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

lucid and illuminating story on the origins of church-state separation in the modern West and its broader implications in our world today. must read for anyone interested in the subject.

With books about atheism doing well in bookstores (like Christopher Hitchens's _God is Not Great_ or Richard Dawkins's _The God Delusion_), believers might worry that a book titled _The Stillborn God_ (Knopf) offers more of the same. This is not the case. The book's subtitle, _Religion, Politics, and the Modern West_, gives a bit better picture of its subject and theme, but does not make its content completely clear. Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University and frequent contributor to the _New York Review of Books_, has written a book about the separation of church and state, but you won't find here references to Thomas Jefferson or the U.S. Constitution. This is a broader and generally Eurocentric view of how theology became pried apart from politics, a process that has taken many centuries. We take for granted now that there is something inherently wrong with a government that imposes or favors one church's belief system, and we are aghast at governments who imprison or suspend rights of citizens simply because of their religious beliefs, but that was, at one time, the way all governments operated. There are plenty of Americans who feel that church and state are too separated now, but there are fewer who would insist that the government ought directly to sponsor particular church movements. The concept of what Lilla calls "the Great Separation" was long in coming, and as he tells the story, it was brought about by influential thinkers; if they had not taught in just the way they did, perhaps we would not have managed the separation at all. It wasn't inevitable. Lilla's is a serious tome which will be enjoyed by anyone who appreciates a historic explanation of this particularly important way we have come to regard both religion and politics. Lilla explains that different conceptions of the Christian God and of the Trinity caused conflict and even bloody religious wars in Europe through the 1500s, so that theologians, and more especially philosophers, began to question whether there should even be a political theology. Lilla nominates 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes as the most important questioner of the issue. He insisted that questions about God could more practically be viewed as questions about human behavior, and that if there were any religious revelation, it had to be filtered by the human mind, perceptions, and passions, including the search for power. The intellectual separation of politics and religion had begun. John Locke and David Hume took Hobbes's ideas and built many of the concepts on which liberal democracies are founded, including that the power of government be limited and shared, and government be unable to interfere or advocate religious ideas or practice. There was reaction against this sort of thinking from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hegel, and Kant. The German liberal theology promoted Protestant bourgeois society as the highest type of moral life to which humans could a

I'll admit straight away that I'm not formally trained in philosophy or theology. I would've liked to have at least minored in the former, but life had other plans. I absorbed what I could, at any rate. That being said, I had very little trouble following the flow of Lilla's narrative. He was dead-on in his assessment that we in the West have made the common (and often fatal) error of forgetting where we came from and how we got here. We needed this reminder. It was quite enlightening to read his analysis of the progression of political theological thought over the course of 400 years. For such a dense subject, it's remarkable that he was able to condense it down to only 300 pages. I'm sure a great deal of nuance was lost along the way, but that doesn't really matter. What matters is that he showed how people took the ideas of reasonable, intelligent men and twisted them into things that those men would be disgusted by. I devoured this book the first time I read it. The consequences of the contradictions inherent in Christianity, as well as the history of the Great Separation itself, are fascinating to me. I'll have to read it again in order to pick up what I missed before. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of philosophy, as well as the history of religious thought.

In The Stillborn God, Mark Lilla, Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, has written a cogent history of "political theology" (the unholy marriage of church and state, religion and politics). Although Lilla deals briefly with Judaism, and mentions Islam (just barely), he concentrates on Christendom and its conflicted theology, which has often led to heated controversies, doctrinal schisms, and religious wars. Here a puzzling paradox emerges: why does a Christian doctrine that blesses the peacemakers and considers the lilies of the field too often inspire racism, intolerance, fanatical hatred, and violence? At the heart of Christianity, Lilla explains, there is a conceptual confusion, an ambiguity found in dogmas such as the Trinity, which leads to a bifurcation of Christian perspectives between "already" and "not yet." While some theologians emphasize the "there and then" (a transcendent God and a future redemption in heaven), others emphasize the "here and now" (an immanent God and a present redemption on earth). Such conceptual divergence has important implications for political theology. While some believers advocate an ascetic withdrawal from the mundane world by retreat into monasticism, passively and patiently awaiting the Second Coming of Jesus, other believers call for political activism, faith initiatives, militant resistant against an evil empire, or a longing for an apocalyptic Armageddon. Such a mentality may advocate and welcome a Christian theocracy--an abolition of the "misguided" separation of church and state. For the philosophically minded, The Stillborn God is a rare treat. Lilla gives a lucid analysis of the religious, moral, and political thinking of philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. Lilla's explication of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) stands at the epicenter of The Stillborn God. Indeed, asserts Lilla, Hobbes's "great treatise Leviathan (1651) contains the most devastating attack on Christian political theology ever undertaken," and established the agenda for nearly all subsequent Western political philosophy. Hobbes's "godless, atheistic materialism" argued for "The Great Separation"--the complete separation of church and state, and favored the steady withering away of the church. His radical proposal caused a storm of protest and subsequent thinkers sought to undo or minimize the "damage" he had wrought. Lilla's portrayal of Immanuel Kant is also intriguing. Kant, the author of Critique of Pure Reason, is often considered to be the paragon of philosophical rationality. However, Kant wrote, "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge [that is, to show the limits of reason] in order to make room for faith." By doing so, he smuggled the concepts of God, the soul, and immortality back into philosophical discourse. Kant was, in effect, a covert theologian who "legitimatized" Christian dogma, sneaking it in by philosophical hocus-pocus. Secul

As a prof. at the University of Michigan, I am always looking for works to improve my thinking and writing. Many authors I read can create beautiful prose but their arguments can be weak; others are insightful but clunky. Lilla is the rare author who can both think clearly and write beautifully. It is always a pleasure to witness his solid and deeply knowledgeable argument take shape in the cadences and the rhythms of his writing. His pacing, his pauses, and his periodic recapitulations make his books an effortless read. The Stillborn God is no exception. If you are interested in an overall framework of Western political philosophy and theology, one that is structurally sound and can accommodate philosophers ranging from Hobbes to Hegel, drawing out in 300 pages these guys' individual philosophies and their conceptual and historical interrelations, then this is the book for you. Of course, as with any framework, there will be gaps. It is in these gaps where Lilla's critics roost. But laymen like me are like students: we don't care about these critics' "technical details", we just want no confusion. An efficient and methodical mastication of Hegel that we can swallow in the first read is all we desire. Lilla's book ends in early 20th century Germany. A worthy follow-up is Keynes's succinct economic masterpiece "Economic Consequences of Peace" (thankfully free on the Internet). Keynes uses the same political philosophy to explain England and France's vicious motives for the heavy WWI German reparations. He laments English and French leaders' failure to understand the rapidly changing nature of intra-European political and economic relationships, which he beautifully documents (European population, for example, had grown a lot, leading to new cross-continental grain trading patterns). And we all know now, as Keynes did then, the ensuing consequences.