Arendt’s Post-Secular Appeal: Why Christian Philosophers and Secular Humanists Keep Returning to Her

Introduction

Hannah Arendt is “popular” (i.e., recurrently appropriated, debated, and taught) across traditions that otherwise disagree about metaphysics, revelation, and the foundations of ethics. That cross-appeal is not accidental. Arendt’s project is architecturally political - concerned with the conditions under which human beings can appear to one another, speak, judge, and act together - yet it is also existential and moral, because it treats responsibility, evil, and the fragility of agency as central philosophical problems.

Her work therefore lends itself to two different but compatible receptions:

1. Christian philosophers often find in Arendt a rigorous, non-pious retrieval of theological motifs (creation, new beginning, forgiveness, neighbor-love) that can be translated into political philosophy without collapsing into confessional doctrine - precisely the kind of “publicly intelligible” grammar that political theology and Christian ethics frequently seek.
2. Secular humanist philosophers often find in Arendt a demanding account of human dignity and freedom without appeal to supernatural teleology: a defense of plurality, civic agency, anti-totalitarian vigilance, and responsibility grounded in worldly practices of speech, judgment, and institution-building rather than in metaphysical guarantees.

What follows is an attempt of an interpretive explanation of these two receptions, grounded in Hanneh Arendt’s texts and in representative scholarship.

I. Arendt’s Conceptual Core: Plurality, Natality, and the Fragility of Action

Hanneh Arendt’s mature “anthropology” is explicitly non-essentialist: she distinguishes the human condition from a fixed “human nature,” and she famously shifts the philosophical focus from “Man” in the singular to human beings in the plural. The Human Condition develops this through the analysis of the vita activa (labor, work, action) and treats politics as the realm where plurality becomes manifest in speech and deed.

Two ideas are especially important for understanding why divergent traditions can “share” Arendt:

1. Natality (the capacity for new beginnings). Arendt connects freedom to the fact that each birth introduces a newcomer who can initiate what did not exist before; politics, at its best, is the cultivation and protection of that beginning-capacity.
2. The irreversibility and unpredictability of action. Because action occurs in a web of relations, its consequences outrun intention. Arendt argues that only certain human powers can “stabilize” or “redeem” action under these conditions - above all, forgiving (addressing irreversibility) and promising (addressing unpredictability).

This pair - natality plus the fragile structure of action - already hints at why both Christians and secular humanists find Arendt fruitful: she offers a philosophy of freedom that is neither voluntarist fantasy nor metaphysical deduction, but a practical-moral account of how agency survives in time, with others.

II. Why Christian Philosophers Find Arendt Attractive

1. A sustained (and philosophically serious) engagement with Augustine of Hippo

Arendt’s intellectual formation includes a doctoral dissertation on Augustine (completed under Karl Jaspers), and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) notes that in this early work she analyzes the Augustinian concept of love while criticizing the “worldlessness” of a dominant philosophical tradition. 

This matters for Christian philosophers because Arendt is not merely “influenced by Christianity” in a vague cultural sense. She engages Augustine as a philosophical interlocutor about community, love, and world. Roy Tsao’s study of “Arendt’s Augustine” emphasizes that her early Augustine book reverberates later in her mature work and helps explain how motifs associated with Christianity (especially creation and neighbor-relations) can be re-functioned within a secular political philosophy.

Christian philosophers can thus read Arendt as a case study in translation without reduction: theological materials appear, but they are subjected to conceptual discipline and political criteria.

2. Natality as a philosophical analogue of creation (and, indirectly, incarnation)

Christian thinkers frequently want to speak of human freedom as something more than preference-satisfaction: as a real capacity to begin again, to respond, to repent, to be transformed. Arendt’s natality provides a non-soteriological account of newness that nonetheless resonates with creation-language.

A representative theological reception explicitly highlights this bridge. Julia Lupton’s review of John Kiess’s Hannah Arendt and Theology argues that Arendt’s concept of plurality is “poetically” linked to the biblical creation of two persons rather than one, and that natality is connected both to creation and to a “Nativity premise” (“A child has been born to us”) that Arendt places at a climactic moment in her discussion of action.

Even when Christian philosophers disagree with Arendt’s criticisms of Christianity, natality gives them conceptual leverage: it lets them articulate a theologically congenial concern - new beginnings - inside a vocabulary that is legible in secular political debate.

