Theocratic Time

This was more interesting when I started writing it a few days ago...

The role of time and liberation in fundamentalist religious movements has parallels in many non-fundamentalist political movements. I think it’s important to understand fundamentalist religious movements as rhetorical strategies for mobilizing people for political action. All messages make sense to someone, and all people make some sense through messages: the only ‘reason’ or ‘logic’ that matters in politics is the one that motivates people to act. That’s why fundamentalist religious groups should be seen as more than the outgrowth of irrational extremism, and more so as the mobilization of people through a specific rhetorical strategy.

The first similarity between religious groups and other political groups concerns the definition and possibility of freedom/liberation/redemption. I see these terms as tied up in each other because they all concern some escape from or transcendence of regular forms of oppression. Marx’s argument that religion is the “opiate of the masses” is an argument about explicit/specific ideologies in bourgeois capitalism, but it has parallels to debates within other liberation/nonstate activists about the function of liberal reform as a salve or mask for state violence (or other forms of violence). Marx’s treatment of religion has parallels in the ways that the argument for paid women’s domestic can be seen as a false promise for freedom, and the mere amelioration and rationalization of worse wounds by capital. Religion is one expression of the cry of the oppressed, just as any other liberation movement is. It merely identifies different means and understandings of what liberation looks like to mobilize people to action. Also, this explains why looking at rhetorical strategies in religious movements is so important: because they are first and foremost political expressions, with implications for understanding loci of oppression, but also for (re)directing political energy, with a co-opting of transformative energy.

I think one of the more important rhetorical strategies fundamentalist religious groups use is a redefinition of time. How people consider time, and how much of it they think they have, determines their perceptions of the political tools available for them. I think there is a general sense of some limited amount of available time, because only when you consider time as constrained on some level is it possible to compare potential costs and rewards for commitment to a political strategy. The perception of a relatively small sacrifice met with a long, sustained reward motivates a commitment to pursue a life of religious doctrine when the stakes, the scene on which life occurs, changes.

I like this article http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,,1344082,00.html because it explains not just a relationship to truth but the means that support a relationship to truth – the political institutions required, what sense of self and reading… (it also expresses a great love for the activity of reading which I really appreciate). However, I think it is too a-historical in that it doesn’t look at how fundamentalists look at themselves through rhetoric about their roles and goals in the world – what is common about fundamentalisms that requires literalism? There seems to be a very particular sense of ultimate rewards, situated in a broad historical time period – rewards that come to matter for their position as part of a history that erases other occupations. Meaning is constructed around time, and the perception of purposefulness attached to that. All forms of fundamentalism seem to be attached to an erasure of individual selfhood in relation to a political messianic goal – this requires the artificial creation of tension between individual desire and collective responsibility. Theocracies talk about responsibility in personal terms – either as sin or as violating revolutionary ends. Individualization is linked to political expedience – the regulation of self under conditions of scarcity for the means of survival, detachment from land/history. These are the conditions also of oppression under capital, which is a driving force for fundamentalist backlash. A litteral, mechanical understanding of words makes the individual responsible for every meaning, leaving everything up to particular forms of emotional control.

Duncan