Table Of ContentRADICAL THEOLOGIES AND PHILOSOPHIES
Resisting Theology,
Furious Hope
Secular Political Theology
and Social Movements
Jordan E. Miller
Radical Theologies and Philosophies
Series Editors
Michael Grimshaw
Department of Sociology
University of Canterbury
Christchurch, New Zealand
Michael Zbaraschuk
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA, USA
Joshua Ramey
Grinnell College
Grinnell, IA, USA
Radical Theologies and Philosophies is a call for transformational t heologies
that break out of traditional locations and approaches. The rhizomic ethos of
radical theologies enable the series to engage with an ever- expanding radical
expression and critique of theologies that have entered or seek to enter the
public sphere, arising from the continued turn to religion and especially radical
theology in politics, social sciences, philosophy, theory, cultural, and literary
studies. The post-theistic theology both driving and arising from these
intersections is the focus of this series.
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Jordan E. Miller
Resisting Theology,
Furious Hope
Secular Political Theology and Social Movements
Jordan E. Miller
Independent Scholar
Newport, RI, USA
Radical Theologies and Philosophies
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For Charlie and Tom, my ancestors, the ghosts. And especially
for their children.
And for Rhen, for whom the world changes.
P
reface
My commitments begin with life, not with God, religion, or theology.
Maybe that’s just semantics—“the love of people is already the love of
God”—or maybe it’s some kind of heresy. Either way, I think the direction
of that commitment matters. The theological method at work in this book
arises out of an immanentist solidarity with real human beings, organizing
and acting in real time, and with the Earth. Resisting theology emerges
from people fighting against the instruments of death, whether biological,
technological, political, theological, economic, or bureaucratic. The first
concerns in this work are always people and the Earth. And, though this is
a work of radical political theology, I risk theology for them. When it’s
necessary—when theology and its partners become an instrument of
death—I resist theology for them. All of life is a risk and, today more than
ever, it seems like those wagers are increasing in value. If we are going to
have any use for theology in the world to come, it will only be as life’s
accomplice.
I was a student during the George W. Bush years. That is when I first
became an activist and community organizer. I have been teaching about
religion, politics, and social movements since 2008. Partly as a way of cop-
ing with the horrors of the world, I began to develop a method for using
my training in philosophy of religion to interpret and equip resistance to
those horrors. In turn, my study of resistance movements began to change
the way I understand the operations of religion and philosophy. These
things have developed into what I call resisting theology: a radical, political
theology engaged with movements of resistance.
vii
viii PREFACE
While I have worked on a number of projects since that time, Resisting
Theology has remained a constant concern. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars
that began within the first year and a half after September 11, 2001, the
economic crisis that began in 2007 and 2008, and racist policing had been
the most visible concerns of leftist movements over those years. Though
leftist organizing has continued to grow and develop since Vietnam, there
has been an almost constant discourse circling back to the Civil Rights and
student movements of the 1960s to uncover lessons for current struggles.
Some even harken back to the labor movement. Many on the left suffer
from nostalgia for a golden age of activism, however they understand it.
Even regarding the current chief executive, activists continue to compare
him and this new situation to Richard Nixon. There is a temptation to
look for footholds for the current struggle in previous struggles. It assumes
a symmetry between that time and this one. Yet as Mark Twain is reputed
to have said, “history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”
In June 2016, I participated in a conference put on by The International
Society for Heresy Studies (heresystudies.org). It was also the 50th anni-
versary of the famous TIME Magazine issue from April 1966 whose cover
asked, “Is God Dead?” I facilitated a conversation with Thomas J. J.
Altizer and Jeffrey W. Robbins about the legacy of the death-of-God the-
ology and movement and its politics. The 1950s and 1960s were a politi-
cally charged time. I suggested to Altizer, the most significant prophetic
voice within the radical theological tradition, that from my position as a
scholar of religion and theology there is a connection between the social
and political changes going on at that time with the theological develop-
ment in the radical tradition and its neglect of politics until the War on
Terror began.
An early reader of this manuscript commented that no one takes radical
theology seriously these days. Somewhat ironically, in commenting on a
movement whose heyday was in the 1960s, that reader reveals themselves
to be behind the times. It is true that the death-of-God theology waned in
popularity over the course of the 1970s. But it did not go away. In the
1980s, radical theology, as it calls itself, was reinvigorated by an injection
of deconstruction and postmodernism by its interlocutors. In 1982,
Thomas J. J. Altizer, Max A. Meyers, Carl A. Raschke, Robert P. Sharlemann,
Mark C. Taylor, and Charles Winquist collaborated on a conference
devoted to radical theology and contemporary continental philosophy.
