Theology and politics. political attempts to subordinate the Church

The article reviews a cultural hybrid, which is defined as religious political science or “theopolitics”. Within the framework of this phenomenon, according to the author, the language of church mission and catechetical practices is subordinated to the discourse of political activists. Among the examples of such subordination are the so-called “maidan theology”, the Declaration on the “Russian World” Teaching, Polish political Catholicism, the accession of the Hrodna episcopate clergy to the “zmagar” political opposition in 2020, etc. Religious political science tends to consider politics itself as a religious practice; political theology, on the contrary, looks at political issues as something that should be brought in accordance with a theological canon. The goals of theopolitics are reached with the close application of modernist theology. The latter seeks to transform the Christian canon according to the secularism, in particular, to sacralize specific events in secular history - this principle is characteristic of concepts from the category of the so-called “theology after” (after Auschwitz, after 9/11, after the global pandemic, etc.) According to the author, the field of church mission is thus taken under control, preaching is reinterpreted in line with the political propaganda, the church is represented as a subsystem of a “civil society”. The author emphasizes the importance of the motives of the “weak Church” and “weak God” for creating a “theological” justification of the ideas of religious political science and concludes that theopolitics is one of the manifestations of the “new Reformation” (otherwise: secular reformation) aimed at secularisation of church institutions.

modernist theology, new Reformation, political theology, religious political science, secular Reformation