Note: “Soteriological” comes from soteriology (Greek sōtēría, “salvation”). In philosophy of religion and theology it refers to doctrines or frameworks about salvation - how human beings are redeemed, reconciled to God, delivered from sin, etc.

3. Forgiveness and promising as “public” (not merely private) virtues

Arendt famously argues that forgiving and promising are not optional moral adornments but structurally necessary capacities for a political life among equals, because they address the temporal wounds of action (irreversibility) and the instability of the future (unpredictability).

This is attractive to Christian philosophers for two reasons:

• It acknowledges a Christian discovery while refusing confessional enclosure. Roy Tsao underscores that Arendt identifies Jesus of Nazareth as the “discoverer” of forgiveness’ role in human affairs, and then insists that the religious context is no reason not to take the discovery seriously “in a strictly secular sense” - i.e., as a political-anthropological insight about human relations.
• It provides a grammar for reconciliation that can operate in civic space. Contemporary Christian ethicists and political theologians often wrestle with how forgiveness should relate to justice, institutions, and public repair. Arendt’s account is a ready-made interlocutor because it treats forgiveness as a political capacity while also sharply limiting what can be forgiven (a point that becomes crucial in debates about atrocity, punishment, and “crimes against humanity”).

Shinkyu Lee’s analysis (in the Journal of Religious Ethics) illustrates how Arendt can be read alongside Christian sources (Lee discusses Dietrich Bonhoeffer) to clarify the scope and limits of “secular” forgiveness and to avoid both moral purism and empty political quietism.

4. A challenging critic of Christian otherworldliness - useful precisely because she resists it

Arendt is not simply “friendly” to Christianity; she can be a severe critic of forms of Christian social life that withdraw from public plurality into privacy and inwardness. That critique is one reason Christian philosophers keep reading her: she forces a confrontation with the temptations of political privatization, and she does so with philosophical (not merely polemical) tools.

This theme is explicit in theological discussions of Arendt. The Syndicate symposium on “Hannah Arendt and Theology,” for example, frames Arendt as a “public philosopher” whose account of thinking and judgment is tied to political action, while also registering her ambivalence about Christianity’s relation to politics.

For Christian philosophers, then, Arendt is useful both constructively (resources for natality, forgiveness, worldly responsibility) and critically (a test of whether Christian ethics can remain public, plural, and non-coercive).

III. Why Secular Humanist Philosophers Find Arendt Attractive

1. A robust account of human dignity without metaphysical guarantees

Secular humanism typically aims to ground dignity, rights, and moral responsibility in human capacities - reasoning, agency, sociability - rather than divine command or cosmic teleology. Arendt’s political anthropology fits this aspiration, but with a distinctive twist: she grounds dignity not in an abstract “human essence,” but in worldly belonging and public agency.

This is one reason her work is central to modern debates about citizenship and rightlessness. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy emphasizes Arendt’s focus on human beings “in the plural” and reconstructs her philosophy through themes including citizenship, agency, and the moral significance of thinking and judgment.

2. Anti-totalitarian vigilance and the diagnosis of “thoughtlessness”

Hannah Arendt remains one of the canonical theorists of totalitarianism and of the vulnerabilities of modern mass society. The SEP entry notes that The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) generated major debate about Nazi and Stalinist regimes, and that Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) coined the term “banality of evil.”

For secular humanists, this is not merely historical. It supports a normative project: defending the conditions under which persons can think, judge, and resist ideological capture. In a worldview that does not rely on divine judgment to “set things right,” the stakes of human responsibility - and of the institutions that cultivate it  ecome even higher. Arendt’s emphasis on thinking and judgment as morally significant capacities (developed most explicitly in The Life of the Mind) aligns directly with that secular ethical urgency.

Note: When Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” in Eichmann in Jerusalem, she was trying to name a specific phenomenon she thought she observed at the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann: the unsettling possibility that enormous crimes can be committed by agents who are not “demonic” monsters, but instead painfully ordinary - careerist, conformist, and rhetorically shallow.

3. Human rights as a political problem: “the right to have rights”

A major strand of secular humanist philosophy concerns universal rights and global moral responsibility. Arendt is “popular” here not because she offers an easy affirmation of rights, but because she poses a hard problem: rights language collapses when people lose membership in a political community capable of guaranteeing them.

