History of ideas. Taylor sees two books lurking in The Stillborn God: a compelling narrative about modern German thinking on religion and politics, and “a much broader narrative of modernity” that he finds borders on the “fantastic.” David Hollinger, on the other hand, takes my purposes “to be rather more modest than those attributed to [me] by many of the postings” and thinks that I’m only trying to “put before us the core intellectual resources of the modern North Atlantic West.” Hollinger has my aims exactly right. He also takes seriously my skepticism about all narratives of modernity. As I say in the book:

We are still like children when it comes to thinking about modern political life, whose experimental nature we prefer not to contemplate. Instead, we tell ourselves stories about how our big world came to be and why it is destined to persist. These are legends about the course of history, full of grand terms to describe the process supposedly at work-modernization, secularization, democratization, the “disenchantment of the world,” “history as the story of liberty,” and countless others. These are the fairy tales of our time…they make the world legible, they reassure us of its irrevocability, and they relieve us of responsibility for maintaining it.

Taylor, though, voices a common criticism, one that José Casanova also made in his previous post. So clearly I have to say more about the kind of story I am telling. To do that, let me first review what I did say in the book, then expand on it.

In the introduction to The Stillborn God I write that:

[The book] reenacts an argument about religion and politics that stretched over four hundred years in the West…. It is not a comprehensive study of all the major contributions to debates over religion and politics in this period, which would fill many volumes. Instead, it takes the reader through the steps of a particular argument, one in which the confrontation between political theology and its modern philosophical adversary was particularly intense, the disputes vivid, and the stakes clear. This is an analytic but highly episodic history of ideas.

These terms – “analytic” and “episodic” – express my approach to the history of ideas, but clearly need to be unpacked. I take the history of ideas to be a different discipline from that of “intellectual history” as the term is employed today. Recent intellectual history, ranging from Skinner to Foucault, is deflationary. It tries to bring ideas down to earth by returning them to their supposed historical contexts, or looking behind their backs to discover the hidden forces of power that generated, then used, them as ideological tools. While I learn from this literature, I have no desire to contribute to it.

What attracts me is an exercise that forces inquiry in the opposite direction: beginning with ideas as they emerge in different contexts, and are advanced for different reasons, to see what their logic is and how they shape and constrain those who try to use them. What strikes me time and again in studying the thought of the past is not how pliable ideas are to human purposes, but how they resist and even shape those purposes. We think ideas, but ideas also think us. As admirers of Hegel, Taylor and I presumably agree on this. Perhaps then we also agree that the philosophical task of thinking through, and then mastering, the ideas that “think us” requires an exploration of their hidden potential and limitations. We can do that by examining concepts abstractly; we can also do it indirectly by analyzing how they play out on the broader canvas of history. That is what I try to do, both in The Stillborn God and, in a different way, in The Reckless Mind. A cumbersome way of doing philosophy, but there it is.

I am well aware of the mountain of methodological objections to what I have just said, and the many attempts to cope with them, from Lovejoy and his “unit-ideas” to the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe project of the Bielefeld school. I cannot address them here. My point is simply to explain the assumptions behind The Stillborn God.

The rules of the games. To explain why the book it has the shape it does, let me try another approach (with due apologies to Heinrich Böll).

In studying the history of political theology over the past decade and a half, I came to feel that I was watching something like the three-dimensional chess game Mr. Spock used to play on Star Trek. Think of political theology as the game on one board. The game has set pieces, which move in certain ways and are not allowed to move in others. The players know this, but they are free to develop an infinite number of strategies within the rules, so there are always surprises. That is how the game is played. The outside observer (me in this case) does not know the rules, but by watching enough games he begins to see how different pieces move and which strategies are successful. Eventually he begins to infer what the rules must be.

Now imagine that a second board is added, and call this modern political philosophy. Many of the pieces are the same but some are new, and certain powerful pieces from the first board are missing. New strategies are developed, so there is variety here as well, but again there are constraints on the game, so not everything is possible. A strategy that works on the first board may not work on the second, and alien pieces won’t work at all. Again, the observer has to watch a number of games to learn how the new pieces work, which strategies are successful, and what the new underlying rules are. He can now begin to compare the two games and see where they seem similar and where they differ. He can also watch the players and see how, at the psychological level, the structure of each game affects the way it is played.

The Stillborn God begins as a book about these two chess games. Part of the book explains, in all too cursory fashion, how the second chessboard came to be built after a stalemated game on the first board (Christian political theology) descended into violence among the players. But the real drama is in the analysis of strategies on the new board, as David Hollinger has seen. There were of course many such strategies, each having its own background, and one could write a history of how each and every one of them developed, who used them in which historical contexts, and the like. I have not done that. Rather, I have focused episodically and analytically on a few grandmasters whose strategies stand out as having advanced the game and revealed its inner possibilities: Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel. Their strategies developed in a certain order because later masters were aware of the earlier ones, but there was nothing teleological about this development and contemporary players can draw on any of their moves, which are now freeware. The game continues to develop, but also repeats itself.

Indeed, games continue at both levels, even in the West, though the question “which board are you on?” seems less pressing today than it did in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. The building of the second board did not abolish the first one, or necessarily lessen its allure. Which is why, in the wake of the French Revolution, certain players began to raise the following plausible question: can’t the two games be combined? Despite the differences in certain pieces and moves, this was a natural suggestion to make, since the strategies on the two boards shared a family resemblance. (As Charles Taylor correctly suggests, not every piece on the old board had a “revealed” valence.)

So in the early-nineteenth century a combined game (liberal theology) was developed, and for a while it seemed playable. Some, like David Hollinger, still think it is. But it turns out to have two fatal weaknesses, mainly psychological. Those players really interested in the second game tend to think the old pieces just muddy play, and conclude that nothing is lost in removing them from the board. Others feel that combined play betrays the grandeur and seriousness of the old game, to which they long to return. That is why, when stressful circumstances present themselves at a certain juncture (e.g., the Weimar years), there is a return to messianic political theology. But not being trained in the old rules and strategies, the new messiahs are prone to making foolish, dramatic moves that put them in indefensible positions. Their experience with the mixed game makes them the worst players, not the best, on the old board. (The same is true of today’s political Islamists, I’d add.)

So in the end, The Stillborn God is about three games and the logic and psychology of playing them: the old game (political theology), the new game (modern political philosophy), and the failed mixed game (liberal theology). Though these developed in a certain historical order, the book does not aim to provide a “narrative of modernity” or anything of the sort. Its aim is rather, to quote David Hollinger again, to expose and assess “the core intellectual resources of the modern North Atlantic West,” which are drawn from all three games.

The Great Separation. I have no idea whether this playful metaphor of the chess game will help clarify things for my critics. Charles Taylor seems bothered by the different metaphors of separation – rivers, chasms, and bridges – that I used in the book, and he may think I’ve just compounded the problem. But in reading him I sense he is looking for something I had no intention of providing. Had I tried to write a “narrative of modernity” he would be quite right to object that “what I cannot see is a moment of Great Separation” and to ask “is the great separation consummated when we’ve all been converted to mechanistic materialism?” But if one focuses on the development of the game, I do think there was a moment of separation, and that was the publication of Leviathan. On the old board, the aim of the game was to legitimate the exercise of political authority on the basis of a revealed nexus of God, man, and world. On Hobbes’s new board, the aim was to legitimate authority without appeal to such a revealed nexus – indeed, by explicitly ruling out that chess piece. (Which is what made Hobbes’s move more decisive than Grotius’s sly etiamsi daremus non esse deum, which left it in play but without real power.)

Now, though Hobbes built the new board and was the first to play on it, those who followed him developed quite different strategies of play (as I indeed say in Chapter 2 and elsewhere). Some, appealing to neo-stoicism, Grotius, and Pufendorf, assumed a more optimistic anthropology, which led them to different political conclusions. Others, like Locke, played a double game, following Hobbes’s materialistic anthropology in some works and various Protestant dissenters and natural theologians in others. Taylor is right: the history is messy, as were the arguments, both before Hobbes among Christian theologians, and after. But even in retelling ourselves this history we need to distinguish which board different writers were playing on, and when. It is no accident that Locke’s Two Treatises are, in fact, two treatises: one directed at Filmer and other political theologians playing on the old board, the other directed to those already playing on the new one.

(I should add that I don’t quite follow Taylor when he says that I use “political theology” in three different senses. I am pretty consistent – in fact, repetitive, according to one reviewer – in saying that I take political theology to be “a doctrine that legitimates the exercise of political authority on the basis of a revealed nexus of God, man, and world.” I do not really take up natural – i.e., non-revealed – theology, which perhaps I should have. This is a large topic, but my short answer is that in practice natural theology usually depends on revelation at some point. Though St. Thomas distinguishes divine, eternal, natural, and human law, those very distinctions appear to be revealed, not arrived at on the basis of reason alone. Finally, when Taylor says I employ the term political theology in a third sense — “the enframing of our thought about politics and human affairs in some doctrines about God and the world” – I simply don’t recognize myself, or understand what he means by “enframing.”)

Our path. Clearly the largest confusion to which The Stillborn God lends itself concerns the connection between political history and the history of these games. I seem to have opened myself to misunderstanding by not speaking more explicitly about the relationship between the Great Separation in Western political thought and the Sonderweg that our societies currently seem on. This has led many critics (some of whom appear to have relied solely on a synopsis of the book published in the New York Times Magazine) to attribute views to me that aren’t my own.

My silence on this score was intentional. The intellectual Great Separation was the necessary condition of our current understanding and exercise of political legitimacy, but it was not a sufficient condition. Nor is liberal constitutionalism the only political doctrine that the Great Separation has spawned – far from it. A Whiggish history of the modern political thought and practice written, say, in the aftermath of the two world wars might have reached much darker conclusions about the impact of the Great Separation and perhaps brighter ones about the wisdom of returning to political theology. (One book that did was Henri de Lubac’s The Drama of Atheist Humanism, written during the war.)

It was my hope to avoid both Whiggism and triumphalism by leaving open and contingent the connection between the intellectual Great Separation and the way different Western institutions in different countries developed at different times, down to our day. We know where we are now, but recounting how we got there is an enormous task (as Charles Taylor knows better than anyone), and the temptation of historical necessity is ever present. I wanted to stress the experimental nature of what we are attempting, and the strangeness of it, seen in the vast sweep of history. There are historians who can fill in the blanks and I hope they do. I also hope that The Stillborn God will be useful to them, by uncovering the deeper logic of two distinct intellectual programs, or games. Once the distinction is appreciated, I think it will be easier to see how different players at different times developed different strategies of play in different matches.

Even stated this way, though, the aims of The Stillborn God are open to the objection that I have forced the distinction between political theology and modern political philosophy. Some critics have asked: what about the United States? Doesn’t its history show that liberal political theology and liberal constitutionalism can work hand in hand, that there is no aut-aut? David Hollinger and Daniel Philpott offer versions of this argument, which has also appeared in previous posts and in published reviews. Let me take them up briefly here before signing off.

I do not disagree with Philpott when he writes that “the formation and incubation of liberal democracy” in the United States drew from Christian tradition of dissent, which opened up theological space for thinking about the autonomy of politics. That is how things happened on the ground; but once it did, Americans found themselves playing by the rules of the new chess game, and today do not generally make reference to a divine nexus of God, man, and world when explaining to themselves what makes their constitution legitimate. We have kicked that ladder away (Pastor Huckabee notwithstanding). Given the presence of real, and really aggressive, political theology in the world today, we need to keep a sense of proportion about this.

Nor do I deny that Christianity “has continued to sustain and, at vital junctures, to contribute to the expansion of liberal democracy, both in thought and substance.” How could it not? After all, the whole point of liberal democracy is that we are no longer in the business of looking into people’s souls and questioning the grounds on which people have certain political views. There are many American Christians, and their Christianity no doubt inspires their views on a range of issues (for better or worse, let’s admit that, too). But the legitimacy of the constitution does not depend on our accepting or even recognizing the legitimacy of their deepest convictions, only that they can express them, and by and large they accept that. Which means they are playing on the new board, not the old one.

David Hollinger thinks I misunderstand the American case because I focus on Germany, suggesting that the god of liberal theology is still alive and kicking here. Institutionally, this clearly isn’t so: the liberal Protestant churches have been severely depopulated over the past forty years, losing young people either to religious indifference or more ecstatic forms of faith, and liberal Catholicism isn’t doing any better. But Hollinger is referring to something else, I think, which is the prophetic strain in American religion which has done so much to inspire the political liberalism of our time. But this is not “liberal theology” in any recognizable sense, which is an intellectual tradition rooted in the nineteenth-century hope of accommodating faith to the demands of the present. The prophetic tradition wants to bring God’s judgment down on the present, denouncing racism, war, environmental degradation, inequality, and the rest. Reinhold Niebuhr was a political liberal but not a theological one; he admired Karl Barth, and his early work in the churches of Detroit during the depression was inspired by a ferocious Augustinianism, not liberal accommodation. Similarly with Dr. King. We should not conflate the prophetic “social gospel” with liberal theology, which inspires very few today. American politics still makes room for prophets, as it should – so long as they retire to their churches once the ballots are cast. And they generally do.

