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Theologico-Political Resonance: Carl

Schmitt between the Neocons and the
Theonomists
ARTICLE in DIFFERENCES JANUARY 2007

Impact Factor: 0.34 DOI: 10.1215/10407391-2007-010 Source: OAI
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Theologico-Political Resonance:
Carl Schmitt between the Neocons and the Theonomists
The Resonance Machine:

Theonomy and Neoconservatism
I
n a recent article, political scientist William E. Connolly
queried why those whom he calls cowboy capitalists hold their noses
when they smell religious dogma yet are willing to make alliances with
the Christian Right (876). Connolly argues that there are certain reso-
nances between frontier marketeers and evangelical Christians that make
their alliance fruitful, resonances that are illuminated by Nietzsches
description of ressentiment (as Connolly describes it, the will to revenge
against mortality, time and the world [877]). Bitterness and revenge are
the unsung melodylike that of Robert Schummans Humoreskethat
makes itself heard in the reverberations between hardcore capitalists and
conservative Christians (87879). Rage against the irrevocable changes
in the world creates fear and a sense of indebtedness to a vengeful God.
Thus, along with ressentiment come compensatory drives for special
economic entitlement and comforts in this world; [and] ugly campaigns
to vilify those whose difference in faith throws [...] self-confidence [...]
into doubt (878). Connollys argument is compelling, provocative, and
Volume 18, Number 3 doi 10.1215/10407391-2007-010

2007 by Brown University and d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
44 Theologico-Political Resonance
energizing in its attempt to make sense of this otherwise perplexing alli-

ance. Ressentiment is highly plausible as an explanation for conservative
Christians accession to amoral capitalism and its existential bellicosity
(876). But what about those frontier capitalists who may not feel indebted
to a vengeful, demanding God? Why do they deign to collaborate with
Christians, whose religious views they may disdain? I wonder whether
something other than repressed fear of a vengeful God is behind the col-
laboration, something that is common to both parties of what Connolly
calls the resonance machine.
Is it possible that on both sides, behind the resentment may also
lie a fear of loss of power, a nostalgia for a time when men were men, when
decisions were unencumbered by discussion and negotiation? Is it possible
that these losses have reified, for both, into a shared understanding of
the kind of law needed to regain lost authority? To be sure, loss of (male)
authority and agency, as well as fear over such loss is something that one
can find quite readily in conservative Christian and political right-wing
writing. For instance, Christian theonomist Ray Sutton bemoans the loss
of male power in the family. As he describes it, what has been lost is the
authority structure given in the Bible:
The Biblical chain of command runs from the man outward

and then downward to the rest of the family. Although modern
man, in all of his rebellion to the God who created him, tries to
escape this reality, the biblical authority structure is a major
ingredient missing from American home life. (14142)
This statement is typical of a certain conservative Christian desire to

reinstate male authority after its perceived emasculation in modernity.
In a homologous vein, neoconservatives attempt to prevent any
loss of power for u.s. American capitalist hegemony. For instance, the semi-
nal report of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century,
Rebuilding Americas Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New
Century, makes much of the need to preserve the United States geopoliti-
cal and military preeminence. The premise of the report, however, is
that the military capacity required to preserve American dominance is
declining and that without it, the happy conditions that follow from it
will be inevitably undermined (Donnelly i). The neocons fear a loss of
national and economic power and so try to reinforce it by strengthening
military power.
d i f f e r e n c e s 45
Taking up the spirit of Connollys analysis, then, I would like

to explore the resonance between the Christian and the political right in
the preoccupation with the need to restore lost power and in the resolution
of that need through structurally (perhaps even theologically) similar,
though ideologically different, conceptions of authority and law. I will
focus on two already mentioned subgroups of the corporate and religious
affiliations that Connelly discusses: the neocons of the Project for the New
American Century (hereinafter referred to as Bush neocons), who could
be called amoral capitalists with religious aversion; and those within the
Christian right influenced in some way by Christian theonomythat the-
ology proposing the institution of biblical law as civil law (more on this
theology below). Finding affinities between the self-named theonomists
and the Bush neocons may seem like a dubious undertaking. The atheism
of the neocons and their vision of sovereign power along centralized lines
are very unlike the theonomists religious fervor, their general distrust of
government, and their vision of decentralized (yet still strongly hierarchi-
cal) power. Yet the two groups do seem to be working in tandem to support
a certain political agenda, and so it is worth analyzing their affinities.1
There is a similar totalizing logic by which authority to break
the law is generated in these two (neo)conservative discourses. Both groups
blame liberalism, in some way, for the attrition of authority and morality;
both take steps to right those wrongs, in large part, through the manipu-
lation of law. For the neocons, the response to lost authority is staged in
the realm of foreign relations, while for the theonomists, it is staged in
the culture war over family values. Both groups reclaim moral authority
for imperial and domestic domination through an appeal to law and the
u.s. American ideal of democracy. What is worrying to commentators (e.g.,
Yurica; Hedges), however, is that although both groups make much of the
rule of law and the ideal of democracy in their attempts to reclaim author-
ity and morality, they also both advocate exception to the law on a regular
basis. It would seem that the critique of liberalism leads these groups to try
to reinstate a certain form of transcendent authority (which they consider
to have been lost post-Enlightenment) in order to protect some of the chief
products of liberalism: freedom and democracy. Perhaps they are only liv-
ing out what Jacques Derrida has called the inevitable autoimmunization
of democracy, whereby democracy overrides its own principles in protect-
ing itself from threat (Rogues 3441). Certainly, the theonomists and the
neocons are not unique in turning to a higher authority to sanction their
legal transgressions; many groups make this move on the right and the
left. Perhaps the question of who has the authority to make and break law
inheres in law itself, as variously considered in the much larger and more
extended discussion in continental and legal philosophy about the relation
of law to justice. 2 Here, I can only hope to examine some of these questions
on a very localized level. My point is not to defend liberalism, but rather to
show what is at stake in the current critique of it and to worry about what
might happen if the losses generating that critique are not acknowledged
and their resolution moved in another direction.
What draws my attention, as a biblical scholar, is the way that
a notion of scripture figures into this equation. The strong resonance
between theonomists and neocons, I will argue, shows that the neocons
treat law in much the same way the theonomists treat the scriptures: the
written word/law becomes the reasoning by which it is interpreted, and
that reasoning is raised to the status of transcendent authority by which
the word/law can be overturned. This totalizing move emerges in the awk-
ward act of trying to hold pre- and post-Enlightenment values together. In
fact, the autoimmunizing gesture might be said to be precisely this form
of scripturalization of reason.
Here the work of another influential critic of liberalism, the
infamous German political philosopher, Carl Schmitt, 3 may be useful
as a heuristic both in assessing the similarities between theonomists
and neocons and in coming to a deeper understanding of the theologico
(scripturalized)-political mechanisms by which they come to their under-
standings of law. Schmitts vision for a political order, based on a notion of
the moral decision, is particularly helpful in showing that the political,
metaphysical, and moral presuppositions behind the views of the neocons
and the theonomists are homologous, in spite of any differences in politi-
cal vision or religious belief. Schmitt, the neocons, and the theonomists
all propose a radical critique of liberalism in order to reinvigorate a con-
ception of the political, which they believe liberalism has eviscerated.
Strongly resembling Schmitts philosophy, both the Bush neocons and the
theonomists try to regain lost authority by trying to reinstate the decisive
(manly) leader who can lead according to a strong sense of morality. Both
advocate exception to the law based on the moral decision of the leader.
As Agamben has compellingly, if briefly, shown in The State of Exception,
the u.s. administration has functioned since 9/11 increasingly in ways
envisioned in the political philosophy of Schmitteven if the philosophi-
cal motivations for neoconservatism refer to Leo Strauss, not Schmitt.
Likewise, the theonomists views seem startlingly similar to those of

Schmitt, though a direct influence is difficult to establish. Space does not
permit me to enter the debate on how these cross-fertilizations may have
occurred, though the one-time mentoring relationship between Schmitt
and Strauss suggests one possibility, 4 and Schmitts influence on German
theological debate suggests another. 5 Because Schmitts work is strongly
informed by Catholic theology, 6 it is useful in showing how some of the
concepts of neoconservatism can be theologically palatable to conservative
Christians like the theonomists, and vice versa.
Perhaps more importantly, Schmitts writing helps us to see
that there is a similar theological metaphysics at work in both visions of
authority and law (even for the purportedly atheist neocons).7 Schmitts
genealogy of the miracle in Political Theologysomewhat underempha-
sized in the many discussions of his workis especially helpful in making
intelligible the resonance between the religious right and the neocons. 8
Andrew Norris has already shown that in Schmitts genealogy, God is
the name of a structural position (153) that is maintained through secu-
larization, 9 and Agamben has already analyzed the interior exteriority of
law at work in Schmitts affirmation of exception to law (The Time 1046;
Homo Sacer 1529). Following from these observations, my argument is
that this interior exteriority in the law is enabled by a conception of an
exterior-interior, transcendent-immanent, miracle-working God. Ulti-
mately, the miracle, God, exception to law, and scripture are homologous.
This constellation in Schmitts discussion of the miracle illuminates the
tension that emerges in conservative discourses resulting from a post-
Enlightenment wish to return to a pre-Enlightenment theological struc-
turing of laws authority. As I will show, this same tension appears in the
contemporary discourse of exception to the law, wherein the value of u.s.
American democracy conflicts with a turn to a higher authority and the
hierarchies of moral virtue. In effect, for both neocons and theonomists,
the longing for a preliberal form of transcendent yet immanent power is
grafted onto an expectation that a democratically developed (immanent)
rule of law is the only moral form of law and yet must be broken according
to transcendent principles.
A slightly longer introduction to the theonomists is in order.
They are less well known than the neoconservative ideologues behind
the second Bush administrationthose who signed the statement of prin-
ciples of the Project for a New American Century (pnac) in 2000 and
who have been active in the Bush administration and behind the scenes,
including Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Donald Kagan, Francis Fukuy-

