  Some interpreters have explained Schmitt’s hostility towards liberal de-politicization as being grounded in the view that a willingness to distinguish between friend and enemy is a theological duty (Mehring 1989; Meier 1998; Groh, 1991; Herrero 2015, 143–177; Vatter 2016). Schmitt argues in Political Theology that all key concepts of the modern doctrine of the state are secularized theological concepts, which suggests that a political theory that continues to use these concepts needs a theological foundation (PT 36–52). In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt claims that all true political theorists base their views on a negative anthropology which holds that man is by nature evil and licentious, and thus needs to be kept in check by a strong state capable of drawing a friend-enemy distinction if there is to be social order (CP 58–68). This latter thesis, Schmitt admits, can take a secular form, as in Hobbes or Machiavelli, as the purely descriptive claim that man is inherently dangerous to man. But Schmitt suggests that this secular version of a negative political anthropology is open to be transformed into the view that man, though by nature dangerous, is perfectible or into the view that man’s dangerous behavior is a mere contingent consequence of a mistaken form of social organization (PT 53–66; L 31–9). In order to establish a permanent need for political authority, negative political anthropology must be given a theological reading that portrays the dangerous nature of man as an irrevocable result of original sin. Liberal de-politicization, from this perspective, is to be rejected as a sign of human pride that rebels against God, who alone, but only at the end of history, can deliver humanity from political enmity.