This is a fascinating story, and well worth the telling, particularly as Lilla weaves together both a Christian and a Jewish variant, which grew symbiotically in Germany. Of course, one might cavil at some of the interpretations; I feel that Lilla pulls his major figures perhaps a bit too far in the anthropocentric direction. In particular I feel that his Hegel interpretation is a bit too human-centred, but there is much room for disagreement here and no writer can please everyone. This is a fascinating account, from which one can’t but learn, whether in agreement or not.

But then this monograph is woven into a much broader narrative of modernity, about the coming, and then later the threatened undoing of what he calls the Great Separation. Otherwise expressed, this involved a determined sidelining of “political theology.” This meant that people were ready to understand political society in purely human terms. This, for Lilla is something achieved in the early modern West, and now perhaps under threat even here. It is foreign, even unthinkable, in other cultures. The motive for the Great Separation was the religiously inspired violence of the confessional wars of the early modern period. Its great architect for Lilla was Hobbes. The threatened return of political theology today may also weaken our defenses against the eruption of violence, hence the importance of our understanding what is at stake.

So the form of the narration is, first an important gain, and then later a threatened back-sliding. This latter threatens as a result of the tradition of liberal theology and the self-declared return to revelation that its discrediting provoked. This is a narrative rather like the secularization one, which often ends in today’s variants with a threatened “return of religion” – except that Lilla sets his face against an idea of secularization as an inevitable historical force.

Now this narrative seems to me wide of the mark. The strong metaphors, like Great Separation, and the image of our having crossed a river, distort and exaggerate the differences. On one bank, political theology supposedly reigns supreme; on the other, it has vanished.

What is political theology? Perhaps that in answering basic political-normative questions (justice, legitimate authority, war and peace, rights and obligations) one appeals to divine authority. Or perhaps that one appeals to revelation. But this is not a category for many religions, so Lilla adds “cosmological speculation.” In any case, for the modern West, “We no longer recognize revelation as politically authoritative.”

But, if you look at what shaped the West “for over a millennium,” you get a much more complex picture. These issues of justice, war and peace, and so on: these were not settled by revelation according to what was long a dominant view. Take Aquinas. The sources here were natural law theory, Aristotle, sometimes Plato (admittedly, Plato comes close to leaning on “cosmological speculation,” if you think of his Idea of the Good). When it comes to legitimate rule, one important source was traditional law. Who was the legitimate successor to the previous King lately deceased?

True, there were demands on the political system made by revealed religion. The King should defend the true faith for example; this was a key notion of post-Constantinian Christendom. And there was indeed a crisis generated by different interpretations of this demand in the early modern period: the Wars of Religion, which we modern Westerners are dimly aware of as the crucible out of which certain features of modern liberal society emerged painfully and over time, most notably the principles of toleration, separation of church and state, and eventually pluralism. This was a tough and sometimes long transition. But we didn’t make it by shifting utterly our modes of political thinking, from one based on divine revelation to one based on purely human considerations.

Take the French Wars of Religion. The normative background in which these were fought out included French Law, including the Salic law of succession; the generally accepted considerations of Natural Law, and the above-mentioned demand that rulers should defend the true church against heresy. In fact the vicissitudes of the 16th Century were partly determined by the ways in which different kings weighted the different demands on them. And the crucial drama turned on the way within each side, and particularly the Catholic side, these demands were differently weighted. In the end the crucial struggle was between the Ligue under the duc de Guise, on one side, Catholic extremists who were willing to over-ride all other considerations in order to defend the Catholic faith, going even to the lengths of assassination of Kings they considered not sufficiently hostile to heresy (but to be fair, the royal party also resorted to assassination, of which Guise was a victim); and on the other side, les Politiques, the party that weighed peace, order, and legality over doctrinal purity. They won, and the compromise was the accession of Henri IV, legal according to Salic rules, along with his conversion and an Edict of toleration (l’Édit de Nantes). Paris vaut bien une messe.

Europe emerged from its wars of religion by moves of this kind. The analogues of the Politiques cobbled together various kinds of deals in which the demands for doctrinal purity were tempered by legality and the requirement of peace and order. The Holy Roman Empire became a patchwork quilt of confessional states in which each local ruler enforced his orthodoxy, while co-existing with neighbours who embraced different confessions. In other states, “heretical” faiths were tolerated within limits.

The great political philosophy which emerges out of this transition is that of modern Natural Law, whose major figures in the 17th Century were Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Pufendorf. This was the school which invented modern human rights; that is, they made central individual “subjective” rights, rights as the property of individual agents. And they all developed powerful reasons why legitimate order should trump any theological claims about the evils of heresy (that is, not render these null and void, but trump them whenever they conflicted with the demands of order).

Where in all this do we find something like a “crossing” to another shore? This seems altogether too dramatic an image. The more so, in that many of these thinkers continued to invoke the will of God as the basis of Natural Law. This is clearly the case with Pufendorf and Locke. For Locke, the kernel of Natural Law is the right to life. And the basic justification of this right is as follows: “For Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one anothers Pleasure.” True, this is arguably not derived from Revelation, but the product of Natural theology. Nevertheless, God remains very much part of the picture. It would not be possible to describe Locke as “thinking and talking about politics exclusively in human terms.”

So what is political theology, and when did we abandon it? One answer is to define this mode of thinking as one deriving basic premises from Revelation, and then note that it was first neutralized, subordinated to the other kinds of consideration which were always in the field, and then later, dropped altogether, in the sense that most political thinkers today do not feel the necessity of evoking revelation. Which of these steps corresponds to “crossing the river”? Hardly the first, because the notion of Nature and particularly human nature as providentially designed persists for a long time. Indeed, it is not even fully clear when the second move occurred, because since the reigning notion of the Age of Enlightenment was that a Supreme and Benevolent Being had designed the world, appeals to God and appeals to Nature were in this domain extensionally equivalent. It wasn’t really until the post-Darwin era that the notion of a normative design in nature, whether based on a theistic account or not, comes under challenge.

Later the discussion in the book seems to introduce a third conception of political theology. In the above discussion we gleaned two senses: (1) political theology exists where our normative political theory depends directly on premises from Revelation, (2) this theory depends on premises which are theological, even though not drawn (only) from Revelation (e.g. Locke and Pufendorf). To these, the discussion of Chapter 2 seems to add a third. Our whole thought about politics can be enframed by a view of God and his purposes, and their relation to human action in history, even though our normative thought doesn’t derive directly from any theological premises, revealed or rationally arrived at. Otherwise put, if we reconstruct political deliberations in the form of practical syllogisms, we are not forced to articulate any specifically theological premises.

Lilla elaborates three such enframings in pre-modern Christianity: one a hyper-Augustinian view which saw the political scene as dominated by what were in effect super-robbers, who can at least quell the petty criminals and keep them in order; a second which did try to draw some conclusions for political order in Church and State from God’s ambiguous relation to human history; and a third, that of millennial rebels, which called on people to reject all established orders in favour of the new eschatological age. “Withdrawal into monasticism, ruling the earthly city with the two swords of church and state, building the messianic New Jerusalem – which is the true model of Christian politics?” He wants to claim that the tension between these three frames helped to bring an end to political theology in Christendom.

This third sense of “political theology,” the enframing of our thought about politics and human affairs in some doctrines about God and the world, Lilla speaks of as maintaining a “divine nexus”. This sense (3) is clearly different from (1) and (2), since it is possible to practice political theory in this sense without engaging in (1) or (2). In our age, Reinhold Niebuhr provided an example. Plainly his Augustinian faith combined with his observations helped him develop a philosophical anthropology of humans as fallen creatures, which made him very skeptical of claims that human life could be radically improved by political engineering, whether communist or liberal.

So what would it mean to end political theology? Perhaps to drop it in all three forms, and to think out the great questions in entirely intra-worldly terms. This seems to be what Lilla is suggesting in Chapter 2, the “great separation.” And this impression is strengthened by his choice of Hobbes as the paradigm figure. He reads Hobbes’ “Epicureanism” i.e., mechanistic atomism, as leveling “nothing less than the Christian conception of man.” Of course, this is highly controversial, if one means that Hobbes meant to level the Christian conception. This would render the whole second half of Leviathan with its elaborate interpretation a tongue in cheek exercise meant to fool his contemporaries. Another interpretation is not ruled out. There were Christian Epicureans in the 17th Century (Gassendi, for instance).

But we can by-pass this and simply say that we consider mechanistic materialism incompatible with Christian faith and that therefore Hobbes was in fact refuting it, even if he didn’t grasp this. But this reading of the Great Separation raises questions for the issue when it was supposed to occur. Hobbes was much less influential in his time than he is in ours, and this was largely because of his reductive theory. Lots of contemporaries judged of him what Lilla seems to have judged, that he was a covert atheist. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. So is the great separation consummated when we’ve all been converted to mechanistic materialism? In which case, it would have to be a moment of liberation yet to come. Or is it just when we stop talking altogether about God? But that doesn’t seem to have happened either, except in some reaches of the academy, and even there you wonder how many crypto-Niebuhrs are hiding.

So how are we to conceive the Great Separation, the abandonment of political theology? In senses (1) and (2), it was never the only game in town, except perhaps for millenarist sectarians. But it was part of the range of essential considerations for most people. There were those who in virtue of their theology in sense (3) wanted to retreat from the political world, like Anabaptists. Whatever theology they had in sense (1) could be called “negative”; have nothing to do with the powers of this world. Obey the Prince when he doesn’t demand something directly contrary to the Gospel (like joining the army), and even when he does issue such commands your disobedience should be utterly passive. Somehow we’ve got to an age in the West where there is very little direct intrusion of normative premises from theology into our political lives; but this can arise for many believers because their enframing sense of the relation to God is much more complex, and doesn’t admit of such direct transfers, or because lots of people are now atheists or agnostics, or more realistically for both reasons: because we are split about the issue of potential theological enframings, the only way we can discuss together about political issues is in terms which remain common.

I think Lilla exaggerates the importance of Hobbes, but he is right to see him as one thinker in the chain of those who developed what I have called the modern moral conception of social order. A more apt founding figure for this outlook is Grotius. It sees human beings as both each pursuing their own goals, of life and prosperity, in potential conflict with others, while at the same time they are sociable, meant to live with others. Our social morality can be derived from this predicament. Those social rules are correct which can enable humans to live together; which can in other terms harmonize their projects, so that they become mutually strengthening, instead of causes of conflict and hence destruction. This is if you like a derivation of social rules from purely human considerations, and Grotius even makes the (in)famous claim that these rules would be valid, even if God didn’t exist. But in the way these ideas were worked out, in say, Locke, or Pufendorf, or the framers of the American Declaration of Independence, they were not disconnected from theology. The assumption was that God had made human beings so that they could achieve harmony by these rules, whether this was established by reason, often in a Deistic mode, or shown by Revelation (and for many people, of course, the fact that these truths were doubly guaranteed made them all the more credible). “We hold these truths to be self-evident….”

Where I agree with Lilla is that this new ethic of order could be detached from a theistic anchoring. It could be seen as inscribed in Nature (Jacobins), and then later as what our instincts and intuitions as they have developed in civilization suggest to us. What I cannot see is a moment of Great Separation, as it were, a crossing of a stream. Even today, our sense of this liberal order of equality, rights and democracy is sustained by what Rawls called an “overlapping consensus,” in which people support the same principles for a host of different reasons, Kantian, utilitarian, but also theological. Now in fact, it is hard to think across these gaps; for a believer to understand an atheist, and vice versa. So people always fall into imagining that their grounds for upholding the consensus are the only valid ones. Certain people on the US right think that Christianity is the only possible basis; certain members of the liberal academy think that if you aren’t some kind of Kantian you have no good reason to believe in Liberalism. These beliefs help to generate the kind of Kulturkampf from which the US suffers. But the fact is that our civilization is anchored in widely incompatible “comprehensive views,” to use Rawls’ term. Only if you forget this can you believe that “we” have crossed a deep divide, and that we are now threatened with regression. It seems to me that the reality is more mixed and less dramatic than that.

So on “our” (modern liberal) side of the river, “political theology” has never been wholly absent, and has often been very prominent. Unless we choose to forget abolitionists in Britain and America, the Civil Right movement, all the Second World War rhetoric about “defending Christian civilization,” etc. It is more or less prominent at different times and in different milieu, but it is always there.

