The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West by Mark Lilla
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

MARC D. GUERRA is the Director of the Graduate Program in Theology at Ave Maria University. He is the author of Christians as Political Animals: Prudence in the Earthly City (ISI Books, forthcoming).

Western nations increasingly find
themselves debating what place, if
any, organized religion should occupy in
modern liberal democracies. The reasons
for this are numerous. The most immediate
and pressing of these is, of course,
the spectacular and horrifying terrorist
attacks perpetrated against the United
States on September 11, 2001. The possibility
of some such event occurring was
not wholly unforeseen. Eight years earlier,
Harvard professor Samuel Huntington
published a provocative article in Foreign
Affairs titled “The Clash of Civilizations?”
Huntington there argued that the
collapse of Soviet Communism presented
the West with a new kind of geo-political
challenge. That challenge extended to the
possibility of an open confrontation with
the militant brand of theological politics
that had taken hold in the Middle East
in recent decades. Weeks after September
11, the term “clash of civilizations” had
become part of the West’s working vocabulary.

But the rise of radical Islam is not the
only reason for our renewed interest in
what Spinoza famously called the “theologico-
political problem.” Under the leadership
of former French President Giscard
d’Estaing, the Convention on the Future
of Europe hotly debated whether any mention
of Christianity’s historic role in shaping
European civilization should be included
in the EU’s proposed constitution.
Closer to home, ever since the 1980s vocal
elements of America’s political class have
warned—at times apocalyptically—about
the purported dangers of the rise of the
so-called Religious Right in our politics.
Similarly, political arguments over the legal
status of abortion-on-demand and “samesex
marriage” are popularly portrayed as
irresolvable wedge issues in the ongoing
“culture wars” waged between “conservative
Christians” and “secular” defenders of
our civil liberties.

Against this backdrop, the appearance
of a thoughtful book that examines the
complex relation of religion and politics
in the life of the modern West should be
looked upon as good news. In The Stillborn
God, Mark Lilla attempts to give us
such a book. A former professor on the
University of Chicago’s prestigious Committee on Social Thought, now teaching
humanities at Columbia University, Lilla is
one of our most celebrated intellectual historians.
As one would expect, the majestic
scope of this work allows Lilla to put his
erudition on display. After a brief, synoptic
treatment of religion and politics in the ancient
world, he offers his own guided tour
through the gyrations that the theologicopolitical
problem has taken in modernity.
But while his book is studded with felicitous
phrases and important—though often
derivative—insights, it finally disappoints.
The Stillborn God tackles one of the most
intrinsically exhilarating and important
questions facing man: the question of God
and politics. However, its author does not
seem to be genuinely alive to that question
or, for that matter, to the complex
and different answers given to it over the
centuries. As a result, Lilla’s argument
ultimately comes across as formulaic and
rather forced.

Lilla’s narrative centers on what he
calls “the most distinctive feature of the
modern West to this day.” That feature is
the “Great Separation.” Simultaneously
a moral, political, and philosophical act,
the Great Separation effectively severed
“Western political philosophy decisively
from cosmology and theology.” Like
many others, Lilla views the bloody religious
wars that beset Europe after the
Reformation as the precipitating cause of
this momentous division. Beginning in
the seventeenth century, a group of early
modern political philosophers worked
to unleash new forms of rationalism and
republicanism that were designed to put
an end to religiously disrupted politics.
Unlike the classical political philosophers
(and, I would add, their Christian theological
counterparts), the early moderns
self-consciously sought to align wisdom
with political power through the project
of universal Enlightenment.

This new state of affairs required a reversal
of the classical teaching on the relation
of virtue or human excellence to political
life. Political life no longer would be
seen to exist for the cultivation of virtue—
what Aristotle felicitously referred to as the
good life—but virtue henceforth would
be subordinated to securing those goods
necessary for man’s material and physical
well-being within political society. Bracketing
any consideration of the summum
bonum or man’s final end, they proposed
a regime that did not try to adjudicate between
the myriad of spiritual goods that
present themselves within political life.
The goal of the modern regime would be
far less lofty. It would pacify domestic politics
by limiting itself to the goal of providing
for man’s bodily needs and securing
his newly discovered fundamental right to
freedom. Ostensibly liberating man from
the tyrannical restraints of both nature and
God, modern political philosophy would
transform the theologico-political question
into a mere technical problem. The
political form the Great Separation would
take—liberal democracy—was presented
by its philosophic exponents as the solution
to the problem of religious disruption
in politics. By harmonizing the tensions
between reason, morality, and God, the
modern state would settle the problem of
God and politics once and for all.

