Religion Without Religion

Religion Without Religion names the structural paradox at Christianity's core as theorized in Rollins's Fidelity of Betrayal: authentic fidelity to a religious tradition is constituted not by adherence to its institutional, doctrinal, or ideological form but by a perpetual act of self-betrayal that the tradition demands of itself. Christianity, on this account, is the exemplary case of a tradition whose deepest message cannot be housed in any stable system of belief or power without being falsified; it must continuously rupture and negate its own settled form in order to remain true to the originary Event that founds it. The hyphenated, self-canceling formulation — religion without religion — is deliberately aporetic: it names a religion that can only authenticate itself by suspending, overturning, and "betraying" what religion ordinarily means (propositional belief, institutional hierarchy, ideological closure).

The concept operates on both an ontological and a political register. Ontologically, the "divine rupture" is said to be constitutive rather than accidental: the self-negation is not something that happens to Christianity from outside but is the very form of its core message, such that belief is "ultimately subordinate to the event that it points toward." Politically, this structural self-overcoming translates into an "anti-system" that seeks out the excluded rather than universalizing power — a logic that systematically undermines every system of power precisely because it refuses to occupy the place of power. The authentic believer is thus structurally a "non-Christian in the Christian sense," just as the authentic act of faith is a faithful betrayal — an act that affirms the tradition by ceaselessly overcoming its sedimented, ideological form.

The concept lives exclusively in rollins-peter-the-fidelity-of-betrayal-towards-a-church-beyond-belief-paraclete and functions as the book's organizing thesis, appearing across at least six strategic moments in its argument. It is best understood as a theological application and extension of several cross-referenced canonical concepts. Most directly, it maps onto The Act in the Lacanian sense: the faithful betrayal that constitutes Religion Without Religion is precisely the kind of gesture that retroactively restructures the symbolic framework of the tradition rather than merely operating within it. The "transformance art" gatherings Rollins describes — which suspend identity and refuse pastoral hierarchy — enact the subject-transforming, framework-dissolving logic of the Act. The concept also works in direct tension with Fetishistic Disavowal and Ideology: what is being targeted is precisely the disavowal whereby the believer knows (at some level) that the institutional form of religion is a distortion of the originary Event yet continues to act as if it were not. Religion Without Religion demands the abolition of this disavowal rather than its perpetuation, making it a structural antidote to the ideological operation that sustains religion as a settled system of belief.

The relation to Truth is equally central: as in the Lacanian account where truth can only be "half-said" and belongs to the level of enunciation rather than statement, the Event at the core of Christianity cannot be fully captured in propositional belief — it can only be pointed toward, making belief structurally subordinate to that which exceeds it. Singularity enters through the anti-systemic political logic: Christianity as Religion Without Religion functions as a singular universal in the sense that it affirms those with no proper place in any system, refusing ideological universalism and instead embodying the universal through its identification with the excluded. Finally, the concept engages Sublation (even if not elaborated in the cross-ref definitions here): the tradition is not simply negated but negated-and-preserved at a higher level through each act of faithful betrayal, consistent with the Hegelian Aufhebung logic that informs much post-Lacanian political theology.

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

Christianity, as we have been endeavoring to explore, exhibits a somewhat disconcerting vertigo-inducing rupture at its very core, a divine rupture that gives it the form of a religion without religion that asks us to betray our faith tradition precisely so as to affirm it in the deepest and most radical manner.

The phrase "divine rupture at its very core" is theoretically loaded because it locates the self-negation not as an external critique but as constitutive of Christianity's structure — the rupture is originary, not accidental. The chiasmic formulation "betray our faith tradition precisely so as to affirm it" captures the Möbius-strip logic of faithful betrayal: betrayal and affirmation are not opposites but the same gesture viewed from two sides, making Religion Without Religion a genuinely dialectical rather than merely paradoxical concept.

This is a 6-occurrence concept; the corpus extractions did not surface a curated illustrative example. See the source page(s) above for the surrounding argument and the cross-referenced canonical concepts for their cited examples.

This is a 6-occurrence concept; intra-corpus tensions and cross-framework comparative analysis are reserved for canonical-level coverage. See the cross-referenced canonical concepts for those layers.