[The following is a conference presentation delivered at the American Academy of Religion’s annual conference in San Diego, under the auspices of the Political Theology programming unit.]

The topic of this presentation began as a joke—an exceptionally niche joke, but a joke nonetheless. For many election cycles now, I have been declaring my intention to vote for the katechōn rather than the man of lawlessness. The reference, which I hope is clear to most attendees at a political theology session, is to the New Testament book of 2 Thessalonians. There, Paul—or, more likely, a later pseudonymous author trying to tone down or “correct” Paul’s apocalyptic teaching in 1 Thessalonians—writes that, contrary to the views that some people attribute to him, the apocalypse is not near at hand but has been indefinitely delayed. The passage reads as follows:

Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day [of Judgment] will not come unless the rebellion comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one destined for destruction. He opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, declaring himself to be God. Do you not remember that I told you these things when I was still with you? And you know what is now restraining him, so that he may be revealed when his time comes. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it is removed. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will destroy with the breath of his mouth, annihilating him by the manifestation of his coming. (2 Thessalonians 2:3-8)

In contrast to 1 Thessalonians, which encouraged Paul’s readers to look forward to the apocalyptic fulfillment of the resurrection of the dead, the pseudonymous author focuses almost exclusively on the destruction that will be wrought by the “man of lawlessness” once the force or individual restraining him—namely, the katechōn—is removed. God is still going to win out in the end, but perhaps the restrainer is a better bet for the time being.

The figure of the restrainer has been the object of considerable reflection in the field of political theology. In Nomos of the Earth, Carl Schmitt argued that the katechōn was the central concept of Christian politics, allowing it to bracket its apocalyptic expectations and get to work creating political institutions in this present world, and many—including me, in The Prince of This World—have argued that the concept of the modern state is a secularized version of this figure who restrains the forces of apocalyptic destruction. Those forces of destruction are normally envisioned as coming from outside the institutional order, whether in the form of foreign enemies or domestic insurrectionaries. My joke about voting for the katechōn, presumably as a form of negative polarization against the man of lawlessness, expressed the sense that contemporary political rhetoric tends to figure the danger as coming from inside the house—that is to say, one of the two traditional parties of government is claimed to represent a mortal threat to the institutional order as such.

And now, of course, the joke is on me, because I have foolishly agreed to write a conference presentation analyzing what turned out to be a devastating election result. I do not intend to use this as a forum for punditry or prediction, genres that most of us have presumably consumed in excess in the last few weeks. Instead, I intend to carry out a political theological investigation of the apocalyptic rhetoric that has marked American political discourse in recent decades—and, it should be noted, almost equally on both sides. Just as Kamala Harris presented Donald Trump as a mortal danger to the American republic, so too did he paint her potential victory as the death of the nation. By pointing this out, I don’t mean to claim that both sides are equally justified in their use of this rhetoric, nor to discount the profound fears that Trump’s return to power have aroused—fears that I very much share. Even if this election turns out to be the time the rhetoric comes true, however, it is still worth reflecting on what it means that a nation split almost perfectly 50-50 between two institutional parties that are both more than 150 years old has developed such an apocalyptic political culture.

I will carry out my analysis in two steps. First, after briefly laying out what I understand to be the task of political theology, I will try to gain some critical distance from our desperate political situation by drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s reading of 2 Thessalonians in his short book The Mystery of Evil, where he claims that the passage is not an apocalyptic vision but instead reveals the deep structure of Western political institutions. With these concepts on the table, I will then plunge back into our domestic political hellscape, using the American situation to show the limits of Agamben’s reading of 2 Thessalonians.

I.

I should begin my analysis proper by clarifying what I mean by political theology. I do not use the term to designate a politically-engaged normative theology—for instance, one that would provide us with values and hopes that would help us to cope with our present political situation. Such work is necessary for faith communities, but I am not a member of any faith community and don’t presume to dictate their political action to them. Instead, I am a critic and scholar, and I view the task of political theology as that of exposing the theological roots of political concepts. As I define it in Neoliberalism’s Demons, “Political theology is a holistic, genealogical inquiry into the structures and sources of legitimacy in a particular historical moment. Political theology in this sense is political because it investigates institutions and practices of governance (whether they are defined as state-based or economic, public or private), and it is theological because it deals with questions of meaning and value (regardless of the form the answers take)” (128). Hence I believe that political theology is especially well suited to analyze the apocalyptic turn in American political rhetoric not solely or even primarily because that rhetoric is drawing on religious patterns of thought, but because it points toward a profound crisis of legitimacy. By the same token, Agamben’s Mystery of Evil is an especially fruitful point of reference for this analysis not only because it discusses 2 Thessalonians, but because it is fundamentally a book about crises of legitimacy—which Agamben believes to afflict all Western institutions.

