Christian Prayer as Political Theory

Abstract

The question concerning the boundary between the religious and political is a continuously vexing question for Christians who want to contribute to public life and those who want to engage public life in a manner that is consistent with their spiritual lives. This article argues that the spiritual life, enacted in the practice of prayer, is not incidental to public life but actually constitutes a unique politics. Prayer bears in its practices a political theory that on the one hand provides areas of interface with secular political theory and practice, whilst at the same time providing a critique of many political presumptions of the status quo. The article will first look more generally at the relationship between practice and theory, before analysing how the embodied nature of prayer implicates the contours of a new public body. This new body in turn suggests new contours of what it means to be a political subject, new terms of citizenship, and flowing from that, a new kind of political modus vivendi, exemplified by new attitudes to the necessity of survival in politics.