And symmetrically, the kinds of philosophical considerations which we rely on today were very present on the “other” shore. One has the impression at times that Lilla sees the pre-modern age as dominated by the Guises and the Münzers. There were far too many then, but then we’ve seen quite a few in our day, not just those with a “theological” outlook, but also Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Lilla never undertakes to describe the “other shore”, but the odd hints he does offer make me wonder. He speaks of contemporary recurrences to political theology as being unlike those of earlier days; they don’t “appeal to miracles, or biblical inerrancy, or divine providence, or sacred tradition.” Later he mentions “fanciful cosmologies.” But Biblical inerrancy is an invention of modern evangelical Protestantism; miracles were not standardly appealed to in political theory, even with a “divine nexus” (it’s true that they became very important in apologetics in the 18th Century, hence the punch in Hume’s deflationary arguments on this score); providence played a big role for thinkers of “British and American Liberalism,” of which Lilla says that for two centuries they “stayed well within the philosophical orbit that Hobbes had circumscribed.” This would certainly have surprised many of them.

One is led to wonder whether for Lilla pre-modern normative thinking was simply dictated out of Revelation. Speaking of our present enlightened age, Lilla says: “No one in modern Britain or the United States argued for a bicameral legislature on the basis of divine revelation.” But did the Norman Kings of England when they summoned the first Parliaments which provided the template for today’s British and American institutions consult the Bible or the doctrine of the Catholic Church?

Of course, one finds the tendency to derive goals directly from Revelation among sectarians and millenarists. These groups are often violent, which is one reason why many secular moderns link religion and violence. The last century has shown that this kind of murderous sectarianism is not confined to religious believers. It’s not clear to me what Lilla’s views are on this question.

In sum, the monograph on German thought is immensely stimulating and suggestive, but the broader narrative is hard to grasp, and seems to verge at times on the fantastic.

But I dissent from its core argument. Let us identify just what that core argument is, for Lilla believes that many of his critics misunderstand what he is trying to explain. Some of the defining principles of modern western politics – “separation of church and state, individual rights to private and collective worship, freedom of conscience, religious toleration” – are ones whose historical development depended crucially on the “Great Separation,” a decisive severing of Western political philosophy from the “political theology” that had previously dominated Western thinking about politics. Of the severers, Hobbes was the most decisive of all. The Great Separation “remains the most distinctive feature of the modern West to this day.”

But the Great Separation was not inevitable or somehow the result of the long march of reason, Lilla reasons. In The Stillborn God, he writes of it as an “experiment”; in his August 2007 piece in The New York Times, he called it “fragile,” a “miracle” and a matter of “lucky breaks.” It was novel in western history and is unique in the world today. And it is reversible. The human mind did not cease to ask theological questions after Hobbes, or to deliver theological answers, or to derive political implications from these answers. One answer, liberal theology, was relatively harmless because it was indistinguishable from modernity. The other, which he calls messianism, is worrisome, for it proposes apocalyptic conclusions and encourages movements like Nazism. Today, there is reason to worry again, Lilla says: “[W]e are again fighting the battles of the sixteenth century – over revelation and reason, dogmatic purity and toleration, inspiration and consent, divine duty and common decency.”

The idea of modern liberalism depends decisively on a jettisoning of theology as a source for arguing about politics: If there is one claim to which Lilla returns again and again from different angles, this is it. So if there is one phenomenon that most decisively calls Lilla’s argument into question, it would be a positive relationship between traditional, orthodox political theology and key features of liberal politics, especially separation of religious and political authority and religious freedom. To the degree that such a relationship is found, it weakens the case that liberalism – particularly, its separation between religious and political authority, freedom of religion, etc. – depends crucially on a divorce from political theology. But in fact, ample evidence exists that traditional political theology has contributed vitally to incubating, sustaining, and expanding liberal democracy, in thought and in practice, before, during, and after the early modern religious wars. Unquestionably, political theology has also begotten the bizarre, the violent, and the illiberal. But its positive contribution is large enough to raise serious doubts about Lilla’s thesis.

Many scholars have charted roots of the separation of religious and political authority to events, episodes, and ideas that long predate Hobbes. Jesus’ own commandment to render to God and Caesar what is proper to each, Pope Gelasius’ enduring fourth century doctrine of the two swords, the growth of emperor and pope as twin authorities in western Christendom (contrast with eastern Christendom where this separation did not occur and where democracy remains weak), and medieval conciliarism were all important. Historian Brian Tierney has made a compelling and respected case for the growth of the notion of rights in medieval canon law. Theologian Christopher D. Marshall even makes a strong case for the origins of human rights in Old Testament texts. In the fifteenth and sixteenth century, theologians like Vitoria and de las Casas argued against their king for the rights of Indians, rooting their case both in biblical scriptures and in Thomistic natural law (which Hobbes also rejected). All of this occurred long before Hobbes, sprouted from the very heart of traditional political theology, and arguably helped lay strong foundations for features of modern liberalism. At the very least, none of this can be dismissed, as Lilla appears to do. (Curiously, in Chapter One, he presents a sketch of classic Christian political theology in which he recognizes many of these features but then argues that they were abruptly severed from, and presumably rendered impotent in western political thought).

Indisputably, the Reformation and the attendant wars of religion in early modern Europe propelled the development of liberalism, too. But did liberalism arise only through a rejection of traditional political theology brought about by ferocious fundamentalism and bigoted bloodshed? It is a story that contemporary liberals commonly tell, including the Dean of Contemporary Liberalism, the late John Rawls. But is it accurate? In his book, How The Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, historian Perez Zagorin has argued that this era’s bloody struggles produced three kind of intellectual reactions: first, religion skepticism, second, the politique approach of temporary accommodationism, but thirdly, and most surprisingly for Lilla’s thesis, arguments for religious freedom and tolerance that were in fact rooted in Christian theology. Diggers, Levelers, other radical Protestants, Mennonites, Anabaptists, Baptists, Quakers – all reached into the very scriptures of the New Testament to argue that expressions of faith ought not to be enforced through the sword. These arguments were in fact the most robust. As Lilla partially acknowledges, Hobbes’ arguments were not very good ones. His scientific materialism, like other forms of deep skepticism, simply cannot sustain arguments for religious toleration – or for virtually any principle of political morality at all. The politiques were pragmatists, open to accommodating religious dissent but also to quashing it if stability demanded it, as King Louis XIV did when he expelled the Huguenots from France in 1685. These theological defenses of religious freedom were not without consequence. As Jose Casanova argues in his post on Lilla, it is virtually impossible to conceive of the religious freedom and establishment clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution apart from the theological arguments of Protestant Christians in the American Colonies, those of Roger Williams being the most famous. As we know, the American constitution was then pivotal in modeling religious freedom for other countries in the world.

Beyond the formation and incubation of liberal democracy, Christianity (and surely Judaism, too, though I am less familiar with its modern intellectual history) has continued to sustain and, at vital junctures, to contribute to the expansion of liberal democracy, both in thought and substance. From the time of the American founding, Protestant Christianity has been at least a key vertebra of American democracy. I don’t simply mean theological liberal Protestantism, either; I mean evangelical Protestantism. In the nineteenth century, as historian Nathan Hatch has shown in his landmark The Democratization of American Christianity, Protestant church structures themselves democratized. Protestants then reciprocally provided the cultural “funds” for liberal democratic political institutions. True, Protestant theology helped to sustain slavery in the American South. But so, too, evangelical Protestants, drawing directly on their theological convictions, largely drove abolitionism, as they did the movement to abolish the slave trade in England. Early feminism was largely rooted in traditional Protestant Christianity, too. Probably the most famous story of Christianity contributing to the expansion of liberal democracy is the civil rights movement in the American South in the 1950s and 1960s. In his book, Stone of Hope, historian Douglas Chappell documents how, in the 1930s and 1940s, secular liberals like Gunnar Myrdal and John Dewey hoped that racial discrimination in the South would disappear through education and economic development, but with little result. It was not until the black churches – with their distinctively theological rationales, motivations, and language – mobilized their followers that the marches on Selma and Birmingham took place and liberalism was expanded. Today, evangelical American Protestants, traditional in their theology, are solidly supportive of the constitution’s religious freedom and establishment clauses as well as other basic features of liberal democracy. Those who dislike their influence may well demur, but they should ask themselves: Are the political positions of conservative Christians simply ones that I do not like, or are they antithetical to liberal democracy? In fact, only a tiny fringe of “Christian Reconstructionists” like Gary North and the late R.J. Rushdoony challenge the constitution’s fundamental rights or its configuration of religion and state. Keep in mind also that, as political scientists Jonathan Fox and Schmuel Sandler have shown through their rigorously constructed “Religion and State” dataset, the United States has the greatest degree of separation of religion and state in the entire world. Put differently, it is the least theocratic country in the world.

My point here is only to demonstrate historically a strong symbiosis between traditional Christian political theology and the idea of modern liberal democracy. If such a symbiosis indeed exists, then does it not sharply call into question Lilla’s contention that the rise of modern liberalism depends precisely on a great separation between traditional political theology and political thought? Obviously, Christian churches and individuals have not always supported liberal democracy. It is a relatively recent historical development that was caused by many factors, including advances in economics and literacy, internal struggles within Christianity, yes, in part a reaction to the religious wars in early modern Europe, as well as a dialogue with the Enlightenment. But there is little doubt that Christians have drawn on their traditional theology to form, sustain, and expand liberal democracy since early modern times.

The story of Catholicism corroborates the finding. Lilla ignores this story, which he justifies in a footnote (see page 12) saying that the Church was hostile to modern society until the twentieth century. Of course, there is much truth to that. But even in the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church by and large prospered in America (despite outbreaks of anti-Catholic prejudice) and came to accommodate the American church-state relationship on a provisional if not deeply principled level. In Europe, figures such as Lord Acton and Cardinal John Henry Newman pioneered Catholic advocacy of religious freedom from a position of traditional, orthodox Catholic theology. Then, in the twentieth century, one of the great stories of evolution in western Christian political theology took place through the rise of arguments for religious and other liberal freedoms among Catholic intellectuals like Jacques Maritain and John Courtney Murray, mostly of a Thomist stripe – again, a strand of thinking whose jettisoning Lilla has us believe was necessary for liberal democracy. Drawing directly on his theological and classical philosophical beliefs, Maritain was also a key player in developing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, a milestone in liberal thought and law. Culminating this trend, the Church’s Second Vatican Council promulgated a right to religious freedom as a manifestation of human dignity, drawing on both scripture and natural law reasoning to make its case. After the Council, and especially its Declaration on Religious Freedom, the Church became an agent of democratic revolution in places like Poland, Chile, Brazil, Guatemala, Malawi, and the Philippines (though not in Rwanda, Argentina, or Uruguay). Again, the necessary caveats are in order: Pope Benedict XVI himself has credited the Enlightenment with promoting the dialogue that brought the Church to embrace human rights and democracy. But when it did embrace them, it did so on the basis of its own theology and tradition of thought – a possibility that Lilla does not adequately recognize.

Finally, as several of the other commentators have pointed out, Lilla gets Karl Barth wrong. I want to reinforce this criticism so as to magnify my general argument here. While acknowledging that Barth opposed the Nazis, Lilla thinks that the “messianic” character of Barth’s thought encouraged radical, illiberal criticisms of the Weimar Republic. What does messianic mean? Virtually any reasonably orthodox Christian or Jew, after all, believes in the coming of the Messiah (whether solely in the future or in the future, past and present alike). Lilla seems to think that it means something more: esotericism and apocalypticism. But this was not Barth. To be sure, he rejected natural law and natural theology, even of the medieval sort. But his central project was to recover the trinity and God’s communication of himself in Jesus Christ as the central sources of Christian knowledge and action, not to make predictions about the end times or some such thing. He was convinced that nineteenth century liberal Protestant theology had lost track of these central sources and had instead conformed itself to the modern German state. Lilla’s own example of theologian Adolf von Harnack writing war speeches for the German Kaiser is deliciously illustrative. It was precisely Barth’s stress on traditional Christian sources that placed him among the handful of German theologians who dissented from the Nazi regime most – including its anti-semitism, which he rejected on strong theological grounds, unlike even many of the other theologians in the bravely dissenting Confessing Church. By contrast, it was the vast majority of German Protestant Christians who, precisely because of their deep theological liberalism, lacked the theological resources from which they could formulate and sustain opposition to Hitler. To boot, during the 1930s and 1940s, Barth wrote some of the most profoundly Christian defenses of modern liberal democracy one can find, rooting his defense of such institutions directly in the character of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. It is hard to understand, then, why Lilla thinks that Barth somehow encouraged right wing critics like Friedrich Gogarten, whose embrace of the German state could not be more inimical to what Barth himself stood for. Perhaps Lilla believes that once one begins to think theologically, one has departed from the plane of the rational and the reasonable and that all bets are off. But if that is the case, then it becomes clear that Lilla’s argument is driven by his own beliefs about theology as much as it is by his beliefs about the history of theology.