ama, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the prominent Christian leader
Gary Bauer.10 The theonomists, on the other hand, are those conservative
Christians who are actively working to structure a society based on the
principles of biblical law. The movement began in the early 1970s with the
publication of Rousas John Rushdoonys Institutes of Biblical Law (1973).
Since then it has been popularized and perhaps softened a little through
the writings of Francis Schaeffer and his many disciples. Among those
highly visible Christian leaders whose work has been influenced in some
way by theonomys goal of reinstating biblical law are: Timothy LaHaye,
Jack Van Impe, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Randall Terry, Bill McCart-
ney, and Herb Titus. As Hedges and Yurica have pointed out, many of these
leaders have had significant influence not only on their extensive Chris-
tian audiences but also on Republican administrations as far back as the
Reagan administration. To this end, theonomy currently has several think
tanks and Christian educational projects, such as the Chalcedon Institute,
Studies in Reformed Theology, the Coalition on Revival, and the Alliance
for Revival and Reformationall accessible on the Web. Several authors,
such as Gary North, Jay Grimstead, Ray Sutton, Greg Bahnsen, and Gary
DeMar, have made their names writing books and producing educational
materials that expound the views of theonomy. Here I will focus on theono-
mist ideas as they are expressed in Rushdoonys Institutes, in the extensive
documents of the Coalition on Revival (1986), and in an instructional video
series on the principles of theonomy titled Gods Law and Society (1999),
produced by The Alliance for Revival and Reformation.
The theology of theonomy (Gods law) is strongly imperialistic
in its impulse and is focused on establishing the hegemony of biblical law
on earth. The stated goals of theonomy are to create a society in which
people can live in full obedience to the Bible (Grimstead and Beisner,
Manifesto 8) and go forth into all the world and make Bible-obeying
disciples of all nations (10). The theology is also variously called domin-
ion theology, after the command to humans in Genesis 1: 26 to exercise
dominion over the earth, or reconstructionist theology, to designate
the reconstruction of a society along the Christian principles of biblical
law. Because theonomists believe that those people or nations that live
in opposition to biblical laws and commandments will, sooner or later, be
cursed and destroyed (9), they also believe that it is to the great benefit
of all mankind, Christian and non-Christian alike, to bring every societys
juridical and legal systems into as close an approximation to the laws and
commandments of the Bible as its citizens will allow (10). In the words
of Eric Holmberg, narrator of Gods Law and Society (1999), the work of
Christians should be reformation and revival in order to restore the crown
rights of Jesus Christ. Much of their discourse, however purportedly bibli-
cal, sounds generically right wing: they focus on family values, the right to
have and defend private property without paying tax on it, decentralized
government, and constitutional originalism.
Im the Decider: Decisionism,

Schmitt, Strauss, and the Neocons
If modernity and liberalism fill their critics with a sense of loss

of agency, one of the affective bonding agents for such critics is reclamation
of the (male) decision; the decision becomes very important for redress-
ing the loss of agency in modernity. The ability to be decisive is important
for both neocons and theonomists and in a sense marks their resistance
to the imagined liberal status quo. The decision becomes the key factor
in reinstating a social order driven by morality. Morals must be decided
upon, as must the hierarchies that depend on morality and the battles that
result from such hierarchies. The decision, morality, hierarchy, and war
are all of a piece in these critiques of liberalism. Decisionism is also one
of the means by which the exception to law is authorized.
One of the most obvious symptoms of this prevailing right-
wing use of decisionism was George W. Bushs celebrated statement of
April 18, 2006, Im the decider and I decide whats best (President Bush
Nominates). Though laughable, the seriousness of this statement should
not be ignored: it proclaims Bushs investment in his role as decisive
leader protecting u.s. interests. He tries to project an image of a resolute,
decisive (as opposed to flip-flopping) leader. This self-understanding has
been consistent over both his terms in office. Consider, for instance, his
response to the millions-strong worldwide protests to the Iraq war in 2003:
First of all, you know, size of protest, its like deciding, well, Im going to
decide policy based upon a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide
policy based upon the securityin this case, the security of the people
(New Securities, emphasis mine). Making a decision is more important
for Bush than listening to worldwide protest. More recently, in the same
interview with nbc news in which he bragged about his eclectic reading
list, including Camus and three Shakespeares, Bush restated his role
as decider. In the face of being gently mocked on the one-year anniversary
of Hurricane Katrina, he made sure to restate both his authority and his
vision of that authority. As he explained to the reporter: The great thing
about the presidency is that you are totally exposed. And people spend a
lot of, particularly if youre making decisions, and hard decisions, people
spend a lot of time, not only analyzing decisions, but analyzing the deci-
sion maker (President Bush Talks). Perhaps in an effort to offset any
question of intellectual ability, Bush appealed to this central affective
theme of decisionism. The appeal of the decider brings together more than
one of his constituencies: it resonates both with the political theory of the
neocons and with the theology of theonomy.
Perhaps along with Camus and Shakespeare, Bush has been
reading Schmitt. For Schmitt, the decision is crucial to a proper under-
standing of the political. Schmitts project is to reimagine and reinvigo-
rate the political. What has been lost through modernity and liberalism,
for Schmitt, is a true notion of the political, as well as the hierarchies of
authority necessary to keep the political alive. For Schmitt, the political
demands both decision and enmity. It opposes the order of liberalism,
which is characterized by endless discussion, and neutrality (a descrip-
tion of liberalism he gives via the voice of the nineteenth-century Catholic
Spanish counterrevolutionary, Donoso Corts [Political 5963]). Over and
against discussion, the political demands that a sovereign power make
decisions. Schmitt describes two kinds of important decisions over the
course of his work. These are the decision on the state of emergency, in
which exception to the law might be necessary (515), and the decision
on who is friend and who is enemy (The Concept 2768). The importance
of the decision on the exception is developed in his earlier work Politi-
cal Theology (1922) and seems to be replaced to some degree in the later
The Concept of the Political (1932) by the decision on the enemy. Though
he does not make the connection so explicitly, the implication is that the
sovereign must decide not only who is the enemy but whether or not that
enemy is threat enough to require measures outside the law in an emer-
gency situation.
The crux of Schmitts thought is the decision; but the decision
(and sovereignty defined by the decision) also requires the enemy. As read-
ers of Schmitt well know, his view is extremely bellicose. He suggests that
the decision between friend and enemy is only a real decision if killing the
enemy is an option: The friend, enemy and combat concepts receive their
real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physi-
cal killing (The Concept 33). The possibility of war is central to Schmitts
conception of the political, and it is set specifically against any possibility of

world peace. A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated,
a completely pacified globe, would be [...] a world without politics. Even
neutrality depends on enmity for Schmitt:
Should only neutrality prevail in the world, then not only war but
also neutrality would come to an end. The politics of avoiding
war terminates, as does all politics, whenever the possibility of
fighting disappears. What always matters is the possibility of the
extreme case taking place, the real war, and the decision whether
this situation has or has not arrived. ( The Concept 35)
It is as if Schmitt sees enmity as a fundamental structure in the world, in

the terms that Michel Foucault later describes as society [...] perpetu-
ally traversed by relations of war, even during times of peace (Society
49; see also 268).
Schmitt determines enmity, and the decision based on that
enmity, theologically.11 He is clear that his view of the political (i.e., the
decision on the enemy) is based on a fundamental assumption of the evil
nature of humans. As he says, [A]ll genuine political theories presuppose
man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and
dynamic being (The Concept 61). The decision on the enemy is based on
an assessment of the evilness of that enemy and its distinction from the
goodness of the friend. Because the decision on the enemy is a decision
about what (and who) is good and what (and who) is evil, Schmitt can say in
Political Theology that the core of the political idea [is] the exacting moral
decision (65, emphasis mine). A correct conception of the politicalthat
is, the decision between friend and enemyfor Schmitt, therefore, requires
an anthropology that assumes evil as a given. As he puts it,
Because the sphere of the political is in the final analysis deter-

mined by the real possibility of enmity, political conceptions and
ideas cannot very well start with an anthropological optimism.
This would dissolve the possibility of enmity, and thereby, every
specific political consequence. ( The Concept 64)
Schmitt scoffs at any political view predicated upon human goodness

