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Situated Critics of Christian Secular Modernity
Yaacov Yadgar’s To Be a Jewish State: Zionism as the New Judaism and William T. Cavanaugh’s The Uses of Idolatry together provide sharp conceptual and interpretive tools for a robust and layered intervention in the study of religion and modernity. One book is written by an Oxford-based Jewish Israeli political theorist and the other by a Catholic theologian based at DePaul University. Both books speak to the urgent questions of religion and European Christian modernity. Their interwoven theses illuminate a substantial engagement with European Christian secular modernity as a broader discourse undergirding international and global structures and reigning rationalities. Both authors, albeit differently, wrestle with Christian secular European modernity’s assault on religious traditions through the production of idols and sequestering of “religion” to its own presumably depoliticized lane. In particular they focus on how their critiques apply to the US, Europe, and Palestine/Israel. In this post, I’ll draw out fruitful points of connection that arise in reading their interviews and books together, focusing in particular on their conceptualization of the secular, the key role that the concept of idolatry plays in their works, supersessionism, and the role of tradition in their understanding of the practice of critique.
Both authors remain grounded mostly in European canons in their effort to expose secular/modern mystifications of nation-state power. To this extent, their works are decidedly not decolonial. A decolonial approach calls for an epistemic puncturing of the hegemonic hold of the Euro-Christian canon and its internal critics and reformers. At the end of this essay, I suggest why being in conversation with such theories—along with sustained engagement feminist interlocutors and others outside the “traditional” canon—would strength their cases and avoid the pitfalls of nostalgia. In spite of these criticisms, I contend that these two books speak to the need to interrogate, from the position of one’s own positionality, the theopolitical and idolatrous dimensions of secular (Christian) modernity.
Nationalism as Splendid Idolatry
Under a redemptive ethos of overcoming their shackles and creating a “disenchanted” world, secular modernity for both these authors amounts to a story of redirecting the sacred to an array of idols (Cavanaugh) and the supersession of the Jewish tradition through the political and theopolitical realities of Zionism (Yadgar). Certainly, this line of analysis places Yadgar and Cavanaugh in the broader genealogy of scholarship in political theology that seeks to excavate and demystify the theological scaffoldings undergirding the secular frame. Both thinkers converge in their critique of nationalism or nation-statism. Drawing on Jean Luc Marion, Cavanaugh interprets nationalism as a “splendid idolatry,” by which he means its ultimately deceptive sense of partaking in something larger than self-interest. The latter, on the other hand, animates the “unsplendid idolatry” of market capitalism. Cavanaugh walks the reader through the complex literature that has examined the relation between religion and nationalism, often within a conceptual landscape replete with secular/modernist assumptions.
Accordingly, Cavanaugh traces, among other adjacent interpretative traditions, functionalist (Durkheimian) accounts that examine how the nation functions like religion once did prior to modernity. Ultimately, such a functionalist interpretative prism obscures what both he and Yadgar are concerned with: the relationship between nation-statism, or nationalism as idolatry, and the religious traditions that predated their consolidation and misdirection of worship, allegiance, and sense of belonging. Further, situated in his Christian American location, Cavanaugh interrogates how and why the migration of the holy to the nation reconfigures the meanings of the Church. Challenging a secularist approach that only asks how religion is used to cohere nationalist sentiments (“the opium for the masses”) but not what nationalism does to religion, and vice versa, he writes:
Nationalism does not simply pick up and adopt Christian themes and symbols and stories; it adopts Christians too, and thus changes the identity of the church. In other words, when the holy migrates from the church to the nation-state, it brings a lot of the church along with it. When nationalism becomes the new religion, the nation-state becomes the new church (250).
