Ir - Religious Drive

The "ir/religious drive" is Rollins's coinage for the structural tension internal to Christianity that simultaneously affirms and negates its own doctrinal-religious form. The slash in "ir/religious" is not decorative: it signals that the drive is constitutively split, operating at the hyphen between religious commitment and its irreligious undoing. The Theoretical move on this page makes clear that what generates this drive is the gap between the faith of Christ — the pre-dogmatic, living, generative source — and faith in Christ — the sedimented, doctrinal, confessional form. Christianity is not torn apart by this tension but is constituted through it; the tension is the engine, not an accident. This aligns with the Lacanian principle that desire and the law are not opposed but co-productive: the prohibition generates desire rather than suppressing it, so that doctrinal constriction is precisely what keeps the living source alive as an inexhaustible beyond.

The concept thus names a drive — in the quasi-Freudian sense of a persistent pressure that cannot be fully satisfied or extinguished — whose object is structurally inaccessible (the faith of Christ as living source) and whose motor is the very particular, narrow site of dogmatic Christianity. The "constrictive" particularity of confessional form is not a barrier to the transcendent but, paradoxically, its privileged opening: the narrower the particular passage, the more it functions as the conduit to what exceeds it. This is the logic of sublimation applied to religion — the particular doctrinal object is "raised to the dignity of the Thing" without ever being the Thing itself, holding open the void that keeps the drive in motion.

This concept appears exclusively in rollins-peter-the-fidelity-of-betrayal-towards-a-church-beyond-belief-paraclete, where it serves as the pivotal formulation for Rollins's constructive theological-psychoanalytic argument. It sits at the intersection of several cross-referenced canonical concepts. Most directly, it is a specification of Contradiction: the ir/religious drive is not a flaw in Christianity but its constitutive inner split — the faith of Christ and faith in Christ are not reconcilable positions but are each condition and negation of the other, functioning exactly as Hegel's motor of contradiction does: generating forward movement rather than demanding resolution. The drive is kept alive by the irreducibility of this gap.

The concept also presupposes the logic of Das Ding and Sublimation: the faith of Christ operates as a kind of Thing — an excluded interior, an original that cannot be possessed or directly named, only circled by doctrinal formulations that are always slightly off. Confessional Christianity is then a sublimatory practice that raises its particular doctrinal objects (creeds, rites, institutional forms) to the dignity of the Thing without ever closing the gap. This is why Particularism is also invoked: the narrow, particular site of Christianity (its specific historical and doctrinal form) is not a limitation but the structural condition for the drive's movement toward the universal/transcendent. Finally, the concept is inseparable from Desire in the Lacanian sense: the ir/religious drive persists precisely because the faith of Christ remains constitutively out of reach — it is the lost object whose very inaccessibility keeps the movement of confession and critique going.

The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond BeliefPeter Rollins · 2008 (page unknown)

This ir/religious drive of Christianity can be further elucidated as we acknowledge how the Christian operates amidst the tension created between the faith of Christ and confessing a faith in Christ.

The phrase "operates amidst the tension" is theoretically loaded because it refuses to resolve the binary — the Christian subject is not placed before a choice between the two faiths but is constituted within the gap between them; and the compound "ir/religious drive" encodes the contradiction structurally in its very typography, making the slash the sign of an irreducible split that is itself the productive engine rather than a problem to overcome.