For Lilla, Hobbes is the architect of the
Great Separation. Lilla’s Hobbes is not so
much a man of his times as he is a man
who made the most of his times. Hobbes
enlisted modern science’s purported discovery
of the nonteleological nature of the
cosmos into political service. For if men
now believed they lived in “a morally
mute natural world remote from its creator”
they could learn to separate “investigations
of nature from our thoughts about
God or the duties of man.” He thus reconceived
political life in purely human terms.
Rooting political life in a pre-moral and
pre-social fact—namely, man’s fear of violent
death at the hands of others—Hobbes
gave birth to the idea of a political order
configured around a natural right to freedom
and self-preservation. By so doing,
he emancipated man from the allegedly
despotic restraints and contentious battles
that accompany religiously influenced
politics. As Lilla rightly—although all too
uncritically—notes, “the truth is that the
way modern liberal democracies approach
religion and politics today is unimaginable
without the decisive break made by
Thomas Hobbes.”

But while Lilla correctly identifies
Hobbes’s pivotal role in formalizing liberal
democracy’s bracketing of any (natural,
as well as supernatural) notions of
man’s end from considerations of politics,
his unmistakable admiration for Hobbes’s
accomplishment leads him to present a
caricature. For example, Lilla spends little
time discussing the connection between
Hobbes’s denial of a summum bonum and his
inglorious affirmation of a corporeal—that
is to say, nonspiritual—soul. Similarly, he
airbrushes the ignoble and dehumanizing
moral, intellectual, and political consequences
of Hobbes’s claim that human life
is naturally characterized by the “war of
all against all.” At the very least, one has
to think seriously about whether Hobbes’s
teaching hinges upon his claim that man
is naturally asocial and apolitical, and
whether his claim that “the life of man” is
“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”
is true.

Lilla does not do this. Instead, he presents
the “Great Separation” as some grand
Manichean either/or. Either men must embrace
the politics of intolerant and violent
divine command theory or embrace the
tolerant and pacific politics of a purely anthropocentric
civil order. There is no other
option. Such a scheme is too formulaic to
be true and thus fails to do justice to the
humanizing forces that thankfully play
upon men’s souls.

The revolution Hobbes inaugurated,
according to Lilla, was secured and made
palatable by Locke. Over and against the
autarchy of Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke envisioned
“a new kind of political order in
which power would be limited, divided,
and widely shared…and in which individuals
would have inalienable rights to
protect them from government and their
fellows.” But Locke did more than allow
for the emergence of the modern rightsbearing
individual. Tacking a new “tactic”
onto Hobbes’s “art of separation,” Locke
“pressed the case for religious toleration and
the disestablishment of state religion.” He
cemented the Great Separation by working
to “liberalize and enlighten the Christian
churches from within.” Lilla enjoins
us to recall that prior to the publication of
Locke’s famed Letter the Christian virtues
were widely recognized as faith, hope, and
charity, not nonjudgmental toleration.

Despite Locke’s efforts, the Great Separation
soon suffered its first internal crisis.
Although he agreed with Hobbes about the
undesirability of theological politics, Rousseau
attempted to channel man’s naturally
religious impulses into the service of civil
society. By so doing, he subtly allowed dangerous
religious forces to creep back into
political life. This ill-conceived tactic would
be taken up and modified, in different
ways, by Kant and Hegel, culminating in
the latter’s claim that a quasi-religious conviction
formed the fecund core of a people’s
national identity. Lilla is at his best tracing
the bizarre interplay between German idealism
and liberal Protestant theology. As he
shows, one tragic effect of this concoction
was that it left liberal Protestantism ripe for
political exploitation (as it was in World
War I) and open to the embrace of atavistic
politics (as it was in World War II).

Over and against this sad state of affairs,
Lilla seeks to remind us that “we are heirs
of the Great Separation only if we wish to
be.” And if we still wish to be, we must
now recommit ourselves to the bold proposition
behind that separation. As Lilla
breathlessly states in his conclusion, as a
people we must be willing to affirm that
“it is wiser to beware the forces unleashed
by the Bible’s messianic promise than to
try exploiting them for public good.”
More than anything else, this conviction
explains why “we have chosen to keep our
politics unilluminated by the light of revelation”
and instead solely reliant upon “our
own lucidity.”

Setting aside the accuracy and adequacy
of Lilla’s genealogy of the theologico-political
problem, what are we to make of
his argument and conclusion? Let us begin
with his conclusion. The open-minded
reader cannot help being struck by the tranquility
with which Lilla affirms the legacy
of the Enlightenment. Half a century ago,
John Courtney Murray, S. J., already recognized
that “today…the serene, and often naïve,
certainties of the eighteenth century have
crumbled.” As a result, the self-evidence
of the self-evident truths that were once
believed to undergird our modern democratic
institutions now might “legitimately
be questioned.” Like Leo Strauss, Russell
Kirk, Eric Voegelin, and Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, Murray had the moral and
intellectual courage to admit that no intellectually
honest man could any longer
defend the goodness of modern democracy
simply on philosophic liberalism’s original
premises. This explains why Murray then
set out to show how America’s founders
“built better than they knew.” The truthful
recognition of the limits of Enlightenment
rationalism requires the defender of
what is genuinely good and desirable about
democracy to root that defense in an argument
that is both broader and deeper (and
hence truer) than that given by the original
exponents of the Great Separation. Viewed
in this light, Lilla’s plea that we presently
recommit ourselves to that original argument
seems far too serene and forced, if
not downright naïve or obtuse.

