Martyr’s victory

Kahn ( Putting Liberalism in Its Place ) again, a wonderful passage on martyrological politics:

“Hegel writes of the master-slave relationship as the origin of political history. The slave is not willing to die; he is a failed martyr. He grants others the power to script the meaning of his life.”

Hegel missed the real structure of Western politics: “The Western state actually exists . . . under the very real threat of Christian martyrdom: a threat to expose the state and its claim to power as nothing at all. In the end, sacrifice is always stronger than murder. The martyr wields a power to defeat his murderer, which cannot be answered on the field of battle.” Kahn argues that martyrdom is not a thing of the past: “think of the continuing place for the politics of human rights or the nonviolent resistance of the civil rights movement.”

This is the original source of Western fears of religious infiltration of politics. It is not a originally a few of theocracy. It’s a fear that Christianity would expose the impotence of the state. Kahn says,

“Separate of church and state enters the Western imagination not as an expression of a philosophically justified, secular politics, but as an aspect of religious belief. It includes not simply an idea that the state poses a danger to religion, but equally the opposite idea that religion poses a threat to the state because it reveals the insubstantiality of the concerns of the state and the limits of the state’s power over the individual. The state’s power is ultimately the power to threaten life, but Christianity begins with a sacrificial act that undermines that threat by announcing life to be death, and true life to be beyond death.”

Even after Christianity reconciled with empire, “the threat of martyrdom is always a dangerous power that the religious can wield against the state. It is the means by which the religious claim an indefeasible power: if defeat means martyrdom, then the state’s victory is always precarious.”