This article examines the implications of Richard Steigmann-Gall's recent revisionist representation of Nazism as a Christian movement for the increasingly fashionable accounts of Nazism as a secular or political religion. Contrary to Steigmann-Gall's contention that Protestant Nazism undermines these accounts, I suggest that his portrayal of Nazism as a variant of Protestant millennialism is not necessarily inconsistent with the secular religion approach. A closer look at the so-called Löwith-Blumenberg debate on secularization indeed reveals that modern utopianisms containing elements of Protestant (...) millennialism are the best candidates for the label of secularized eschatology. That Steigmann-Gall has reached exactly the opposite conclusion is primarily because his conceptual understanding of secular religion is uninformed by the secularization debate. Insofar as Steigmann-Gall extracts his model of secular religion from contemporary political religion historiography on Nazism, this article points to a larger problem: a disjunction between historians utilizing the concept, on the one hand, and philosophers and social theorists who have shaped it, on the other. (shrink)

This study argues that the bond between ‘secularization’ and ‘de-legitimation’ is not only borne out in debates over grand historical narratives relating to the status of modernity, as argued by Hans Blumenberg, but in debates over the appraisal of specific modern philosophical programs as well. It does this by examining how the category of ‘secularization' is used to delegitimize Martin Heidegger's thought, from both theological and secular perspectives, by two of his former students, Hans Jonas and Karl Löwith. By analysing (...) their interpretation of Heidegger and their understanding of secularization, legitimacy, and the philosophy-theology relationship, this study sheds light on the intellectual projects of these three thinkers – master and two students – and demonstrates the application of secularization as a hermeneutical category of de-legitimization on the basis of ‘insufficiency’ – either insufficiently secular or insufficiently religious. (shrink)