Jacques Ellul is probably the most influential scholar of the 20th Century that no one has heard of. Ellul was a university professor in France, a public official, a sociologist, a theologian, and an analyst of western society. Whether his subject was law, sociology, technology, politics, scripture, faith, or revelation, his perspective was unique and insightful. His writing influenced the likes of Charles Colson and Os Guinness. His views on the nature and influence of politics have proven to be prescient.
While Ellul’s political writings are myriad and many are still in print (or in any used bookstore worth its salt), probably his most eye-opening essay on politics appeared as a chapter to his 1973 book Living Faith, and is entitled “Politics: The Realm of the Demonic.” Whether one agrees with Ellul or not, or even understands what he’s saying, his perspective is important when considering the life lived in following Christ, and the current political culture of our society. The following are excerpts from this chapter of Living Faith.
If evil [in society] has piled upon evil, if the tide of danger is rising, the reason lies in politics and nowhere else. Politics is the contemporary image of absolute evil. It is satanic, diabolical, the home base of the demonic. And when I say “politics,” I am not pointing at the state…The point I want to make concerns those who would conquer and use the state for their own purposes…
Politics is the acquisition of power; the means necessary for getting it, and once you have it, the means for defending yourself against the enemy and so holding on to it. But what does one use it for — for goodness and virtue? No, one uses it for power; it’s an end in itself. And that’s all there is to politics. All the fine talk about politics as a means of establishing justice, so forth and so forth, is nothing but a smokescreen that on the one hand conceals harsh, vulgar reality and on the other justifies the universal passion for politics, the universal conviction that everything is political, that politics is the most noble human activity, whereas it really is the most ignoble. It is, strickly speaking, the source of all the evils that plague our time…
Politics is diabolical. The devil can be the one who divides, separates, disjoins, disrupts communions, brings about divorce, breaks up dialog. In the Bible the devil is the one who instigates the break between God and humankind…God creates humans free, bidding them govern creation and subdue it. The devil induces them to declare themselves independent of God’s will, to seek autonomy. And in the same way he transforms the power given by God into a will to dominate.
This kind of distortion is typical of the way the devil acts, pretending to accomplish God’s work, while transforming it into its opposite…
[S]peaking concretely of society today, what is the father of lies? It is politics, and I would go so far as to say politics alone…
[P]olitics is the divisive force par excellence. It is politics, and not economics that causes class divisions and shapes class struggle…
Politics creates nothing…nor does it unify society, make it humanly responsible, or lead it forward. Politics produces nothing but division and inner conflict…
That’s how politics is; it induces, lures, and provokes people into frenzied conflicts. It makes us deadly serious about the cause or the doctrine or the opinions that must be defended against those of others…
We hear solemn, grandiloquent political proclamations, but their only real, long-term effect is discord…But for the moment people believe them, with their eyes closed. Politics makes us totally blind…
It stirs up irreversible conflicts…
When people have dealings with individuals of different color or race, when they meet with strange customs, with curious ways of dressing and acting, it doesn’t necessarily prevent mutual understanding. People are quite capable of respecting one another. But as soon as politics seizes on physical or cultural differences, then these become grounds for exclusion, and racism is born. Racism is always stirred up by politics, making use of natural feelings of antagonism — which were never an absolute bar to coexistence, despite occasional clashes. Thus politics makes differences murderous, conflicts irreversible, disagreements irreparable. This is true diabolical discord…
The diabolical has taken on different forms down through history, and currently, the devil, the sower of discord, is politics, and politics alone. We see it diabolically corrupting the law, lying about justice, arousing false hopes (ever brighter tomorrows), driving people into a labyrinth of hostility.
