Church and state as agonistic partners in the time of neoconservatism

Abstract

The point of this paper is to indicate that liberal secularist frameworks are not very useful to address the de-democratising phenomena that neoconservatism and religious right-wing actors are causing today. Taking the Argentinian context as object of philosophical analysis, I defend two intertwined theses that have bearing on the way left-wing politics and activism deal with the revitalisation of the political participation of right-wing and neoconservative churches and religious actors. The first one is that although the secularisation thesis cannot explain today´s religious political revitalisation, at the same time the reconfiguration of the way Christian churches participate in politics is confined to the political ideology of secularism. The second thesis is an explanation as to why this is so: secularism is enacted within an agonistic-deliberative political field in which fully legitimised and polarised agents shape each other’s agency, and that at the same time delegitimises those subjectivities and collectives that do not adjust to its homogenising polarisations. In sum, debating about secularism and religion is still needed, but today the focus of the discussions should be put in the way the liberal state and the hegemonic church authorities collaborate to marginalise several collectives from political participation.