My take on The Stillborn God is more positive than most of the postings on this blog. Lilla’s account of the salient intellectual history of early modern Europe strikes me as dazzling in its “lucidity,” the ideal Lilla urges us to pursue. I wish that some of my praise for Lilla’s incisive analyses of Rousseau, et al., had made it past the austere editorial instincts of LRB. I understand Lilla’s purposes to be rather more modest than those attributed to him by many of the postings. What this book does the most commandingly is to put before us the core intellectual resources of the modern North Atlantic West for keeping supernatural warrants for political action from playing too great a role in polities that include many citizens who disagree about just what the divine asks of us and some other citizens who doubt that there is any divinity to be obeyed at all.

My frustration with the book begins with Lilla’s assumption that these core resources are sufficiently available in the writings of the great philosophers of Europe from Hobbes to Hegel. He alludes to Tocqueville, but offers no exposition of Tocqueville’s ideas to match what he offers about Kant and Rousseau. Indeed, after Rousseau, every thinker Lilla addresses was German. One might think that British, American, and French theorists have a claim on Lilla’s attention, especially since in all three of those countries stronger steps were made toward The Great Separation than were made in Germany. By saying virtually nothing about Anglo-American and French intellectuals of the last 200 years, Lilla leaves the impression that he believes all of them were just recycling ideas of the Old Greats. But the narrowly German scope of Lilla’s treatment of the history of ideas about religion and politics since the late 18th century would not be so objectionable were it not for Lilla’s argument about the function of liberal Protestantism in the North Atlantic West during that exact period. The God of liberal Protestantism was “stillborn,” Lilla argues, because it proved unable to do more than sanctify the state.

Lilla’s carefully worked-out, extensively documented, German-centered defense of this claim is not directly discussed (to my enormous surprise and puzzlement) by any of The Immanent Frame’s bloggers so far. Yet, Lilla’s argument about liberal Protestantism is anything but marginal to his book. It is this argument that 1) gives The Stillborn God its title, 2) takes Lilla from Hegel to the Third Reich and the Bolshevik Revolution and beyond, and 3) most distinguishes Lilla from other writers who have addressed the history of ideas about religion and politics in the modern West. Hence much of my LRB review is a critique of Lilla’s interpretation of liberal Protestantism. Let me here summarize my main points about Lilla’s argument, and elaborate in ways that space limitations prevented me from doing in my review.

Lilla attributes to liberal Protestantism a much tighter logic than its actual history displays. Lilla is right to call attention to Ernst Troeltsch’s association of the Kaiser’s 1914 call to arms with “the living breath of God,” and to other connections between liberal Protestantism and state power in Germany, but all of his evidence about the sanctification of the state comes from a society with an overbearing tradition of political absolutism and a monolithic sense of the Volk. If Lilla had devoted more attention to the case of the United States, a nation where liberal Protestantism has been uniquely influential and where The Great Separation was largely enacted through a constitutional separation of church and state, he would be obliged to admit that liberal Protestantism has given itself to a variety of outlooks on state power quite different from those he finds in Germany. The great “higher critic” Theodore Parker was a member of the “Secret Six” who financed John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. “Social Gospel” theologian Walter Rauschenbusch was deeply embedded in the German theological culture on which Lilla concentrates, but Rauschenbusch’s embrace of modernity was defined largely against the decisions made by state, rather than for those decisions. Rauschenbusch’s successor as the most politically important liberal Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, is so significant that his ideas about religion and politics are vigorously and even vociferously debated to this day (The Atlantic published an extensive overview of this discussion in November 2007), but Lilla says nothing about Niebuhr, or Rauschenbusch, or Parker. Harvey Cox’s The Secular City drew explicit inspiration from both Ernst Bloch and Friederich Gogarten, the two German totalitarians with whom Lilla climaxes his narrative of German acquiescence in state power, but Lilla does not deal at all with Cox and Cox’s support of a variety of 1960s radical movements. Martin Luther King, Jr., is perhaps the most widely respected American liberal Protestant of the 20th century, but King and his protests against established political authority escape Lilla’s attention altogether.

Lilla alludes to the fact that “in the Anglo-American orbit, a liberal theological outlook could grow up alongside a liberal politics whose principles derived from Hobbes’s materialism,” but this crucial part of his story he covers only with the cryptic observation that it was made possible by “a strong constitutional structure and various lucky breaks.” At issue is more than a historically accurate understanding of liberal Protestantism. At issue, too, is the role that liberal Protestantism can play in today’s struggles over religion-and-politics. Lilla is too quick to dismiss (he counts among liberal Protestantism’s triumphs a disposition to prescribe “the length of a gentleman’s beard”) liberal Protestantism as a setting in which he might find allies in the campaign to employ lucidity in the defense of a political sphere separated from divinity. Hence the big problem with The Stillborn God, as I insist in my LRB review, is not that Lilla has failed to give us a comprehensive history of the relationship between religion and politics in Western thought. That was never his intention, and he should not be held responsible for it, or for comparative body counts of religious and secular fanatics. The problem is that Lilla’s selection of episodes since 1830 cannot vindicate the claim that entitles his book. Moreover, this misstep drastically narrows the constituency that might potentially avail themselves of the intellectual resources he identifies in the writings of the canonical philosophers of early modern Europe.

If anyone doubts that liberal Protestants can advance Lilla’s cause, they need look no further than the campaign speeches of the liberal Protestant Barack Obama. “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific values,” Obama declared in a widely quoted speech. Democratic commitment obliges religious believers to advance policy goals on the basis of principles “accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.” This sounds pretty good to me, and it is a long way from Governor Huckabee’s comment the other day to the effect that we ought to amend the Constitution so that it better reflects God’s views on same-sex relationships and abortion. There are sharp differences of opinion among religious believers in the United States, and non-believers as well as believers have a stake in the disagreements between people like Huckabee and Obama. Obama’s theoretical position tracks a tradition of American political theory exemplified by John Rawls that is congruent with what Lilla means by The Great Separation. Lilla’s aloofness from this rich American discourse renders The Stillborn God disappointing even to someone as massively sympathetic as I am with Lilla’s basic outlook. If liberal Protestants can help our cause, why not welcome them?

First Response (narrative mode)

In reading Casanova, Sullivan, Smith, and Hurd I can see that a more explicit treatment of method in The Stillborn God might have forestalled certain objections, though not all. So let me begin by saying a little more about how I approached the themes in the book, and then get to the main worry they express, which concerns “triumphalism.”

Political theology
When I use this term I mean the legitimation of political authority on the basis of a divine revelation. I’m well aware that others use this term differently; this is how I use it, and for several reasons. My interest, which outstrips the scope of this one book, is to understand an alternative between what it might mean to live – individually and collectively – under divine authority, and what it might mean not to. This is an exhaustive disjunction, which is not to say that it exhausts everything that might be said about living one’s life. In this book I explore more narrowly the logic of political theology by examining a particular story: the revolt of early-modern political philosophers against the long tradition of Christian political theology, and the revolt of later modern thinkers against those early moderns, which resulted in a revival of political theology. That seemed to me an interesting and particularly instructive exercise. To repeat, this has to do with political authority and how it is justified, not the “secularization” of society more broadly conceived – a term I avoid, given how much misunderstanding it engenders. The justification of authority tells us something of crucial importance about societies, though it does not tell us everything we need or want to know about them.

But what general lessons can be drawn from such a parochial story? That question seems behind many of the responses, and it gets at a certain ambiguity in the book, which really has two focuses: political theology and how we govern ourselves now. (More about “we” in a moment.) Yet to my mind these subjects are linked because of the political ambitions shared by the architects of the Great Separation. Although their proximate adversary was Christian political theology, they in fact did devise an alternative to political theology as such – to the Christian divine right of kings, to Jewish halakha, to Muslim sharia, to the Laws of Manu, to the many emperor and kingship cults the world has known. They devised a novel way of legitimating political authority without any appeal to divine authority. This is not to say that it is the only alternative to political theologies. There have been nations and civilizations without such theologies that knew nothing of the Great Separation, and in the future there may be more. But it is an alternative, intellectually at least, and given the contemporary rhetoric of democratization and liberalization it appears to be a live alternative everywhere today. (I think that’s an illusion, but more on that, too, in a moment.) Understanding how that alternative came about, what its achievements and limitations are, seems to me a pressing undertaking today.

“Episodic history of ideas”
I say in the book that this is what I have written, though it’s clear now I should have explained more what I meant by that. My aim was to use the history of Western political thought and theology selectively to bring out the underlying intellectual potential of the different alternatives. For example, Chapter 2 investigates how the Christian conception of the Messiah opens and forecloses certain theological possibilities for conceiving of political authority. I spend a long time with Hobbes because he lays out most clearly a new foundation for political thought, with new potentials, but he was hardly alone. Rousseau is just one example of the modern yearning to restore dignity to the religious impulse after Hobbes (Schleiermacher is obviously another); Kant and Hegel then developed the potential in that new position. As for the liberal theologians and their messianic rivals, their writings show, surprisingly to me, that there was a theological-political potential hidden in Rousseau’s rebellion. This is not to say that any of these intellectual moves were inevitable, let alone that they somehow caused major historical events in the wider world (as James Smith took me to be saying). The Stillborn God mounts no argument about how these ideas directly shaped our world – as José Casanova points out, that would be a different undertaking – only about how they make us see the world. Karl Barth, for example, opposed Nazism and did nothing to encourage it; but his ideas did prepare others to see in it the Second Coming.

“We”
So who is the “we” in The Stillborn God? Another good question. For my purposes it is those nations whose political institutions were developed, and are today justified, on principles enunciated in the Great Separation and in explicit rebellion against the political theologies that justified the institutions of Western Christendom. On this point Gil Anidjar and I agree: the Great Separation was an event within the Christian (though I would say Western Christian) orbit. What distinguishes the political institutions and reigning political ideas of the modern West is that they were forged in a polemical struggle with Christian political theology, yet aspired to offer an alternative to all political theology. This put us on a Sonderweg.

There is an understandable reluctance to use the first-personal plural pronoun promiscuously, but I do think we need to get over our “we” anxiety. I frankly am not impressed by books purporting to reveal the creation of a “discourse of othering,” to use Elizabeth Hurd’s phrase, and I’m baffled by how uncritically they are received in the academy today, given that the charges they make are neither falsifiable nor to the point. Yes, concepts make distinctions and concepts have histories; let’s live with that. And let’s also recognize that a concept’s history cannot determine whether it helps us understand the world or not. Either one uses concepts and accepts their history, or one enters an infinite regress of suspicion and is unable to say anything at all. (It is striking how those who worry about such things usually slip in their own unexamined, usually political, concepts somewhere along the way, and then say quite a bit.)

Triumphalism
The most surprising reaction I’ve had to The Stillborn God is from those who see in it a Western-triumphalist message. And not just critics: I’ve left several triumphalist interviewers disappointed (and perhaps an editor or two at Knopf!). I see the book as an exercise in self-examination and, in the current political climate, a plea for modesty and humility. It was begun over a decade ago without any thought to political Islam or fantasies of global democratization, though now I suppose it offers some perspective on both. But I undertook the writing originally for the reason stated above: to help me understand something about what it might mean to live under divine authority, and what it might mean not to.

That said, yes, I do believe the modern West is on a historical Sonderweg. But exceptionalism does not mean superiority, by any stretch of the imagination. Hobbes and thinkers like him set us on a certain path, hoping to escape certain perennial political problems within Christendom. To the extent that they succeeded – never completely, and with plenty of backsliding – they also failed, since our institutions and our understanding of religion have ever since been tethered to their polemical struggle. In trying to solve one problem for ourselves, we have created others; Rousseau understood that perfectly well, which is why he is as much a hero in the story as Hobbes is. Hobbes understood something about violence, and about how messianic religion can feed into it; that is a lesson worth preserving. But Rousseau’s understanding of religion, its psychology and social implications, was infinitely deeper. What we in the West have never managed to do is reconcile and retain the lessons of both these thinkers. Instead, we shuttle unsteadily between them. The Great Separation was an exceptional achievement, but it brought with it exceptional problems, caused mainly by yearnings unfulfilled. And it did nothing to solve other perennial problems of politics: as James Smith and others have pointed out, the most appalling crimes of recent memory have had nothing to do with political theology. An achievement is not a triumph; after the Separation we’ve simply been making our way. But it is our way for the foreseeable future, and we can continue down it wisely and with self-awareness, or foolishly and with illusions about the available alternatives.

Seen in this light, it is hard to imagine that our unusual political development would provide any sort of map or user’s manual for nations that have not been touched by the struggle over Christian political theology. It may not even have much to tell us about alternatives to other traditions of political theology, such as the Islamic one, since the kind of political crisis that sparked the Great Separation in the West is unimaginable there. This is not to say that other nations might not adopt features of our political institutions, or that they won’t develop good, different ones on their own (and have something to teach us). It might be that a transformation within a tradition of political theology, such as the Islamic one, could provide political decency and justice – and also give us something to think about. Many things are possible. But in politics it is best to keep one’s eye fixed on the likely things, and for now focus our minds on shoring up the achievements of the Great Separation. For politics, like religion, is prone to fantasy.

