An excerpt of Chapter I of Politics as Religion (Princeton University Press) appears below. Click here to read the complete chapter.

Abstract: Throughout history, political power has always been invested with a sacred nature, even when not directly identified with a divinity. Absolute power is an essential attribute of the sacred, while an aura of sacredness always emanates from those who hold power. In the modern age, the state, having freed itself from the sanctification conferred on it by traditional religion, can appear as a numinous reality and an enthralling and awe-inspiring power that invokes a feeling of absolute dependency.

Shared beliefs relating to sacred objects, such as the flag, the motherland, a form of political organization, a hero, or a historical event are mandatory beliefs in that the community will not tolerate their rejection or desecration. Even modern warfare can be perceived as a violent experience of the sacred and therefore facilitate the formation of new religious beliefs directed toward secular entities, such as the nation, the people, or the race.

Emilio Gentile,a professor at the Sapienza University of Rome. is considered one of the world’s foremost cultural historians of fascist ideology.   Politics as Religion For information on ordering, PLEASE CLICK HERE. Emilio Gentile argues that politics over the past two centuries has often taken on the features of religion, defining the fundamental purpose and meaning of human life. Secular political entities such as the nation, state, class, and party became the focus of myths, rituals, and commandments, becoming objects of faith, loyalty, and reverence.

Abraham Lincoln defined reverence for the laws handed down by the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as the “political religion of the nation.” Luigi Settembrini called the Giovine Italia (Young Italy), a "new political religion."

In The Ruling Class, Mosca discussed churches, religious sects, and political parties in the same chapter, and put founders of religions sociopolitical schools within the same category, observing that the latter are "quasi-religions stripped of the divine element.” Religious sects and political parties operate in the same way, and “as long as their followers are loyal to the flag, they cover for and excuse their worst villainies.”

According to Gustav Le Bon, the concept of religion does not necessarily presuppose the existence of a transcendent divinity. The gods are figments of our imaginations: “It was man who created the gods, but he then became subjugated to them immediately after their creation.

Le Bon stated that religion originates in “the need to submit oneself to a divine, political, or social faith, whatever the circumstances.”

This sentiment has very simple characteristics, such as worship of a being supposed superior, fear of the power with which the being is credited, blind submission to its commandments, inability to discuss its dogmas, the desire to spread them, and a tendency to consider as enemies all by whom they are not accepted.

Whether such a sentiment applies to an invisible God, to a wooden or stone idol, to a hero or to a political conception, its essence always remains religious. A person is not religious solely when he worships a divinity, but when he puts all the resources of his mind, the complete submission of his will and whole-souled ardor of fanaticism at the service of a cause or an individual who becomes the goal and guide of his thoughts and actions.

Emile Durkheim believed that religion “is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions–beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in a single moral community called a church.”

Its function is to elevate people beyond themselves and have them live a superior life in the collectivity to which they belong. Religion is the condition in which the individual, in a psychological state of “effervescence,” of elation and enthusiasm, transcends himself or herself through deep involvement in the collectivity. Religious experience "the exaltation of all mental activities, the transport of the individual beyond himself.”

The individuals who constitute a community feel unified and maintain that unity for as long as they share a set of beliefs and practice the rituals required by those beliefs. “Religious force is the feeling the collectivity inspires in its members, but projected outside and objectified by the minds that feel it. It becomes objectified by being anchored in an object which then becomes sacred, but any object can play this role.”

Religious beliefs express the unity and identity of a collectivity, while rituals are forms of actions that serve to evoke, maintain, and renew the unity and identity of a social group through their reference to sacred entities, which can be objects, animals, persons, or ideas.

Shared beliefs relating to sacred objects, such as the flag, the motherland, a form of political organization, a hero, or a historical event are mandatory beliefs in that the community will not tolerate their rejection or desecration. “For us the fatherland, the French Revolution and Joan of Arc are sacred entities and will not allow anyone to offend them.”

