Reddit mentions of The Politics of Redemption: The Social Logic of Salvation

> Again, to me you seem to be describing an example where scholars are taking into account theological influences in the thought of Marx

No, they're constructive Marxist theorists. That means they aren't just (or even primarily) trying to figure out what Marx thought and why he thought it, but are instead focused on extending and developing the Marxist tradition, and they're using theological material to do that: for instance, several of these figures have written commentaries on St. Paul.

> What are political theologians doing that makes their word distinct from political science or religious studies or any other secular discipline?

As I've already said, they're not doing religious studies because they're doing constructive work. They're also not political scientists because political science is, as the name suggests, mostly about the "science" of actual politics. These folk are engaged in political theory/philosophy, which is a deeper critical study of the nature politics. They don't care about how to run a campaign, they'd be more interested in what modern campaign methods tell us about people's understanding of themselves in a media-saturated late-capitalist culture or something like that. And then they'd want to critique that understanding and pose revisions/alternatives.

In this sense, they're doing the work of political theorists, but with more attention to the religious dimensions of the questions they deal with (again, religion in a "secularized" sense whose object is not a real transcendent deity). Admittedly there are no hard-and-fast divisions between the disciplines here, because there's tremendous overlap between several humanities disciplines. Whether someone gets called a "philosopher" or a "theologian" or a "political theorist" mostly has to do with their training, even if they venture into other disciplines in their work. But those who engage in "political theology," whatever their disciplinary background, are focused on the constructive relationship between political and theological thought.

Because of their focus on the theological in the political and the political in the theological, political theologians of all stripes (orthodox or heterodox or atheistic) have been responsible for drawing attention to dimensions of political life that had been ignored by other political thinkers: concepts like sovereignty, glory, liturgy, messianism, faith, and all sorts of others that are operative in political life even if they remain invisible to normal eyes.

> Maybe it's just me but I don't see how "theologized atheism" even means anything.

Then read somebody like Feuerbach, and you can see how different his atheism is from that of someone like Dawkins and get a clearer sense of what's going on. The only way to really get a solid sense of what's going on is to encounter it firsthand.

> Whatever distinction you think there is either doesn't exist or you haven't made it plain.

I've made it pretty plain, I think. Atheist theologians are doing theology. The things that theologians do are what atheist theologians do. The main difference is that they immanentize the object of their study, so they're not talking about something that really exists outside of the anymore, but human experience.

Take a book like this one. This is a constructive work on the Christian theology of redemption (no descriptive, but focused on actually developing Christian thought), and most of it could easily have been written by an Christian theist (and has been favorably reviewed by Christian theists). But it's written by an atheist doing theology from a secularized Christian perspective.

I haven't read it yet (been on the "to read" list for a couple years now...), so I'm not sure if it'll be exactly what you're looking for, but you might find Adam Kotsko's The Politics of Redemption: The Social Logic of Salvation interesting.