A place for pastoral power: From the “government of souls” to “global struggles for souls”

Abstract

While research on geopolitical space and faith has drawn on Michel Foucault's work on power/knowledge, subjectivity, and strategy, little use has been made of his genealogies of Christian pastoral power. Arguing that Foucault's work on the pastorate analyzes political-religious submission, care, control, and resistance without reflexively secularizing faith (by either normalizing or abnormalizing it), this article calls for its use in research on “global struggles for souls”. However, to make pastoral power relevant to contemporary Christian and non-Christian subjectivities in Europe and beyond, Foucault's confinement of the concept to ancient-medieval Western-European Christendom must be revisited. To that end, the article undertakes a close and concurrent reading of Foucault's key works on pastoral power and identifies core conditions around the concept's contemporary applicability. Moreover, in critiquing Foucault's Eurocentric mapping of the pastorate, I argue that its analytical merits cannot extend to subaltern subjects (Christian and otherwise, in Europe and beyond) unless it is rethought through postcolonial and decolonial notions of power as relations of embodied race, class, gender, and other difference reproduced through colonial legacies.