Introduction to the special issue on the Frankfurt School and religion

The upsurge of politically engaged religious organizations that began during the late 1970s, such as the Moral Majority in the United States and political Islam in Iran, has continued to fuel tensions and inform group identities in a postcolonial world. Indeed, concepts that have claimed universal status such as multiculturalism, secularism, and “Western values” remain tenuous and contested, perhaps more so in the age of Trump than since the end of the Cold War, with consequences ranging from right-wing authoritarianism, xenophobia, religious and ethnic conflict, and war. While the early Frankfurt School wrote during a different era—one marked by the rise of the seemingly secular ideologies of fascism and communism, after the events of 11 September 2001, Habermas, a second-generation critical theorist, turned his attention to religion. The question this special issue seeks to explore is: what is the relevance of the Frankfurt School and critical theory to the study of religion? How are their insights and theoretical frameworks useful for understanding the role that religion plays in our current era?

Eduardo Mendieta first brought together Jürgen Habermas’s writings on the topic of religion in a 2002 volume entitled, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, and in 2004 edited The Frankfurt School and Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers, with essays by Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Johann Baptist Metz, Jürgen Habermas, Helmut Peukert, and Edmund Arens. These contributions from figures representing the inner and outer circle of the early Frankfurt School thinkers at the Institute for Social Research, along with second-generation theorists like Habermas ¹ and theologians (Browning and Fiorenza, 1992) who have critically appropriated his work, reflect a broad range of primary sources dealing with the Frankfurt School’s writings on religion in the English language.

Situating religion within this broader framework of the interdisciplinary study of society, Mendieta (2005, 2014) stresses the influence of both Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin and how their views on religion and theology were foundational for the first generation of Frankfurt scholars for thinking about questions such as inheritance and cultural memory, emancipation, and utopian critique in the face of an increasingly disenchanted and secular world (see Kohlenback and Guess, 2005). Indeed, for those associated with the Institute for Social Research, who were mostly secular Jews, religion was a complex inheritance of both ideology and emancipatory longing embedded within cultures and language. In this sense, thinking about religion was a dialectical process that required neither rejection nor affirmation but rather a critical engagement with this inheritance through a process of immanent critique. As Craig Christopher Brittain (2012: 204) puts it in a recent essay, the Frankfurt School offers a more nuanced view on religion than most contemporary scholarship in philosophy, sociology, and political theory, by providing both a critique of the ideological functions of religion while drawing upon its “cultural legacy in Western societies,” which “provides an orientation towards a negative concept of truth, one that prevents the absolutizing of the existent, and which nurtures a longing for a just society.”

While the early Frankfurt thinkers drew primarily on strands of “secular and atheistic forms of Jewish apocalyptic and Messianic critique” (Mendieta, 2005: 6), and thus could be characterized as having a Eurocentric or even orientalist orientation, their interest in religion was also guided by a desire to provide an immanent critique of those traditions, namely, Judaism and Christianity, most familiar to Western Europe and the United States (Brittain, 2012). What is of central theoretical importance here is a critical orientation toward the relationship between religious narratives or myths and modern rationality. This overarching concern is what unites the first generation of Frankfurt thinkers with the second, most notably Habermas (2008, 2017), whose later work has sought to think about how dominant myths and rituals most commonly connected to religious traditions might illuminate emancipatory insights for our present moment. This includes an engagement with the notion of a “clash of civilizations,” the concern over “fundamentalism,” and the reconsideration of the old secularization thesis in light newer theories of postmetaphysical thinking and postsecularism.

The genesis of this special issue on the Frankfurt School and religion came out of a conference panel in May of 2016 at the Left Forum in New York City, featuring Eduardo Mendieta, Craig Christopher Brittain, and Matt Sheedy, with a response from Warren S. Goldstein. These conference papers have been greatly expanded here, along with new contributions by Marsha Hewitt (2018), Kenneth MacKendrick (2018), and a co-authored article by Afary and Friedland (2018).

The first three articles in this issue draw on the work of the early Frankfurt School—in particular, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer—and apply their ideas to contemporary theories and issues.

Marsha Hewitt’s (2018) essay, “Christian Anti-Judaism in Early Object Relations Theory,” in this issue revisits the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers’ keen interest in Freud (see Marcuse, 1974), particularly their emphasis on his theory of drives, which, as she puts it, they used “to understand the aggressive and destructive tendencies in human behaviour.” While these and other dimensions of the Frankfurt School theory undergird Hewitt’s aims, her essay focuses on the work of Scottish psychiatrist Ian Dishart Suttie (1889–1935), and the influence of his book The Origins of Love and Hate (1935), widely considered foundational for object relations theory. Guiding Hewitt’s investigation is, as her title suggests, the current of anti-Jewish sentiment not only in Suttie’s influential text but also the problematic inheritance of certain theological threads throughout this school of thought. What is at stake for Hewitt is to locate how certain Christian-centric ideas continue to inform and constrain object relations theory, and to suggest, in the spirit of the early Frankfurt School’s “negative critique,” links between Jewish theology and “internal representations” of the unconscious mind and Freud’s concept of Eros as a social ideal.

