Är politik utan transcendens möjlig?

"Is politics conceivable without religion? The answer is obviously affirmative as the evidence of various secular political theories testifies. But is politics practicable without religion? That is the question. And it is the question that Rousseau´s thinking politics faces. Can politics become effective as a way of shaping, motivating, and mobilizing a people or peoples without some sort of dimension -  if not foundation -  that is religious, without some sort of appeal to transcendence, to externality, to what we call above, with Charles Taylor, ´fullness,´ however substantive or otherwise that appeal might be? I do not think so."
[...]
The secularization that seems to define modern politics has to acknowledge a moment of what Emilio Gentile calls sacralization, the transformation of a political entity like a state, nation, class, or party into a sacred entity, which means that it becomes transcendent, unchallengeable, and intangible.

So, can a political collectivity maintain itself in existence, that is, maintain its unity and identity, without a moment of the sacred, without religion, rituals, and something that we can only call belief? Once again, I don not think so."

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Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (Verso, 2012), 24.