Which brings us to Prof. Anidjar.

Second Response (mock-lyrical mode)

Mon cher collègue, quelle mouche t’a piqué? “Disingenuous,” “noxious,” “smug,” “carpet-bombing style”!! Yes, those words came to mind in reading your contribution too. I actually enjoyed this coquille St.-Jacques, though; it reminded me of being on the rue d’Ulm, where many years ago I used to go watch a performance artist do conjuring tricks every week. Mondialatinisation! Bravo – an excellent imitation!

But, really, climb down from that little folding chair and let’s talk seriously. This is serious business. And you are on to something.

What is it about Christianity? You ask the right question. The other questions – can we really say there are universals, or perennial alternatives? – don’t interest me so much, either because I’ve addressed them above, or because they are so old I’ve forgotten the answers. Yes, we could discuss whether political theology as I’ve defined it covers Egyptian and Mesopotamian kingship, the Edicts of Ashoka, the Laws of Manu, the Chinese and Japanese emperor cults, and the like, but I’m guessing the discussion would devolve into whether the modern “discourse” of “religion” “invented” all these phenomena. Quel bore. But the Christianity question: now that’s interesting.

Again, what is it about Christianity? Could it be there is something to the hoary Christian claim that it was something new under the sun? Where does it stand in the history of religions (assuming you think there is such a history)? Where does it stand in relation to Judaism (assuming that’s not just an invention of modern discourse, too)? And, of course, what does the post-Christian West owe to Christendom – or is it still just Christendom in another form? This will surprise you, but I agree: those are momentous questions.

But how to answer them? Here, I confess, I don’t follow you, in your post or in your article on “Secularism” in Critical Inquiry, which kept dancing around the Christianity question without ever quite coming to the point (you should work on that). Maybe it’s too soon, but I do look forward to reading what you’ll say on this, since I know a battle is brewing.

(For the folks at home whose subscriptions to Critical Inquiry may have lapsed, here’s the background. For years, advanced thinkers schooled in the ways of systematic suspicion turned up their noses at the very idea of “the universal.” Then, stunningly, a very advanced thinker – so advanced he’s still a Maoist – by the name of Badiou stood up to defend the cause of universalism by defending the Christian St. Paul!! Imagine the shock! Not wanting to be left behind in that fashion-forward world, other advanced thinkers – Agamben! Žižek! – rushed out their own thoughts, usually favorable, on Paul and the Christian legacy, mixing in a little Carl Schmitt, a little St. Jacques, a little Jacob Taubes, à votre goût. But now that’s gotten tired; people want change. And it looks like they’re going to get it, in an attack on Christianity as the source of all our malheurs, intellectual and political. “We have met the enemy and he is us!” So it turns out we can speak of “we,” but only with enmity. Je m’en doutais! Still, it should be a fascinating competition. A little like Project Runway, only with professors.)

I wish you luck in the competition. One bit of advice, though; it has to do with “speaking truth to power.” That’s a tall order, since it requires defending something as truth, which I really would like to see you do, and then conducting a careful investigation into the nature of power. I worry about the second bit: when I reread your post to see what you had to say about power, all I could find, apart from the usual cui bono stuff, was one reference to the “military-industrial complex.” I’m afraid you have a long way to go, mon cher. Besides, I’m not sure quoting Dwight D. Eisenhower is going to cut it at Critical Inquiry. You might just try speaking truth, which would be more than enough to shock its readers.

Bonne chance et bonne année!

The question, at least, of the times and what they positively require is raised by Lilla with dramatic flourish. As he ventures in the book’s closing lines, “we have wagered that it is wiser to beware the forces unleashed by the Bible’s messianic promise than to try exploiting them for the public good. We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated by the light of revelation. If our experiment is to work, we must rely on our own lucidity.” A rousing declaration to be sure, if not also a bit conventional in our post-post-Enlightenment. But then Lilla is not aiming for diagnostic creativity in these pages. There is the fortress called “the Modern West” to defend and a story to tell about its internecine struggles that makes this defense more urgent and more vexing than ever. In the dense, Tim Burton-style fog of late, late 2007 on this bloody planet earth (2008 by the time you read this), who could doubt that, well, something needs urgent defense, that, indeed, it may very well be that “our lucidity” has been souring in its own carnivorous juices for so long that the masses will no longer stomach our pies.

Yet it is harder than it might seem to get to the bottom of Lilla’s concluding claims about politics, reason, and biblical theology, hard, simply, to discern who or what is the agent in these sentences: What are these forces? Which Bible—which books, sections, verses, versions? By what method is the Bible’s promise discerned? On what grounds might we distinguish the productive light (lucidity) from the destructive light (revelation)? These questions betray precisely the disingenuous sensibility Lilla wants to pulverize. His analysis trades on a single distinction: between political theology and political philosophy, between, in short, a politics informed by “larger, impersonal forces” and one chastened enough to exile such forces, to make one’s way alone—to let God be. But the villain in Lilla’s nightmares is not “the religious mind in all its chiaroscuro intensity, pulsing with conscience and curiosity, hope and despair.” It is the thieving, academic fop, the purveyor of the quixotic “third way” between these poles, the liberal theologian, that is, with his well-anointed and even better appointed liberal deity scavenged from the early modern dump. Empowered by Kant and emboldened by Rousseau, the “post-Christian” theologian (does it not matter that he is, as Gil Anidjar notices in his fiery response to Lilla, “the Jew, the Arab”?) doubles “the Christian lion” and the “Christian lamb” in brotherly love, like Jesus and the Devil in Mike Huckabee’s rendering of Mormonism. Shall we not abhor such wanton mixing? Shall we not refrain from asking how we are to distinguish the tangled limbs in the bedclothes when their progeny is already short-sheeting our bed?

The stillborn is in this light an equivocal image for Lilla. For the atmosphere he conjures is hardly the hushed sorrow cloaking the inert fetus: named, blessed, buried, remembered (would that it were so). It is rather the chaotic atmosphere of carnival, in which the fangs of the real God are impossible to distinguish from the benign liberal effigy until the very moment of the unholy kiss between theology and politics. Something live has emerged from the early modern birth canal, and this is precisely why we must wager at all, separating both the real and the simulacrum lest any seed be spilled. No doubt the “the liberal deity” was “unable to inspire genuine conviction among those seeking ultimate truth.” It is stillborn in only this sense, then: that its face and figure simply do not pass in the world. But for Lilla, there really is no liberal God that is not also (how could we have missed this, he wonders?) a fiercely partisan and demanding lover: “for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God” we are reminded, in the epigraph from Exodus. There is no third way. What is stillborn for Lilla, then, is not God—his (Lilla’s, God’s) gallop through the Modern West suggests just the opposite. What is stillborn is the promise God makes, which the dragon slayer Hobbes might very well have been too hasty in assuming he had procured—the promise God makes to keep his eros to himself.

So it is and shall be. “We have trouble letting God be… because [for believers in biblical religions] God does not let us be.” But if this is so, whither Lilla’s walls? If the wager is for a sobered political philosophy schooled in the lessons of the “Great Separation,” what will separate the separation from its opposite—from mixing, tangling: from the very passions on this (Modern, Western, Hobbesian) “shore” of the divide? Lilla seems both to trust in the strength of the Hobbesian imaginary and to assume its impermanence. Hence the book’s fundamental ambiguity, its insistence both that we are on another shore (however narrow the river), which makes it difficult to understand both the religious frenzy on the international pages of the daily papers and our (the “West’s”) own tormented struggle to domesticate this frenzy, and that in fact there is no shore, no respite, no haven from the “craving for a robust faith” which seems a constitutive threat, a “temptation,” to political life as we know it. “Thomas Hobbes was wise” not because he successfully put an end to political theology (the thesis of the book is that he did not) but because he saw the necessity of doing so—he saw that this necessity is part of the task of a proper political philosophy. But then, one assumes such a task would not be accomplished through lucidity alone, as if simply seeing the danger of political theology would convince us to abandon it. Indeed, it seems strange to suggest, as Lilla does, both that political philosophy is constituted through “self-awareness” and restraint and also that only “with great effort and a great deal of argument can people be trained to separate basic questions of politics from questions of theology and cosmology.” Argument, on Lilla’s grounds, seems to have little to do with it (for all the danger of their positions, “reading Rousseau and Hegel on religion is an infinitely richer experience than reading Hobbes or Hume…”). Effort, yes, and here it would be consistent with Lilla’s drift to recall Nietzsche’s observation that our values (of restraint above all) are writ in blood. It takes work to separate: education, but also discipline and protocols and police and maybe a little, too, of Sweeney Todd’s grief and self-mortification. Lilla may be sincere when he casts his book as identifying “no dragons to be slain.” But this bit of fantasy wears thin by the end, thanks to Lilla’s own gallant horse. That he slays none is not for lack of trying: the wisdom of Hobbes, I take it, above all.

It is at this point, though, that the disorientation sets in. Lilla notes that since the time of Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, “the liberal democratic tradition” has really failed to confront “just what religion is.” But just what, or who, or where is religion for Lilla himself? Is the problem really the Bible—that, in addition to being modern, “we are heirs to the biblical tradition”? This seems so profoundly to beg the question. For what makes the Bible the Bible, if not the passion (“the forces unleashed”) that would so obviously survive its exile? What makes revelation (the divine light) different from lucidity (the natural light) if not the thing they precisely share: the appetite that drives human beings towards at once hedgehog-like commitments to the whole and fox-like commitments to the piecemeal and the plural. Reason and revelation are names for human desires, but from neither of these desires, then, can there be any separation. As above, we can get God to promise to stay out of politics (we can, with effort, divide our passions from their aim); we cannot make this promise ourselves (we cannot divide our aims from the passions).

To some degree this is Lilla’s point—that we are to be ever vigilant (lucid, self-aware). But he wedges this fact into a pseudo-history about “the West” and its vicissitudes, making it seem as though there is some historical lesson to be learned here, from the Bible to Hobbes to Kant to Cohen to Bhutto. Lilla’s real problem is not history, though (or particular books, for that matter, whether Amos or King Lear). It is ontology—not the ontology of religion, e.g., the “messianic longings embedded in biblical faith,” but the ontology of division, of separation. One might say Hobbes’s “Great Separation” expresses Lilla’s own messianic longing for the purity of a political philosophy that keeps its sights down and its garters tight. To be sure, there is (against many intellectual fashions) an admirable focus in Lilla’s observation that his book wagers “between two grand traditions of thought, two ways of envisaging the human condition”—in his boiling down the innumerable complexities, perspectives, and traditions here to two. What threatens the argument, however, is Lilla’s squeamishness about mixing. Like Strauss on Athens and Jerusalem, Lilla invests everything in a separation between reason and religion for which he has no real way of accounting. Their opposition is presupposed, a presupposition which has the ironic effect of requiring the very third between them that is anathema to Lilla. In his own analysis in the book, the third is but a mask for one side, a failed attempt to stand in both reason and religion, an emissary reabsorbed by the fires of the side that sends it forth. Yet, like Lilla’s imputation of dangerous tendencies to the Bible rather than its readers, this opposition—and the structure of opposition as such—is not given an intellectual outline. It is as if the words reason and revelation have frozen referents to which we need only point. This pointing cannot take place on rational grounds, for there are no reasons given for it; equally it cannot take place on revealed grounds, for revelation, on Lilla’s reading, is unable to pick out the human apart from its connection with the divine. The standpoint of revelation can see only itself; the standpoint of reason can see everything but itself. Neither can hold onto the tension, much less the opposition, between themselves (the opposition itself is a fantasy of each), and so one can only imagine Lilla their narrator preaching from the ice floe of the very third which his own argument rules out. This time, one regrets to say, it is Lilla himself who vanishes.

It would be hard to be “self-aware” under these circumstances. In Lilla’s endgame, any admixture of revelation in reason spoils the batch. But, holding onto the clarity of his “two grand traditions of thought,” one might productively take a cue from Burton, who is in other ways a quite delicious muse of the proceedings. Lilla’s work tries, to its credit, not to be about good and evil, at least as Gnostic complementaries. This is food, glorious food: appetite, passion, eros, revenge. In Burton’s Sondheim, we are saved from none of these, and here Lilla puritanically demurs. But for Burton this anti-salvation is declared as much in a cheerfully spinozistic mode as a gothic one: human appetite is ruinous, and yes, with the fierce consciousness of this appetite, that is all there is. Does this mean we will eat our own, live and stillborn both? Undoubtedly. Man the barricades. And yet, and yet those barricades are erected in the playing fields of what they protect us from, by that same material, with the same dangers. Shall we slit our own throats as a result? Not at all. For consciousness can be read on the tongue and in the stomach—it can function to limit and to restrain and to choose from there. If this, finally, is what Lilla can mean by lucidity (even if it is not what he does mean), let it reign unimpeded, in this tradition and that.

