Peter Leithart and Simon Critchley and the Possibility of a Secular Order

From the blog of Peter Leithart:

In a New Yorker interview, Simon Critchley discusses his recent The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, which raises fundamental doubts about the possibility of a secular political order: “Even if you look at things like social democratic forms of government, which would believe themselves entirely secular, they’re not. If you look at a country like Sweden, it has taken the moral teachings of Lutheranism and combined them with a form of utilitarian ethics into a form of social behavior, which people think of as just the way things are. But for me, different forms of political life are different forms of what’s sacred.” In short, every political order has to have “something that sanctifies it.”