The Quiet Rise of Political Religion

Politics has always involved trust, hope, and belief.
But what happens when belief turns into devotion?

When leaders are no longer questioned—but revered?
When critique begins to feel like betrayal?

Drawing on thinkers like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and B. R. Ambedkar, this blog explores a subtle but powerful shift:

•  the transformation of politics into faith.

Because when politics begins to sound like prayer,
democracy may already be changing.

When Politics Begins to Sound Like Prayer: On Sacralisation, Charisma, and Democratic Distance

In many parts of the world today, something subtle yet profound is unfolding in the soundscape of politics.

Songs circulate.
Public gatherings resonate with praise.
Leaders are no longer described merely as administrators of policy, but as protectors, redeemers — figures seemingly destined by history itself.

At first glance, this may appear as admiration.

And indeed, admiration is not alien to democratic life. Democracies are sustained not only by institutions but by affect — by trust, hope, gratitude, and identification.

But there are moments when admiration crosses a threshold.

It begins to resemble something else.

Sacralisation.

It is at this threshold that theory becomes indispensable.

From Religion to Politics: Marx and the Opium of the Present

An oft-quoted dictum of Marx on religion reads:

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people” (Marx, 1844).

While Marx speaks of religion, the conceptual elasticity of terms like religion and opium invites us to think beyond their immediate referents.

What happens when secular politics begins to acquire religious characteristics?

When it becomes:

• dogmatic

• ritualistic

• unquestionable

It begins to function like opium.

Not by suppressing pain entirely — but by dulling the critical faculties that allow societies to question power.

In such contexts, politics does not merely govern.

It sedates.

Political Religion: When Authority Becomes Sacred

The idea that politics can assume religious form has been extensively theorised by Emilio Gentile through the concept of political religion.

As Gentile observes:

“The sacralization of politics is politics becoming religious, independent of the traditional church…The sacralization of politics in modern terms is an autonomous form of religion based on politics, not on traditional church-state religion” (Gentile, 2009).

Here, politics does not merely borrow religious language — it becomes a site of faith.

Gentile further elaborates:

“A religion of politics is created every time a political entity such as a nation, state, race, class, party, or movement is transformed into a sacred entity…”

At this point, authority is no longer negotiated.

It is venerated.

Critique, in turn, risks being recoded — not as disagreement — but as betrayal.

The language of governance begins to resemble prayer.

A Genealogy of Political Faith: From Lincoln to the Present

This entanglement of politics and religious imagery is not entirely new.

In 1838, Abraham Lincoln invoked the idea of a “political religion” in his Speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield:

Let reverence for the laws…let it become the political religion of the nation…

Lincoln’s invocation was strategic — an attempt to stabilise democratic commitment through moral fervour.

But history reminds us that what begins as metaphor can, over time, become structure.

Charisma and the Aesthetics of Power

To understand how such sacralisation operates, we turn to Max Weber.

Weber’s concept of charismatic authority rests on:

“personal devotion to, and personal trust in, revelations, heroism, or other qualities of leadership in an individual” (Weber, 1994).

Charisma exceeds institutional legitimacy.

It is affective.
It is aesthetic.
It is deeply personal.

Yet charisma alone does not create devotion.

It must be performed and reproduced.

As Jan Plamper notes:

personality cults involve the “godlike glorification of a modern political leader…”

and the “symbolic elevation of one person much above others.”

The vocabulary here is unmistakably religious:

• glorification

• worship

• sacral aura

Charisma, when routinised, begins to displace institutions.

Loyalty shifts:

• from procedure to personality

• from law to aura

Ritual, Emotion, and Collective Effervescence

The durability of such formations depends not only on leaders — but on collective participation.

Émile Durkheim offers a crucial insight through the concept of collective effervescence.

Political gatherings — songs, gestures, synchronised performances — generate emotional unity.

They bind individuals into a shared moral community.

Durkheim reminds us:

“Thus there are rites without gods…”

and:

“Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities…”

Religion, for Durkheim, is not dependent on gods.

It is the society venerating itself.

In political contexts, the leader becomes a totemic figure — a symbolic condensation of collective identity.

In that moment, critique dissolves into belonging.

Hegemony and the Cultural Production of Devotion

From a Gramscian perspective, this is not merely emotional excess.

It is hegemony in action.

As Terry Eagleton explains:

“hegemony refers to the ways in which a governing power wins consent…”

Consent is not enforced—it is cultivated.

Through:

• music

• imagery

• narrative

• repetition

In the digital age, this process intensifies.

