Christianity Without Guarantees

Abstract

This review essay critically examines Hannah Strømmen and Ulrich Schmiedel’s The Claim to Christianity, an activist intervention that seeks to explicate and contest the theologies running through far-right claims to Christianity. While importantly focused on the semantic struggle for Christianity, refusing to interpret the presence of Christianity in far-right ideology as mere instrumentalisation, and espousing a critical Christianity without guarantees, the book suffers from several analytical and evaluative shortcomings. Framing the object of Strømmen and Schmiedel’s work as a component part of the contemporary post-fascist atmosphere, I suggest that drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch and Antonio Gramsci and attending to the utopian, dystopian, stratified, temporally multiple, and synthetic qualities of far-right claims to Christianity better illuminates the ideological operations of post-fascism and suggests the need for powerful alternative theologies.