(Political 5666). Because the world contains evil, the optimism of a
universal conception of man is impossible (The Concept 65).
Following from this anthropological pessimism is another of
the presuppositions that grounds Schmitts distinction between friend and
enemy, good and evil: people are not, and cannot be, equalmorally or
naturally. In other words, the theological distinction between good and
evil is also what maintains hierarchy. For Schmitt, there is no such thing
as universal humanity; such a notion would be equivalent with neutrality.
Gopal Balakrishnan has pointed out in his intellectual biography of Schmitt
that this conception of human inequality was perhaps most obviously (and
frighteningly) stated by Schmitt in conjunction with other members of
the Nazi legal body, the Bund Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Juristen
(bnsdj). They argued in 1935 that the term man be eliminated from
Article 1 of the Civil Code (Balakrishnan 188). Reported by the Frank-
furter Zeitung on November 19, 1935, the academic jurists of the bnsdj felt
that the term man was too universal and abstract.12 It got in the way of
seeing equal as equal and above all unequal as unequal, and emphasizing
the differences among men of different races, nations and occupational
estates in the sense of God-given realities (qtd. in Balakrishnan 188).
(Schmitt does not clarify in his work the obviously problematic theologi-
cal relation between God-given inequality and evil; that is, if inequality is
God-given, how can it also be judged as evil.) Schmitt contests any notion
of humanity that evokes a universal society [in which] there would no
longer be nations in the form of political entities, no class struggles, and
no enemy groupings (The Concept 55). If everyone were equal, there could
be no enemy and no decision. These kinds of hierarchies (class, nations,
etc.) are necessary for Schmitt if the political is to be maintained through
the decision. In a neutral society there is no possibility for an interest
group [...] to become cultural, ideological, or otherwise more ambitious
in the sense of the political (The Concept 57). Given that the decision on
the enemy is a moral decision, social groupings of class become a ques-
tion of morals. The logical conclusion hereone that of course came to
the fore in Schmitts Germany and can also be seen in the contemporary
conservative writing on social divisionsis that any social distinction that
might produce conflict can be seen as a moral distinction.
It is at this point that the political theology of Schmitt meets the
philosophy of Leo Strauss. Both argue against a neutral universal liberal
order and for a return to some notion of social hierarchy and leadership
based on morality. Though the precise details of the theology and philoso-
phy of their arguments are different, the overall structure is the same. As
Heinrich Meier points out, both Strauss and Schmitt eschew the idea of a
world state that would bring about neutrality and peace; for Strauss this
is because a world state would herald Nietzsches last man and the end of
philosophy on earth, whereas for Schmitt a world state would be a sinful

attempt to establish paradise on earth (Meier, Carl 47).
Strausss views on human evil and neutrality can be seen in his
comments on Schmitts Concept of the Political. In these comments, written
before he fled from Germany, Strauss also gives voice to several of his own
opinionsviews that can also be seen in his later work, which would shape
neoconservative thought. Strauss emphasizes that in contrast to Hobbes,
Schmitt sees evil not as simply naive animal instinct but rather as moral
baseness. Evil for Schmitt, concludes Strauss, is a moral deficiency that
requires dominion (Notes 100n26). Humans dangerousness means need
of dominion (98n25). Yet, as Susan Shell points out, Strauss is critical of
Schmitt for accepting a notion of naive evil (i.e., animal power) in that
he uses dangerousness to ground the political decision. Strauss accuses
Schmitt, in fact, of admiring instinctual (as opposed to moral) evil in the
affirmation of the political based on dangerousness (Shell 19093). In
other words, Strauss thinks that Schmitt is not holding firmly enough to
a notion of moral evil.13 For Strauss, it is precisely this kind of thinking
that led Hobbes astray. Hobbess denial of moral evil lead him to imagine
that there is no higher obligation than an individuals claims on the state,
and therefore, presumably, no basis (i.e., no morality) for differentiation
in decision making. Strauss argues, however, that if one denies moral evil,
one cannot demur in principle against the proclamation of human rights
as claims of individuals upon the state and contrary to the state, against the
distinction between society and state, against liberalism (Notes 99n26).
So moral evil is a necessary category if one wishes to argue against the
individuals primacy in liberalism and against some distinction between
society and state, as Schmitt does. Strauss, for his part, is not driven by a
notion of moral evil as much as by its reverse, a standard of moral virtue
for which people and leaders must strive and that some people lack. As he
writes elsewhere, one of the problems of modernity is that it replace[d]
moral virtue by universal recognition [which] eventually destroys the very
idea of a standard that is independent of actual situations (Restatement
132). In this view, moral virtuefollowing the classical philosophical
position that virtue is the highest good (On Tyranny 98)becomes the
higher standard upon which distinctions can be judged, decisions made,
and leadership taken.
The relation of moral virtue to politics and to its purported
nemesis, neutrality, comes through in the writing of Strausss followers as
well. The editors of Strausss On Tyranny summarize his argument against
a final neutralized universal state, which they characterize as made up of

Nietzsches men without chins, who lack the nobility of moral virtue:
[The] souls [of these last men] are atrophied. They are repugnant.
The mere fact we cannot help recoiling from them clearly shows
that we aspire to more than the satisfaction of being recognized
as free and equal. [...] When souls driven by great ambition are
denied scope to seek what is noble and beautiful they will become
bent on destruction. (Gourevitch and Roth xx)
Here, hierarchy is intimately connected to ambition and success. Likewise

Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism, follows the Strauss-
ian turn to the hierarchized society of classical philosophy. He writes:
A just and legitimate society, according to Aristotle, is one in which
inequalitiesof property, or station, or powerare generally perceived
by the citizenry as necessary for the common good. I do not see that this
definition has ever been improved on (Neo-Conservatism 167). This long-
ing for the age of classical philosophy and virtue is, of course, one of the
hallmarks of Straussian and neoconservative thought. One of the downfalls
of modern bourgeois society, for Kristol, is that there is no high nobility
of purpose, no selfless devotion to transcendental ends, no awe-inspiring
heroism (171). In other words, in liberalism there is no moral vision ade-
quate to distinguish equal from unequal, and to propel leadership forward.
The belief in neutrality and universalism is stagnating and unhealthy.
Ambitious leaders with noble visions are needed.
To see the argument repeated in terms applicable to the politi-
cal action of the u.s., one need only to look at the work of neocon ideologue,
Francis Fukuyama. For Fukuyama, in his famous book The End of History
and the Last Man, the fight for superiority is necessary for the creation of
anything else worth having in life (302). In national terms, the fight for
superiority requires an enemy and a war, because war calls forth both the
virtue and ambition required for a healthy society: A liberal democracy
that could fight a short and decisive war every generation or so to defend
its own liberty and independence would be far healthier and more satis-
fied than one that experienced nothing but continuous peace (32829).14
Certainly, the fight against the neutrality of equality is strongly present in
the actions of the Bush administration. The language of friend and enemy,
good and evil, and the need for a decisive stance against evil has become
familiar territory in u.s. American discourse, post 9/11.
A similar kind of argument can be seen in Harvey Mansfields

recent study on manliness, in which the longing for lost power comes
through clearly. Mansfield advocates for manly assertion as philosophi-
cal courage, based on the Platonic and Aristotelian principle of thumos (a
concept much favored by Strauss and the neocons). Thumos (spiritedness)
is that virtue, also described in the citation of Fukuyama above, of being
willing to risk and sacrifice ones life to save it (2067; 22021). Thus, the
manly or courageous person [...] takes responsibility in a risky situation
(226). This kind of thinking might explain the autoimmunization of democ-
racy to which Derrida points. In discussing whether or not the manly man
is justified in feeling superior, Mansfield admits that for Aristotle (and by
extension for his own view) manliness implies superiority and to some
degree tyranny. He writes,
When examined, manly assertiveness reveals an element of

tyranny [...] especially in the best regime. Politics in its manli-
ness has a problem it cannot resolve; the manly men in taking
responsibility for others cannot stop themselves from ruling their
inferiors and from treating them as slaves. Their very goodness,
when it is responsible, compels them to compel others so as to
make them good too. (217)
But this tyranny is acceptable, it would seem, as long as it is in the even-

tual interest of peace and the common good (218). The unstated implication
here, of course, is that, as Fukuyama also suggests, unending peace is not
to be desired; some kind of conflict is always needed for the expression of
manly assertion and thumos.
It would appear, therefore, that the neocons agree with Schmitt
that both the enemy and the exacting moral decision are necessary to
conceptions of the political. Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism
himself, has perhaps stated most clearly the way in which the neocons
bring together the work of Strauss and Schmitt. In a later definition of
neoconservatism in The Weekly Standard, Kristol lays out what he calls
the neoconservative persuasion. He argues against increased vulgarity
in u.s. culture and hints that it is morality that will rectify this problem
(as per Strauss and the Straussians); he argues for a foreign policy that
works against world government (as per Schmitt and Strauss); and he
argues for the need for political leaders to distinguish between friend
and enemy (Schmitt). Moreover, he suggests that the cure for vulgarity
may lie in the hands of religious groups (Neoconservative). Here, he is

consistent with his earlier Neo-Conservatism, in which he states explicitly
that perhaps one of the best responses to the losses of transcendence and
virtue in secular humanism is to breathe life into the older, now largely
comatose, religious orthodoxies (146). In this earlier work, Kristol reveals
that the neocons do in fact use the religious right for their own purposes
on the domestic front, but he also indicates that the theologies promoted by
religious groups are consistent with the moral philosophy of the neocons.
If the neocons consciously make use of religious conservatism (like that
of the theonomists), they can do so because the structure of their concerns
is so similar. I would now like to consider how the affinities between the
neocons and the theonomists go beyond the simple desire to strengthen
the moral fiber of the country.
Schmitt and the Theonomists
The theonomists share with Schmitt and the neocons a demand