Likewise, the reliance of modern/secular nationalism on religiocultural building blocks (always through a selective retrieval) exposes, as Benedict Anderson writes, the paradox of nationalism’s philosophical poverty and even incoherence versus political power (5). This insight is critical for unpacking and tracing how even iconoclastic secular nationalism can come to define “religion” through racialized dynamics of exclusionary citizenship. This point is pertinent for Yadgar’s analysis of Zionism, even though, like Cavanaugh, Yadgar does not engage with the intersectional literature on race and religion explicitly. Locating his interrogation of Zionism within a broader critique of modernity/secularity, Yadgar effectively de-exceptionalizes Zionism as a form of racialized nationalism. In his interaction with Cavanaugh, he writes that Zionism is but “a local, specific rendition of the playing out of some of the founding paradoxes of the so called ‘secular,’ liberal modernity’s relation to its ‘religious’ past. Or, more specifically—to use your own framing, this time—it is about the encounter between ‘the splendid idolatry of nationalism’ and its traditional past.”
Idolatry Critique & Zionism as the New Judaism
Indeed, Yadgar traces how the Jewish tradition is both appropriated and negated by Zionism. Provocatively in this case, Zionism becomes “the New Judaism,” as the subtitle of Yadgar’s book conveys. For Cavanaugh, “idolatry critique” entails self-critique of the “divinization of things,” such as nationalism. Unlike, but in continuation with his earlier non-theological critical account of modernity’s mythology about itself, The Uses of Idolatry digs into Catholic theological sources, exemplifying “idolatry critique” as a form of self-critique. Idolatry critique is also precisely what Yadgar is doing in his book, which, like the film Israelism and Naomi Klein’s powerful reflection on the April 2024 “Seder in the Streets” amid the Gaza genocide, interrogates Zionism as a form of idolatry. Klein discussed the rage that led Moses, when he descended from Mount Sinai to see the people worship the golden calf, to shatter the tablets upon which God inscribed the ten commandments. Klein rereads this plotline as a story about “the human tendency to worship the profane and shiny, to look to the small and material rather than the large and transcendent.”
Klein’s decrying of Zionism as idolatry—along with the diagnosis of idolatry by Yadgar and Cavanaugh—resonates for me as I watch a Jewish Israeli genocidal assault on Gaza, underwritten by the United States and other enablers, continue to unfold. This last detail is essential for this synthetic reflection because both these books illuminate modern nationalism as a catastrophic form of idolatry and a departure from and negation of traditional religious traditions. For Yadgar, the story of how Zionism became the new Judaism is not simply a parochial account of the history of modern Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel, but a broader intervention that exposes, like Cavanaugh, the relation between nation-statist theopolitics and “traditional” theology (e.g., 3). Cavanaugh examines nationalism as a deceivingly “splendid idol,” whose deception resides in its narcissistic and destructive logic. It hides behind a rhetoric of “horizontal solidarity” and an ethos of sacrifice for the greater good, as described by Marxist scholars of modern nationalism, such as Benedict Anderson.
Misdirection & Sacramentality
To recap some key points: Cavanaugh critiques the established philosophical canon for subscribing to Max Weber’s concept of “disenchantment,” i.e., the secular as emptied of religious enchantment. Instead, for Cavanaugh, secular modernity entails the migration of the holy to the market and the nation. In other words, secular modernity does not vanquish religion from the public sphere, it rather relocates it. He catalogues and wrestles with the diminishment of human flourishing and solidarity that is a result of the idolatry of the market and nationalism. Further, he illuminates a distinction between western modernity’s mythology about disenchantment and the intellectual traditions marshalled to establish this form of idolatry or what he also calls “misdirected worship” (4). For Cavanaugh, therefore, exposing the aspirational rather than empirical descriptive force of the concept of disenchantment opens pathways for disrupting the binarization of believers versus non-believers, one of the key categories of analysis that a critical study of religion interrogates. In this conceptual framing, there is not a way to opt out of belief, there are rather different objects at which belief aims, i.e. God or the Nation.
