A judge in black robes enters a courtroom and everyone rises. A president appears before flags, military honors, and the concentrated symbolism of the state. A legislature gathers to turn social conflict into binding language, taxes, budgets, and rules. None of this is worship. Yet none of it is empty of ritual and symbolism historically associated with religious and political authority.
Modern constitutionalism often describes itself through a story of differentiation, a pattern also central to accounts of secularization by José Casanova and Charles Taylor. Religion becomes one sphere of social life, government another. Authority is divided, offices are limited, and public power is justified in secular terms. But the interesting question is not whether supposedly secular institutions are secretly religious. It is whether secular political orders continue to organize authority through distinctions that are older than the language of constitutional law itself.
My recent book, Gods, Judges, and Presidents, uses the comparative mythology of Georges Dumézil (1896–1986) as one way of asking that question. Dumézil famously identified, in works such as Mitra-Varuna, a recurring three-part pattern in the functioning of several Indo-European religious and mythological traditions: (1) a function of authoritative or sacred sovereignty, (2) a function of force and warfare, and (3) a function concerned with production, prosperity, and the material life of society. Read cautiously, that schema offers a vocabulary for thinking about constitutional institutions not only by what they are called, i.e. sacred or secular, but by what kinds of work they are expected to perform.
Three Kinds of Political Work
The temptation in thinking about the mythological inheritance still present in constitutional orders is to make comparisons that are too literal. After all, judges are not priests, presidents are not warriors, and legislatures are not farmers or merchants. Nor does the existence of a three-part constitutional structure prove a hidden mythological origin. The value of the comparison lies elsewhere, in recurring structural distinctions that constitutional orders reproduce and reconfigure.
Dumézil’s framework separates forms of authority that are often collapsed into the single idea of sovereignty. One form establishes what counts as lawful, binding, or legitimate. Another acts, commands, protects, and, when necessary, coerces. A third organizes the conditions of collective life through rules of property, taxation, exchange, welfare, infrastructure, and social provision. These are not watertight categories, and actual institutions constantly overlap. But constitutional systems repeatedly worry about what happens when too many of these functions accumulate in the same hands.
This is also the point at which the comparison brushes against the Schmittian legacy in political theology. In Political Theology, Carl Schmitt argues that central concepts of modern state theory are secularized theological concepts and makes the sovereign decision, especially the decision as to when an exception to the law is required, central to political authority. Dumézil was not criticizing Schmitt, directly or indirectly; the two projects are doing different kinds of work, even if their vocabularies sometimes overlap. Dumézil’s project was comparative and historical, concerned with patterns in Indo-European myth and religion rather than with a genealogy of modern state concepts. My use of Dumézil therefore does not claim that constitutional law is theology in secular dress. The narrower claim is that secular constitutional orders may continue to differentiate among forms of judgment, force, and material ordering whose symbolic and conceptual histories are much older than the institutions that now perform them. Where Schmitt’s political theology has sometimes been invoked to emphasize the persistence or reintegration of theological and political authority, my use of Dumézil cuts the other way; it highlights the value of keeping judgment, coercion, and material provision institutionally distinct rather than reuniting them under a sovereign authority.
The American separation of powers can therefore be read as a modern legal arrangement that also performs a more basic act of differentiation. Courts specialize in authoritative judgment. Executives concentrate the capacity for action and enforcement. Legislatures translate competing social interests into general rules and fiscal choices. Using Dumézil for comparative purposes does not tell us that one institution is sacred and another secular. It asks why modern political orders so often make legitimacy depend on distinguishing judgment, force, and the ordering of social life.
Secularization as Redistribution
This question matters because the secular is not simply what remains after religion disappears. Talal Asad’s work on formations of the secular and Saba Mahmood’s work on religious difference under secular governance have shown how secularism creates its own classifications, authorities, and boundaries. It decides what counts as religion, what belongs to public reason, and which institutions may exercise which kinds of power.