Leaders are transformed into:

• cultural artefacts

• aesthetic objects

• circulating icons

Politics is no longer just debated.

It is performed, consumed, and felt.

Political Theology: Sovereignty as the Secular Divine

Carl Schmitt pushes this further:

“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts…”

Modern sovereignty, in this reading, carries theological residue.

When leaders are framed in salvific terms, we witness a form of secular messianism.

The sovereign becomes:

• exceptional

• indispensable

• beyond ordinary scrutiny

But democracy rests on the opposite principle:

• that no one is beyond question.

Ambedkar’s Warning: The Dangers of Devotion

In the Indian context, B. R. Ambedkar issued a warning that remains strikingly relevant:

“Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics… it is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”

Hero-worship transforms citizens into devotees.

It narrows the space for dissent.

It converts disagreement into disloyalty.

Democracy requires participation.

But it also requires distance.

Foucault: Power, Discourse, and the Making of Subjects

Finally, Michel Foucault invites us to ask a deeper question:

• What kinds of subjects are produced through these practices?

As he notes:

“Discourse determines what can be said, who can speak, and under what conditions” (Foucault, 1972).

When leadership is repeatedly aestheticised and sacralised,
citizens begin to internalise these representations.

They defend:

• not policies

• but personas

Devotion becomes a subtle technology of governance.

Between Admiration and Accountability

The question, then, is not whether leaders deserve admiration.

Many do.

Nor is it whether affect belongs in politics.

It does.

The question is one of proportion.

• When does admiration become insulation?

• When does reverence weaken accountability?

Democracy is healthiest when leaders can be respected —
without being sanctified.

A Final Reflection

When politics begins to sound like prayer,
something fundamental has shifted.

Power moves:

• from office to aura

• from governance to myth

And in that shift, critique becomes difficult.

Not because it is impossible —
but because it begins to feel like heresy.

References

Ambedkar, B. R., & Sidhwa, R. K. (1949). CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY 

DEBATES OFFICIAL REPORT Volume XI. In CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY DEBATES OFFICIAL REPORT Volume XI (pp. 923–924)

Durkheim, Émile. 2001. (1915).  The elementary forms of religious life. 

Oxford University Press, USA.

Eagleton, Terry. Ideology. London, England: Verso.

Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: 

Pantheon

Gentile, Emilio. “Interview: Politics and Religion, Politics as Religion.” 

2009. Vision, 

www.vision.org/interview-emillio-gentile-politics-and-religion-882.

Lincoln, Abraham. “Speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield 

(1838).” (n.d.). National Constitution Center – 

constitutioncenter.org.

Marx. (n.d.-a). “Marx, a contribution to the critique of Hegel’s 

Philosophy of Right 1844”. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

Pitsoe, V., & Letseka, M. (2013). Foucault’s discourse and power: 

Implications for instructionist classroom management.

Open Journal of Philosophy, 3(1), 23-28

Plamper J. “Introduction: Modern personality cults”. In: Heller K, 

Plamper J, editors. Personality Cults in Stalinism – Personenkulte im Stalinismus. V&R Unipress; 2004.

Plamper J. The Stalin cult: A study in the alchemy of power. Yale 

University Press; 2012.

Schmitt, C. (2005). Political theology: Four Chapters on the Concept 

of  Sovereignty. University of Chicago Press.

Weber, M. (1994). Weber: Political writings (P. Lassman & R. Speirs, 

Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Scrolling Minds: How Screens Rewired Our Thinking & Why Our Classrooms Are Struggling to Keep Up (for readers from the academic world)

 We keep saying: “This generation doesn’t focus.”

But what if the problem is not discipline - but design?

From Marshall McLuhan’s warning about media as environments to Bernard Stiegler’s idea of outsourced memory, this blog explores a deeper crisis:

We are not just using screens.
Screens are reshaping how we think, feel, and learn.

This is not a mere generation gap.
This is a cognitive rupture.

(for readers from the academic world)

When Focus Fades, Something Deeper Is Shifting

Let us begin with a familiar complaint.

“They don’t focus anymore.”
“They are always on their phones.”
“They don’t think deeply.”

These statements circulate in staff rooms, seminar halls, and everyday conversations about students - especially Gen Z.

But what if these are not explanations, but symptoms?

What if the problem is not them - but the world we have collectively built around them?

What if we are not witnessing a failure of discipline, but a transformation in the very conditions of thinking, feeling, and being human?

We Thought Technology Was a Tool. It Became an Environment.

We like to believe we use technology.

That we control it.

That it sits quietly in our hands, waiting to be switched on and off.