The text itself consists of two short essays that heavily overlap. The first is a reflection on Benedict XVI’s abdication from the papal throne due to old age, which strikes me as uncannily timely given that the defining moment of this election cycle was Biden’s withdrawal from the race for the same stated reason. Agamben views Benedict’s decision as exemplary because it “forcefully calls attention to the distinction between two essential principles of our ethico-political tradition, of which our societies seem to have lost all awareness: legitimacy and legality” (2). By admitting that he was unable to carry out the duties of his office any longer and stepping aside in favor of a more vigorous leader, Benedict was, in Agamben’s reading, asserting the purely spiritual power of his office rather than asserting his legal prerogative to hold the position until death. More than restoring the legitimacy of the church in the public eye, however, for Agamben Benedict’s resignation serves to expose how much the church has given up all claim of legitimacy by descending into the machinations of money and politics.

To that extent, then, Benedict’s gesture was a messianic one in Agamben’s terms. This is one of the slipperiest concepts in his arsenal, not least because it seems to evoke hopes of political revolution or apocalyptic fulfillment. For Agamben, though, the messianic is ultimately a philosophical category rather than a political or theological one. The messianic is not concerned with any particular historical revelation and especially not with any arbitrary sequence of future events that is supposed to lead to the end of history. Instead, the messianic exposes the dynamics of history by providing a point of view from which the operation of the “political machine” that structures our lives is suspended so that we can actually understand it—and perhaps thereby transform it. Agamben’s reading of theological texts, especially the texts of Paul, is therefore a kind of secularization of their insights. In The Time That Remains, for instance, Agamben claims that the famous “already/not-yet” dynamic of messianic expectation is not tied to the postponed arrival of a particular messianic figure known as Jesus of Nazareth, but instead provides us tools to understand the experience of time through language. Hence it turns out that there is something fundamentally messianic about rhyming in poetry, for instance.

Agamben clears the space for this kind of reading by asserting—idiosyncratically and, in my view, falsely—that Paul is emphatically not an apocalyptic thinker and that apparently apocalyptic passages should instead be read “messianically.” In the case of 2 Thessalonians, such an assertion is especially counterintuitive, since the passage has almost universally been regarded as an apocalyptic narrative in which the katechōn is taken to represent a concrete historical individual or institution—most often the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, Agamben finds a productive minority tradition in the fourth century theologian Tyconius, who is often classified as a Donatist heretic but who had a decisive influence on Augustine (and the young Joseph Ratzinger). For Tyconius, the katechōn is not an external agency like the Roman Empire, but the Church itself, insofar as it is still mired in sin. Whereas the conventional reading positions the katechōn as good, or at least as a necessary evil, Tyconius opens up the space to see this restraining power as a negative thing—and, in one of Agamben’s characteristic interpretive tours de force, to understand what pseudo-Paul calls the anomos in a more positive valence, not as a wicked individual or force, but as something that is “outside the law” in the same sense that Paul can describe the messiah and his followers as being “outside the law.”

Translating his extrapolation from Tyconius into more political terms, Agamben claims that “the katechōn is the power—the Empire, but also the Church, like every juridically constituted authority—that opposes and conceals the lawlessness that defines messianic time and in this way slows the revelation of the ‘mystery of lawlessness.’ The unveiling of this mystery coincides with the manifestation fo the inoperativity of the law and with it the essential illegitimacy of every power in messianic time” (33-34). Agamben applies this analysis directly to our present, “when the powers of state act openly as outside the law,” so that “the anomos does not represent anything but the unveiling of the lawlessness that today defines every constituted power, within which State and terrorism form a single system” (34).

