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Journal of the American Academy of Religion Advance Access originally published online on September 2, 2009
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 2009 77(3):680-711; doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfp046
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Empire's Allure: Babylon and the Exception to Law in Two Conservative Discourses

Erin Runions

Erin Runions, Religious Studies Department, Pomona College, Pearsons Hall, 551 North College Avenue, Claremont, CA 91711, USA

E-mail: erin.runions{at}pomona.edu


  Abstract

Reference to Babylon and Babel in theonomist and neoconserative discourse is instructive in thinking about how the Bible and processes of biblical interpretation might condition U.S. citizens to accept the inconsistencies of empire and its recourse to the state of exception, in which leaders suspend the law in order to save democracy. Despite significant philosophical and religious differences, these conservative discourses are strikingly similar in allegorizing the Babel story to motivate resistance to a universalizing secular humanism and its laws (which are called Babylonian). Though suspicious of political unities like empires, and in favor of decentralization and individualism that can go beyond the law, these discourses insist that resistance is in the name of a unified truth, often presented in strongly imperialist terms. Slippages between unity and multiplicity in these allusions to Babylon—partially produced by a mélange of pre- and post-Enlightenment values—are found to be homologous with the structure of the exception and with a common canonical mode of biblical interpretation. When these dynamics are read alongside Carl Schmitt's genealogy of the exception in Political Theology, a clear picture emerges of the scripturalized structure of exception to law in U.S. liberal democracy.

I am most grateful to Elizabeth Castelli, Michael Casey, Oona Eisenstadt, Yvonne Sherwood, Randall Styers, Jay Twomey, as well as two anonymous reviewers for JAAR, for their helpful engagements with the ideas in this paper, and for their demands for further clarity. I am also indebted to generative conversations with and presentations by Katrina Van Heest on the work of scripturalization.


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