The conference produced the book, Deconstruction and Theology, which
PREFACE ix
reignited scholarly interest in radical theology.1 A spate of influential and
widely read books was published after that, bringing radical theology into
literary and philosophical conversations through the gateway of decon-
struction. Again, this wave of radical theology began to fade around the
end of the last century. However, there has been a second reinvigoration
and a third wave.
I am the co-editor, with Christopher D. Rodkey, of The Palgrave
Handbook of Radical Theology2 that includes essays from 54 contributors
from around the world. An Insurrectionist Manifesto, by Ward Blanton,
Clayton Crockett, Jeffrey W. Robbins, and Noelle Vahanian3; Radical
Theology: A Vision for Change, by Jeffrey W. Robbins4; Radical Political
Theology, by Clayton Crockett5; Radical Democracy and Political Theology,
by Jeffrey W. Robbins6; and A Materialism for the Masses, by Ward
Blanton,7 have been published in recent series by Columbia University
Press and Indiana University Press. Resurrecting the Death of God, edited
by Daniel J. Peterson and G. Michael Zbaraschuk,8 presents radical death-
of- God theology as a response to contemporary theological conserva-
tism. In 2012, Palgrave Macmillan launched the “Radical Theologies”
book series, edited by Mike Grimshaw, Michael Zbaraschuk, and Joshua
Ramey. The series is described as a call for transformational, “post-theis-
tic” theologies and includes this book. In 2011 and 2013, conferences
were held in Springfield, MO under the title, “Subverting the Norm.”
These conferences have brought together leading progressive church
1 Thomas J. J. Altizer, Max A. Meyers, Carl A. Raschke, Robert P. Sharlemann, Mark
C. Taylor, and Charles Winquist, Deconstruction and Theology (Spring Valley, NY: Crossroad
Publishing Company, 1982).
2 Christopher D. Rodkey and Jordan E. Miller, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Radical
Theology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
3 Ward Blanton, Clayton Crockett, Jeffrey W. Robbins, and Noelle Vahanian, An
Insurrectionist Manifesto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
4 Jeffrey W. Robbins, Radical Theology: A Vision for Change (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 2016).
5 Clayton Crockett, Radical Political Theology (New York: Columbia University Press,
2011).
6 Jeffrey W. Robbins, Radical Democracy and Political Theology (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2011).
7 Ward Blanton, A Materialism for the Masses (New York: Columbia University Press,
2014).
8 Daniel J. Peterson and G. Michael Zbaraschuk, eds., Resurrecting the Death of God
(Albany: SUNY, 2014).
x PREFACE
practitioners with academics working in the fields of postmodern thought
and radical theology. The events have been well attended and widely dis-
cussed in social media, representing an important emerging market. At
both conferences, many attendees lamented the lack of serious political
engagement there. Finally, the Westar Institute’s Seminar on God and the
Human Future—“the God Seminar”—is entering its fourth year of col-
laborative work. The Westar Institute is the organization responsible for
the Jesus Seminar from the 1980s and 1990s—the most important inter-
preter of historical Jesus scholarship in the twentieth century. The God
Seminar has explored varieties of post-theism for its first two years of
meetings. All of this is to say that rumors of the death of radical theology—
the death of the death of God—have been greatly exaggerated.
Radical theologians are busy. And they’re newly politically engaged.
But what radical theology has not done thus far is put its political variant
into discussion with actual, lived social movements. This is my task in this
book. Historically, there has been a close relationship between atheism
and anarchism—“no Gods, no masters,” being an old anarchist slogan.
But regardless of the historical connections, it would seem that atheism—
the absence of a sovereign—would have significant political consequences.
There are a few essays and chapters that touch upon political revolution,
but to my knowledge, Altizer has never written a work of political theol-
ogy until what will likely be his final book,9 despite gesturing toward a
critique of sovereignty in the early part of his career. In 1966, he wrote
that “Once the Church had claimed to be the body of Christ, it had
already set upon the imperialistic path of conquering the world, of bring-
ing the life and movement of the world into submission to the inhuman
authority and power of an infinitely distant Creator and Judge” and that
the radical Christian “knows that either God is dead or that humanity is
now enslaved to an infinitely distant, absolutely alien, and wholly other
epiphany of God. To refuse a deity who is a sovereign and alien other, or
to will the death of the transcendent Lord, is certainly to risk an ultimate
wrath and judgment.” The only explicitly political article he’s written
states that death-of-God theology does not have any obvious or immedi-
ate political meaning or implications and in the end, comes off as quietist,
9 Thomas J. J. Altizer, Satan and Apocalypse: And Other Essays on Political Theology (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2017).