for decisive leadership that grows out of a critique of liberalism (includ-
ing the anxiety about a neutralized world state), a valorization of war over
peace, a focus on the distinction between the friend and the evil enemy,
a desire to take a warfaring stand against the enemy, and a critique of a
notion of fundamental equality between people. Theonomists share with
Schmitt a religious worldview in which human nature is evil, moving
toward inevitable doom, and in need of salvation. Biblical law provides
theonomists with the standardaway from which liberal society has
movedby which to judge sinfulness and the enemy and on which to make
decisions and do battle.
For theonomists, the Enlightenment was the beginning of a
totally depraved worldview, in which the absolute of Gods law was replaced
by the relativity of natural law. As theonomys progenitor, Rushdoony, put it,
In accepting natural law as a substitute for God, the Enlightenment saw
it progressively in mechanistic terms. [...] The universe was compared to
clockwork (68889). Here Rushdoony sounds much like Schmitt who, in
his study of Hobbess Leviathan, analyzes in great detail the mechaniza-
tion process that destroys the Leviathan by neutralizing it. Rushdoony is
deeply troubled by an image of the universe that does not require Gods
intervention and that runs in a mechanized way without Gods help. In
this same vein, the theonomists who expound their view in the video
series Gods Law and Society constantly decry humanism and any form of
religious expression (such as deism) that is associated with it. Their argu-
ment for making the United States into a biblically based nation depends
on the premise that the founding of the u.s. was not as much a product of
the Enlightenment as of Christianity. In their view, because the United
States has always has been a nation bound to the Bible, it must return to
its origins; Christians must therefore resist any constitutional change that
would pervert these origins.
Theonomists, like Schmitt, argue against neutrality in favor
of a world where clear stances can be taken. In order to resist the evils of
neutrality inaugurated by the Enlightenment, Christians must fight. The
video series Gods Law and Society suggestsin a segment titled The
Myth of Neutralitythat there is no such thing as neutrality, therefore,
Christians must fight for the right side. The narrator, Eric Holmberg, tells
his audience that Jesus addressed this issue of neutrality when he told
his disciples in Matthew 12.30, He who is not with me is against me. He
goes on to say, The very idea that we as followers of Christ can peace-
fully coexist with the pagan world system is refuted by the Lord himself:
Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I did not come to
bring peace, but a sword (Matthew 10.34). Later on in the same segment,
interviewee Phil Vollman, senior pastor of Shiloh Christian Church in
Ohio, emphatically argues, There is no such thing as neutrality [...] this
is a winner take all battle.
War takes a prominent place in the language of theonomy.
Fighting becomes a way to express decisionism and the law. The attempt
to end war through some form of legal social contract is, for Rushdoony,
an attempt to take the place of God. He complains of the Enlightenment
legacy, Since neither God nor nature had eliminated wars, man, the new
god and law-giver, would mold the nations and all men to eliminate wars
(689). By contrast, the law of God should bring warfare, not end it. He
makes his case for bellicosity in a section subtitled Law and Warfare,
where he argues that law is a form of warfare, and indeed, the major and
continuing form of warfare (92). Those who do not abide by Gods law
are enemies of the law-order and must be arrested. [...] Law is

a state of war; it is the organization of the powers of civil gov-
ernment to bring the enemies of the law-order to justice. The
officers of the law are properly armed; in a godly state, they
should be armed by the justice of the law as well as weapons of
warfare. (9293)
The video series Gods Law and Society contains a similar warfaring
impulse. For instance, Pastor Vollman suggests that if Christians properly
understand their prophetic role in the real world, they will realize that we
have just declared war in time and history to all those who will not bow
the knee to our king the Lord Jesus Christ. Likewise, Randall Terry, the
founder of Operation Rescue, says, So when Christians take scriptures
out of context to try to justify or to vindicate retreat and cowardice, I say
to them: Wait a minute. The Bible says that Jesus is the Prince of Peace,
but it also says, the Lord is a man of war. It is unclear how far a step it is
between metaphorical, spiritual warfare and real physical warfare. But
the distance between the two is made closer when the death penalty is
considered the proper biblical response to enemies of law-order, such as
those who commit adultery, incest, bestiality, sodomy, rape of a betrothed
virgin, and so on (Rushdoony 77). Jay Rogers, one of the associate pro-
ducers of Gods Law and Society, puts it thus on the discussion board of
his online Christian news source, Forerunner: We believe that there are
two biblically prescribed punishments enforceable by the state: execution
and restitution. We do not believe in jail sentences. We believe in only the
biblically prescribed punishments for violations of the moral law.
The decisions demanded while working for the dominion of
Christ are, therefore, decisions on the enemy. Whereas the enemy is out-
side the nation for the neocons, for the theonomists, the enemy is within;
it is most often defined by those who violate family values. The enemy is
part of the real world, where they really kill babies, where they really
sodomize our sons, and where they really enact public policy detrimental
to our health and well being (Vollman in Gods Law). The enemy is to
be dealt with decisively and possibly violently (if the death penalty laws
would conform). She or he is variously demonized, most often in some
way related to abortion or homosexuality. The way that one knows who
the enemy is, of course, is through Gods law. As Terry puts it, arguing
against moral relativity, the only way to verify the (to him obvious and
ubiquitous) feeling that homosexuality is wrong is because the Bible says
so (Gods Law). The law becomes that which defines the enemy. Thus, in
the real world, against which some nondecisive Christians are not properly
engaged, womens reproductive roles and masculine impenetrability are
not properly upheld in the way that Gods law demands.
This battle requires decisive, courageous leaders. Over and
over in Gods Law and Society, believers are encouraged to take a stand,
to have courage to do the right thing. The Church needs Christian leaders
who, as Randall Terry puts it, do not want to run from the three Cs of
conflict, controversy, and confrontation, in order to embrace the three
Cs of comfort, cowardice, and compromise (Gods Law). The Coalition
for Revival expresses this same need for reinvigorated leadership in its
Manifesto for the Christian Church, signed by four hundred Christian
leaders. In this vision for the Church, leadership within churches and
church organizations must be clearly defined and hierarchically orga-
nized: [S]truggles for power and poorly defined organizational chains
of command must be seen as problems not to be tolerated, except for
temporary periods, until the unity around the proper leadership can be
defined and established (Grimstead and Beisner 12). Decisive leadership
is required in the church.
If dominion is tied up with the decision over friend and enemy
for Schmitt, that decision seems also to be part of defining masculinity
within conservative Christianity (as it is for the neocons). Predictably,
masculinity is tied to the family. There are strong affinities here with
what Linda Kintz has shown more generally within the Christian mens
movement to be a consistent pairing of leadership and masculinity (11139).
Indeed, it is possible, as Hedges argues, that the Christian mens move-
ment makes theonomy palatable for the common person. Certainly for
Rushdoony, the struggle for Christian dominion is a mans work: [T]he
exercise of dominion in work and knowledge precedes the exercise of
dominion as husband and father (343). Along these lines, Kintz shows
in her analysis of one book commonly read in the mens movementStu
Webers Tender Warriors: Gods Intention for a Manthat the ideals of mas-
culinity are related to notions of leadership and dominion. As she describes
Webers view, The Four Pillars of manhood are king, warrior, mentor, and
friend. [...] [T]he king, of course, is God, but he legitimates Adam, his
earthly son, who is destined to rule with all power and authority and who
is instructed beside the Genesis spring to have dominion (121). Kintz
shows how male leadership is so central to the reclamation of the male
role in the family, using Tony Evans words to Promise Keepers:
[S]it down with your wife and say something like this: Honey,
Ive made a terrible mistake. Ive given you my role. I gave up
leading this family, and I forced you to take my place. Now I must
reclaim that role. Dont misunderstand what Im saying here.
Im not suggesting that you ask for your role back, Im urging
you to take it back. [...] [T]here can be no compromise here. If
youre going to lead you must lead. Be sensitive. Listen. Treat

the lady gently and lovingly. But lead! (qtd. in Kintz 129)
Dominion, decisive male leadership, and the family are of a piece in this
thought.
The man who does not assume leadership in the world and in
his family is the effeminate man. Men who are not decisive are said to be
sissies (e.g. Evans, No More 18398), or, as Vollman puts it, referring to
politicians who are not decisive, suffering from pta, permanent testicular
atrophy (Gods Law). The Coalition for Revivals Manifesto repents of
this lack of male decisiveness (female decisiveness is not mentioned): We
have permitted both Christian and non-Christian men of our society to fail
in leadership, becoming emasculated, tamed, dependent, self-centered,
and soft (Grimstead and Beisner 6). So the decision is important not only
for a conception of the political but also for a conception of the masculine.
Moreover, for theonomists, as already discussed, (masculine) decisions
are based on an understanding of Gods law and on fighting the enemy.
One can see, therefore, how Bushs proclamation of himself as a decider
might appeal strongly to this constituency.
The law also becomes that which distinguishes equal from not
equal. The Coalition on Revivals document The Christian World View
of Law suggests that civil law, modeled on biblical law, must recognize
inequalitiesboth God given and created by humansrather than try to
do away with them:
We affirm that civil law must recognize that there are some
inherent differences between human beings (e.g. capabilities);
that additional differences result from Gods assignment of dif-
ferent roles to different human beings (as within marriage and
the family); that individuals, by their own actions, may create
inequalities (e.g. economic inequalities may result from the
diligence of some and the sloth of others); that civil law should
recognize these differences as legitimate and not attempt to
minimize them; and that efforts to impose total equality (iden-
ticalness, leveling, or egalitarianism) through civil law will
cause great harm to both society and individuals. (Grimstead
and Beisner 22)
Clearly some inequalities, which the law is to recognize, are created by

