The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (Vintage) [Paperback]

In The Stillborn God, Mark Lilla, Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, has written a cogent history of "political theology" (the unholy marriage of church and state, religion and politics).

Although Lilla deals briefly with Judaism, and mentions Islam (just barely), he concentrates on Christendom and its conflicted theology, which has often led to heated controversies, doctrinal schisms, and religious wars.

Here a puzzling paradox emerges: why does a Christian doctrine that blesses the peacemakers and considers the lilies of the field too often inspire racism, intolerance, fanatical hatred, and violence?

At the heart of Christianity, Lilla explains, there is a conceptual confusion, an ambiguity found in dogmas such as the Trinity, which leads to a bifurcation of Christian perspectives between "already" and "not yet." While some theologians emphasize the "there and then" (a transcendent God and a future redemption in heaven), others emphasize the "here and now" (an immanent God and a present redemption on earth).

Such conceptual divergence has important implications for political theology. While some believers advocate an ascetic withdrawal from the mundane world by retreat into monasticism, passively and patiently awaiting the Second Coming of Jesus, other believers call for political activism, faith initiatives, militant resistant against an evil empire, or a longing for an apocalyptic Armageddon. Such a mentality may advocate and welcome a Christian theocracy--an abolition of the "misguided" separation of church and state.

For the philosophically minded, The Stillborn God is a rare treat. Lilla gives a lucid analysis of the religious, moral, and political thinking of philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel.

Lilla's explication of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) stands at the epicenter of The Stillborn God. Indeed, asserts Lilla, Hobbes's "great treatise Leviathan (1651) contains the most devastating attack on Christian political theology ever undertaken," and established the agenda for nearly all subsequent Western political philosophy.

Hobbes's "godless, atheistic materialism" argued for "The Great Separation"--the complete separation of church and state, and favored the steady withering away of the church. His radical proposal caused a storm of protest and subsequent thinkers sought to undo or minimize the "damage" he had wrought.

Lilla's portrayal of Immanuel Kant is also intriguing. Kant, the author of Critique of Pure Reason, is often considered to be the paragon of philosophical rationality. However, Kant wrote, "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge [that is, to show the limits of reason] in order to make room for faith." By doing so, he smuggled the concepts of God, the soul, and immortality back into philosophical discourse. Kant was, in effect, a covert theologian who "legitimatized" Christian dogma, sneaking it in by philosophical hocus-pocus.

Secular humanists (or simply humanists, for all true humanists are secular) believe with the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras that "man is the measure of all things" and that when religion seeks to "call the shots" in political life, it becomes, in the words of John Calvin, "a plant so corrupt that it is only capable of producing the worst of fruit."

Lilla, therefore, praises the wisdom of our founding fathers who created a government based on a balance of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and on a separation of church and state. He warns, however, that our felicitous experiment in democracy will not inevitably survive, but is continually threatened by an insidious political theology.

Sinclair Lewis warned, "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." The whole tenor of Lilla's work is in agreement with such an assessment; it is a cautionary tale warning us that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

The Stillborn God is an impressive and powerful volume that should be read by every intelligent, thinking person. It's a timely work with important lessons for our 21-century world.

Mark Lilla is Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He was previously Professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. A noted intellectual historian and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, he is the author of The Restless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics and G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern. He lives in New York City.

With books about atheism doing well in bookstores (like Christopher Hitchens's _God is Not Great_ or Richard Dawkins's _The God Delusion_), believers might worry that a book titled _The Stillborn God_ (Knopf) offers more of the same. This is not the case. The book's subtitle, _Religion, Politics, and the Modern West_, gives a bit better picture of its subject and theme, but does not make its content completely clear. Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University and frequent contributor to the _New York Review of Books_, has written a book about the separation of church and state, but you won't find here references to Thomas Jefferson or the U.S. Constitution. This is a broader and generally Eurocentric view of how theology became pried apart from politics, a process that has taken many centuries. We take for granted now that there is something inherently wrong with a government that imposes or favors one church's belief system, and we are aghast at governments who imprison or suspend rights of citizens simply because of their religious beliefs, but that was, at one time, the way all governments operated. There are plenty of Americans who feel that church and state are too separated now, but there are fewer who would insist that the government ought directly to sponsor particular church movements. The concept of what Lilla calls "the Great Separation" was long in coming, and as he tells the story, it was brought about by influential thinkers; if they had not taught in just the way they did, perhaps we would not have managed the separation at all. It wasn't inevitable. Lilla's is a serious tome which will be enjoyed by anyone who appreciates a historic explanation of this particularly important way we have come to regard both religion and politics.