Surely this last bit is evocative of all kinds of examples in all our minds, from police violence up to the president-elect’s solicitation of stochastic terrorism. Equally evocative is Agamben’s assertion that we cannot simply rely on the workings of the law to fix this problem of pervasive illegality. Here we might think of the attempt to solve police violence through improved training and procedures or the long-cherished (and now-thwarted) hope that the law will somehow save us from Trump. From Agamben’s perspective, however, we can see that this strategy was doomed to fail, because “the hypertrophy of law, which presumes to legislate over everything, on the contrary betrays, through an excess of formal legality, the loss of all substantial legitimacy” (3). Elsewhere he associates this excess of legality with “the paradigm of the self-regulating market [that] has taken the place of that of justice and [that] pretends to be able to govern an ever more ungovernable society according to exclusively technical criteria” (17). In either case, we are dealing with a legal or regulatory system that has dispensed with the need to establish its own legitimacy and has indeed attempted to collapse legitimacy into legality without remainder—in other words, to effect a final victory of the katechōn over the man of lawlessness.

The real solution, Agamben claims, is to find a way to hold in productive tension “the two coordinated but radically heterogeneous principles—legitimacy and legality, spiritual power and temporal power, auctoritas and potestas, justice and law—that constitute the most precious patrimony of European culture” (18). Rather than hoping for some ultimate end of history to arrive, we need to participate actively in the dynamic of history, recognizing that no constituted order can escape contestation over its legitimacy and that the attempt to shut down that contestation through purely legal means leads only to the worst forms of illegality and violence.

II.

Returning to the American political scene, we can see that both parties are engaging in their own form of apocalyptic speculation, in Agamben’s derogatory sense. Both are claiming, again and again, that they represent the katechōn over against the forces of lawlessness on the other side. Obviously the rhetoric is more plausible on the Democratic side, given Trump’s straightforward criminality and obvious ignorance of and contempt for the American constitutional system. But on the Republican side, Trump is taken to represent the avatar of a kind of natural order that is menaced by the Democrats’ supposed “woke” agenda. Both equally seem to imagine a final elimination of the lawless element. Democrats hope to defeat Trump once and for all, allowing a “strong Repulican Party” to rise from the ashes and begin the hard work of bipartisan dealmaking, while Trump supporters have more lurid fantasies of purging “woke” advocates from all positions of power and authority. Perhaps less obviously, I would also say that both sides share a kind of fetishization of the law. This is again clearest on the Democratic side, as they keep hoping that laws and norms will do their political work for them. But Republicans, too, seem to indulge in a kind of magical thinking where simply passing a law, or seizing a veto point, or locking in a permanent majority through gerrymandering, will simply be the end of the matter. That’s what I choose to hear in Trump’s declaration that his supporters will never need to vote again—not that he will somehow become dictator for life (or not only that), but that he will fix the system so completely and permanently that no one will ever be able to infect it with “wokeness” ever again.

If we return to the question of why the US should have such an apocalyptic political culture, Agamben’s analysis suggests that the reason is that American institutions are fundamentally illegitimate—hence menaced by the anomos. Neither side can fully admit that the anomos is coming from inside the house, however, so they project the lawless element onto their opponents, whom they then cast as foreign bodies to the republic that can and must be eliminated. And they have been in such a frustrating stalemate for so long because what they propose to do is impossible. The katechōn cannot finally win. Legality cannot finally swallow legitimacy whole. The attempt to make that happen is at best futile, as when Democrats allow their brief opportunities to govern to be fed through the woodchipper out of respect for “norms,” and at worst horrifically destructive, as with our worst fears about what Trump may actually be able to achieve this time around.

But what of Agamben’s prescription? What would it even look like to restore awareness of legitimacy as a principle heterogeneous to law? To me, the first step would be to break the taboo against even discussing major overhaul or even replacement of our absolutely abominable Constitution—but it’s difficult for me to imagine an actual overhaul or replacement happening without an intermediate stage marked by the old ultraviolence. And on a more conceptual level, I worry that Agamben is repeating, to a second degree, the same gesture he rightly critiques among the powers and principalities of our age. That is to say, I wonder if he is setting up the dynamic between legitimacy and legality, between the anomos and the katechōn, as a kind of meta-katechōn that staves off the decadence and violence that follows from the collapse of the tension between them. In other words, I wonder if he is offering us anything more than the naïve hope that we could make our existing order work if everyone would just act more in good faith, following the spirit of the law rather than weaponizing its letter. It is a telling sign of our predicament that such a seemingly obvious and even boring outcome seems roughly as likely as the coming of the messianic age.