Archaeology of the theological knowledge: theological-political discourses issue in post-secular societies

[Associated axes: RR1, RR2, SWL and and PT ]: “I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator: By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work” (1). It is not by chance that this statement by Hitler is directly related to the premise of the German jurist, Carl Schmitt, that modern political concepts are understood as a secularized expression of theology and his attempt of support the Nazi «total State» with the Führer arrival as the salvation from the Weimar Republic’s crisis, in two perspectives: the establishment of a state of exception as a kind of divine intervention to maintain the order; the formulation of a Sovereignty of the State as a secularization of papal infallibility in the Church, in which, in the face of the crisis, «uniformization» (Gleichschaltung) was necessary as a power structure that eliminate all types of dissonant expression (2). On the one hand, it does not seem to be a coincidence that groups with authoritarian discourses still claim such a divine mandate in contemporary times. On that, it emerges the perception of insufficiency of the secularization hermeneutics aiming to guarantee the noble ideal of secularism as protecting public order and safeguarding individual freedom of conscience. In the «public-private» disjunction, which affects the dynamics of religious identification, a social impertinence of religious worldviews is supposed to be, given their self-referentiality, limiting them to the private sphere. However, within the framework of recompositions typical of post-secular societies (3) and within the scope of certain political projects, such self-referentiality is explored as an immunizing element in the contexts of critical debate typical of the public sphere. The emergence of a «public religion» as conceived by José Casanova (4), in these circumstances, may not help to build a common project, shared by a pluralistic society, but becomes an instrument for the political strengthening of identity blocks. On the other hand, simultaneously, there is the emergence of counter-hegemonical plural political theological hermeneutics, committed to a public agenda within the religious traditions, such as the Theology of Liberation in the Americas, the Dalit Theology in Hinduism, and the Islamic Theology of Liberation, as pointed out by Boaventura Sousa Santos (5). In addition, some of the symbols of modern citizenship, particularly in the area of civil rights advocacy - Martin Luther King Jr. or Desmond Tutu - participated in those struggles by clearly mobilizing their religious beliefs for a Human Rights agenda. Recently, some world religious leaders, such as Pope Francis, The Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, the Muslim Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb, Rabbi Noam Marans, from the American Jewish Committee, The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, Primate of the Church of England, the Ayatollah Mohaghegh Damad, among others, have committed to the 2030 Agenda, to the point of being recognized by some UN analysts as a «spiritual» sector (6). This other face of the religious traditions in the post-secular societies is viewed by the «last» Habermas as a possible source of wisdom, valid for building consensus about life in common (7). Nonetheless, the incorporation of a public agenda in the religious realm is still insufficient, as can be seen in the re-emerging and the growth of extremist groups in democratic societies with religious support. The present project intends to answer the following questions: 1) How to understand the ambiguous reactivation of «theological-political» discourses in post-secular societies? 2) To what extent can religious discourse legitimately mobilize political forces for the realization of a public agenda and a shared project of a plural society? What epistemology is appropriate for a public theology, aiming at building a communicative sphere open to religious worldviews, overcoming the «public-private» disjunction? The hypothesis of the project is that a self-referential epistemological foundation of theology (as an internal logic of the religious phenomenon) is ineffective to contain the reinsertion of a neo-hegemonic political-theological project in the public sphere. To this end, it is assumed here the interlocution of three archaeological projects, that focus on this type of discourse, namely those of Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau and Giorgio Agamben, as a way to: a) offer complex analysis tools for the question of the re-emerging of the political theological discourse in post-secular societies; b) establish an epistemological critique of theological self-referentiality, mapping its modern forms; c) develop elements for an epistemological model of a post-secular public theology in dialogue with the public rationality, and from the primacy of ethical signification of the social practices in order to promote a public agenda, foster a culture of alterity and ethical discernment, respecting differences and promoting the common good.