Gregory Dinsmore’s Cornell dissertation summarizes Arendt’s argument that, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, human rights proved unable to protect stateless people because they could not secure what she called “the right to have rights,” and it highlights Arendt’s further claim that to be a bearer of rights one must have “a place in the world.” 

Ayten Gündoğdu’s Oxford chapter similarly frames Arendt’s critique around the “perplexities” of the Rights of Man and the crisis of statelessness as a permanent challenge to human rights theory.

For secular humanists, this critique can be productive rather than deflationary: it pushes humanism away from complacent abstraction (“humanity” as a merely moral idea) toward the institutional and civic conditions that make dignity effective - citizenship, public spaces, legal guarantees, and practices of political action.

4. Pluralism as the ethical shape of a secular world

Hannah Arendt’s insistence that politics is constituted by plurality - by the fact that different persons disclose themselves in speech and action - offers secular humanists an ethical ideal that does not depend on shared theology. The “human” is not primarily a metaphysical substance but a condition of coexistence: appearing to one another, negotiating a common world, and sustaining institutions that protect difference.

This emphasis also explains why Arendt is frequently used in secular, cosmopolitan, or human-rights-adjacent projects. An open-access record in Ethics & Global Politics presents Arendt’s conditions (plurality, natality, action) as providing theoretical grounding for cosmopolitan norms such as democratic inclusion, openness, and dynamic engagement. Even when one rejects cosmopolitanism, the point remains: Arendt supplies secular moral vocabulary for plurality that is richer than mere tolerance and more concrete than moral universalism alone.

Note: Cosmopolitanism (from Greek kosmos = world, polites = citizen) is a family of positions in moral and political philosophy that treat human beings as belonging, in some important sense, to a single worldwide community. Many cosmopolitan readings try to use Arendt to support global inclusion and human-rights norms. But Arendt is also often treated as a challenge to cosmopolitanism: she stresses that rights become real only when persons are embedded in political communities and institutions capable of guaranteeing them, which complicates purely moral or abstract universalism.

Conclusion: One Thinker, Two “Translations”

Hannah Arendt’s unusual position - neither confessional theologian nor reductive secularist—explains her dual popularity. Christian philosophers can read her as a disciplined translator of theological motifs into political philosophy: natality, forgiveness, neighbor-relations, and love of the world become publicly discussable without being emptied of existential weight. Secular humanists can read her as a demanding defender of human freedom and dignity grounded in plural civic life, wary of ideology, and attentive to the institutional reality of rights and rightlessness.

In both receptions, what is most compelling is Arendt’s refusal to treat politics as mere instrumentality. Politics is, for her, the worldly space where human beings become answerable - through speech, judgment, and action - for the kind of common world they build and whether newcomers can still begin.

Bibliography

Primary sources (Arendt)

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. (Also rev. ed. with introd. by Margaret Canovan, 1998.)

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951. 

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking, 1963. 

Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Viking, 1963.

Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future. New York: Viking, 1961.

Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. Edited by Mary McCarthy. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

Secondary sources

Calvet de Magalhães, Theresa. “The Frailty of Action: Forgiving and Promising: The Redemption of Action through the Potentialities of Action Itself in Arendt.” HannahArendt.net 1, no. 1 (2005). 

Dinsmore, Gregory Laurence. A Place in the World: Hannah Arendt and the Political Conditions of Human Rights. PhD diss., Cornell University, 2011. 

Gündoğdu, Ayten. “Perplexities of Human Rights.” In Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 

Hayden, Matthew J. “Arendt and Cosmopolitanism: The Human Conditions of Cosmopolitan Teacher Education.” Ethics & Global Politics 5, no. 4 (2013): 239–258.

Lee, Shinkyu. “The Political vs. the Theological: The Scope of Secularity in Arendtian Forgiveness.” Journal of Religious Ethics 50, no. 4 (2022): 670–695.

Lupton, Julia Reinhard. Review of John Kiess, Hannah Arendt and Theology (Bloomsbury, 2016). Political Theology 18, no. 4 (2017): 1–3.

Tömmel, Ingeborg. “Hannah Arendt.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. First published 2006; substantive revision 2024.

Tsao, Roy T. “Arendt’s Augustine.” In Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, edited by Seyla Benhabib. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Kiess, Joh,. “Hannah Arendt and Theology” (symposium page). Syndicate.

Van Osta, Peter. Een Arendtiaanse analyse van de moderne gezondheidszorg (An Arendtian analysis of modern healthcare).