Afary and Friedland’s article, “Critical Theory, Authoritarianism, and the Politics of Lipstick: From Weimar Republic to the Contemporary Middle East,” draws upon studies on authoritarianism pioneered by Fromm in 1929 and Adorno in 1950, with an emphasis on questions concerning the link between the decline in patriarchal authority, the rise of feminism, and masculine control over women’s bodies. Basing their work on Facebook surveys that they conducted between 2012 and 2013 in seven Muslim majority countries and in the diaspora, Friedland, Afary, Gardinali et al., (2016) compiled over 19,000 responses to questions concerning “family, sex, religion, and democracy.” Like Fromm’s 1929 survey, they accounted for religious affiliation and class in order to explore links between monist absolutism and authoritarianism with views on makeup and women’s empowerment.

Craig Christopher Brittain’s essay, “Racketeering in Religion: Adorno and Evangelical Support for Donald Trump,” also takes its lead from studies on authoritarianism, in particular Adorno’s 1943 study of the American right-wing Christian preacher Martin Luther Thomas’s radio broadcasts, as a way to conceptualize Trump’s unexpected popularity among evangelical Christians. Brittain notes that while common explanations of Trump’s appeal to evangelicals, such as links with the prosperity gospel, white ethnocentrism, and “inauthentic belief,” have been popular, Adorno’s theories of “religious subjectivism” and “racketeering religion” offer a better explanation of how populism is connected to societal factors like the encroachment of state and corporate capitalism on cultural life. Growing weary of the floundering politics of the religious right, Brittain suggests that the desire to be part of a winning racket sheds light on this unprecedented phenomenon amidst on-going globalization and the rise of social media and “fake news.”

The remaining three essays in this special issue offer critical appraisals of Habermas’s theory of religion (in relation to the history of religion, Islam, and Karl Jasper’s Axial Age thesis), which continues to be influential in a variety of academic fields.

Eduardo Mendieta’s essay, “The Axial Age, Social Evolution, and Postsecular Consciousness,” draws on an unpublished work by Habermas dealing with postmetaphysical thinking and the discourse on faith and reason. Mendieta is interested in exploring Habermas’s return to Karl Jasper’s Axial Age thesis on the development of religion in human societies, offering a critical intervention into some of the pitfalls of his theory. Drawing on the critiques of Johann P. Arnason, who is concerned with Jasper’s “sociological specificity and historicization” (Mendieta, 2018: 298), and Jan Assmann, who challenges modernization and modernity theories that view social evolution as a universal telos rather than selective form of “cultural memory,” Mendieta is particularly interested in how religious ideas were shaped during the Axial Age period through the primary and secondary canonization of texts and uses this critical insight to leverage some provisional redirections for the productive use of Habermas’s theory.

Kenneth MacKendrick’s essay, “Does Past Religion Have a Past? Habermas, Religion, and the Sacred Complex,” provides a critical-historical intervention into the modern conception of religion, and how many philosophers, political theorists, and sociologist interested in religion have failed to consider this fraught history. Drawing on the work of Martin Riesebrodt, Hans Kippenberg, Tomoko Masuzawa, Brent Nongbri, and Maurice Bloch (among others), MacKendrick aims to critique and problematize the category “religion” thereby demonstrating Habermas’s uncritical use of it. In closing, MacKendrick takes up his own research on the imagination and interstitial entities in order to demonstrate how Habermas’s theory of religion is a thoroughly modernist construct and argues that his work can be effectively reconceived without his Axial Age thesis, based instead on a more fundamental analysis of human imagination.

Matt Sheedy’s essay, “Habermas, Islam, and the Theorizing the ‘Other,’” traces a brief genealogy of Habermas’s theory of religion in the public sphere, in particular his interest in theorizing Islam and fundamentalism in the post-9/11 era. Sheedy argues that while Habermas aims toward an inclusive model of communicative ethics and deliberative democracy, his indebtedness to certain Jewish and Christian theologies as a universalizing ideal leaves him unable to situate Islamic theologies in any meaningful way. More importantly, Sheedy claims that Habermas’s reliance on macro theories of secularization and modernization positions secular liberal democracy as the gold standard for modern religious identities, thereby reproducing a soft variety of the “clash of civilizations” thesis, despite his intentions to the contrary. In conclusion, Sheedy draws on a number of critical scholars of religion and Islam in order to better historicize and contextualize discussions about Islam in the West and concludes with his own theoretical redirection that argues for a topological analysis of “Islam” as a symbolic discourse in the public sphere that relies more on affect than reason.

All in all, these essays point toward the enduring relevance of the Frankfurt School as an interdisciplinary approach toward a critical theory of society with a practical intent. While the contributions of the Frankfurt School to studies on the “culture industry,” the public sphere, neo-Marxism, and authoritarianism (among other studies) are well known, their contributions to a critical theory of religion remain somewhat obscure and understudied (see Goldstein, 2005). It is our hope that the essays contained here can contribute to a renewed interest in this important body of work for thinking about our present moment.