Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: This article presents political religion as a concept for studying Communism, Fascism and National Socialism, which display significant elements of traditional religion, such as rites of purgation, penitence and renewal, cultic patterns of behaviour, and heresy. It then considers the history of the concept, paying particular attention to the light thrown on the phenomenon by the analysis of Nazism offered by the writer Franz Werfel in 1932. This argued that the roots of its appeal lay in the solution it seemed to offer to the contemporary socio‐political crisis of Weimar, which was widely experienced as a personal crisis of meaning and identity. For believers this imparted a redemptive, religious aura to the entire Nazi movement. Finally, it questions the legitimacy of ‘political religion’ as a concept, asking whether it can truly be used to explain or illuminate political phenomena without distorting the basic idea of religion in the process.
Source: Politics Religion & Ideology
Author: Hans Maier
Institution: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2133780231