After the elimination of the king, political importance was transferred, we said, to the institutions. But that didn’t last. Man, who felt his politics keenly, very quickly found it necessary to have proposed to him an incarnation mediating between this world and the other world. What was characteristic of regimes known as totalitarian is now becoming characteristic of almost all political regimes. There is no more relativity. There are no more ‘good-natured’ elections and reasonable discussions. The whole person is at stake every time.
Everything is political. Politics is the only serious activity. The fate of humanity depends upon politics, and classical philosophical or religious truth takes on meaning only as it is incarnated in political action. Christians are typical in this connection. They rush to the defense of political religion, and assert that Christianity is meaningful only in terms of political commitment. In truth, it is their religious mentality which plays this trick on them. As Christianity collapses as a religion, they look about them in bewilderment, unconsciously of course, hoping to discover where the religious is to be incarnated in their time. Since they are religious, they are drawn automatically into the political sphere like iron fillings to a magnet.
Of course, they do not believe in the crude, explicit dogmas. Like Helmut Gollwitzter (Christian Faith and the Marxist Criticism of Religion, 1970), they can be clairvoyant about the religious nature of communism, but they think they are cleared of the religious simply because they have denounced the cult of personality or the mystique of its practice. The fact is, however, that all they have criticized is the now defunct (except in China) religious phase of communism. They fail to see that we are now in a new phase of political religion extended into political action itself. Gollwitzer, an active partisan of political involvement, is a good example of this Christian attachment to the neoreligious. Politics has become the principal justification. Christianity no longer means much, but it is restored like new, and reinvigorated if Christians get into politics. Now it is Christianity which is justified by being legitimized in this way. Everything which carries the political message, everything expressed in terms of political commitment, is now justified and legitimized.
That is the new soteriology.
Jacques Ellul, The New Demons. Trans. C. Edward Hopkins (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975), 199-200.
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