It is also a handsome book, just the sort of thing one expects from Knopf: stout and meaty in a 5×8 format with a textured dust-jacket and creamy pages—a pleasure to hold and (I have to confess) caress. Only deckled pages would have been an improvement. Such lovely materiality deserves praise.

But back to the first claim: What makes the book stunning is the fact that Lilla, if you’ll forgive the semiotic jargon, is a helluva story teller. Let’s not underestimate his achievement. The Stillborn God is so lucid that it lulls you into thinking you actually understand Kant and Hegel. Giants in German theology like Schleiermacher and Troeltsch are adroitly encapsulated in a few pages, and relatively minor figures like Gogarten or Cohen stride onto the stage as such fulsome characters in the story that one is compelled by their amplified presence. Lilla uniquely weds the analytic skill of an expositor with the story-telling skills of a dramatist. This is as close as Hegel is ever going to get to “creative non-fiction.”

Lilla’s erudition informs a sweeping narrative from late medieval Christendom up to the outbreak of World War II. But it is a tale with a curious narrative arc: the hero emerges early, but the remainder of the story tracks all the ways he is forgotten by later dramatis personae—such that only the narrator (Lilla) seems to honor his memory. The story goes something like this:

We begin with a crisis, the so-called “wars of religion”: awash in the fervor and passion of religious faith, the early modern west finds itself spiraling into the chaotic violence of religious wars which are the result of a toxic mix of theology and politics that Lilla simply describes as “political theology.” Into this milieu of religio-political violence strides our hero, Thomas Hobbes, engineer of the “Great Separation” that sequestered theology (with its claims to divine revelation) from having any role or authority in matters of “politics” (which was to be conducted on the basis of public reason available to and agreed upon by all). Thus was “modern political philosophy” born as the antidote to “political theology.” Hobbes and political philosophy liberated “us” (sic) from the “Kingdom of Darkness” (a phrase that gets repeated just often enough that it takes on a kind of Michael-Moore-ish quality, I’m afraid).

To this point, up to Locke’s liberalization of Hobbes, Lilla’s story is not especially unique. It’s a classic example of what Charles Taylor would call a “subtraction” story of modernity. But things get interesting when Lilla continues to consider the fate of this Great Separation after Hobbes. From this point the story becomes a jeremiad, lamenting the ways that Hobbes’ heirs (Rousseau, Kant, Hegel) rolled back the accomplishments of the father of “modern political philosophy,” giving just enough ground to religion and theology that political theology would once again rear its ugly head right here in the “enlightened” West. Rousseau and Kant both re-admit (an albeit scaled-down, “rational”) religion back into public political discussion. Something about human nature and human morality pressed them to give a continuing though chastened role to religion for even “modern” man. But keeping the door open just a tiny bit was fateful: what began as a toe in the door ends up as the elephant in the room. Thus Lilla plays Samuel to Rousseau and Kant’s Saul: “What’s this bleating of sheep I hear?” Why have you not vanquished every vestige of political theology? Making room for even a “modern” political theology as purveyed by the liberal theology of Schleiermacher or Cohen gives rise to a Frankenstein-ish monster that comes back to haunt “the West” in the form of “German Christianity” (indeed, the book might have been better subtitled Religion, Politics, and Modern Germany).

Admittedly, one of the places where Lilla’s story-telling goes off the rails is his account of twentieth-century German theology, and Barth in particular, upon whom he lays the blame for Nazism. Only someone as deft as Lilla could make such a claim seem even remotely plausible, but at the end of the day it remains a ludicrous charge. But I’ll leave it to the Princeton police to protect Barth.

The lesson Lilla draws from this morality tale is that the “God” that would have issued from the Great Liberal Separation was a “stillborn God”—a superfluous deity easily lopped off by Occam’s razor. After all, just what work does such a god do? What does such a non-interventionist, deistic, distant bestower of human autonomy add to the universe? Why bother? “To the decisive questions—‘Why be a Christian?’ ‘Why be a Jew?’—liberal theology offered no answer at all.” Most people need more than that.

It is perhaps the pronouns that are most telling in The Stillborn God. Throughout the book I found myself wondering: Just who is this for? What’s the point? Why is this story important? For whom? This is hinted at in the opening but clarified in a final coda: the story is intended as a cautionary tale for “us.” “The rebirth of political theology is a humbling story,” Lilla concludes, “or ought to be” for those of us with the intellectual will and fortitude to choose to be “heirs to the Great Separation.”

At this point Lilla turns aside to the small cadre of the Enlightened who see the story for what it is: “Those of us who have accepted the heritage of the Great Separation must do so soberly. Time and again we must remind ourselves that we are living an experiment, that we are the exceptions.” Wavering between insider code and an invitation to join this inner circle of the exceptional, Lilla ends with a manifesto of inverse gnosticism: “We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated by the light of revelation. If our experiment is to work, we must rely on our own lucidity.” “We” turns out to be the sect of modern-day Essenes living on the upper West Side, who have vowed to abstain from the illusions of the masses and consigned themselves to the cold, hard desert “reality” disclosed by reason. Lilla and his exceptionalist monastic brotherhood of enlightened “us” have girded their loins in order to make their way in the world without the comforts of faith and revelation (I’m guessing one would bump into Hitchens and Harris in the same rationalist desert after all).

Where does that leave the rest of us—the us not included in Lilla’s enlightened “us?” I, for one, am not persuaded to drop my nets and follow Hobbes.

A first core problem of the book is the very beginning of the story: it buys into the simplistic myth of religious violence and secular peace, resting on the unsubstantiated empirical claim that “religion” (whatever that is) breeds violence whereas institutions of liberal democracy foster peace (current world conflicts in the name of “democracy” not withstanding). Thus Lilla repeats the liberal alarm about religion’s “passion” and “fervor” as the incubator of violence—passions to be curbed by the machinations of Leviathan and, later, the liberal democratic state. But this is a distinction that is untenable for anyone who has ever attended a professional sports event in the United States. It sounds as if Lilla has never witnessed the fervor and passion incited at the opening of a NASCAR race when the dancing colors of the flag are mingled with the iconography of a military fly-over. The opening prayer certainly doesn’t excite the same passions!

In short, the myth of distinctly religious violence and liberal peace is untenable. As the work of William Cavanaugh has demonstrated, the so-called “wars of religion” were primarily about statecraft, and “religion” was an invention of the politiques behind the modern state. While we might not expect Lilla to be a theologian, he is culpably responsible for his ignorance of Cavanaugh’s trenchant challenge to the tired, liberal story about the “wars of religion.” If that story is placed in doubt, then the liberal state is not the savior it pretends to be. Leviathan is more perpetrator than liberator. And Lilla can’t simply plead that he’s “doing history;” what’s at stake is his historiography.

A second core problem is a related distinction between “political theology” and “modern political philosophy.” While he never quite clarifies the nature of the distinction, political theology is seen to be problematic because it appeals to revelation, whereas political philosophy subscribes to a kind of epistemological asceticism that resigns itself to the human all too human. Modern political philosophy is thus more “realistic,” according to Lilla, and in this sense has a leg up on the illusions or dishonesty of political theology.

But this, too, is an untenable distinction. This is not a tension between faith and reason, theology and the secular. It is always already a tension between two faiths, between competing theologies, between rival stories about the world—neither of which can be “proved” but both of which are affirmed by faith. While I think Lilla has conveniently (and irresponsibly) ignored scholarship along these lines (as articulated in the work of John Milbank, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Jeffrey Stout), in fact his own account admits the point. As he observes, Hobbes is not without faith: “On the very first page of his work Hobbes makes an implicit profession of faith: that to understand religion and politics, we need not understand anything about God; we need only understand man as we find him, a body alone in the world.” Not all theologies require appeal to revelation; theologies bubble up from the fundamental, faith-based stories we tell about the world. In this respect, modern political philosophy is always already a political theology. Leviathan is not without its priests and prophets. Lilla’s story about liberation from theology is informed by an alternative theology. That fact calls into question his entire project.

“The world of today is torn asunder by a great dispute; and not only a dispute, but a ruthless battle for world domination. Many people still refuse to believe that there are only two sides, that the only choice lies between absolute conformity to the one system or absolute conformity to the other.” What Czeslaw Milosz in The Captive Mind was calling “a great dispute,” Mark Lilla calls “The Great Separation.” With this phrase, The Stillborn God presents itself, like its predecessor, as an account of the world, “our world, the world created by the intellectual rebellion against political theology.” Milosz was speaking with some ambivalence of a harsh, still expanding, if still finite, situation, one contained within historical and political limits. More ambitious, Lilla writes of a “perennial challenge,” a cosmic and paradoxically irenic struggle marked by a broken history of repetition but untouched by notions as crass as power or domination. Strangely, Lilla thus appears less concerned with politics than with metaphysics, with “two ways of envisaging the human condition.” And indeed, this originary parting of the ways is structured by a quasi-transcendental confrontation, “an actual choice contemporary societies face” (and have therefore always faced). The choice – one might be tempted to say, after Carl Schmitt, the decision – is the privilege of an ambiguously located subject, the collected and collective psychology of which appears dry and hollow (don’t go in the water, Lilla seems to insist, stay on the safe shore: “The river . . . is narrow and deep; those who try to ride the waters will be swept away by spiritual forces beyond their control”). The decision, at any rate, inhabits less than it simply confronts two ways and testifies to two sides. Yet, there are only two sides. And that, Lilla dramatically sums up with undeniable empathy, “that is the human condition.”

There lies, in this typically deft and disingenuously benevolent, laissez-faire gesture of comprehensive universalization, Lilla’s most brilliantly revealing and, considering the success and praises his book has gathered, his most noxious contribution. This is no doubt secularism at its best.

Like enmity for Schmitt, Lilla’s “political theology” simply is an essential element of human life. There would have been, then, there were always “political theologies.” Or, to delve into the refined and complex subtlety of the argument, it has been and remains always and everywhere the case that “certain religious beliefs get translated into doctrines about political life” (emphasis added). In this implausible and unwanted bilingualism, there is religion – here is politics. And since their translation, at once impersonal and perennial, does not affect the meaning of the terms involved (religion is belief, politics is human), the only question that remains is “why?” Indeed, if there is a “great separation” and if the translation it seeks to abolish no longer occurs, the condition of which Lilla speaks must go back to the beginnings of time – and of religion. “We stretch the bow, the arrow flies; that is why they were made. So, by analogy, it is not difficult for us, when considering the cosmic order, to imagine that it was constructed for a purpose reflecting its maker’s will.” The present tense testifies throughout that this is religion. Which is always distinct from politics (the latter’s relation to bows and arrows being different, I suppose). Yet, for some reason or reasons, religion and politics get mixed up: “The believer has reasons for believing that he lives in this divine nexus, just as he has reasons for thinking that it offers authoritative guidance for political life.” There is religion; here is politics – and never the twain shall meet. Yet, confronting both, we nonetheless find ourselves: “We all face the implicit alternative between living in light of what we take to be divine revelation, or living in some other way.” Such is the “great separation” which, at once constituting and suspending our humanity, can and must be upheld through “the art of separation.” For Lilla and his readers, it does not get any better – or worse – than this.

After his own fashion, and like the hero of what he explicitly claims is not a fairy tale (“The Stillborn God is not a fairy tale”), one could say that Lilla is no Christian. Bow and arrows (and Hobbes apologia) aside, he is no theologian either (and indeed, anyone claiming that “the Messiah” – rather than God, or at least the Word – “became flesh” would have to flunk that Kantian test). But Christians can be bad theologians. They can even be bad Christians. For who could otherwise afford to ignore – or obscure by way of exposition – the singular Christian history of political theology (never mentioning that the phrase was revived in the twentieth century by a good – or even bad – Catholic, who went by the name of Carl Schmitt) and spare himself the effort otherwise necessary to universalize it? Such work is conducted elsewhere. Here instead, we are all presented with a difficult, nay, an impossible mission – should we accept it? – a primordial struggle. “Political theology is a primordial form of human thought and for millennia has provided a deep well of ideas and symbols for organizing society and inspiring action, for good and ill. This obvious historical fact apparently needs restating today” (incidentally, Lilla will in fact restate it almost verbatim on a number of occasions). One has hardly room to wonder about the obviousness, the universality, or the historicity of such primordial facts. Of course, Lilla does show some interest in history, if a restricted one, but it is important to remark that he “does not arrive at his view inductively after surveying the bloody record of political history. He is making an anthropological assumption about human nature that is meant to reveal the true lessons of history” (I take the liberty here of quoting from Lilla’s own description of Schmitt in The Reckless Mind). This would only become disquieting were history to mean or function outside of the purview of Christianity in its working and worlding Wirklichkeit. Consider that, although Lilla does not bother to mention any such outside of the expanding confines of Western Christendom, among all the political theologies of the ages of the world (the world having recently found out through this and other thick and marketable volumes that it has always had a political theology, the way it discovered just about one hundred and fifty years ago that it was mired in “religion,” even “world religions”), none should be spared being criticized (or summarily explained away).

