The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West
By Mark Lilla, Knopf, 352 pp., $26
The publisher Alfred A. Knopf snared the cover of The
This is a lucid book of great learning and shrewd insights into political and religious psychology. Lilla, a distinguished public intellectual at Columbia, has an unusual biography for a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books: He once was a Christian evangelical, and writes about the fire of religious awakening from the inside, and with understanding.
The nexus of his book is the contrast between two strands of Western thinking about religion and politics. The first is well-known to Americans: the revolution in thought, largely in response to the Wars of Religion which left a devastated 16th-century Europe soaked in blood, in which Thomas Hobbes and later John Locke sought to free the political order from theocratic control. "A Great Separation," as Lilla calls it, "took place, severing Western political philosophy decisively from cosmology and theology. It remains the most distinctive feature of the modern West to this day."
Yet the most interesting thing about Lilla's book is subtle exposition of the second strand of Western thinking about political theology, the philosophical tradition which stands opposed to that of Hobbes, Locke, and American notions of the separation of church and state. That tradition begins with Rousseau, a thinker typically associated with the left. The pedigree of this political theology will surprise those who associate the marriage of religion and politics with controversial figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. But it was Rousseau, the forebear of the French Revolution, who believed that man in his natural state is inherently religious, and that the state should encourage the religious impulse.
To the anti-clerical Rousseau, the Catholic Church was a swamp of superstitions, indulgences, and corruption. But if you strip away these accretions, you are left with man in his natural state, which is to say a man who yearns for religion. In this view, religion is not a threat, but provides the moral underpinnings without which no society could thrive. Philosopher Immanuel Kant agreed, albeit as a proponent of the Christian "church militant." So did Georg Hegel, who saw a reformed Christianity as the epitome of reason, and a natural ally of the modern state. And there was a group of distinguished liberal Protestant and Jewish thinkers such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Hermann Cohen who sought to make explicit the connection between liberal religious movements and the German state.
But when blessing begins, thinking ends. Consider Cohen, a prominent liberal Jewish philosopher of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the middle of World War I, he wrote an open letter to American Jewry hoping to enlist them in support of the German side. "Next to his fatherland, every Western Jew must recognize, revere, and love Germany as the motherland of his modern religiosity." We scoff at Cohen's allegiance to Germany. Yet Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the most hospitable place Jews had known, a citadel of learning, culture, and advancement of Jews into modernity. Cohen died before Hitler's rise to power: His wife, Martha, was exterminated by the Nazis in 1942. The happy congruence between religion and the state was no longer. The stillborn God of the book's title refers to the dashed hopes of liberal theologians - stillborn because their God was a reflection of the steady clip-clop of bourgeois life, and couldn't ignite the divine spark of redemption Germans craved after the defeat and humiliation of World War I, and economic and social turmoil of Weimar. The political theology of the reformers was replaced by a "craving for a more robust faith, based on a new revelation that could shake the foundations of the whole modern order."
In a fresh look at writers like Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Ernst Bloch, and Martin Buber, Lilla writes that the most daring thinkers of the day transformed liberal theology into hope for a redemptive apocalypse. German political theology was hijacked by a regime suffused in a politics of redemption. Hitler fulfilled the religiosity Rousseau believed every man and woman craves with the messianic fervor of utopian salvation - and deadly consequences. The book makes scant mention of Islamic ideologues, the Christian right, and other contemporary instances of the marriage of politics and theology. Lilla has a prior task: the need for Western thinkers to renew their awareness of what Rousseau argued. Yet as Lilla pessimistically concludes, "Contemporary political philosophy no longer feels it necessary to engage with political theology, which reflects great confidence in the durability of our experience and its universality. Whether that confidence is well placed can be judged by any reader of today's newspaper."
Jonathan Dorfman writes frequently about politics and religion.