During the early years of the Revolution, under the influence of widespread enthusiasm, there was public support for a new religion with its own dogmas, symbols, altars, and festivities, which spontaneously made sacred such entities as the Motherland, Freedom, and Reason, which originally had been purely secular. The Revolution attempted to gratify officially these “spontaneous aspirations” by establishing the cult of Reason and the Supreme Being.

The historian Albert Mathiez considered revolutionary cults to be spontaneous manifestations of a new religion that originated from the political experience of Revolution. These cults constituted a “true religion” because they contained all the elements common to all religions: faith, i.e., a set of obligatory beliefs that are asserted as indisputable dogmas, and worship, i.e., a set of symbols and rituals through which the beliefs are manifested. The political essence of this religion was patriotism and the messianic expectation of regeneration; its dogmas were the Law, the Constitution, Equality, Liberty, and the Sovereignty of the People.

The existence of a civil or political religion appears plausible if we refer to the concept of the sacred developed by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in 1917. According to his theory, the sacred, which he considers to be “a category of interpretation and valuation peculiar to the sphere of religion,” is an inexpressible spiritual experience that cannot be understood rationally and occurs in the presence of the numinous.

This term refers to the manifestation of an immense, mysterious, and majestic power that, through its enthralling and awe-inspiring nature, invokes a feeling of absolute dependency in whoever experiences it, but at the same time produces an irrational energy that “engages man’s sentiments, drives him to ‘industrious fervor’ and fills him with a boundless dynamic tension both in terms of asceticism and zealousness against the world and the flesh, and in terms of heroic behavior by which the inner excitement erupts into the external world.” Religions originate from the numinous experience of the sacred.

Throughout history, political power has always been invested with a sacred nature, even when not directly identified with a divinity. According to religious anthropology, absolute power is an essential attribute of the sacred, while political anthropology explains that an aura of sacredness always emanates from those who hold power.

In the modern age, the state, having freed itself from the sanctification conferred on it by traditional religion, can appear as a numinous reality and an enthralling and awe-inspiring power that invokes a feeling of absolute dependency. Even modern warfare can be perceived as a violent experience of the sacred and therefore facilitate the formation of new religious beliefs directed toward secular entities, such as the nation, the people, or the race.

At the beginning of the Great War, following the decline of nineteenth-century secular religions, the “numinous sentiment,” wrote the Italian philosopher Adriano Tilgher in 1938, “wandered in a state of freedom and purity in search of new objects and terms on which to discharge itself, just as a lightning charge wanders in search of a place in which to discharge itself.

Just after the war, it discharged itself on new objects: the State, the Fatherland, the Nation, the Race, the Class, which were entities which had to be defended against mortal dangers or one of which everything was expected.”

The period after the [First World] War witnessed one of the most startling outbreaks of pure numinousness ever recalled in the history of the world. We witnessed the birth of new deities [numines] with our own eyes. You would need to be blind and deaf to all current realities if you were unable to realize that for very many of our contemporaries State, Fatherland, Nation, Race, and Class are objects not just of enthusiastic veneration but also of mystical adoration.

Modern politics has thus become, according to the religious sociologist Jean-Pierre Sirroneau, “the preferred terrain for the creation and expansion of the sacred in secular societies.”

Our contemporaries have directed their religious aspirations and passions toward politics, transforming political ideologies into myths, looking on political leaders or dictators as divine and heroic figures. Modern politics is full of “sacred” persons.

These figures are both terrifying (tremendum) because they possess all the (technical, military and psychological) power of the modern state and have enormous capacity to impose their will and reek destruction, and reassuring (fascinans) because they represent a providential force capable of providing protection and safety to modern man who has been uprooted and ground down by the great industrial and urban complexes.

Politics has produced the idols of our time. Politics reveals more easily the traditional expressions of religions, namely myth, ritual, communion and faith. Politics have taken on the role of legitimizing the social order that in the past was carried out by religion.

The experience of totalitarian religions authorizes us to argue that politics was the battlefield where the new gods fought for supremacy over men during the twentieth century. Those who witness the advent of totalitarian religions were certainly convinced of this, and they considered such religions to be a deadly danger to humanity.