The Politics of Rebirth and the Prospects for Secular Democracy

The authors of two recent books— Born Again: Romanticism and Fundamentalism by Jeffrey Champlin and The Political Theology of Hannah Arendt by Michael Weinman—will be joined in discussion by Courtney Hodrick and Sophie Lauwers in order to unpack this “rebirth” trope, why it is so pervasive in our current political and cultural moment and why the focus on the “extremism,” “fundamentalism” or “immoderation” in much of the discourse around the politics of being born again does as much as to obscure as to make clear the connection between the pitfalls of secularism and the anti-democratic (in the sense of majoritarian decision making and popular sovereignty) character of many liberal defenses of the current international order.