None? There is one that may nonetheless stand up and stand out, “the intellectual structure” of which “turned out to be exceptional.” The discreet charm of this not so peculiar Christian exceptionalism operates in such a manner that it attributes, again and again, no significance to translation (how does one say “political theology” in the original biblical Hebrew?) nor to a division and a distribution of regions of being that would be different from its own (how does one determine or indeed contest the boundaries of any and all communities as predicated on an alternative between “political” and “theological”?). “In one sense the claim to exceptionality can be justified: in Christianity, versions of every species of political theology can be found.” Lilla does not, in any way, essentialize Christianity (others might not get away so easy from the accusation). On the contrary, he accounts for it with Vichian sapienza poetica – and with what appears to be at once immaculate and multiple conceptions (“The Great Separation was never a fait accompli, even in Christian Europe where it was first conceived”). Thus, Christianity – the New Faith – operates through its making and remaking so as to gently and efficiently endow the entire world with its own attributes and divisions, in order to claim for itself the exceptional virtue of having had the lucidity to “emancipate” itself from the shackles it blissfully sees itself as having shared and sharing still, and often enforcing this view in very concrete, evangelizing, ways. With such generous blessings, how could one fail to ask in wondrous amazement: why? (“Understanding reasons is the key to understanding political theology”). Why is it, indeed, that out of Christian political theology there emerged “an authentically new way of treating political questions”? And what was it “about the Christian tradition that provoked such a profound challenge to the way societies had always conceived of political life?”

Before engaging these not so novel questions (after Nietzsche, one could have asked simply: “Why Are We so Great?”), let me summarize the logic, or mechanics, here at work. First, a Christian thinker – which is to say one educated within, or an active participant in, what Lilla himself calls “the Christian tradition” – resolutely and decisively begins by rejecting his own Christianity. Alternatively, he may repeatedly affirm that other Christian thinkers were not Christian thinkers, as in “Hegel was no theologian, let alone a Christian one.” Along with its contemporary followers, the Church – having a long and venerable tradition for seeking out dissenters of whatever sort, excommunicating them and worse – has been happy to oblige and confirm the verdict: “this is no Christian of mine!” (compare how one can write a book these days about a Jewish theologian in order to intégrer the poor fellow into the community of “real” philosophers. Rushing to give you a prize in order to celebrate the exclusion of this prodigal son will be your local synagogue and other institutions of higher Jewish learning). Second, instead of proposing a critique of Christianity, the no-longer Christian thinker gently extends his rejection/critique to “religion” and beyond to the whole of humanity (“not just Christian political theology, but the basic assumptions upon which all political theology had rested”), proceeding to a. condemn “them” for not having achieved his own degree of freedom and, b. affirm the exceptional dimension of – what else? – Christianity, which thankfully brought him to the happy shores on which he finds himself (“We live, so to speak, on the other shore” as Lilla smugly and tirelessly repeats). Finally, our non-Christian exonerates Christianity (forgive me, he exonerates “true Christianity,” not them marginal dissenters, mystics and fanatics) by piling up the blame on those toward whom he had previously extended his kind, and unsolicited, attention. As a coda he proceeds to ask – it is, after all, the great separation – “Why Are We so Great?”

Part Two: The Stillborn, Reckless Mind

“The human mind is a weak organ”

Not so deeply buried through Lilla’s explorations is the verso side of an answer, which I am almost afraid to discuss for fear of joining the current war on anti-Semitism. Yet, Lilla is disturbingly clear and insistent that the reasons behind Christianity’s gentle contribution to the emancipatory advancement of the world at large are not Jewish reasons. They are nothing but Christian, of course, but because Lilla lingers on figures that he identifies as “Jewish,” the reader gains an essential perspective on “the other shore” and its history. Thus, having cast the Bible as the quintessential Jewish text (Lilla kindly adopts the politically correct “Hebrew Bible,” thus erasing the Reformation’s invention of the Bible as both political and theological and as neither political nor theological, further advancing us on the path of liberation from the recently canonized and vernacularized Old Testament and, presumably, toward the next Good News, the happy shore on which we stand), Lilla warns us to “beware the forces unleashed by the Bible’s messianic promise.” Clearly, whatever we have to thank for the Great Separation does not come from the Hebrew Bible, or from the Jews (Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig). For under these names and headings, we should recognize the perils of “political messianism,” a.k.a., “religious passions,” “biblical religion” and my personal favorite “biblical political theology.” There is found the living and searing source of the perennial alternative that confronts us. There the danger that threatens us and our choicest way of life. One can see how those who fail to think “that the destructive forces within biblical religion [sic!], which surfaced repeatedly in premodern Jewish and Christian history could ever again pose a threat” carry a heavy burden of responsibility. For “the religious passions traditionally associated with messianism [are] still alive. Heresies, false prophecies, peasant revolts, massacres, genocides, self-immolations – the history of messianic moments bulges with them.” Surely, it is political theologies, nay, religion itself that is to blame for such a bloody history. Is it not religion, after all, and religion alone, that “can express darker fear and desires, that can destroy community by dividing its members, that can inflame the mind with destructive apocalyptic fantasies of immediate redemption”? Who would not want therefore “to protect modern man from the cycle of superstition and violence into which political theology inevitably led”? Yes, it must be religion, and religion alone that should stand out among those who make possible “the foulest of modern ideologies.”

Lilla does not go so far as to blame the Hebrew Bible, Jewish political theology, or even a Jewish thinker, much less the Jewish religion, for the rise of Nazism and whatever one considers its avatars today (much in the same way, back in 1993, Deborah Lipstadt had refrained from blaming “deconstructionism” for Holocaust denial). He does not even blame a Christian theologian for the advent of whom he calls “the Messiah of 1933.” He does better than that. He understands them (“they wanted to experience the moment of absolute decision and to have that decision determine the whole of their existence. Well! They did experience it.” Nazism – now, that’ll teach them!). Layering the association (or is it the guilt?) he explains that “they show how resilient political theology is, how it could survive in the modern West and be adapted to justify the most repugnant of modern political regimes.” And then he forgives them all for their lack of lucidity, for failing to see the beast they were participating in shaping and breeding.

[For] neither Rosenzweig, who died in 1929, nor Barth, who lived until 1968, recognized the connection between the rhetoric of their theological messianism and the apocalyptic rhetoric that was beginning to engulf German society. Their books did nothing to cause that political development, which had much deeper sources. But they did unwittingly help to shape a new and noxious form of political argument, which was the theological celebration of modern tyranny.

Part Three: East is East, West is West

For his part, Czeslaw Milosz – who avoided blaming either Jew or Christian for Nazism or Communism – knew well that “the pressure to conform” was exercised on both sides of the “great dispute,” if differently. It is important to recognize this. Milosz speaks of conformity, not of “speaking truth to power,” something one might have to do on the same shore, not from the safety of the other side on this now quasi-proverbial river, behind borders and ever higher walls. Like Lilla, he did not fail to choose one form of conformity over the other. What the two moreover share is a gesture whereby that which is seen, if for a fleeting moment, as an internal defect is subsequently projected onto the outer world. What they share is an exoneration of the hither side. It is the other side, the side of the other, therefore, that is defined, as it were indifferently, in political, religious and psychological terms. There is the side of “the New Faith.” Can we fail to discern something more there? It is revealed, I think, by way of the psychological profile Milosz traces of the main foot-soldier of this New Faith, this totalitarianism (Lilla would say: this political theology).

Milosz calls him “Ketman.” He is the arch-paradigm of “the captive mind” – “not only must one deny one’s true opinion, but one is commanded to resort to all ruses in order to deceive one’s adversary” – although he stands in an odd relation to the typology otherwise mapped by Milosz. In a way, Ketman is degree zero of the problem one confronts when considering the New Faith. It should come as no surprise that Ketman comes to us from “the Mussulman East.” Ketman is a stereotype of the worst kind, of course, which in fact comes from one of the undisputed founders of modern racism, Arthur de Gobineau. He was recently revived – if he ever went away – by those who appeal today to the wisdom of Milosz in recognizing that through the Communist East, the West never stopped fearing, and fighting, “Asiatic despotism.” Since Montesquieu at least, the paradigm for the despotic ruler traveled from the Ottoman Sultan to the Chinese emperor and the Russian Czar. The paradigm for the despotic subject, however, dominantly remained: Muslims. At times, they go unnamed – they are simply those who live on the other shore of politics, under the metaphorical or literal despot. Sometimes the name they bear remains unheard (think of the Muslims of Auschwitz). But since there are only two sides, details and differences among them, while interesting perhaps, need not concern us. As Lilla explains,

Most theories of religion, ancient and modern, have adopted a third-person perspective on belief: religion is something that happens to human beings, arising out of ignorance and fear or as a mythical expression of a society’s collective consciousness . . . Subjectively viewed, religion is a choice, perhaps even a rational choice, for individuals and societies. We all face the implicit alternative between living in light of what we take to be divine revelation, or living in some other way.

By the end of The Stillborn God, the perennial alternative will have imposed itself through sheer repetition. “Islam conquered its empire self-consciously with a confident tradition of political theology . . . Christianity, by contrast, acquired its empire accidentally and was forced to derive the principles of its political theology under the press of circumstances.” To repeat, then: although there may be more than one way on the hither side of things as well, it remains the case that, as Milosz put it, “there are only two sides” (for Milosz though, the choice may not be so “rational” – his own decision, he explains, “proceeded, not from the functioning of the reasoning mind, but from a revolt of the stomach”). That is why Gobineau is relevant here, and Milosz as well. For if, engulfed by these terms, we start to ask today about the other side, we will not have to wonder for long who they are and where they come from, or what the policy implications might be. They come – imagine that! – from “biblical messianism” and “from the Mussulman East.”

But of course, the enemy is also within (as Paul Cooke puts it, “Hobbes’s intention in treating the Bible as he did, I believe, was to sustain the form of Christianity while changing its actual substance for such readers, and this intention required the greatest care, manifested as a kind of duplicity, or, as I call it, a conspiracy against Christianity”). It is possible to go so far as to claim that the enemy is us? Lilla acknowledges at the outset that the great separation is internal (“we are separated from our own long theological tradition of political thought . . . . Now the long tradition of Christian political theology is forgotten”). Moreover, to the extent that Lilla’s perennial alternative, and the choice that derives from it, constitute “the human condition,” the answer would have to be: yes, the enemy is within us. But the enemy is, as we have seen, facing us. That is why, notwithstanding all the “fragility” rhetoric (“we” are in grave danger, of course, under threat or attack, our confidence shaken, and what not), Lilla is less interested in self-interrogation than in “knowing the enemy,” and in the repeated affirmation that we must be steadfast in upholding our sense of ourselves. “We sense ourselves to be thinking, critical creatures considering the alternatives before us. And therefore we are.”

And who are we, then, we who are, with or without sense or reason, that which we sense we are? We are those “who have accepted the heritage of the Great Separation.” Truly, this is not a fragile “we” that continues to be confronted by itself, or by an internal enemy, nor one faced any longer (was it ever?) with an existential decision. This “we” that speaks through Lilla is nothing if not content and confident: “we have made a choice” already. “We have chosen to limit our politics to protecting individuals from the worst harms they can inflict on one another, to securing fundamental liberties and providing for their basic welfare, while leaving their spiritual destinies in their own hands.”

I suppose we should be proud of these indubitable achievements – in Iraq or in our prisons and reservations, on the Mexican border and in the slums where the exponentially multiplying poor survives (or not) – proud of having held political theology and indeed religion at bay (Lilla does assert that “it is only thanks to a strong constitutional structure and various lucky breaks that political theology has never managed to dominate the American political mind”). Right. But does this fairy tale – it is, I am afraid, a fairy tale – demonstrate “fragility” or does it manifest unwavering assurance? If anything, it seems to “attest to the strength of Americans’ self-confidence.” To the very least, it manifests the faith of a gated secularism in the righteous inevitability of its internal, rigid rather than liquid, ways. And it is consistent with what Lilla had elsewhere described as the “pride in our capacity to absorb immigration and shame in the legacy of slavery,” the political commitment and engagement that is “the logical extension of the social enfranchisement given to immigrants and promised, but never delivered to American blacks,” something which “speaks volumes about the social consensus that exists in this country about how to think and argue about such questions.” Right. Then again, “success has bred complacency.” Oh really?

