Confronting Demonic Autonomy in Digital Capitalism: Reconstructing Tillich’s Religious Socialism as a Post-Secular Public Theology

In an age in which the post-secular condition and digital capitalism are increasingly interwoven, the question of what role religion ought to play in the public sphere—and how it might regain critical and constructive force amid deepening crises of meaning—has become urgent. Contemporary digital capitalism, characterized by the pseudo-sacralization of algorithmic logic, generates a persistent absorptive power marked by ecstatic effects. This elevates technological rationality and market logic to a level of pseudo-sacral authority, exercising a form of symbolic and spiritual domination. Returning to Paul Tillich’s thought, this article reconstructs his vision of religious socialism not as a historical artifact, but as a critical public theology capable of resisting this form of demonic domination. Tillich’s central insight is that the crisis of capitalism is not merely economic but ontological: its culture of “autonomy” severs itself from its religious ground, allowing finite forms—now amplified by digital technology—to elevate themselves into ultimate meaning and thereby consolidate into self-absolutizing, demonic structures. Against this background, the article argues that Tillich’s religious socialism is not a proposal for institutional replacement, but a public theological practice rooted in “ultimate concern.” Its task is to expose the structures of usurpation operative within digital capitalism and to reconfigure the order of meaning through the symbolic vision of theonomy. Through this symbolic practice, religion is recovered as a deep dimension of culture capable of critically piercing the regimes of meaning-occlusion. Moreover, it is precisely the unfinished and open-ended characteristic of religious socialism that enables it to regain theoretical and symbolic vitality in the post-secular present.