Readers are likely to be surprised to see an essay by an American legal theorist in an issue devoted to the idea of incarnation. The divide between religion and state is too deep; the commitment to a secular politics is too entrenched; and the entire history of Enlightenment suggests that incarnation is not an idea that belongs in the political domain. The only question for the modern legal theorist should be, “What are the free exercise protections that the state must extend to religious rituals of incarnation?” That is not my question.

There is a substantial gap between modern political theories and the experience of citizenship. Sometime in latter part of the 20th century, theory lost touch with the beliefs that make citizenship a meaningful practice. Perhaps we had had enough of political meaning after the massive destruction of the two world wars. Theorists no longer focused on the violence of the state, despite the fact that we were all living under a regime of mutual assured destruction.

Theorists returned to social contract theory. Each individual makes a calculation that entering into the contract is more likely to advance his or her private interests than is remaining in the state of nature. The problem is not that this is a myth, but that it is a pernicious myth. Its error is to place contract, rather than sacrifice, at the origin of the state. It is as if one tried to describe the origins of Judaism in a covenant from which God has been removed.

Theorists returned to social contract theory. Each individual makes a calculation that entering into the contract is more likely to advance his or her private interests than is remaining in the state of nature. The problem is not that this is a myth, but that it is a pernicious myth. Its error is to place contract, rather than sacrifice, at the origin of the state. It is as if one tried to describe the origins of Judaism in a covenant from which God has been removed.

The puzzle of the modern state is to explain how it has sustained a practice of killing and being killed for two centuries, ending in a condition that threatens the end of history. Such threats rest on a faith in the state’s transcendent value – a value of immeasurable worth beyond any competing values. Once we recognize this, we see that weapons of mass destruction are not an aberration but an endpoint of the logic of the state.

The modern state is nonsectarian but it is not secular in the Weberian sense of disenchanted. Faith in the popular sovereign is, rather, the successor form of monotheism, after traditional religion was dealt a nearly fatal blow by the rise of modern science, including Darwinism. There is only one institution that can make a total claim on a life today: the state. That we accept that claim suggests that we remain people of faith.

The modern political imagination is shaped by the religious imagination that preceded it. The popular sovereign steps into the place of the divine sovereign but it keeps the threefold form of the Trinity. We encounter remnants of the Trinity everywhere in American political belief. The Father as creator appears in the faith that the Constitution was authored by the popular sovereign in a founding moment. That founding has the character of creation ex nihilo: it has no cause but the decision of the people themselves. The Holy Spirit appears in the faith that the development of law is the presence of the popular sovereign working out its full meaning in and through history. The popular sovereign is, accordingly, both transcendent and immanent.

Where then is the belief in a politics of incarnation? That we have trouble identifying the political theological moment of incarnation is a consequence of the revolutionary origins of the modern state. Killing the king, the popular sovereign eliminated a Christ-like figure, whose body was the mystical corpus of the state. When Shakespeare names Cordelia’s suitors “Burgundy” and “France,” he is deploying an idea of incarnation.

Some might think that the incarnate body of the American people is the President. That belief, however, confuses fame and incarnation. Of course, fame counts in democratic politics, but it is not a political theological idea. For that, we have to turn to sacrifice.

The mystery of incarnation is sacrifice: every sacrifice is the displacement of the finite body by a value that has no limit. To sacrifice is to respond to an ultimate claim by the extraordinary act of giving up the finite self in order to make present another of transcendent value. This is sacrifice as an act of love – another idea the moves from religion to politics in the modern era. A love that will not bear sacrifice is one that sounds in contract and calculation, rather than meaning.

To begin to make sense of the mass political violence of the 20th century, we have to recognize the erotic character of politics at the foundation of sacrifice. Through death is life. This belief was prominently expressed in fascistic regimes, but it was met by an equal faith in sacrifice by the liberal states that opposed them. The idea stands at the center of America’s greatest political expression: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Those who died on the killing fields of Gettysburg gave their lives that “We the People” might endure. They were the popular sovereign incarnate.

Wherever a claim is made of incarnation of the popular sovereign, there is an implicit threat of violence beyond law. This is the violent threat of populist movements today. Just as the Church had to move the practice of incarnation from the extraordinary experience of sacrifice to the practice of institutional maintenance, so have modern democracies. They, too, have needed sacramental rituals that give order to the potentially unconstrained character of incarnation.

In modern democracies, the ritual of incarnation is realized in the voting booth. Voting is the communion of the state. Voters participate in a ritual affirmation of the presence of the popular sovereign. Only so does a majority claim the right to bind not only those who disagree, but future citizens who had no opportunity to agree or disagree. In the United States, we wonder why we are governed by a centuries-old constitution enacted by wealthy white slaveholders. How can that be democratic?

Absent faith in incarnation, it cannot be democratic. With that faith, we are governed by the constitution because it is a text delivered by the popular sovereign. Those dead white slaveholders were an incarnation of the transgenerational, collective agent that is the popular sovereign. That movement from individual voter to incarnation of the sovereign is repeated – or sought to be repeated – each time we go into the voting booth.

Believing this, we look back at our history as the expression of sovereign agency. We see the action of a transgenerational, collective subject that claims us still. If we no longer hear the claim, we will lose our faith that the national history is our own. It becomes a chronology of events to be explained by contingent causes – most of them unjust.

The implicit but necessary claim of a majority to be the incarnation of the popular sovereign is the source of the strength of the state as a force in the world, but also of threat to the rule of law. The seeds of popular authoritarianism lie here, for incarnation is always linked to an antinomianism. The presence of the popular sovereign is always beyond law because it is the very ground of law. This is exactly the claim of revolution.

Just as revolution must be followed by constitution if the state is to avoid the crisis of terror so incarnation – whether on the battlefield or in the voting booth – must be followed by affirmation of the rule of law if the state is to avoid authoritarianism. This constraint on the antinomianism of incarnation points to the need for a political theology that appeals equally to the other two figures of the Trinity: the Father as lawgiver and the Holy Spirit as the immanent system of law. Together, the three figures of the Trinity describe the promise and danger of the state.