Chapter 1 The Evolution of the Critical Theory of Religion and Society: Union, Disunion, and Reunion of the Sacred and the Profane (1946–2019): Part i

Rudolf J. Siebert

1 Introduction

The beginning of the critical theory of religion and society, or dialectical religi- ology, reaches far back to the middle of the 20th century, to my return to Frank- furt am Main, Germany, from the American prisoner of war camp, Camp ­Allen, in Norfolk, Virginia, usa, in February of 1946. The start of the critical theory of religion and society in Frankfurt was the consequence of the experiences of my generation, born in the late 1920s, after the First World War.

2 Ideology Critique

The beginning of the critical theory of religion and society, as ideology cri- tique, was the consequence of my growing up under German and European fascism; my participation in World War ii; living through the period of liberal restoration, the cold war between the capitalist and the socialist block, in- cluding the wars in Vietnam and Yugoslavia, and finally through the conflict ­between parts of the Muslim world and the West, including the Afghan, Iraq and Syrian wars. This East/West conflict still continues today most fanatically, as shown by the recent double bombing of a Roman Catholic Cathedral by isis in the Philippines, on January 26, 2019, and by the March, 2019, murder of 49 Muslims in a Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, by the Australian Brenton Tarrant. He made his authoritarian-populist, and fascist position and ­motivation quite clear in his manifesto: The Great Replacement: Toward a New Society.1 Here ideology is understood critically as “false consciousness;” as nec- essary appearance; as fake news; as the masking, hiding and cover up of par- ticular, economic, political and military interests; as reason without realty, and as realty without reason. It is idealism without materialism, and as materialism

1 Brenton Tarrant, The Great Replacement: Toward a New Society. Self-Published, 2019.

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2 Siebert without idealism; as the religious without the secular, and as the profane with- out the sacred; as abstractions intervening between subjective and objective reason; as the concealment of an existing lack; as meaning without reality, and reality without meaning; shortly, it is the untruth. All these historical events above made up and constituted an era, an age, an epoch, of greatest secular and religious, personal and collective insecurity – uncertainty of knowledge, unsafety of the physical existence, and social insecurity – which nourishes ir- rationality, despair, extremism, and populism. It is also continually accompa- nied by historical regressions, e.g. the present wave of secular authoritarian, or even totalitarian nationalism in America and Europe. This happens only 70 years after the fascists Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Ante Pavelić, António Salazar, Philippe Pétain, etc., and their paradoxical alli- ances with religion, particularly with the Vatican and the Roman-Catholic, as well as the Protestant, paradigm of Christianity, the Religion of Becoming and Freedom: a completely ideological, and thus untrue reunion, or reconciliation of the modern disunion between the religious and the secular, in which the sa- cred is betrayed, and the profane is mystified, justified, elevated, idealized, and glorified, no matter, how unjust and evil it may be, or if in it secular salvation is promised idolatrously, and in hubris. Dialectical Religiology is essentially critique of the untruth in the spheres of personal life, private right, personal ­morality, family, civil society, liberal or social state, history, art, religion, phi- losophy and science.2

3 Last Battle

It was at the end of World War ii, after the Battle of Aschaffenburg, Germany, my last battle, in March 1945, during Easter, that I surrendered as a young Ger- man soldier of the officer company from the Kaserne (barracks) of the ­Tank-Destroyer Battalion in Büdingen, to General Patton’s army near Alzenau, Germany.3 In Büdingen, I had been trained to fight at the Eastern Front against so-called “atheistic bolshevism.” But then I, nevertheless, battled at the West- ern front, when General Patton attacked the Rhine-Main area. I was brought as a prisoner of war on trucks, trains, and ship over Babenhausen, Dieburg, Darm- stadt, Worms, Marseille, France, Oran, Africa, Gibraltar, across the Atlantic to

2 Rudolf J. Siebert, Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion: The Wholly Other, Liberation, Happiness, and the Rescue of the Hopeless. Leiden: Brill, 2010. 3 Quentin W. Schillare, The Battle of Aschaffenburg: An Example of Late World War ii Urban Combat in Europe. Fort Leavenworth: Kansas, 1989.