disobedience to the law.
Rushdoony shows how inequalities created through disobedi-

ence to the law become enmity in his section Law as Warfare. Charac-
teristically, he focuses on sexual sin: prostitution and homosexuality. He
argues that in biblical times, Israelite prostitutes and homosexuals were
not simply sinners before the law; they were enemies of law, outside of
the law. Such persons should not be considered citizens, because only the
right have the rights (92). Canaanites, because they practiced prostitu-
tion and homosexuality as a form of religiosity (according to Rushdoony,
who does not substantiate this point), were such horrific enemies of the
law that they were all to be killed (93). Inequality becomes enmity and
ultimately warfare.
Because they oppose neutralitysince the world is inherently
marked and divided by good and eviltheonomists argue against a one-
world order, again much like Schmitt. They reject what they call the global
government of Babylon. As Jeff Ziegler, President of Christian Endeavors
and Reformation Bible Institute, puts it in Gods Law and Society, Scrip-
ture does not support dictatorships. In fact, it doesnt trust dictatorships.
The whole idea behind God judging Babylon was that man was coming
together. He had all of his strength and all of his wherewithal coming
together in one central locale to have a global government, and God, by
one stroke of his hand, decentralized their government. Textual overlay
tells the viewer that Ziegler is referring to the tower of Babel in Genesis 11.
But this way of describing the global government is no doubt also meant to
trigger the apocalyptic tradition, based on a certain interpretation of the
book of Revelation, in which Babylon is the future evil, one-world order
into which the antichrist will try to incorporate the whole world.
The theonomists solution to the threat of global government
is somewhat different from that proposed by Schmitt. Whereas Schmitt
argues that the sovereign representative of the state is the one who should
make the decision on the enemy, theonomists argue against any form of
centralized government. Rushdoony himself explains in an interview on
Gods Law and Society that the dominion of Christ should take place in
a grassroots way starting with self-government then moving up through
the family, education (with a strong emphasis on homeschooling), the
work place, society in general, and civil law. Thus, theonomy struggles
with the contradictory impulses of hierarchy and decentralization: on
the one hand, it wants dominion of the crown rights of Jesus, through
biblical law, which seems to aim at centralization; on the other, it empha-
sizes decentralization. Theonomists work very hard to smooth over this
contradiction. Over and again they insist that the dominion they envision
is not like dictatorship. Clearly, they see themselves as democratic. At the
same time, they demand centralized leadership through unquestioned
patriarchal leadership in the church and the family, which in their view
are the two structures most important for establishing Gods law. In some
way, the decision and battle that Schmitt argues for at the level of the state,
the theonomists argue for at the level of the church and family.
Where Schmitt is interested in the relationships between states
and in the decision of the sovereign of a state, the theonomists are, to
some degree, interested in individuals decisions to fight the battle for the
dominion of King Jesus. At times, decisions must be made in the face of
state power; indeed, at times they have engendered civil disobedience (as
evident, for instance, in the actions of Operation Rescue under Randall
Terry). Here, the theonomists are true to their Protestant rootsand also,
unwittingly, more liberal than they might like to imagine. For Schmitt, this
kind of individualism is far too liberal; it is problematic in that it breeds
autonomy of decision and distrust of the state, both of which hinder the
states ability to fight the enemy (The Concept 7071). The state should be
able to demand the obedience of the individual in return for protection
(The Leviathan 83), an obedience that should include sacrifice of life if
necessary (The Concept 71). Individualism gets in the way of such obedi-
ence. In Schmitts words, For the individual as such there is no enemy
with whom he must enter into a life-and-death struggle if he personally
does not want to do so (The Concept 71). The individual can choose not
to fight, not to sacrifice his life, thus undermining the power of the state
to fight its battles and leading to an entire system of demilitarized and
depoliticalized concepts. Indeed, it was precisely the division that Hob-
bes made between public belief and private belief, further exploited by
Spinoza, that ultimately caused the view of the total state, which Schmitt
so admired, to deteriorate (The Leviathan 5363).15 To Schmitts mind, the
idea that people could make individual decisions on matters of belief was
what caused the secular and religious powers united in the glorious fig-
ure of the Leviathan to come unhinged from each other, allowing for the
emergence of a mechanized, secular, and neutralized state power (83).
If the form of governmentality for which the theonomists argue
does not mirror precisely that proposed by Schmitt, Bush, on the other
hand, acts much more like the sovereign representative of the state that
Schmitt esteems. In fact, it would seem that Bush is closer to Schmitts
model than to the grassroots patriarchal leader opposed to centralization

that the theonomists esteem. One might suppose that such differences in
opinion over governance would hinder collaborations between theonomists
and Bush neocons (i.e., that the theonomists would reject the centralization
that the President embodies). But these differences are partially obscured
by the resolute populist figure that Bush tries to approximate. He plays the
part of the individualist leader making moral decisions, though in fact he
acts as the head of state. But differences in the ideal locus of governance
are also mitigated by the fear of loss that resonates between the two: fear
of loss of human distinctions (along with superiority), loss of standards of
good and evil, loss of decisiveness, loss of masculinity.
The Interior Exteriority

of the Law and the Exception
Though the theonomists are not in complete agreement with

either Schmitt or the neocons, Schmitts political philosophy is useful in
that it helps us to see that the resolution of a sense of loss comes, for both
groups, through the structural contour of the interior exteriority of the law
and the miracle, which allows for exception to the law. It is to this part of
Schmitts theory that I now turn.
The neocons, at least those in the Bush administration, seem to
valorize the law and yet appeal to something higher than the law. Two of
Bushs constant refrains are that democracy fosters the rule of law and
that the best example of a democracy that enforces the rule of law is the
u.s. So for instance, in the recent discussions over immigrant labor, Bush
consistently reiterated that the u.s. privileges the rule of law and therefore
must secure the border: This nation is a nation of laws. And were going
to enforce our laws. Thats what the American people expect (President
Discusses). And yet, as is becoming increasingly common knowledge,
Bush frequently appends signing statements to the bills he signs into law
in order to reinterpret them according to constitutional powers, which
he asserts give him the right to ignore sections of the bill (Savage; Cooper).
The most notorious of these was Bushs signing statement accompanying
the ban on torture (part of the Department of Defense Appropriations Bill,
2006, h.r. 2863), in which he argued that he would interpret that section
of the bill on the basis of his constitutional authority to protect the people
of the United States (Presidents Statement). Effectively, he left himself
room to make use of torture if needed. In other words, the president

makes exceptions to law based on some notion of a constitutionally based
presidential authority that is higher than the law.
Herein lies the logic behind Schmitts state of exception,
which has recently been brought to the attention of the intellectual world
by Giorgio Agamben. The state of exception is a suspension of law in an
emergency situation for the purposes of consolidating power. A state of
emergency allows political leaders to suspend law for their own purposes
(State 14). Though he traces the state of exception back to Roman law,
Agamben has been concerned to show the increasing role of the state of
exception in modern democracies, making special note of the way it has
operated in the United States since 9/11. He underscores Schmitts famous
formulation, The sovereign is he who decides on the state of excep-
tion (Political 5). The sovereign decides when the enemy threatens to
the degree that an emergency must be called and usual legal structures
bypassed. The exacting (manly) moral decision, then, becomes not only
that which determines the enemy, but also that which bypasses the exist-
ing law in dealing with the enemy.
As Agamben points out, Schmitt develops his notion of the
sovereigns priority over law in Political Theology. The sovereign draws
on his authority to make decisions that go beyond the law (the exception).
For Schmitt, all law is situational law to be contextualized by the sov-
ereign. The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its total-
ity. [...] The decision parts here from the legal norm, and (to formulate it
paradoxically) authority proves that to produce law it need not be based
on law (Political 13). For Schmitt, it is the sovereign that has access to
unlimited authority, whereby he can then decide either to produce the
law or to break it. As he puts it, [T]he existence of the state is undoubted
proof of its superiority over the validity of the legal norm (12). It is impor-
tant to notice the connections that Schmitt draws between authority, the
sovereign, and the state. Yet the state is itself a legal entity. Thus, the law
itself bestows the authority over law.16 Though Schmitts views about law,
authority, and state do change over time, this kind of thinking seems to
stay consistent throughout his work. Jan-Werner Mller shows that even
though Schmitt eventually considered decisionism arbitrary (an idea sug-
gested in his writing even as early as Political Theology), he always opted
for basing decisions on a notion of the concrete order, which for him
came to be ultimately grounded in the authority of the Fhrer (3739). A
dialectic between a concrete (legal) order and authority always remains
for Schmitt; in fact, one of the reasons Schmitts power declined in the
Nazi party is that he wanted to retain a notion of the state, whereas Hitler
wished for the movement to be predicated on his own personal authority
(Mller 3839; see also Schwab xxxi).
Agamben is interested in precisely this process whereby sover-
eign authority, which comes from outside the law to make the decision on
the exception (and on the enemy), is also inscribed within the law. Agam-
ben describes the relation between authority and law as an indeterminacy
between inside and outside, whereby the law is applied in disapplying
itself (The Time 105). As Schmitt expresses it in Political Theology, The
exception remains, nevertheless, accessible to jurisprudence because both
elements, the norm as well as the decision, remain within the framework
of the juristic (13). Agamben argues that this process is totalizing pre-
cisely because of the indeterminacy it creates between inside and outside
the law. In his words,
To the extent that the sovereign has the legitimate power to

