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The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West

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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.

I'll admit straight away that I'm not formally trained in philosophy or theology. I would've liked to have at least minored in the former, but life had other plans. I absorbed what I could, at any rate.

That being said, I had very little trouble following the flow of Lilla's narrative. He was dead-on in his assessment that we in the West have made the common (and often fatal) error of forgetting where we came from and how we got here. We needed this reminder. It was quite enlightening to read his analysis of the progression of political theological thought over the course of 400 years. For such a dense subject, it's remarkable that he was able to condense it down to only 300 pages. I'm sure a great deal of nuance was lost along the way, but that doesn't really matter. What matters is that he showed how people took the ideas of reasonable, intelligent men and twisted them into things that those men would be disgusted by.

I devoured this book the first time I read it. The consequences of the contradictions inherent in Christianity, as well as the history of the Great Separation itself, are fascinating to me. I'll have to read it again in order to pick up what I missed before. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of philosophy, as well as the history of religious thought.

Mark Lilla's "Stillborn God" is a book about politcal theology, and more particularly, the gradual "evolution" of ideas about how and whether the State should be founded on religious precepts. There are two major problems, though: first, Lilla deals more with the history of theology than the history of its relationship to political thought; secondly, Lilla focuses so much on the history of ideas that he ignores how theology has influenced the ACTUAL world of politics in favor of dealing with how the PHILOSOPHY OF religion has influenced the PHILOSOPHY OF politics.

Before I elaborate, here are the positives. Lilla is a very knowledgable scholar who dissects and explains various thinkers religious philosophies very well. He explains the gradual progression of religious thought, from the Aristotle-informed writings of Augustine, to the atheistic rationalism of Hobbes, to the more emotionalistic view of religion espoused by Rousseau. Through LIlla's evocations, we see how religion and the philosophy of theology's relationship to politics has gradually "secularized" (meaning that, through the years, it became more p ossible to form a poltic governed less by revalation and more by appeals to the human condition).

Here are the two things Lilla did not do, though, and they are very important. First, Lilla gets so swept up in his exegesis of thinkers' theologies and religious philosophies that the book seemed more to be a history of theology than of political theology. (For instance, Lilla tells us much about Kant's theology but doesn't say much on whether or if it had an effect on the politics of Germany.)

The second problem is related to the first. As with many 'histories of ideas,' the ideas are focused on almost to the exclusion of the world of practice. To be honest, I care less about how x thinker affected the world of academic thought than I do about how x thinker affected the world of POLITICAL PRACTICE. Lilla, though, focuses almost solely on the former. We talk about Rousseau, Locke, Kant, and Hegel's religious philosophies, and how various theologians concieved of the proper relationship between church and state. We do not really talk about Madison, Jefferson, and Paine, and my suspicion is that it has much to do with an intellectual not wanting to get his thoughts dirty by talking about the practitioners. Best to talk about the philosophies of church and state, rather than the actual practice of it.

I don't want to be so hard on Lilla, but this book really does focus so much on the ideas that the practical consequence of them is either glossed over or ignored. For those who want an interesting and informative summaative history of our attempts to puzzle out philosophies on what religion can offer the state, this is a very good book. For those who want a book on the history of how we put those ideas into practice, I urge readers to look elsewhere. (For a good book on the competing ideas on religion/state relations in US History, read Gary Wills's "Head and Heart."

There are many excellent books exploring the internal flaws of organized religion, but "The Stillborn God" steps outside those problems and delineates the way in which the tenets of Christian and Jewish faith contradict and impede humanity's progress towards the rule of law. Lilla surveys the philosophical innovation of Hobbes and the later contortions of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and others' attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, ultimately leading European thought up to the marvel known colloquially as "World War II". Less sensational than recent books by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, Lilla adds the historical and philosophical ballast the others lack. An excellent and demanding read, Mr. Lilla should now be encouraged to produce an executive summary of his latest book for our government's current administration. (Bush, that was...)

Mark Lilla does a superb job of tracing the history of political theology in Europe, since the Great Separation between religion and politics was instituted by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century. By no means do I have the intellectual background to negatively critique his analysis of the philosophical progression in Europe over the next three centuries.

Lilla points out that even after the Great Separation, political theology reared its ugly head in 20th century Europe, in of all places, Nazi Germany, particularly due to some backsliding towards religious messianism in philosophical thought.

I leave one star off of my review, partially because I come from a different religious tradition. The God of the Old Testament is a vengeful, jealous God. Christ of the New Testament proclaims that He is the only path to the Father, and St. Paul institutionalized this cult (in my words) by making the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross as the centerpiece of the Christian faith. (Of course, I have only good things to say about Christianity, in its efforts to reach out to sinners.) However, because Christ proclaims that He is the one, true path, Protestant churches and the Catholic churches have competed over which of them is "the one true path"--until the Great Separation separated that personal quest from questions of politics.

As for Islam (which is only hinted at obliquely in this book about European Christians and Jews), only now in Iraq are Shias and Sunnis confronting what Protestants and Catholics went through during the Thirty Years War in Germany. Islam is still awaiting its "Great Separation."

