Secular Polemics
The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West
by Mark Lill
Knopf, 2007
(334 pages, $26.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Mark Winter
Some books are actually two books, the one starkly at odds with the other until one emerges scarred but victorious. Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God is such a book: a stimulating if very general history of ideas that careens into broad polemic, but instructive for its failures as well as its merits.
Difficult Christianity
According to Lilla, professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, the history of the West is in large part the history of political theology: that is, the practice, with roots in the ancient world, of claiming divine and theological sanction for political arrangements, and even drawing political arrangements out of theology itself.
He believes Christianity is an especially difficult faith for political theology because it combines the usually separate notions of an immanent God, a transcendent God, and a hidden God. Further, because of its ambivalence about political life and its messianic emphasis, an unstable conception of God makes Christian peoples especially prone to political instability and violent religious enthusiasms, often of a millenarian kind.
After more than a century of religious wars associated with the Reformation, the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes inaugurated what Lilla calls “the Great Separation” that stabilized the West: He insisted on treating religion as a purely human thing born of material need, fear, and ignorance, with revelation rendered as a dubious human claim to knowledge rather than a disclosure of God’s nature and promises to his creatures.
This “Great Separation” allowed secular politics to take hold in Europe, and, with the writings of Spinoza and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, allowed for the possibility of egalitarian secular politics. Yet for Lilla, Hobbes failed to take into account authentic spiritual curiosity, hope, and desire (he admits that Hobbes’s “religious psychology” is “simpleminded”).
Tacitly acknowledging this problem, eighteenth-century thinkers like Rousseau and Kant reintroduced the positive need for religious faith, even as they accepted the earlier critique of any discrete revealed religion, and made religion an affair of the heart whose supreme licit expression must be a universal morality. The German philosopher Hegel subsequently developed a historical trajectory according to which it was the vocation of Christianity to spill itself out into an ethics of the modern citizen.
This philosophical deposit underwrote nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism, with its emphasis on a kind of slimmed down, minimalist political theology preoccupied with ethics, social reform, and human progress made visible through the actions of “advanced” nation-states or “civilization.”
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