but a particular, and possibly self-deceiving, theology of its own. Schmitt also gives politics its starkest definition: the fundamental distinction is friend versus enemy, the political analogue of the religious line between the saved and the damned.

The katechon and the Antichrist

Thiel’s distinctive contribution is to make the episode’s working example a pair of New Testament figures:

  • The katechon — the ‘restrainer’ of 2 Thessalonians, the force that holds back the Antichrist and so delays the end. Thiel reads certain institutions and technologies as katechontic: they stave off catastrophe without themselves being the good.
  • The Antichrist — read not as a cartoon tyrant but as a figure of false peace and safety, a one-world order that promises to abolish conflict and risk (and, in Thiel’s telling, might arrive under the banner of safety, harmonisation, and stagnation). The danger, in this frame, is not too much conflict but a totalising ‘peace’ that extinguishes freedom — which is where the concept touches Totalitarianism from a theological angle.

The upshot is a politics suspicious of universalist, friction-abolishing projects, and alert to the theological shape of secular utopias.

Girard in the mix

Political theology, in Thiel’s usage, runs through René Girard: human conflict originates in mimetic desire (we want what others want), escalates toward a war of all against all, and is temporarily resolved by scapegoating — the community’s violence discharged onto a single victim. Christianity, on Girard’s reading, is the revelation that unmasks the scapegoat mechanism by siding with the victim. Thiel folds this into the political-theological picture: modern politics still runs on scapegoating and friend–enemy distinction, now often disguised in secular moral language.

Where mainstream views differ

  • Descriptive or prescriptive? Critics note Schmitt was a Nazi jurist and read political theology as an authoritarian apologia — a case for the decider over the rule of law. Defenders treat it as a diagnostic tool (politics is theological whether we admit it or not) that does not commit one to Schmitt’s politics.
  • Secularisation, contested. Historians (Blumenberg most famously) deny that modern political concepts are merely secularised theology, arguing modernity has genuinely novel, self-grounding legitimacy.
  • Idiosyncrasy of Thiel’s reading. Thiel’s katechon/Antichrist application is a particular, heterodox synthesis (Schmitt + Girard + his own technological pessimism), not a settled scholarly consensus — closer to a provocation than a doctrine.

See also