But as Marshall McLuhan warned long ago, this is an illusion. Technologies, especially in the world of media, are not tools - they are environments. They reshape how we see, feel, and understand the world.

He offers a striking image:

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics. If the operations are needed, the inevitability of infecting the whole system during the operation has to be considered. (McLuhan, 1964).

This is not simply technological change.
It is neurological, sensory, and social reconfiguration.

Print culture trained us to:

• read slowly

• think linearly

• wait

Digital culture trains us to:

• jump

• skim

• react

And yet, according to McLuhan, the most dangerous part of this transformation is that we do not even notice it:

I call this peculiar form of self-hypnosis Narcissus narcosis, a syndrome whereby man remains as unaware of the psychic and social effects of his new technology as a fish of the water it swims in. As a result, precisely at the point where a new media-induced environment becomes all pervasive and transmogrifies our sensory balance, it also becomes invisible. (The Playboy Interview)

We are not just using screens.
We are living inside them.

When Thinking Left the Body

Bernard Stiegler reminds us that humans have always used tools to extend their minds:

When a pre-historic man is producing flint stones, thereby exteriorizing his experience, he is in fact transforming his brain, his psyche (Stiegler, 1998).

But something radical has changed.

We have moved from supporting thought to replacing it.

Memory is no longer something we cultivate.
It is something we outsource.

Stiegler calls this a loss - a quiet but profound one:

We call proletarianization the process through which an individual or collective knowledge, being formalized through a technique, a machine, or an apparatus, can escape the individual - who thus loses this knowledge which was until then his knowledge. (Stiegler, 2014)

We do not remember anymore.
We search.

We do not dwell on ideas.
We scroll past them.

From Meaning to Flow

There was a time when understanding meant pausing.

The Humanities, for instance, were built on what scholars call hermeneutics - the slow, careful act of interpretation:

Traced back to their earliest known root words in Greek, the origins of the modern words ‘hermeneutics’ and ‘hermeneutical’ suggest the process of ‘bringing to understanding,’ especially as this process involves language, since language is the medium par excellence in the process. (Palmer, 1969)

But digital culture has quietly replaced meaning with movement.

As Friedrich Kittler reminds us, media determine what can be said — and how. ““Media determine our situation” (Kittler, 1999).

Today:

• ideas become posts

• arguments become clips

• narratives become feeds

We are no longer asking:

What does this mean?

We are asking:
What’s next?

The Marketplace of Attention

In 1971, Herbert A. Simon saw this coming:

The obverse of a population problem is a scarcity problem… What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance. (Simon, 1971)

Later, Michael H. Goldhaber made it even clearer:

It sets up an unending scramble… for what is increasingly scarce, which is of course attention. (Goldhaber, 1997)

Today, attention is no longer ours.

As Shoshana Zuboff explains:

I define surveillance capitalism as the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material… sold into behavioral futures markets… (Zuboff, 2019)

We are not just users.

We are:

• data sources

• attention reservoirs

• predictable subjects

We Don’t Just Think Anymore - We Feel First

Something else has shifted.

We no longer process the world primarily through thought - but through feeling.

Sara Ahmed captures this beautifully:

Forming an impression also depends on how objects impress upon us… We need to remember the “press” in an impression… an affect that leaves its mark or trace. (Ahmed, 2004)

Digital spaces are designed for this:

• outrage spreads

• anxiety circulates

• desire intensifies

We do not think and then feel.

We feel - and only sometimes think.

When Reality Became a Feed

Jean Baudrillard once warned:

simulating is not pretending…simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary” (Baudrillard, 1994).

Today, that warning feels less like theory and more like description.

We do not encounter the world.

We encounter:

• curated realities

• filtered lives

• algorithmic truths

The screen no longer reflects reality.
It produces it.

The End of Waiting - and the End of Thinking

Thinking takes time.

But time has disappeared.

Research now confirms what many teachers intuitively feel:

Long-term exposure to the rapid, fragmented nature of digital content interferes with the brain’s capacity… excessive digital exposure shrinks the ability to invest in… deep thinking, reflection… (Yousaf et al., 2025)

And:

constant exposure to algorithm-driven content flows… reduces individuals’ ability to engage with meaningful information… (Özbay, 2026)

Without pause, thought cannot settle.

Everything becomes:

• immediate

• unstable

• forgettable

We Have Become Scrolling Bodies

This transformation is not just mental.

It is physical.

We have become:

• fingers that flick

• eyes that dart

• bodies that cannot sit still

The scroll is no longer an action.

It is a condition.