Cavanaugh’s anthropological approach to worship as unavoidable and inscribed in the human qua human leads him to elaborate “a practice of sacramentality” to “overcome idolatry” (5). Hence, he offers a situated intervention from within Catholic theology that articulates “an ethic of immersion in material creation that neither elevates material realities into gods nor lowers human beings into instruments to be dominated, but rather participates in divine life through the material realities that God sustains in being” (5). This approach is deeply theological and grounded in the Christian motif of Incarnation. It is, therefore, difficult to see how and where his ethic of immersion can also lead to a relational political ethics of interculturality that disrupts nostalgia’s conservative force.
Nostalgia is present in both authors’ desire to return to traditions outside the nation-statist modernist/secularist frame. It is also present in the political projects that they oppose. Yadgar’s discussion of (Ashkenazi and Mizrahi) nostalgia is thought-provoking. It captures how, within the context of the Israeli nation-state, nostalgia for exilic and diasporic Judaism is policed or prohibited. At the same time, biblical archeology is used to construct ancient Jewish origins in the land and thereby manufacture a biblical nostalgia (e.g., 99–100), which sanctifies and authorizes the ongoing Palestinian catastrophe of depopulation, domination, and denial. This manufacturing of nostalgia, Yadgar writes, is pivotal for Zionism’s self-fashioning “as a revolution that confrontationally, aggressively seeks to redefine and appropriate the very meaning of Judaism” (53). It is also, as Yadgar acknowledges, pivotal for the sacralization of settler-colonial violence which Yadgar acknowledges. But rather than settler colonialism, he focuses instead on the category of the nation-state to ascertain how the case of Israel and “Jewish nationalism” exemplifies a broader critique of secular modernity. The exclusive focus on nationalism rather than on settler-colonial nationalism obscures the need to engage with other explanatory paradigms and relevant ways of thinking about religion and political and epistemological forms of violence.
Zionism as Supercessionism
Nationalism is a product of western Christian secular modernity, even if it is articulated as “religious” or ancient. Yadgar’s account of the particularity of Zionism illustrates this broader point about modernity’s political project. For Yadgar, Zionism is unintelligible outside European Christian modernity, the other side of which, as decolonial scholarship shows, is a coloniality predicated on systems of racialization. In the case of Palestine, the aspiration of some Jewish Zionists to call their nationalism a “Jewish” one, violates not only the multiple histories of the land and the humanity of its Indigenous people, but also the validity of their stories. It also violates Jewish traditions and histories that reside outside the assimilation of Jews, as Santiago Slabodsky has shown, into western Christian secular modernity and its civilizational (Islamophobic and orientalist) discourse. Yadgar’s idolatry critique, therefore, entails a meticulous analysis of Zionism as a product of European Christian modernity.
Indeed, Yadgar (along with others) reflects on how Christian Zionism predated Jewish Zionism by centuries, going back to the Reformation. Rather than reflecting a love for Jews, this form of Zionism entails their instrumentalization and ultimate demise in a Christian eschatological drama. In many forms of this narrative, Jews will either convert or be sent to hell at the time of Christ’s second coming in Jerusalem. Christian Zionism’s supersessionist logic persists in the naturalized (but very recent) construct of the “Judeo-Christian,” which is deployed to promote Islamophobic and other racialized agendas. Yadgar’s account of Zionism shows how it continues to deploy and replicate a Christian supersessionist logic that negates Jewish traditions and Jewish pasts outside a Zionist teleological frame. He writes: “Zionism rebels against its past, and against what it sees as an outdated meaning of Jewishness captured by this past, while seeking to appropriate this past to promote its politics and ideology” (55). His application of the concept of “supersession,” which denotes a Christian theological logic of replacement (“the Old” with “the New”), exposes “the dual action of appropriation and negation of Jewish tradition by Zionism, even if [its ideologues] do not use the term ‘supercessionism’ itself” (44).