suspend the validity of the law, he is both inside and outside
the law. [...] [T]his means that there is no outside of the law.
In the state of sovereign autosuspension, the law thus meets up
with the utmost limit of its enforcement and [...] coincides with
reality itself. (105)
In effect, authority garnered from within the law is implemented as if it

were authority from outside the law.
In the exceptions to the law advocated by Bush and also by
theonomists (through civil disobedience), the relation between law and
authority is something like that described by Schmitt in terms of a seem-
ing exterior authority acting from within the law. As already discussed,
Bush uses constitutional authority (internal to the law) to override the law.
Likewise, theonomists suggest that Gods law should motivate decisions to
take a stance against existing civil law; but the biblical laws eventually put
in place, they argue, should be structured by some form of u.s. American
democracy. The biblical rule of law they envision will not resemble, as
they take great pains to say, Islamic law, totalitarian law, or centralized
Church (read Catholic) law. Thus, the external power of biblical law to
which theonomists appeal when they argue against a particular civil law
or when they decide to break a law is already inscribed in and dictated
by their understanding of u.s. law and politics. In looking for appropri-
ate u.s. models (since present forms of u.s. law are morally deficient),
they idealize the original u.s. Constitution and its vision of democracy as
somehow exemplifying Gods law. So, for instance, George Grant, director
of Kings Meadow Study Center (for reformed theology) argues in Gods
Law and Society that the separation of powers outlined in the u.s. Consti-
tution is based on biblical concepts. Likewise, the Coalition on Revivals
document, The Christian World View of Law, describes the original u.s.
American view of law as one commensurate with Gods view, as laid out
in Scripture:
[T]here was a consensus among both Americas leaders and

her people that certain legal/constitutional/political principles
were unarguably true. These principlesJudeo Christian in
natureincluded the following: the existence of a God who is
transcendent yet definitely involved in the affairs of men; the
existence of absolute standards authored by this God to guide the
nations political and legal life; the belief that nations are obli-
gated to seek and obey Gods standards and will suffer for their
disobedience; and the reliance upon Scripture as the clearest
expression of those standards. (Grimstead and Beisner 6)
It is this view of God-centered civil law that theonomists feel has been lost
and to which they wish u.s. American civil law to return. Thus, theono-
mists, like the Bush neocons, idealize law as it appears in the u.s. American
form of liberal democracy to the extent that this very law comes to appear
as a form of power outside of law that allows them to make exceptions to
it. This masking of power is the ideological operation par excellence in
that it hides its working as such.17
Miraculous Exceptions
Schmitt offers a reason in Political Theology for the develop-

ment of this inside-out relationship between authority and law, as well as
the invisibility of this relationship. In that text he outlines the genealogy
of various conceptions of the modern state as products of secularized
theology. Schmitt famously begins chapter three of Political Theology
with the statement, [A]ll significant concepts of the modern theory of the
state are secularized theological concepts (36). The chapter then traces
how changes to the idea of God in modernity correspond to changes in
jurisprudence and conceptions of the state. He suggests that conceptu-
alizations of jurisprudence were traditionally structured along the lines
of a theological view of a transcendent, yet immanent miracle-working

God, that is, a God who is both inside and outside of the created order.
He valorizes the exception as the proper heir to this preliberal belief in
miracles, where transcendent power is made immanent. In his words,
The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology
(36). Schmitt reveals his political ties in wanting to recoup this notion of
transcendent-yet-immanent authority for the state to make exceptions to
law; nonetheless, his genealogy of the exception is revealing. The story he
tells shows precisely how it is that the neocons and theonomists come to
a similar conception of law in spite of their differences. It helps us to see
that although in democracies the law is meant to be based on the reasoning
of the people, the fact that the origins of laws authority are theologically
structured leaves ample room for a revalorization of transcendent author-
ity, either through the sovereign (as with the Schmittian Bush neocons),
through virtue (the Straussians), or through the Bible (the theonomists).
Schmitts genealogy runs as follows: As notions of God changed
from being both transcendent and immanent to simply transcendent
(deist) or simply immanent (Hegel), so also notions of sovereignty and the
state changed. Over time, the notion of a deist God was detached from the
machine of the state and the notion of an immanent God was transformed
into the will of the people. The decisionistic and personalistic element
in the concept of sovereignty was thus lost (Political 48). Schmitt is not
happy about the theological change whereby the single sovereign mak-
ing decisions is transformed into a shared decision-making process. He
sounds as if he is responding, avant la lettre, to Foucaults descriptions
of the automatization and disindividualization of power in modernity
(Discipline 202). He looks back longingly to the time when the individual
sovereign made a firm decision. Moreover, loss of belief in the immanent/
transcendent God also meant loss of belief in the miracle (Gods inter-
vention into the world) and therefore loss of acceptance of the sovereign
exception. This secularized theological metaphysics rejected not only the
transgression of the laws of nature through an exception brought about
by direct intervention, as is found in the idea of a miracle, but also the
sovereigns direct intervention in a valid legal order (3637). Schmitt is
clearly concerned about the loss of both the sovereign exception and the
miracle. Behind this concern can be seen a yearning for both the authority
of transcendence (sovereign authority) and the power of immanence (the
ability to affect the workings of the world). Nostalgia for the lost power of
the deciding sovereign is tied to nostalgia for the miracle.
Prior to this point, which occurred sometime in the nineteenth

century, a degree of transcendence was fortunately (for Schmitt) safe-
guarded (even during the Enlightenment) through what Schmitt calls
the difference between the substance and the practice of the law in juridi-
cal conceptualization (Political 42). So, for instance, Schmitt cites even
Rousseau, chief ideologue of the Enlightenment, as saying, Imitate the
immutable decrees of the divinity (46), thus preserving some notion of
transcendence. Though he does not state it directly, it seems as though
Schmitt understands the substance of the law in this period to properly
model the kind of transcendence that enables the immanent decision of
the jurist, sovereign, or state on the particular practice of the law. In other
words, for Schmitt, proper juridical thinking has the structure of the
miracle (transcendent yet immanent, exterior yet interior) and therefore
allows for the possibility of the exception. He explains approvingly that
this conception of jurisprudence, like theology, had a double principle,
reason (hence there is a natural theology and natural jurisprudence) and
scripture, which means a book with positive revelations and directives
(3738, emphasis mine). Though he does not explain this formulation, it
seems as though for Schmitt, this kind of juridical thinking is still con-
nected to a notion of transcendent immanence, whereby natural theology
and jurisprudence (reason) remain in the structural place as transcendent
while positive law (scripture) is immanent. Even in the Enlightenment,
reason was seen as providing the substance of the law and was enacted
on positive law by the sovereign. In this vein, for Schmitt, the best con-
stitutions [i.e., scriptures] are the work of a sole wise legislator [reason]
who stands in the structural place of God (47). In this double principle,
scripture, or law, still requires a higher outside element for its interpre-
tation; post-Enlightenment transcendence can still be filled, for Schmitt,
through the reason of the wise sovereign or state.
Schmitt wants to reclaim this older theological conception of
jurisprudence, as his veneration of the sovereign decision on the exception
shows; but his text indicates that he also thinks that it does continue on, in
hidden form, in the relation between the state and the law. The state ends
up acting as the transcendent power that intervenes in the affairs of those
looking to it for legal regulation. Here, it is worth quoting him at length:
But whoever takes the trouble of examining the public law

literature of positive jurisprudence for its basic concepts and
arguments will see that the state intervenes everywhere. At times
it does so as a deus ex machina, to decide according to positive

statute a controversy that the independent act of juristic percep-
tion failed to bring to a generally plausible solution; at other
times it does so as the graceful and merciful lord who proves
by pardons and amnesties his supremacy over his own laws.
There always exists the same inexplicable identity: lawgiver,
executive power, police, pardoner, welfare institution. Thus to
an observer who takes the trouble to look at the total picture
of contemporary jurisprudence, there appears a huge cloak-
and-dagger drama, in which the state acts in many disguises
but always as the same invisible person. The omnipotence of
the modern lawgiver, of which one reads in every textbook on
public law, is not only linguistically derived from theology. (38,
emphasis mine)
So although the transcendent-immanent relation has been theologically