This Is Not a Mere Generation Gap. It Is a Rupture.

What we call a “generation gap” is something far more radical.

Gaston Bachelard describes such moments as epistemic breaks:

Critical moments… involve a total reorganisation of the system of knowledge… It changes species. (1938)

Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z -
they are not simply different.

They inhabit different cognitive worlds.

We Keep Asking the Wrong Question

We ask:

Why don’t they focus?

But this is the wrong question.

This is not about discipline.
It is about design.

When attention is constantly interrupted,
focus is not difficult—it is structurally undermined.

The real question is:

What kind of world makes thinking so hard?

Speed Has Become Violence

Speed was once progress.

Now, it is pressure.

As warned by Paulo Virilio, every technology invents its own accident. What arrives as progress also carries the blueprint of its failure - hidden within it, waiting for the right moment to surface and disrupt the very world it promised to improve.

Referring to Aristotle’s proposition that ‘the accident reveals the substance’, Virilio says:

To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck. To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment. To get what is heavier than air to take off in the form of an aeroplane or dirigible is to invent the crash, the air disaster. (Virilio, 2007)

Today, the accident is this:

the collapse of thought.

The Quiet Death of Boredom

We have eliminated boredom.

But boredom was not always the enemy.

boredom can be a source of creativity and innovation in that when bored, brains are more likely to wander and explore new ideas or perspectives. Boredom can encourage one to seek novel experiences, discover new interests, or challenge oneself to learn and grow. (Ndetei, et. al, 2023)

It was the beginning of:

• imagination

• creativity

• reflection

Without boredom, the mind never turns inward.

It remains trapped in constant stimulation.

The Classroom as a Site of Crisis

Today’s classroom is not just a place of learning.

It is a meeting point of different worlds.

Teachers trained in slowness meet students shaped by speed

The result?

• frustration

• misunderstanding

• breakdown

The challenge is no longer just teaching content.

It is teaching attention.

Slowness as Resistance

We do not need to go back.

But we need to push back.

To slow down
to pause
to think

is no longer passive.

It is political.

The Radical Act of Doing Nothing

Perhaps the most difficult lesson today is this:

To sit without a screen.
To think without input.

To be.

In a world of constant noise,
silence is rebellion.

A Final Reflection

This is not a story of one generation failing another.

It is a story of a world that is slowly losing its ability to think.

And unless we recognize this,
we will continue to misdiagnose the crisis.

What Next?

In the next blog, we step into the classroom -

not to ask how we should teach better,

but to confront a deeper challenge:

How do Gen X and Millennials translate knowledge for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, when they no longer inhabit the same worlds of thinking?

References

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Bachelard, Gaston. 1938. The Formation of the Scientific Mind: A Contribution to a Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge. Clinamen Press, 2002.

Baudrillard J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. The University of Michigan.

Goldhaber, M. H. (1997). “The attention economy and the Net.” First Monday, 2(4). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v2i4.519

Jenkins , H. 2006 . Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide , New York and London : New York University Press .

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford UP, 1999.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage. 1964. New York ; Toronto : Simon and Schuster, 1989.

Ndetei DM, Nyamai P, Mutiso V." Boredom-understanding the emotion and its impact on our lives: an African perspective." Front Sociol. 2023 Jun 29;8:1213190. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2023.1213190. PMID: 37456271; PMCID: PMC10342197.

Özbay Ö. “'Brain Rot' Among University Students in the Digital Age: A Phenomenological Study.” Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2026 Feb 5;28(1):11. doi: 10.1007/s11920-025-01658-w. PMID: 41642385; PMCID: PMC12876105.

Palmer, Richard E. 1969. Hermeneutics; interpretation in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Simon, H. A. (1971). “Designing organizations for an information-rich world.” In M., Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, communication, and the public interest. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford UP, 1998.

Stiegler, Bernard. The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism. A&C Black, 2014.

“The Playboy Interview.” Next Nature Museum, nextnature.org/en/magazine/story/2009/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan.

Virilio, Paul. The Original Accident. Polity, 2007.

Yousef AMF, Alshamy A, Tlili A, Metwally AHS. “Demystifying the New Dilemma of Brain Rot in the Digital Era: A Review.” Brain Sci. 2025 Mar 7;15(3):283. doi: 10.3390/brainsci15030283. PMID: 40149804; PMCID: PMC11939997.

Zuboff, Shoshana. “ Interview with John Leidre: High Tech Is Watching You.” Harvard Gazette, 4 March 2019, news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/03/harvard-professor-says-surveillance-capitalism-is-undermining-democracy.