Christwreck: An Accidentology of Christianity

A fault line in contemporary scholarship has emerged around what Gil Anidjar calls “the Christian Question,” litigating Christianity’s historical contributions to the creation of a profoundly unjust arrangement of global politics. On one side of the fault line stand those who argue that Christianity is ultimately abusive, and therefore should be discarded as much as possible through deconversion; on the other side are those who argue that the way out of perverse Christian products is a deeper conversion to a true, pure identity for Christianity. This dissertation wades into the dilemma by arguing that Christianity can be fruitfully understood as a technology of human beings, by which people change the world and themselves. Drawing from Paul Virilio, it suggests further that, like all technologies, Christianity contains unforeseeable accidents (e.g., the invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck), consequences that may not at first seem recognizably Christian but nevertheless descend from Christian sources. Reading Christianity through the lens of the accident, the dissertation aims to provide a method for dealing with Christianity’s historical relationship to oppression and liberation, arguing that Christian technologies must be retrofitted according to a horizon of liberation. The study is organized into six chapters, bookended by an introduction and conclusion that ground the dissertation broadly in what Enrique Dussel calls philosophy of liberation, which presents an alternative means of conceiving of the role of philosophy of religion beyond postmodern approaches. The study begins by explaining how Christianity could be conceived of as a technology, engaging media theorists like Peter Sloterdijk and Vilém Flusser (chapter one). Then, the study takes Virilio as a particular theorist of technology and guide for thinking about Christianity and accidents, briefly offering the emergence of white supremacy in the United States as a case study to illustrate this theoretical point (chapter two). To better understand Christianity’s historical and formative role in global politics, the study explores critical scholarship on religion and secularism, proposing to see Christianity as an infrastructure undergirding categories that may not seem ostensibly Christian (chapter three). Philosophically, these insights have consequences for philosophy of religion and the secular, which the study demonstrates by engaging Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas through critics like Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood (chapter four). With a broad paradigm in place, the study directly engages the fault line around the Christian Question, reading theologian William Cavanaugh as representative of the conversion side and Gil Anidjar and Daniel Colucciello Barber as representative of the deconversion side (chapter five). Lastly, the study puts forward the possibility of constantly retrofitting Christian technology, always accountable to the negative inevitabilities of the accident (chapter six).