What We Can Learn from Irving Kristol’s Political Theology Today

At the start of a 1983 collection of his essays, Irving Kristol—the so-called “godfather of neoconservatism”—cited an epigraph by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: “Everything that passes for politics today will be unmasked as religion tomorrow.” Matthew Continetti argues that Kristol’s belief in the theological roots of politics, a belief summed up by this quotation, animated much of his thinking. To Kristol, whose essays on Jews and Judaism are among the less well-known of his many writings, the “rabbinic” impulse, with its emphasis on law and tradition, was politically superior to the utopianism of what he termed “gnosticism.” In this light, Continetti goes on to discuss the relevance of Kristol’s political theology to today’s political debates. (Interview by Devorah Goldman and Daniel Wiser, Jr. Audio, 46 minutes.)