The Political and the Religious

This paper undertakes a conceptual examination of the separation between religion and politics that has become a defining feature of most contemporary nation-states. Underlying this separation, and most definitions of the political and the religious that are produced in modern thought, are a set of dichotomies between the natural and the supernatural, the profane and the sacred, and the immanent and the transcendent, where the religious is considered in contrast to the public, secular and mundane. This paper proposes to call the distinction between the political and the religious into question, since both consist in directing attention. Instead, it proposes that a more fundamental dichotomy lies between intrinsic and extrinsic modes of evaluation: where religious life responds to what is taken as intrinsically valuable, secular thought responds to representations of what others take as valuable. The primary medium for the representation of secular values in the modern world is money. Nevertheless, since most money is created as debt, it functions in practice as an obligation, as if it represented intrinsic values. The result is a direct conflict between religious and economic values. The example of money, insofar as it results in the giving of attention, illustrates how even the most secular phenomena may be at once political and religious.