Ludger H. Viefhues-Bailey, No separation: christians, secular democracy, and sex. A critical notice

The article takes its cue from Ludger H. Viefhues-Bailey’s book “No Separation: Christians, Secular Democracy, and Sex” and discusses the question of who is entitled to belong to the citizenship today: who are the people of whom, by whom and for whom democratic rule exists? In his book, Viefhues-Bailey investigates the rise, in spite of the wave of secularization still taking place in the West, of a prototypical political Christianity that operates as the common ground for a relative majority of citizens who believe that they are reacting to a direct threat to popular sovereignty and thus to their right to self-rule. The author, however, does not merely record this striking phenomenon, but he analyzes three different instantiations of it (respectively, the case of Germany’s islamophobic Leitkultur, of French Catholic “republicanism,” and of the American Protestant Right) and constructs an original theoretical framework to account for such a distinctive and enigmatic socio-political dispensation. To be more specific, Viefhues-Bailey investigates the “libidinal underpinnings of the democratic project” (p. 30), the “libidinal substructure of political belonging” (p. 28), its “libidinal undercurrent” (p. 100) or “foundation” (p. 163), shedding light on the often overlooked link between “secular democracy” and “sex,” as the book’s subtitle recites. Aside from the richness of the case study analysis, where the book works best is in its recognition of the residually tragic dimension of democracy: of its inability, that is, to establish functioning networks of care, friendship, and love. However, this does not prevent Viefhues-Bailey from successfully defending the Deweyan idea that democracy is a form of life that does not serve to connect “isolated omnipotent sovereign individuals into bonds of friendship, but rather cultivating the relationships within which we grow and live into friendships of equality”.