expulsed from contemporary understandings of the state, it still, Schmitt
suggests, permeates the states interaction with the law in secularized
form. The state acts as God, deciding on the fates of those who stand
before the law. So some sense of transcendence is maintained, even though
exclusively scientific thinking has [...] repress[ed] the essentially juristic-
ethical thinking [i.e., based on true transcendence] that had predominated
in the age of enlightenment [and before] (48). It is in order to reclaim this
theological heritage that Schmitt is so anxious to defend the authority of
the state over that of the people.
Nonetheless, this double principle of reason and scripture (a
book with positive revelations and directives) of which Schmitt speaks
marks a point of slippage between the interiority and exteriority of the law
that is important to interrogate. The theonomists view of scripture shows
how this slippage works. For theonomists, the Bible is much more than
positive law (a book); it is the only way to the substance of the law, that is,
to the transcendence (the higher Law) behind the particular regulations
in scripture as well. The exterior is only known via the interior. As the
Coalition on Revivals Christian World View of Law puts it, revealed Law
is a [...] complete, precise, objective, and reliable statement of higher law
[...]; Gods special revelation concerning law is to be found in the Bible and
the Bible alone (Grimstead and Beisner 11). Yet, at the same time, revealed
law is to function as positive law. The scripture is both transcendent and
immanent. Scripture has the same structure as miracle.
In fact, the scripture cannot fully be understood without

recourse to the external authority of the Spirit, which, as it turns out, is
also internally produced. As the Coalition on Revival puts it: We affirm
that mans understanding of Gods Law and its application to civil law can
be enlightened and enlivened constantly by the work of the Holy Spirit in
the world today (Grimstead and Beisner, The Christian 12). The Spirit
acts as an exception to the final authority of the Bible; it helps humans to
decide where and how to apply the Bible to civil law. The contradiction
between the Bibles final authority and the Spirits additional authority
mirrors the interior exteriority of law that I have been discussing. Just as
(original) u.s. American civil law is thought to be authorized and judged
by the Bible, thereby giving the Bible authority over it, the Bible is thought
to be authorized and judged by the Spirit, giving the Spirit authority over
the Bible. Further, just as the Bible reveals that God alone is the ultimate
source of civil law and the very concept of civil law originated in Him, so
the Spirit reveals that the Bible has something to say to civil law. How is
the Spirits work to be judged? Presumably, through the Bible. Here again
the totalization of law and authority appears. The totalizing move between
Bible as positive law and Bible as transcendent principle becomes clear.
The Bible both reveals God/the Spirit as the authority behind the civil law,
and it reveals the civil law itself, further revealed by the Spirit, whose work
is judged by the book. The Bible is both scripture and reason.
It could be said that an inverse relation between reason and
scripture is at work in the reasoning of the Bush neocons. For the Strauss-
ians, as we have seen, the transcendent authoritative principle is virtue,
determined through philosophical contemplation and manly assertion,
whereas positive law is like scripture, the book of regulations to which vir-
tue is superior. Along these lines Bushs pretensions to decisive leadership
may well resonate with a notion of philosophic contemplation of virtue that
is transcendent to any particular form of law. Bush implies that his decision
making is based on some higher (Christian) virtue. It is at this point that
the overlap between the two groups is really solidified, since his notion of
Christian virtue is biblically definedand influenced by theonomy (via
Dobson and others). Yet, Bushs decision making, in order to be acceptable
to the general population, must always be tempered by a commitment to u.s.
democracy. Thus the u.s. Constitution (like scripture) also becomes the prin-
ciple (like reason) by which other laws can be judged and broken. Where the
theonomists scripture also becomes their reason, Bushs (biblically based)
reason/virtue becomes conflated with his scripture (the Constitution).
To come back to the question of resonances with which I began,

one can see how the specific tactics of the neocons and the theonomists
might be acceptable to one another, given the affinity Schmitt traces
between the miracle and the exception. The interior/exterior structure of
laws authority is conditioned by a belief in miracles, a belief that expects
the exception to occur as validation of the revealed order of things. The
Bush neocons function through the transcendent/immanent structure of
miracle in their use of the exception because of a combined belief in tran-
scendent virtue and immanent democracy. The theonomists expectation
of miracle in the world, central to their worldview, makes them predis-
posed to the exception. For both, the inbreaking of external authority in
the world is expected and desired as welcome relief to the loss of decisive
power in liberalism. As noted earlier, the external authoritative principle
is not understood as emanating from the logic of the law itself (or the will
of the people), even though it does; rather, it is seen as truly external. The
disavowal of the interior exteriority of this relation hides the totalizing
impulse that both views share. It is little wonder, then, that the theonomists
and the neocons are able to work together on domestic policy and that the
theonomists do not revolt against the neocons foreign policy.
Restoring Losses?
In her essay Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,

Wendy Brown diagnoses the disappearance of liberal democracy through
the neoliberal corporate takeover of politics. In some senses, her work
could be said to show how the interior exteriority that I have been discuss-
ing has been enacted in economic terms, though that would be the subject
of another paper. What is of interest to me here is that she cautions those
who wish to counteract the increasing totalitarianism of governmentality
against defending liberal political values. She argues that perhaps properly
mourning and letting go of liberal democracy is more appropriate so as
to avoid a melancholic relationship with it that would simply reinstall its
worst qualities through nostalgia. As she puts it,
[T]he Left is losing something it never loved, or at best was

highly ambivalent about. [...] [W]e criticized liberal democracy
not only for its hypocrisy and ideological trickery but also for
its institutional and rhetorical embedding of bourgeois, white,
masculinist, and heterosexual superordination at the heart of
humanism. (53)
Browns astute comments remind us that the reclamation of hierarchy and

the (manly) moral decision is not, in the end, so very far away from the
heart of liberal democracy, even as it pushes toward a more totalitarian
regime.
Likewise, Schmitts genealogy shows that the return to hierar-
chy and to the decision, with which both the neocons and the theonomists
remedy their sense of loss, is merely the replenishing of a structure that
has persisted in liberalism through the process of secularization. The
exacting moral (male) decision simply reclaims and repeats the role of
the transcendent/immanent God; the hierarchies thus produced serve to
justify the need for this role. Like Freuds incorporated lost love object (to
which Brown refers [54])whose loss is so traumatic that it is encrypted
within the ego to haunt it through melancholiathe transcendent/imma-
nent God haunts liberal democracy. At the end of the day then, one might
say that these critiques of liberal democracy (by Schmitt, the neocons,
and the theonomists) are not actually critiques at all, but restorations (a
fact made manifest in the tension between the critique of modernity and
the desire for u.s. American democracy). And yet, what is disavowed in
the reclamation of hierarchy and the decision is the interior exteriority of
the determinations by which the decision is made. There is no sense that
positive law (i.e., original u.s. constitutional law) produces both a certain
kind of scriptural authority (one that mandates an American form of
biblical law) and a kind of transcendent reasoning (the kind that can use
the Constitution to override Congress in the name of safety). One can see
how autoimmunization works as a result of the tension between pre- and
post-Enlightenment values: the law eats itself as it interprets itself, without
appearing to do so.
To Browns caution, then, I would add that if liberal democracy
is already itself in a melancholic relationship with the notion of a tran-
scendent/immanent Godwhose disavowed haunting pushes it toward
totalitarianismthen refusal to mourn would be a double refusal of loss,
with the double risk of melancholia. Perhaps there is something to be
learned from the theonomists and the neocons. Perhaps they worry about
real losses.
As I said at the outset, my point in this essay has not been to
defend liberalism, but rather to show what is at stake in the critique. It is
worth considering that the losses generating the current love/hate rela-
tionship with it (loss of the miracle, loss of male agency, loss of hierarchy)
are serious losses, to be celebrated, but also to be mourned if the political

is to move beyond bellicose totalitarianism. Rather than disavow these
losses in defending liberal democracy against Schmitt18 or in looking to
Schmitt for (melancholic) answers to or for liberalism, no matter how
well intentioned and nuanced,19 perhaps it is better to accept these losses,
work through them, and see where else we can go politically without
reinstating them in the totalizing reinforcement of scripture by reason
and vice versa. What might it mean to do politics without any recourse to
transcendent principles? Without guidance by scripture of any kind (i.e.,
any set of regulations through which immanence and rationality are taken
for transcendent authority)? As Brown puts it, even the comforting leftist
formula of reason, knowledge, truth and freedom against power is no
longer viable now that power is understood to be interior to these very
discourses (103).
What would it mean to claim uncertainty as a political prin-
ciple? Here, perhaps deconstructions insistence on interrupting the very
certainties of justiceto which I might add the political or decisionism
based on moralitymight be helpful. Derrida might say, as he does in
Force of Law, that justice goes beyond mere calculation. Though Der-
rida ends up arguing for the necessity of the decision (justice requires a
decision), he describes a moment that, I think, is also helpful for combat-
ing decisionism. Arguing that any calculation, any decision, any attempt
at justice has to go through that terrible moment of the undecidable, that
moment of suspense in which the decision could go either way, he notes, A
decision that would not go through the text and ordeal of the undecidable
would not be a free decision; it would only be the programmable applica-
tion or the continuous unfolding of a calculable process. For Derrida,
the possibility of establishing a just decision only occurs in the absent
moment of suspense of the undecidable (Force 253). The undecidable
haunts every political calculation. Such a haunting (to quote again from
Derrida) deconstructs from within all assurance of presence, all certainty
or all alleged criteriology assuring us of the justice of a decision. Justice,
including just decisionism, is, therefore, an impossibility. Perhaps only an
extension of uncertainty can rupture the processes of scripturalization
and autoimmunization that threaten to reinscribe transcendent sovereign
power.
My thanks go to Michael Casey for putting me onto the theonomists and for his consistently
hard and critical questions about both writing style and content. I am also most grateful
to Yvonne Sherwood and Oona Eisenstadt for helpful feedback, resources, and ongoing
conversation about these ideas. Their engagement has helped me clarify my arguments
considerably; any lack of clarity, of course, remains my own.
erin runions is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Pomona College. She is the author
of How Hysterical: Identification and Resistance in the Bible and Film (Palgrave, 2003) and
Changing Subjects: Gender, Nation, and Future in Micah (Sheffield Academic Press, 2001).
Notes 1 A few reporters and political eventually became a well-known