So what about “the bloody record of political history”? In The Reckless Mind, Lilla had mentioned it, apparently in order to suggest that such minor “European” events as decolonization and the collapse of Communist regimes “have had no appreciable effect on American intellectual life, for the simple reason that they pose no challenge to our own self-understanding.” How is that still possible, one would ask, if one had not read Walter Benjamin on the rule and the exception. “We are the exception,” exults Lilla anyway, doing so along with a number of our American compatriots. As one fellow combatant recently put it, speaking truth to power from the assured shores of power: “This is America at its best.” It is, indeed, and going, and going, and going. But I would submit that it has little to do with liberalism. It has even less to do with “religion,” still less with “religions” or “political theologies.” It does acknowledge, if rather crudely, the lines of continuities that link “the unique theological challenges of Christendom” and its self-proclaimed “emancipation” from itself. It also shows the persistence of a pattern of distribution that separates politics and religion from a familiar, determined and determining perspective, applying its universal scheme wherever it casts its critical or distracted, often destructive, gaze. (Caesar meet God. God meet Caesar.) Does this “essentialize” Christianity? By no means. It merely situates “us” on the right side of the shore, well-placed to teach the world the lessons it keeps failing to learn. By insisting that this is a lesson in religion and its limits; by identifying “sides” along with enemies – and loving them – Christianity reveals less an essence than its pertinacity. And so still, the Jew, the Arab (“Thinking about such behavior was more highly developed in Christianity than in Judaism and Islam”).

This is not – and certainly not only – politics, here masquerading anyway as “the Clash of Religions” (not that Huntington meant anything else really). Affirmed or denied, reformed and reaffirmed, Christianity is many, of course, but by the force of its ever new faith and fairy tales, and by a few other means, it manages to remake and reconstitute itself in the figure of the Christian tradition and its alleged self-transcendence, which pervades Lilla’s book and grants it its language and understanding (“The idea of separating political discourse from theological discourse was a novelty, conceived to meet a particular predicament in Christian history”). Does it not ours? It works and operates as a one-sided decisionism of an all-too common kind, one that continues to spread and advance (God protect us!) carpet-bombing style, privileged to ignore its effects, or its tireless repetitions. “We have little reason to expect other civilizations to follow our unusual path, which was opened up by a unique theologico-political crisis within Christendom.” If this is the secular age – allegedly an offer they can refuse, perhaps thanks to “our self-restraint” – it is still sustained and advanced by Western Christendom: far more than a religion and a benevolent set of political choices, the military-industrial complex hand in hand with the democratic and economic mission in its theologico-political teachings. The Stillborn God is a secular book, no doubt, but more importantly, it is Christianity triumphant. It partakes of a mondialatinisation it describes quite aptly: “The Anglo-American liberal tradition lacks a vocabulary for describing the full complexity of its own religious life, let alone for understanding the relation between faith and politics in other parts of the world.” After The Stillborn God, it is obvious that this lexical mishap – the irrelevance and abolition of translation – plagues not only the book itself, but the discriminated world it stands for and affirms. But hey, as one Texas governor is said to have put it, “if English was good enough for Jesus-Christ, it’s good enough for me!” Just listen to the way this little phrase – “political theology” – is spreading.

Listen.

It is the enduring sound of one civilization clashing.

This positive, at times triumphalist, narrative gathers some momentum in Lilla’s book, at least at first. It is a compelling and confidence-inspiring story. Yet at other moments The Stillborn God approaches historical and contemporary European negotiations of religion and politics with hesitance and even trepidation, with Lilla concluding near the end of the book that “the river separating political philosophy and political theology is narrow and deep; those who try to ride the waters will be swept away by spiritual forces beyond their control.” In this second, more defensive mode of argumentation, which competes throughout the book with the first, Lilla presses the reader to acknowledge the danger of negotiating a third way between political theology, defined as appealing at some point to divine revelation, and, political philosophy that attempts to attain political good absent such appeals on the other. This tension between the West’s alleged accomplishments in the domain of religion and politics and the prospect that these salutary advances are under siege from a variety of quarters runs throughout the book, pushing the narrative forward and lending coherence to what otherwise might read more like an introduction to the religious politics of several Western canonical political thinkers than an intervention into contemporary debates on religion and politics.

Lilla’s claim that the Great Separation is unique to the West has important implications for global politics, and I want to point toward some of the difficulties surrounding his assumption that (Western) postmetaphysical political philosophy is located on a fundamentally different and distinct plane than political theology. I question the assumption that Western theopolitical identities, practices, and institutions are fundamentally different and distinct from other civilizations that allegedly have yet to discover the resources to make such a transition possible.

For Lilla, Westerners are the exception because we live on what he calls “the other shore.” Civilizations on the “opposite bank” puzzle us because we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do. They are, moreover, unlikely to follow our path because to successfully navigate the hazardous shoals of political theology as we have done would require a difficult excavation of theological resources. Lilla seems skeptical that this will occur, in part because he seems to lack confidence in the capacity of other traditions to negotiate these difficult matters, and in part because our own crossing to the “other shore” has been complicated “by the fact that the religious anthropology that supplanted theology as the foundation of Western political thought contained paradoxes and problems of its own.” This crossing has been placed in jeopardy by, among others, intellectual traditions that seek to revive political theology within the West, such as those that draw on the writings of Ernst Bloch and Friedrich Gogarten, and Lilla is as critical of these as he is candid about the alleged shortcomings of other civilizations. Thanks to these internal dissenting traditions, he laments, political theology has once again entered through the back door of Western civilization, threatening the hard-won gains of the Great Separation and overwhelming liberal theologians such as Cohen and Troeltsch with messianism by exploiting the “gnostic potential embedded in the Bible’s promise of redemption.” Lilla’s remedy for this backsliding into political theology is to rely upon “our own lucidity” to reign in the impulse to theologize politics, to hold ourselves in check when tempted by questions of theology, cosmology, and metaphysics. It is a question of discipline. The liberal deity is a stillborn God; political theology has been reborn.

I agree with Lilla’s contention that we need to revisit the tension between political theology and modern political philosophy. I disagree, however, with his easy assumption that political theology and political philosophy are and must be mutually exclusive. Rather than settling this contentious relation in advance by fiat, as his argument aspires to do in its more confident moments, the relation between political philosophy and political theology, and how various instantiations of this relationship shape institutions, practices, and identities of world politics, is precisely what needs to be explored.

Reading Lilla’s argument next to The Invention of World Religions, Tomoko Masuzawa’s study of the vicissitudes of European discourse on world religions and its relation to the formation of modern European identity, gave me a different take on these questions. Masuzawa offers an alternative historical and philosophical framework for contextualizing Lilla’s argument as part of a broader tradition of secular European discourse on world religions. As she suggests, “the new discourse of pluralism and diversity of religions, when it finally broke out into the open and became an established practice in the first half of the twentieth century, neither displaced nor disabled the logic of European hegemony—formerly couched in the language of the universality of Christianity—but, in a way, gave it a new lease” (xiv). Lilla’s self-congratulatory contention that we in the West have made it (though fitfully and not without setbacks) to the other shore appears as part of a long historical trajectory of Western discourse about religion that has served to reinforce a particular understanding and practice of European identity, global power, and hegemony. Modern discourse on religion and religions, as Masuzawa argues, was from the beginning a discourse of secularization at the same time that it was a discourse of othering. A symmetry and affinity appear between these two “wings” of the religion discourse, enabling it to “do the vital work of churning the stuff of Europe’s ever-expanding epistemic domain, and of forging from that ferment…the essential identity of the West” (20).

Lilla’s argument serves to buttress a particular understanding and practice of a “secular” West that claims to be developmentally more advanced than its non-Western rivals, while reinforcing Western identity in opposition to a series of others (both inside and outside the geographical West) defined by their location on the “other shore” of an allegedly clean political philosophy-political theology divide. Whether and how other civilizations and internal dissenting traditions will be quarantined to this “other shore” is not entirely clear. In any case, the presumption that we have left the rest of the world on the opposite bank does a great deal of work in international politics. In an earlier post on this blog, Nicolas Guilhot suggested that part of the problem in international relations scholarship is the assumption that “the very idea that the ‘science’ of politics that has shaped our understanding of international affairs is substantially different from religious worldviews or political repertoires claiming a relation to some form of transcendence.” In other words, and contra Lilla, could it be that we are all on the same shore, struggling with questions of transcendence and immanence in different languages and traditions? If so, Guilhot is right that we have to let go of the notion that “we” in the West “enjoy some kind of epistemological privilege because our understanding of world politics has somehow worked itself out of its own cultural embeddedness and acquired universal relevance by becoming secular.”

Lilla’s confident defense of the West’s hard-won, allegedly “postmetaphysical” accomplishments and accompanying call to arms against threats to these accomplishments emanating from both inside and outside the West propel his argument forward. This alternation between a confident narrative of theopolitical success and the frightening potential that it will be (already has been?) derailed helps to explain why the author finds the prospect of navigating the waters separating political philosophy and political theology so threatening. Lilla’s conclusion that those who spend time exploring these waters risk the possibility of being swept away by “spiritual forces beyond our control” attests to the unresolved tension between his aspiration for a clean divide between political theology and political philosophy and the messy realities of the politics of religion in the real world.

Lilla masterfully describes the problem posed for all would-be Christian political theorists and some of the various efforts made over the centuries to solve it. Christianity was not originally a religion for government; the inherent instability in the Trinity is a troubling foundation for a political order; and the Christian god’s movement between immanence and transcendence causes constant tension. Lilla delineates the arguments of some very smart people who worry about the problem. His passion and clarity make this book good to think with.

But there were several points that troubled me.

First, Lilla tells us that he was originally motivated to explain the revival of messianic political theology in interwar Germany. He says that he came to see the liberal Christianity that set up this revival as a product of the previous nineteen centuries of experiments in creating a Christian political theology, and its failure as, in a sense, foreordained. Having begun this project as one of genealogy, though—an effort to explain the failure of German liberal Christianity—the book seems to have been written in reverse so that the failure of German liberal theology is made to seem the inevitable outcome of any Christian political theologizing. Beginning on a world stage with three types of religion structuring a comparative treatment of political theology, Lilla ends with the very particular story of post-Hobbesian/post-Rousseauian/ post-Kantian German Protestant Christian theology. What might be convincingly explanatory from a genealogical viewpoint becomes startlingly parochial and alarmist, even Huntingtonian, in this reverse treatment.

Secondly, what Lilla calls “the human condition” turns out to be the condition of one strain of protestant theology. Protestant Christian political theology is made first uniquely triumphal in its creation of The Great Separation and then uniquely corrupt in its underwriting of the Holocaust. Other religions—indeed, other Christians, Protestants and otherwise—are virtually absent. That others have also experimented politically with the built–in tension between immanence and transcendence—as well as with other creative tensions present in other religious cosmologies—is patent. To write of comparative political theology in the twenty-first century without so much as a nod to other Christian and non-Christian political philosophies is surprising, to say the least.

Thirdly, the book makes copious use of the first person plural. It is not at all clear who “we” are. All moderns? All Christians? Or all Americans? To the extent that he is speaking to the latter, it is important to note that American Christianity—and European Christianity outside of Germany—is different from German Protestantism. With respect to the U.S., German liberal theology is exemplary only for U.S. university trained theologians, not for most American Christians. For most American Christians, the accommodation between evangelical Protestantism and U.S. civil religion, while arguably complicit in extending the lives of various unjust legal structures, is also arguably far less dangerous than the German messianic variety has been in the past. American Christianity is moralistic and pietist, but it is also tempered by a common sense pragmatism and endless division.

Lastly, this book is written as a cautionary tale, urging us to have the courage—and the will—to maintain what Lilla terms “the Great Separation” in order to avoid a fall into the temptation of messianic politics. It is Lilla’s view that the heirs to the Great Separation, an experiment he terms a unique adventure in truly secular politics (a politics built on Hobbesian psychology) are at a crossroads, a crossroads where they must choose the hard road of separation rather than the soft, seductive—and potentially disastrous—road of a new political theology, one of comprehensiveness and assurance. He has a lot of company today in those who warn of an impending return to “theocracy.”

Lilla writes: “Political rhetoric in the United States, for example, is still shot through with messianic language, and it is only thanks to a strong constitutional structure and various lucky breaks that political theology has never managed to dominate the American mind.” I disagree. While there is real evidence from time to time of “the paranoid style” in American political life, there has never been a serious danger of messianic politics. And it is not just the Constitution and luck. American religion, generally reflecting American associational life, is too fissiparous and lacking in institutional infrastructure to stage a takeover.

It would have been enough for Lilla to frame this book as an explanation of the genealogy of bourgeois protestant German Christian liberal political theology and the long shadow that it casts over the post-enlightenment world order. To see that theology as inevitable and as uniquely significant as a diagnostic for comparative political theology undercuts the very conversation Lilla begins with, one that is well worth having—a serious comparative study of political theologies, one that acknowledges that separation is also a political theology.