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A common theme among conservative ideologues is that Christianity, its followers, and its values are under attack in the United States. Some Christian populations view a push for insurance to provide birth control, a broadening of the definition of marriage, an elimination of prayer in school, and even the use of "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," as signs of the secularization of the United States, and thus, as attacks on its Christian foundations. An all too common response to these anxieties is to dismiss them as simply the result of ignorance, lies, or delusions. Yet, according to Adam Kotsko in The Prince of this World, to dismiss these anxieties is to misunderstand their theological origins. In particular, he argues, they reflect a victim-blaming logic that the modern secular order has inherited from a medieval theological paradigm. The vulnerability expressed by some conservative Christian populations over threats to the legitimacy of God's will are nothing new, and to dismiss them is to ignore the insidious consequences of conceptual transfers (modern political subjectivity, social contract theory, racialization, sovereignty, and freedom) from Christian theology to the current political situation. Kotsko examines these transfers and their consequences by way of an elegantly written and well-structured genealogy of the Judeo-Christian Devil.
Early, in The Prince of this World, Kotsko highlights an important reversal in the role of the devil, which is perhaps its strongest contribution to contemporary politics: "the devil, having originated as a theological tool of the oppressed, has become a weapon of the oppressor."1 As he traces the reversal of the figure of the devil, Kotsko defamiliarizes some of the core values of the modern western secular world (freedom, responsibility, sovereignty, the social contract, and justice), placing his book firmly within a long tradition of post-modern political theory that has grappled with neoliberalism, racism, capitalism, and sovereignty, etc. Where Kotsko may differ from other interventions in this tradition is in his claim that we must first recognize that the modern world is "Christianity-shaped," and that we cannot build an alternative to it without coming to terms with this "explosive inheritance," and further, without considering this inheritance as part of a solution. In other words, in order to build a better alternative, we must...