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

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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This searching history of western thinking about the relationship between religion and politics was inspired not by 9/11, but by Nazi Germany, where, says University of Chicago professor Lilla (The Reckless Mind), politics and religion were horrifyingly intertwined. To explain the emergence of Nazism's political theology, Lilla reaches back to the early modern era, when thinkers like Locke and Hume began to suggest that religion and politics should be separate enterprises. Some theorists, convinced that Christianity bred violence, argued that government must be totally detached from religion. Others, who believed that rightly practiced religion could contribute to modern life, promoted a liberal theology, which sought to articulate Christianity and Judaism in the idiom of reason. (Lilla's reading of liberal Jewish thinker Hermann Cohen is especially arresting.) Liberal theologians, Lilla says, credulously assumed human society was progressive and never dreamed that fanaticism could capture the imaginations of modern people—assumptions that were proven wrong by Hitler. If Lilla castigates liberal theology for its naïveté, he also praises America and Western Europe for simultaneously separating religion from politics, creating space for religion, and staving off sectarian violence and theocracy. Lilla's work, which will influence discussions of politics and theology for the next generation, makes clear how remarkable an accomplishment that is. (Sept. 14)
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* Political science begins in the wars-of-religion-devastated seventeenth century with Hobbes' treatise Leviathan, with its theory of the state based on philosophical, not theological, reasoning, sanctioned by humans, not God. After outlining the political implications of the three different conceptions of divine-human relations, Lilla begins with Hobbes, too, and the "Great Separation" between God and earthly authority that his thinking inspired. Humans being by nature disputatious, barely had desacralized politics got off the ground than the Romantic philosophers Rousseau and Kant argued to bring God back to ground statecraft ethically. A later Romantic, Hegel, subsequently made the ethical political God downright salvific, at least for the bourgeois Protestant state (with eventually dire consequences, thanks to such teleological ideologies as Nazism and Communism). Cultural critic Richard Weaver's famous dictum ideas have consequences seems to be the leitmotif as Lilla traces the imperiled life of the nontheological polity that Hobbes first formulated, that was realized tacitly in England during the eighteenth century and explicitly by the U.S. Constitution, and that has been adopted by most of the West despite successive attempts to weaken or destroy it for God's sake. Riveting, engrossing reading, even though it is history-of-philosophy. Olson, Ray

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