Politics as Religion.

• Author: Gottfried, Paul
• Position: Book review

Politics as Religion By Emilio Gentile. Translated by George Staunton Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. 168. $39.50 cloth.

In his most recent book, which appeared in Italian in 2001 with the subtitle Fra democrazie et totalitarismi, Emilio Gentile, professor of contemporary history at La Sapienza University of Rome, dwells on a theme that he has researched for decades, the sacralization of political symbols and political authority in twentieth-century Europe. Gentile writes as an engaged researcher who is still preoccupied with the legacy of Italian fascism and who plainly views the Catholic Church as a wholesome check on temporal power. He believes that the temptation to treat political ideologies as a form of religious revelation has been especially strong in the modern era. This trend has asserted itself as traditional ecclesiastical authority has declined and as secular political institutions have grown more potent. Italian fascism, we are told, exemplified this modern sacralizing temptation because the Mussolinian state claimed for itself a transcendent significance. Indeed, it refused to recognize any legitimate source of command beyond its purview. Epitomized by the precept "niente fuori dello stato" (nothing outside the state), fascism presented itself as both a religion and a political movement (pp. 34-36). It became by intention an exercise in state power, falling back on sacralizing language and iconography to describe its nature and purpose.

Gentile extensively quotes German philosopher Eric Voegelin, who in 1938 during the Nazi ascendancy produced The Political Religions, a pioneering study in the relation between statist ideologies and the appeal to sacral symbols and millenarian expectations. Gentile emphasizes Voegelin's investigation of "the forms in which totalitarian regimes created political cults" (p. 56), but he also points to pertinent observations that preceded Voegelin's work. Catholic critics, who included popes and other prelates, had been struck by how modern ideologues borrowed from religious ceremonies and redemptive paradigms, a practice that had been going on from the French Revolution to Bolshevism and fascism. The fact that in the case of the fascist state the parallel was made from across the political spectrum, from leftist Italian exiles to Pope Pius XI, rendered it especially persuasive.

Gentile shows easily that the Catholic hierarchy issued some of the sternest criticism against the fascist appropriation of religious symbols. Attempts to invest the state with a religious mystique ranged from ceremonies celebrating the Italian...