Yadgar, therefore, delineates distinctions between the construct of “the Jewish State” and Israel as a Jews’ State. He concludes his incisive analysis with the debates around the Knesset’s ratification in 2018 of the Jewish Nation-State Law that declares the entirety of “the Land of Israel” as belonging to the Jewish People (and them only). For him, this law indicates that “Zionism and the Israeli polity have shifted the discourse…from asking, ‘What makes someone or something Jewish?,’ to constructing a polity based on a majority of ‘Jews’” (39). Further, the Jewish Nation-State Law showed how “Jewish nation-statehood…as a ‘state of Jews’—is found to be undermined by its inconsistency with basic democratic principles of equality” (39). This is where Yadgar’s analysis echoes Cavanaugh’s account quoted above of how “nationalism becomes the new religion, the nation-state becomes the new church.”
“Tribalism”
Beyond the materiality of genocidal violence experienced by Palestinians, the “Jewish State” supersedes, in Yadgar’s account, the Jewish tradition, which is not singular but instead contested, plural, and polymorphic both historically and geographically. If, for Cavanaugh, the “parochial” practice of sacramentality disrupts the idolatry of nationalism, Yadgar deploys the concept of “tribalism” to counteract the destructive logic of western Christian modernity/secularity. By “tribalism,” he refers to “communal identities fed by and carrying varying traditions.” Such “tribalism,” he continues, “may be the way out of the nationalist bind” (159). To offer an example of this alternative to Jewish nationalism, he zooms in on counter-archival Jewish remains and histories, such as what Jewish Israeli scholar Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin describes in his study of the sixteenth-century Palestinian Ottoman town of Safed. Raz-Krakotzkin endorses a Mishnaic consciousness, which refers to the rabbinic textual hermeneutical praxis, to that of a messianic biblical consciousness, which is rooted in Christian eschatological imagination (160). Drawing this move to the counter-archival, for Yadgar, has a reparative potential. It recovers from the homogenizing logic of modern European nationalism (as manifested in Zionism) the “universally parochial nature of our communal identities: we are all (hence the universal) members of such traditional or local (either geographically or culturally; hence the parochial), communities or identity groups” (159). This focus on “triablism”—or Jewish variety outside Zionist teleology and homogenization— gestures to what Yadgar asks Cavanaugh about regarding his parochial move to engage in idolatry critique via a sacramental practice. In their interview, Cavanaugh responds to Yadgar’s question, saying, “precisely because idolatry critique should first and foremost be self-critique, we need to start with our own practices and our own theological resources.” It is the limits of that immanent critique that I turn to now.
Broadening the Conversation
Neither author engages with feminist hermeneutics and critiques of nation-statism and religious traditions underneath the modernist construction of theopolitical secular regimes. Nor do they articulate their idolatry critique with the literature about modernity/coloniality that traces, as Nelson Maldonado-Torres does, for example, the construction of religion as a racialized category that was brought into being via colonial violence. Their critique of modernity would be greatly enhanced through a conversation with scholarship in religious studies that links the critique of secularism/modernity with decolonial scholarship, as An Yountae does, for example. This scholarship pushes the critique of the secular/modern beyond the analysis of idolatry by engaging with the question of religion and colonialism through a robust interrogation of racialization. The lack of such feminist and decolonial nuances, or an epistemology from the margins, simply points to where Yadgar’s and Cavanaugh’s critique of the modern/secular can fruitfully converge with transformative relational ethics and hermeneutics that resist conservative claims to an authentic tradition that existed before the ideological project of modernity. Such an authenticity discourse, which both Yadgar and Cavanaugh seem to resist—while not necessarily offering a future-oriented pluralistic methodology for engaging in such resistance—too often converges with regressive policies and political ideologies. Therefore, reading Yadgar and Cavanaugh together enhances a religiously literate critique of the modern/secular while also pointing to where such a critique can cross-pollinate with an intersectional account of religion along the matrices of gender, race, class, ability and so forth. This modes of analysis, in combination with decolonial epistemologies from the margins, offer ways to resist romantic and conservative nostalgias.