Lilla explains that different conceptions of the Christian God and of the Trinity caused conflict and even bloody religious wars in Europe through the 1500s, so that theologians, and more especially philosophers, began to question whether there should even be a political theology. Lilla nominates 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes as the most important questioner of the issue. He insisted that questions about God could more practically be viewed as questions about human behavior, and that if there were any religious revelation, it had to be filtered by the human mind, perceptions, and passions, including the search for power. The intellectual separation of politics and religion had begun. John Locke and David Hume took Hobbes's ideas and built many of the concepts on which liberal democracies are founded, including that the power of government be limited and shared, and government be unable to interfere or advocate religious ideas or practice. There was reaction against this sort of thinking from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hegel, and Kant. The German liberal theology promoted Protestant bourgeois society as the highest type of moral life to which humans could aspire. The Bible was symbolic, not inerrant, and the German Protestantism derived from it was held to be essential to public life.

World War I destroyed the bourgeois smugness. Advocates of liberal Protestantism (and liberal Judaism, too) supported the initial German war effort. This led to disillusionment afterwards, the "stillborn God" of the title. It also led, after the war, to a theology that could be incorporated into totalitarian states, both Nazi and Communist, and thus again to religion bound up in worldly battles, the sort of cycle that Hobbes was trying to get us to emerge from. Lilla's is a limited history. He does not mention America's Christian conservatives, many of whom want the nation to support Christianity more openly, and some of whom are interested in turning the country over to an overt theocracy. He also does not mention the lack of church-state separation that such Christians find horrifying within some Islamic countries. Lilla's book is, however, a lucid reminder that despite the clamor of fundamentalists, the separation of theology from politics (however partial it might be) was a process that began centuries ago, not with the formation of the ACLU or "activist judges". It also is a welcome recognition that we are the fortunate heirs of philosophers and societies which understood that neither citizens nor government nor religion prosper when politics and religion are officially combined.

Mark Lilla wrote this book for the heirs of what he calls the Great Separation: the modern West's attempt to distinguish religious questions from political ones once and for all. This is the West's most ambitious political experiment. The trouble, according to Lilla, is that we in the West have forgotten that it is indeed an experiment, that in trying to think through political questions atheologically, the West is the historical exception rather than the rule. Because of this forgetfulness, "we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that leave societies in ruin. We assumed that this was no longer possible.... We were wrong" (3).

So Lilla sets out to remind us of the long, prestigious, and powerful legacy of political theology in the West. He marches quickly through the rise of Christianity (and its "accidental" acquisition of an Empire) up to the first attempt at the Great Separation by Thomas Hobbes (chs. 1 and 2), then more slowly through a few major thinkers who wrestled with the consequences of that attempt: Locke and Hume (ch. 3), Rousseau and Kant (ch. 4), Hegel (ch. 5), the 19th century liberal Protestants and Jews (ch. 6), and finally the re-emergence of both Christian and Jewish political theology in, above all, Karl Barth and Franz Rosenzweig (ch. 7). In the beginning, Hobbes intended to disavow religion entirely, seeing it as merely an expression of humanity's incessant fearfulness, inevitably leading to violence. But religion gradually regained a foothold in political thought, first in the negative form of "freedom of conscience" and later in the more positive form of an "enlightened" religiosity. After Rousseau, who wrote in Émile about the need for religion (shorn, of course, of any particularistic dogmatism) to encourage the natural expansiveness of the human soul, appeals to the positive social contribution of religion, especially Protestant religion, became much more common.

This renewed (though severely qualified) approval of religion emboldened 19th-century liberal Protestants and Jews in Germany to reassert their religion's politico-cultural significance, while cautiously avoiding any serious social critique. The fatal consequence of this sideways-step back toward political theology, says Lilla, was to have "left the faint odor of revelation hanging over its celebration of modern political and cultural life, implying it had been divinely blessed" (249). Once that social order began to crumble after the First World War, therefore, the condemnation of its "stillborn God" was basically fated also to take religious form. In the overtly theopolitical rhetoric of Franz Rosenzweig and Karl Barth, sharply critical of the liberal attempts to accommodate themselves to late modern German society, it suddenly and disastrously appeared possible once again to urge political decisions on the basis of some perceived revelation. An intensely apocalyptic fervor had been reawakened. Political theology had been reborn. And though neither Barth nor Rosenzweig would ever have countenanced the atrocities of the Nazi regime, their political theological ambitions, on Lilla's telling, only encouraged "a new and noxious form of political argument, which was the theological celebration of modern tyranny" (278).

All this, in brief, is the powerful and terrible intellectual legacy of which Lilla sets out to remind us, lest we lose sight of the immense fragility of the West's grand experiment. We must not take the separation of religion and politics for granted. We must not forget the captivating power of political theology.

Although this book falls victim to the oversimplification characteristic of most all popular histories of ideas, and readers more knowledgeable about a particular figure will find plenty to quibble about (especially, I think, on the theological figures), even Lilla's mistakes can be instructive. He writes with unrivaled interpretive and analytical clarity, all the more impressive given the complexity of the figures he discusses.