Timely Politics: A Political Theory of Messianic, Evangelical, and Queer Temporalities

What roles do philosophies and narratives of time play in political thought that resists the hegemonies of modernity? This article explores the modes through which theories and practices of queer time, evangelical time, and messianic time provide critiques of the progressive, linear, and secular temporality that dominates Western modernity. These critiques-while not identical and ultimately quite varied in their political implications-resonate with one another in their visions of past, present, and future, as well as in their critiques of progressive temporalities that have often dominated Western thinking. Furthermore, these three articulations of time also constitute and are constituted by everyday practices, rhetorics, and political orientations that strive for alternative modes of being and becoming.

We argue that, ultimately, these three temporalities serve as political and theoretical challenges to chrononormativity. Elizabeth Freeman develops the concept of chrononormativity to theorize the “vision of time as seamless, unified, and forward moving” that constitutes and is constituted by Western modernity as its defining temporal mode-a temporality engaged in “repressing or effacing alternative strategies of organizing time.”¹ When Cesare Casarino critiques the “dominant conception of time in the West” as one that is “spatialized, measurable, quantifiable, homogeneous, empty, and teleological,” we understand him to be identifying chrononormativity as the object of critique.² Furthermore, Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual histories of European modernity detail the ways in which it relies on a notion of progress in which “history could be regarded as a long-term process of growing fulfillment which, despite setbacks and deviations, was ultimately planned and carried out by men themselves” in the aim of reaching “the objective of possible completeness” on earth rather than in the “Hereafter.”³ Our central claim is that constructing a nexus of queer,⁴ evangelical,⁵ and messianic⁶ times demonstrates the way these temporal narratives resonate with one another not only in their critiques of chrononormativity, but also in the work of translating theory into practice and producing believing-acting subjects.

In this way, time works as a vehicle of contestation for oppressed and/or non-normative⁷ beliefs and their adherents. This article distills lessons about politics and time from the elements of temporal narrative shared by texts drawn from queer theory, evangelical thought, and theorists engaging questions of messianic time. These texts use...