Seen from this perspective, constitutional differentiation is not the absence of sacred authority. It is a redistribution of authoritative roles into offices that justify themselves in new terms. The judge does not speak as an oracle, but the courtroom still stages a distinctive form of judgment whose force depends on ritual, precedent, and institutional distance from ordinary political contest. The executive does not claim heroic kingship, but modern states still concentrate the symbols and instruments of decisive action in executive office. Legislatures do not embody a fertility cult, but they remain centrally responsible for the material architecture of collective life, especially through taxation and appropriation.
The point is functional rather than theological. Secular government can reject divine legitimation while retaining a need to distinguish among different modes of authority. In that sense, secularization may transform the grammar of public power without erasing the older problem that grammar is trying to solve: who may judge, who may act, and who may structure the conditions under which people live together.
A Comparison with Limits
There is also a danger in using Dumézil here. His trifunctionalism was developed from Indo-European materials extending from India and ancient Iran to Rome and northern Europe, and it should not be converted into a universal anthropology of politics. Doing so would take a comparative framework derived from a particular Indo-European corpus and present it as the structure of human society as such.
The more productive move is almost the reverse. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to provincialize Europe invites us to treat European categories as historically consequential but not universal. Dumézil can help provincialize constitutionalism in a similar way. If the American constitutional order can be illuminated by an interpretive vocabulary drawn from Indo-European myth, Plato, Montesquieu, and Roman political thought, then the familiar account of constitutional modernity as a purely rational break with an enchanted past becomes harder to sustain. What looks universal begins to look situated. Provincializing Europe, however, need not provincialize the history of Indo-European exchange. A fourteenth-century BCE treaty between the Hittite king Šuppiluliuma I and the Mitanni ruler Šattiwaza invokes the Indic divine names Mitra-Varuna, Indra, and the Nāsatyas far to the west of South Asia, while Gregory Nagy has traced inherited Indo-European linguistic and poetic structures into specifically Greek and Homeric forms; the point is not universality, but the historical mobility and localization of a shared repertoire.
That does not diminish the value of constitutional law. It makes comparison more demanding. A constitutional system in another historical or religious setting may distribute political functions differently, combine them in different institutions, or reject the very distinctions that seem natural from an American or European vantage point. Comparative constitutional law may therefore learn more by comparing what institutions are expected to do than by comparing what constitutional systems call themselves.
What Secular Institutions Inherit
To use the concept of myth in constitutional analysis does not require one to claim that myth secretly controls politics. It, rather, exposes how many assumptions about political order become invisible once they are translated into familiar institutional names. In the Indo-European materials examined by Dumézil, comparable functions might once have been embodied in priests and sacral kings, warriors and military elites, and the cultivators, herders, and craftsmen responsible for material prosperity. ‘Court,’ ‘executive,’ and ‘legislature’ sound like secular descriptions, but behind them remain contested expectations about judgment, action, material provision, legitimacy, and restraint.
This is where the study of religion and constitutionalism can meet without reducing one to the other. Religion need not be treated as a fossil buried underneath secular law, and secularism need not be treated as completely emancipated from religious forms. Both can be studied as ways societies classify authority, draw boundaries around power, and decide which forms of action appear legitimate.
The modern state did not become secular by becoming symbolically empty. Secularization can instead be understood, in part, as a reassignment of powers, rituals, and expectations to institutions that speak the language of law rather than cosmology. One effect is that citizens are asked to obey the office and its procedures rather than the sacred status of the person who occupies it, even as that office retains older expectations of judgment, protection, or provision. Yet the underlying problem persists. Every constitutional order must still decide how judgment, force, and social ordering are related, and what dangers arise when they cease to be distinct.
Suggested Reading
Nagy, Gregory. Greek Mythology and Poetics. Cornell University Press, 1990.
Casanova, José. Public Religions in the Modern World. University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
