Political theology is finally having its moment — every op-ed columnist reaching for Christian nationalism, every neoreactionary tech founder invoking the katechon, every mainline pastor watching JD Vance lecture the Pope about just war doctrine, every abolitionist community organizer working the intersection between the sacred and the political. And yet almost no one seems to know what political theology actually is. Luke Bretherton and Vincent Lloyd — two of the three co-authors of a genuinely important new Columbia University Press book, What Is Political Theology? — sat down with me to explain what they had done. The book itself models the thing it argues for: three scholars from three disciplines refusing to synthesize their differences and instead sitting inside the productive tension. In one hour we cover why the standard Carl Schmitt genealogy needs to be de-centered, what from above and from below are actually good for, why secularism is not a neutral space but an ideology, what Peter Thiel’s Antichrist lectures accidentally reveal, why Richard Dawkins now identifies as a cultural Christian, and what the difference between apophatic and cataphatic is currently doing to Luke’s and Vincent’s friendship. Live disagreement, on tape. The nice version.

Highlights from the conversation

The Carl Schmitt genealogy needs to be de-centered. The book’s opening move: political theology is not (only) the German reactionary tradition that migrated into continental philosophy in the 1990s. It is a global story. Every time you are told political theology emerges — Iran 1979, Israel, the American Christian Right, the tech oligarchs — the framing of emergence is the tell. It never went away. What went away was the secular academy’s ability to see it.
From above vs. from below. Vincent’s methodological handle. Above starts with the state and a God-on-a-throne looking down. Below starts with the neighborhood, the practice, the ritual, the poem. His chapter’s example: reading Aimé Césaire’s Caribbean poetry — from a poet who is not a Christian but ends a poem with a prayer — as a site of political theology diagnosing false gods in a colonized context. Not what political theology says. What political theology does.
The four uses of the political. Luke’s typology, which does the work of dissolving the assumption that we already know what political means when we say political theology. One: politics as common life (creation-shaped). Two: politics as friend-enemy relation (fall-shaped — every claim to be human makes a claim that some are not the right kind of human, and that pattern applies as much to universalist Marxism as to any nationalism). Three: politics as sovereignty and order (providential). Four: politics as eschatological horizon — the utopian longing for common life without conflict, scarcity, or the need for sovereignty. Different political theologies foreground different ones. Reading the traffic between them is most of the work.
Secularism is not neutral. It is an ideology. Vincent on the MLK monument in D.C. — none of the carved quotations mention God, or Jesus, or divine law. You would not know Martin Luther King had a PhD in theology. Luke on the university strategic-planning meeting at which he said we should think about the meaning and purpose of the university, and his colleagues laughed out loud. Secularism functions to rule out the questions we most need to ask — and produces the reactive political theologies (Christian nationalism, tech-libertarian apocalypticism) that are now naming what secularism refused to name. Badly.
Peter Thiel and Richard Dawkins as accidental confessors. Thiel’s Antichrist lectures at Oxford (which Luke happened to be in the room for). At least Thiel is not claiming to be secular — libertarian, hyperindividualistic, apocalyptic, but not disguised. Which is more than can be said for a Heritage Foundation white paper. And Richard Dawkins now identifying as a cultural Christian is the same phenomenon in reverse: the earlier secularization story (leave religion behind, get to rationality) has quietly flipped into a Spengler story (Christianity is the crucible that produced our civilization). Racialized undertones included at no extra cost.
Apophatic vs. cataphatic — and what it is doing to their friendship. Gabriel Marcel’s distinction between a problem (which can be solved, like irrigation) and a