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The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West | 
 enlarge | Author: Mark Lilla
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 100561
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.3 x 5.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 1400043670
Dewey Decimal Number: 201.72
EAN: 9781400043675
ASIN: 1400043670
Publication Date: September 11, 2007
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Product Description
Religious passions are again driving world politics. The quest to bring political life under God’s authority has been revived, confounding expectations of a secular future. In this major book, Mark Lilla reveals the sources of this age-old quest—and its surprising role in shaping Western thought.
The story could not be more timely. Most civilizations in history have been organized on the basis of a political theology – a myth or revelation about the correct ordering of society. Yet due to a crisis in Western Christendom nearly five hundred years ago, a novel intellectual challenge to political theology arose in Europe. By portraying religion as an expression of human nature, not a divine gift, modern Western thinkers found a way to free politics from God’s authority and build barriers against destructive religious passions.
But the temptations of political theology are always present, even in the West. As Lilla vividly shows, the urge to reconnect politics to religion remained strong and took novel forms in modern European thought. By the Second World War a forceful political messianism had arisen, justifying the most deadly ideologies of the age.
Making us question what we thought we knew about religion, politics, and the fate of civilizations, Lilla reminds us of the modern West’s unique trajectory and what is required to remain on it.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Timely book explores unholy marriage of religion and politics October 21, 2007
Roy E. Perry (Nolensville, Tennessee)
48 out of 51 found this review helpful
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.
Secular humanists (or simply humanists, for all true humanists are secular) believe with the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras that "man is the measure of all things" and that when religion seeks to "call the shots" in political life, it becomes, in the words of John Calvin, "a plant so corrupt that it is only capable of producing the worst of fruit."
Lilla, therefore, praises the wisdom of our founding fathers who created a government based on a balance of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and on a separation of church and state. He warns, however, that our felicitous experiment in democracy will not inevitably survive, but is continually threatened by an insidious political theology.
Sinclair Lewis warned, "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." The whole tenor of Lilla's work is in agreement with such an assessment; it is a cautionary tale warning us that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
The Stillborn God is an impressive and powerful volume that should be read by every intelligent, thinking person. It's a timely work with important lessons for our 21-century world.
Mark Lilla is Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He was previously Professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. A noted intellectual historian and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, he is the author of The Restless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics and G. B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern. He lives in New York City.
 Superb foreboding about messianism in Western religion September 18, 2007
Rajesh S. Raghavan (North Brunswick, NJ USA)
37 out of 52 found this review helpful
Mark Lilla does a superb job of tracing the history of political theology in Europe, since the Great Separation between religion and politics was instituted by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century. By no means do I have the intellectual background to negatively critique his analysis of the philosophical progression in Europe over the next three centuries.
Lilla points out that even after the Great Separation, political theology reared its ugly head in 20th century Europe, in of all places, Nazi Germany, particularly due to some backsliding towards religious messianism in philosophical thought.
I leave one star off of my review, partially because I come from a different religious tradition. The God of the Old Testament is a vengeful, jealous God. Christ of the New Testament proclaims that He is the only path to the Father, and St. Paul institutionalized this cult (in my words) by making the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross as the centerpiece of the Christian faith. (Of course, I have only good things to say about Christianity, in its efforts to reach out to sinners.) However, because Christ proclaims that He is the one, true path, Protestant churches and the Catholic churches have competed over which of them is "the one true path"--until the Great Separation separated that personal quest from questions of politics.
As for Islam (which is only hinted at obliquely in this book about European Christians and Jews), only now in Iraq are Shias and Sunnis confronting what Protestants and Catholics went through during the Thirty Years War in Germany. Islam is still awaiting its "Great Separation."
However, Hinduism (my faith) has never had this problem. In Hindu philosophy (the Upanishads), God is the center of all Truth in all affairs; furthermore, there are multiple paths to the Godhead to suit the different needs of different individuals and communities. Furthermore, the Hindu God is not a vengeful or jealous God demanding obedience. Rather, every individual reaps the fruit of past good and bad actions in future lives according to the laws of karma. The role of God, be it Vishnu, or Shiva, or Durga (the primary deities worshipped by the three major branches), is to periodically intervene in human affairs to rescue devotees from evil.
Messianism has always been a positive force in Hinduism. Although, I look forward to the day when the Great Separation, highlighted in Europe in Mark Lilla's book, comes into effect in Islam, I am not convinced that it is necessary for politics in societies with traditions other than those of the three monotheistic Middle Eastern faiths.
 Stillborn in the mists of Germany October 3, 2007
N. Ravitch (Savannah, GA United States)
26 out of 60 found this review helpful
I had looked forward to this book, after a version of one chapter, the one on Thomas Hobbes, appeared in the New York Times Magazine, but I was disappointed. After a fine, even brilliant discussion of the secular separation between theology and politics led by Hobbes Prof. Lilla proceeds to Rousseau and Kant where he get sidetracked. Rousseau in fact invented the two real religions of the modern world, nationalism and socialism, but Lilla prefers to get lost in the verbiage of Hegel and later in the irrelevancies of Karl Barth, with a sop thrown in to Franz Rosenzweig and Ernst Bloch, two Jews whose importance to this subject is more than questinable. Lilla wants to observe that the abandonment of theological politics is difficult if not impossible but he fails to make his legitimate case because he concentrates on trivia rather than essentials. He might have profited from THE HOLY EMPIRE by Richard Stegmann-Gall, but that would have meant abandoning his precious philosophical nonsense for real history. Alas, this book is destined to be stillborn a second time.
A Succinct and Rugged Framework for Understanding Western Philosophy and Theology October 4, 2007
V. Nagar (Ann Arbor, MI USA)
18 out of 26 found this review helpful
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.
The History of the Great Separation November 28, 2007
R. Hardy (Columbus, Mississippi USA)
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
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 aspire. The Bible was symbolic, not inerrant, and the German Protestantism derived from it was held to be essential to public life.
World War I destroyed the bourgeois smugness. Advocates of liberal Protestantism (and liberal Judaism, too) supported the initial German war effort. This led to disillusionment afterwards, the "stillborn God" of the title. It also led, after the war, to a theology that could be incorporated into totalitarian states, both Nazi and Communist, and thus again to religion bound up in worldly battles, the sort of cycle that Hobbes was trying to get us to emerge from. Lilla's is a limited history. He does not mention America's Christian conservatives, many of whom want the nation to support Christianity more openly, and some of whom are interested in turning the country over to an overt theocracy. He also does not mention the lack of church-state separation that such Christians find horrifying within some Islamic countries. Lilla's book is, however, a lucid reminder that despite the clamor of fundamentalists, the separation of theology from politics (however partial it might be) was a process that began centuries ago, not with the formation of the ACLU or "activist judges". It also is a welcome recognition that we are the fortunate heirs of philosophers and societies which understood that neither citizens nor government nor religion prosper when politics and religion are officially combined.
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