analysts, such as Chris Hedges, political philosopher at the Uni-
Katherine Yurica, and Stephenie versity of Chicago. Because his
Hendricks, have already alerted work emphasizes a return to clas-
their readers to the congru- sical philosophy, it has been taken
ence between these two world- up as exemplary by many conser-
views. They have pointed out the vatives and has become iconic for
Machiavellian (Yurica) and fascist the neoconservative movement.
(Hedges) tendencies of the com- See Drury.
bined force of these groups, as For a discussion of
well as their anti-environmental the actual relationship between
impulses (Hendricks). For a dis- Schmitt and Strauss before the
cussion of the neocons use of reli- war and the way it may have
gious language and ideas for their affected their writings throughout
own ends, see Kline, Culture their lives, see Meier, Carl Schmitt
War; Milich; Runions; Urban. For and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dia-
a discussion of the way religious logue; for affinities between their
belief feeds into the political thought, see McCormick 24989;
landscape, see Phillips. For the Vatter. For Schmitts influence on
connection between the players u.s. American neoconservative
in the Bush II administration and thought, see Gleason; Kline, Cul-
the religious right, as far back as ture War; McCormick 30214;
the Reagan administration, see Milich; Scheuerman 183255;
Grandin 14356. Wolfe. For arguments against
Schmitts influence on u.s.
2 See Agamben, Homo Sacer; policy, see Bendersky, Definite;
Benjamin; Derrida, Force; Piccone and Ulmen.
Mahlmann; Maley; Sarat and
Kearns. 5 For Schmitts influence on
German theology, see Kline,
3 Schmitt (18881985) was a strong Genealogy 11346; Reimer.
critic of the Weimar Republic;
he served as a legal theorist and 6 Though Bendersky argues that
counsel for the Hindenburg gov- in the mid 1920s Schmitt moved
ernment and, for a time, the Nazi away from his Catholic affilia-
party. For details, see Bendersky. tions toward a secular approach
Despite this infamy, his critique (Carl Schmitt 8586), it is clear
of liberalism has been taken up by that Schmitts work retained a
thinkers on the right and the left. strong theological influence, so
much so that his Catholic friends
4 Born in Germany, Leo Strauss were certainly impressed with
(18991973) emigrated to the the arguments put forward in The
United States in 1937 (via Concept of the Political, ten years
France and England) where he later (Bendersky, Carl Schmitt 94).
7 For a discussion of the neocons disagreements over the kind

atheism, see Drury 3760. of total state that was most
desirableultimately ending in
8 For a discussion of Schmitt in loss of prominence in the party
relation to contemporary Anglo- see Cristi 2552; Mller 1747;
American legal theory, see Schwab.
Dyzenhauss introduction to
Law as Politics. 13 Schmitt does, however, seem to
approve of some notion of original
9 Others have noticed the relevance sin. In response to Strausss
of laws theological heritage for critique of his view of evil, he
the study of contemporary law, cites the belief in original sin
politics, or philosophy (with or held by the counterrevolutionary
without Schmitt). For an analysis theologians he so admires as a
of the secularization of the term useful corrective to the optimism
secular and of the theology of of the universal conception of
secularism, see Stolzenberg. For humanity. It is not exactly clear
an analysis of the changing inter- where he stands on this issue,
pretation of the Bible with respect however, as he also says that
to sovereignty and the law in Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Fichte
seventeenth-century England, are able to arrive at the same
see Sherwood. anthropologically pessimistic
conclusions without recourse
10 It should be noted that some of to theology.
the neoconservatives originally
behind the Bush government, 14 For a longer analysis of Fukuy-
like Fukuyama and Bill Kristol amas End of History in the con-
(Irvings son), are beginning to text of neoconservative thought,
be critical of Bush. The neocons see Runions.
distancing from Bush is evident
in Fukuyamas book America at 15 For a careful analysis of Schmitts
the Crossroads and in Kristols anti-Semitic reading of Spinoza,
appearance on Fox News Sunday, see Vatter.
October 15, 2006, where he sug-
gested that Bush should return to 16 As is made clear in his later work,
his 20023 Bush doctrine of u.s. Nomos of the Earth (1950), Schmitt
leadership instead of looking for distinguishes between a kind of
international support. constituting legal power (that of
the sovereign and the state) and
11 For an extended discussion of constituted legal power (laws).
Schmitts political theology on For him, nomos indicates this
this point, as well as his theologi- kind of constitutive power: In its
cal influences, see Meier, The Les- original sense, however, nomos
son. For an analysis of Schmitts is precisely the full immediacy
reliance on Tertullian for the of a legal power not mediated by
theological importance of the laws; it is a constitutive histori-
friend/enemy, see Meier, The Les- cal eventand act of legitimacy,
son 9295; Versluis 5257. For an whereby the legality of a mere law
insistence on the political nature first is made meaningful (73; see
of Schmitts use of theology, see also 78, 82). Nonetheless, the state
Kennedy 17583. is only encoded through a specific
set of laws.
12 For excellent discussions of
Schmitts involvement with 17 In iekian terms, this operation
the Nazi party, as well as his is much like the little piece of the
Real (object a) raised to the level uses of Schmitt on the left, both
of ideological pinning point (the new and old, see Mller 16980,
phallus). 22143. Even Derrida turns to
Schmitt and, as Gil Anidjar points
18 See McCormick; Scheuerman. out, takes up Schmitts focus on
the decision in a number of his
19 See the essays in Dyzenhaus, Law works, including Force of Law.
as Politics; and those in Mouffe.
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Theologico-Political Resonance: Carl

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energizing in its attempt to make sense of this otherwise perplexing alli-

The Biblical chain of command runs from the man outward

This statement is typical of a certain conservative Christian desire to

Taking up the spirit of Connollys analysis, then, I would like

Likewise, the theonomists views seem startlingly similar to those of

including Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Donald Kagan, Francis Fukuy-

Im the Decider: Decisionism,

If modernity and liberalism fill their critics with a sense of loss

conception of the political, and it is set specifically against any possibility of

It is as if Schmitt sees enmity as a fundamental structure in the world, in

Because the sphere of the political is in the final analysis deter-

Schmitt scoffs at any political view predicated upon human goodness

philosophy on earth, whereas for Schmitt a world state would be a sinful

a final neutralized universal state, which they characterize as made up of

Here, hierarchy is intimately connected to ambition and success. Likewise

A similar kind of argument can be seen in Harvey Mansfields

When examined, manly assertiveness reveals an element of

But this tyranny is acceptable, it would seem, as long as it is in the even-

may lie in the hands of religious groups (Neoconservative). Here, he is

Schmitt and the Theonomists

The theonomists share with Schmitt and the neocons a demand

are enemies of the law-order and must be arrested. [...] Law is

youre going to lead you must lead. Be sensitive. Listen. Treat

Clearly some inequalities, which the law is to recognize, are created by

Rushdoony shows how inequalities created through disobedi-

model than to the grassroots patriarchal leader opposed to centralization

The Interior Exteriority

Though the theonomists are not in complete agreement with

room to make use of torture if needed. In other words, the president

To the extent that the sovereign has the legitimate power to

In effect, authority garnered from within the law is implemented as if it

[T]here was a consensus among both Americas leaders and

Schmitt offers a reason in Political Theology for the develop-

of a theological view of a transcendent, yet immanent miracle-working

Prior to this point, which occurred sometime in the nineteenth

But whoever takes the trouble of examining the public law

it does so as a deus ex machina, to decide according to positive

So although the transcendent-immanent relation has been theologically

In fact, the scripture cannot fully be understood without

To come back to the question of resonances with which I began,

In her essay Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,

[T]he Left is losing something it never loved, or at best was

Browns astute comments remind us that the reclamation of hierarchy and

are serious losses, to be celebrated, but also to be mourned if the political

Notes 1 A few reporters and political eventually became a well-known

7 For a discussion of the neocons disagreements over the kind

. State of Exception. 2003. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: u of Chicago p,

. The Definite and the Dubious: Carl Schmitts Influence on Conservative

. President Bush Nominates Rob Portman as Office of Management and Budget

. President Bush Talks to Brian Williams: An Exclusive Conversation on the

. President Discusses Comprehensive Immigration Reform. Whitehouse News

. Presidents Statement on Signing of h.r. 2863. Whitehouse News 30 Dec.

Connolly, William E. The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine. Political Theory

. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael

Dyzenhaus, David. Why Carl Schmitt? Introduction. Dyzenhaus 120.

. America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative

. The Christian World View of Law. Coalition on Revival 2000. http://www