That is just how the diabolical element operates: it dramatizes everything; it leads to breaches that can’t be healed; to one hopeless impasses after another. And it does this by seduction, by promises, by illusions. We shouldn’t forget that the principal weapon of every political system is propaganda and that propaganda is essentially a lie. In our time the father of lies speaks through propaganda, which engenders passion and false clarity, burning commitment and inner alienation…
Where in our time do we hear the great accusations that condemn certain persons or groups as absolutely evil? What plays the role of world prosecutor, bringing charges against a whole class or nation or race? The answer can only be politics…The satanic is the pure distilled essence of the political. Gone is any reason or balance, any human consideration at all which might serve as a mitigating force…
How many times have I read the words (which seem to have been written in a trance), “Capitalism is absolute evil”? The writer is a Christian, as it happens. But the phrase might just as well have been, “Communism is absolute evil.” This accusation leaves no room for pardon, for leniency, for conversion. Once you have been a communist, you can’t change; you remain crushed beneath the weight of the satanic accusation. The enemy, by definition, has nothing good or admirable about them; the only remedy is to wipe them out completely. This is the only solution, and it was invented by politics.
No doubt some readers are already objecting, “But aren’t you really talking about religion?”…My answer on this point is direct: yes indeed, religion has become satanic, every time it has fallen into the grip of politics. The dreadful part of the Inquisition was not the church’s doing, but the crimes perpetrated on behalf of and often by the state…The Inquisition did not resort to extreme measures until it came under the control of the king of Portugal, the king of Spain, and the republic of Venice. Excommunication was nothing more than a remedium animi (healing of the soul) until it became a political tool. And who was responsible for the forced conversions? Who used violence to convert the Saxons? Charlemagne. Who used violence to convert the New World Indians? The conquistadors…
[J]ust as politics tries to pass itself off as the whole of reality, dethroning God in the process, conversely politics raises accusation to the status of an absolute, thereby counterfeiting — that is, utterly falsifying — divine justice. So it is no facile literary image but a far-reaching insight into the nature of politics to call it satanic, to view it as Satan’s handiwork…
People always need to feel just, and up till now it has been the task of religion to provide people with the means of self-purification…The great classical religions have disappeared, however, or have lost their power through lack of faith. But people’s religious needs are as intense as ever…And the only way now available to them to achieve this goal is through accusation, through the political discovery and designation of a scapegoat…
Politics today is indeed the realm of the demonic. It is the realm of total illusion in our society. Politics is the art of multiplying false problems, of setting up false goals, and of starting false debates, false with reference to the concrete life of concrete people, false with reference to the actual socioeconomic trends that politics never touches.
Having created this false orientation, politics mobilizes everyone’s energies…
Politics becomes the necessary universal mediator between the individual and society. Politics offers the only possible way to act upon society as a whole…
In the end, as everyone knows, the modern state claims to be our savior. We have already made the transition to the state-as-Providence, but now we’ve gone beyond that to the state as dispenser of salvation. What is actually a lie proclaims its salvific mission — such is the power of evil to disintegrate reality…
A final note: Of all the writing Jacques Ellul produced on the topic of politics, this chapter in Living Faith is probably the most provocative (and some might say “inflammatory”). Regardless of whether one accepts Ellul’s conclusion that politics is “diabolical” and “demonic,” his observations about the characteristics of politics have the ring of truth: that politics heightens divisions, heightens passions, inhibits cooperation and discussion, divides rather than unites, and mutates political opinions and ideologies to a level of quasi-religious dogma.
Ellul wrote Living Faith some 35 years ago when our political culture still retained a certain amount of civility and bipartisan cooperation. Since the publication of his book and this chapter, politics has become baser, more rigid, more dogmatic, more divisive, more of a blood sport, and more futile. Ellul tapped into something and foresaw the condition of politics as it is today. In other writings (e.g., The Political Illusion, and Hope In Time of Abandonment), Ellul observes that politics has become less about bringing people together, or influencing voters to a particular way of thinking on a variety of issues, but has become the art of dividing the electorate such that your candidate or party gets 50%+1 of the votes in any election.
If nothing else, voters need to knock politics down a few notches in their own consideration and recognize that “everything is NOT political,” and dethrone politics as something akin to a contemporary religion accompanied by the fervor of self-righteousness.
The secular world, in its desperate need to find something to believe in, may unconsciously adopt politics as its dominant religion, with some political ideology as its foundational theology, but the church shouldn’t. The insight that politics has become something of a divisive false religion may not impress the world, but for the disciple seeking to follow Christ, such should be seriously considered, and a new attitude about politics needs to be taken.