More deeply, Lilla’s position ignores the
subtle connection between philosophic
liberalism’s insistence upon bracketing any
serious consideration of the summum bonum
and the rise of those late modern doctrines
that deny the existence of any transhistorical
and transpolitical truth. In our day
that denial most notably takes the form of
ideologies such as radical historicism and
cultural relativism which assert there are
no permanent and transcendent principles
that could assist us in elucidating the human
predicament. Indoctrinated in such a
view, late modern man almost instinctively
appeals to such notions as Nietzschean creativity
or Heideggerian authenticity to
make sense of his situation.

The claim that man arbitrarily creates
the world and values around himself,
however, is both humanly destructive and
paralyzing. On the one hand, such a stance
prods human beings to accept the legitimacy
of any “sincere” moral claim, thereby
denying the existence of any humanizing
distinction between the just and the unjust
or the base and the noble. It also leaves us
sadly ill-equipped to think about any transhistorical
end that may perfect our nature.
In its effort to “unstring the bow,” philosophic
liberalism and the regime it helped
bring into existence gradually sowed the
seeds for postmodernism’s flight from reason.
Nietzsche correctly diagnosed this
problem—and aggravated it.

One reason why Lilla can turn a blind
eye to such considerations is that, despite
his claim to the contrary, he does not deal
with the actual encounter of religion and
politics in the West. The West is the product
of a number of sources—the accom-
plishments of ancient Greece and Rome,
the fierce independence of the barbarian
tribes, the presence of Christian faith and
the Catholic Church, and the scientific and
political revolutions that occurred in modernity.
Lilla slights many of these sources,
but above all he fails to take Christianity
seriously. He treats it simply as “religion,”
placing it in some preconceived, abstract
category that is indifferent to what this
faith actually says. Religion, for Lilla, is
“revelation,” and revelation always takes
the form of voluntaristic socio-political divine
commands. This is the deep “truth”
Lilla believes that Hobbes saw. Consequently,
Lilla’s understanding of Christian
faith has more in common with the
self-understanding of militant Islam than
it does with Christianity’s own tradition
of theologico-political reflection or the actual
lived experience of Christianity in the
West. For this reason, Lilla’s account of the
actual religion that shaped the West rings
untrue—and by extension, his account
of the reasons why early modern political
philosophers effected a break with the premodern
Christian and philosophic traditions
remains partial at best.

This problem is most visible in Lilla’s
systematic refusal to acknowledge the
transpolitical nature of Christian revelation.
The Christian faith is less concerned
with delineating a detailed moral-political
divine code by which its followers are to
lead their lives than it is with announcing
“the Good News” of the arrival of the
kingdom of God. To be sure, Christianity
does promulgate a law that includes a
substantive moral teaching, but the goal of
that law is the attainment of eternal blessedness,
not the juridical establishment of
a specific sociopolitical program. As the
Christ of the Gospels repeatedly states, His
“kingdom is not of this world.” The way
of life to which the Christian is called focuses
his gaze on a goal that transcends the
distinctions that dominate and determine
the character of political life—a fact the
anti-Christian Rousseau often lamented.
Among other things, this explains why
Aristotle’s Politics, which deliberately takes
political life on its own terms, came to be
seen as the book on politics in the Christian
West. Affirming faith and reason—and not
simply the dichotomy of reason and revelation—
Christianity’s early intellectual caretakers
appreciated that political philosophy
could help them provide their coreligionists
with much-needed political guidance.
That the Christian faith fails to provide its
own explicit paradigm for the correct ordering
of society or refuses to endorse any
existing social and political arrangement is
a direct result of its transpolitical nature.
But remarkably, this glaring fact does not
factor into The Stillborn God‘s analysis.

That is a shame. No account of the legitimate
accomplishments of modern democracy—
its protection of religious liberty,
its defense of the nobility of self-rule, its
constitutionalism, its political articulation
of man’s legitimate freedoms and human
equality—that fails to take into consideration
the role that Christianity played in
achieving these accomplishments is complete.
This is not to say that modern democracy
is the result or accomplishment of
Christianity. Nor is it an affirmation of a
secularization thesis, be it that of the non-
Christian Hegel or the enthusiastic Christian
Lord Acton. It is simply to say that the
achievements of modern democracy are in
some ways indebted to Christianity’s role
in shaping Western thought and institutions,
most visibly in its dogged rejection
of the ancient world’s claim that man’s
whole life lies in the province of the city or
the empire. By reminding all men of their
indebtedness to God and of their transpolitical
destiny, Christianity reminds human
beings of the messianic dangers of thinking
that the political order is the measure