However, Hinduism (my faith) has never had this problem. In Hindu philosophy (the Upanishads), God is the center of all Truth in all affairs; furthermore, there are multiple paths to the Godhead to suit the different needs of different individuals and communities. Furthermore, the Hindu God is not a vengeful or jealous God demanding obedience. Rather, every individual reaps the fruit of past good and bad actions in future lives according to the laws of karma. The role of God, be it Vishnu, or Shiva, or Durga (the primary deities worshipped by the three major branches), is to periodically intervene in human affairs to rescue devotees from evil.

Messianism has always been a positive force in Hinduism. Although, I look forward to the day when the Great Separation, highlighted in Europe in Mark Lilla's book, comes into effect in Islam, I am not convinced that it is necessary for politics in societies with traditions other than those of the three monotheistic Middle Eastern faiths.

As a prof. at the University of Michigan, I am always looking for works to improve my thinking and writing. Many authors I read can create beautiful prose but their arguments can be weak; others are insightful but clunky. Lilla is the rare author who can both think clearly and write beautifully. It is always a pleasure to witness his solid and deeply knowledgeable argument take shape in the cadences and the rhythms of his writing. His pacing, his pauses, and his periodic recapitulations make his books an effortless read.

The Stillborn God is no exception. If you are interested in an overall framework of Western political philosophy and theology, one that is structurally sound and can accommodate philosophers ranging from Hobbes to Hegel, drawing out in 300 pages these guys' individual philosophies and their conceptual and historical interrelations, then this is the book for you. Of course, as with any framework, there will be gaps. It is in these gaps where Lilla's critics roost. But laymen like me are like students: we don't care about these critics' "technical details", we just want no confusion. An efficient and methodical mastication of Hegel that we can swallow in the first read is all we desire.

Lilla's book ends in early 20th century Germany. A worthy follow-up is Keynes's succinct economic masterpiece "Economic Consequences of Peace" (thankfully free on the Internet). Keynes uses the same political philosophy to explain England and France's vicious motives for the heavy WWI German reparations. He laments English and French leaders' failure to understand the rapidly changing nature of intra-European political and economic relationships, which he beautifully documents (European population, for example, had grown a lot, leading to new cross-continental grain trading patterns). And we all know now, as Keynes did then, the ensuing consequences.

Mark Lilla had me at his previous book, The Reckless Mind. Lilla is the first philosopher I've read to review the works of past thinkers, and attach their thoughts with their actions.
I find Lilla's writing energetic, strong and opinionated. He's clear in his ideas, and he knows he's taking a position. "Opinionated" has negative connotations, but I mean it in a masculine way, one who's sure of himself, one who's thought it through for a few months, maybe longer.
This is a short book, written in plain sentences, everyday words. Yet the ideas are unique. And the thoughts require some background in philosophical thought. Not deep, not profound, but some understanding of the writings of those who wrote before any of us were born.
And that's all good to me. Lilla assumes those who wrote before him were intelligent, sincere, and wanted to have The Right Answer. To review the past masters in hindsight, to critique the philosophy superstars of yesterday with the facts of history takes courage. If you know some history, this book won't bore you. It takes a stand, it has an opinion. But philosophy is opinion, unless you're osama bin laden, who believes in only one way.
Lilla compares current approaches of Democracy or Controlled Society to against those ideas of past generations. This is as far as a person can apply the scientific method to the construction of a society.
He teaches us that truth was found in previous generations, only to be laughed at by the next generation.
I enjoyed every minute i read this book. Highly recommended.

Written in the straightforward tone of a lucid history lecture, Lilla's 310-page book argues that complacency and chauvinism, the idea that our country has paved the way for secular enlightenment and that all other nations will soon follow, have made the great nations allow for religious fanaticism to dangerously creep into political life. Secular political philosophies are the best but they don't have the appeal of religious political philosophies and that appeal is assurance and comprehensiveness. To wake us from our complacency, he wants to "reenact the tension" or conflict between religion and politics." I think he overstates this complacency; the conflict has always been evident, since its inception 400 years ago, to many of us at least.

Lilla does a good job of showing how the age of science or The Enlightenment began "The Great Separation," with theocentric view of the world at conflict with a scientific one. One scientific view, which Lilla describes in detail (and he becomes more excited and passionate than the rest of the book), stems from the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, an Epicurean, who believes the cosmos were not created by God for our benefit but rather nature is indifferent to our plight and we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control. Lilla argues that Hobbes' Leviathan "contains the most devastating attack on Christian political theology ever undertaken . . ." Religion is not from God; its springs from the confused mind of man, a helpless creature overwhelmed by "the rush of experience." Man has created religion to gain pleasure and to avoid pain and he is "stubbornly ignorant." The creation of a monotheistic god is, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a perversity that becomes a Fearful Monster, a "capricious" god stripping man of the very solace and comfort he wanted to derive from his god in the first place. Clearly, for Hobbes, a political philosophy built on the foundation of such an irrational, self-destructive religious psychology is doomed to fail. It's apparent by the sudden passion of Lilla's tone that he has a special fondness for Hobbes and I daresay he could written an entire explication of Leviathan.

As an aside, I take issue with the unfortunate title, which, taken from his final chapter, doesn't do justice to this carefully-written book. His second chapter is titled The Great Separation. I'll let readers decide which title is better.