The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West
Mark Lilla
Knopf, 2007
$34.00
334 pp.
In academic circles, the future of Muslims in the post-Cold War world was being debated long before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In The End of History and the Last Man, the 1992 book he expanded from a National Interest essay, Francis Fukuyama argued that the world was witnessing “the universalization of Western liberal democracy.” The Islamic world, he wrote, “would seem more vulnerable to liberal ideas in the long run than the reverse.” Samuel Huntington published a response of sorts in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, his own article-turned-book, which held that Islamic countries would remain theocratic and illiberal. In large part, Huntington wrote, differences between Islam and the West resulted from the “Muslim concept of Islam as a way of life transcending and uniting religion and politics versus the Western Christian concept of the separate realms of God and Caesar.”
Initially, to many the Sept. 11 attacks seemed to provide evidence for the Huntingtonian perspective. In October of 2001, the late Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said lamented that the attacks “ha[d] been turned into proof of Huntington’s thesis.” Soon, however, as U.S. President George Bush declared his intention to bring democracy to Muslim countries, the Fukuyaman ideas about the universality of liberal ideals gained currency. The Iraq War has swung the pendulum back into Huntington’s corner, however, with increasing numbers of Westerners believing Muslims are committed to uniting politics and religion.
Mark Lilla’s new book is an entry into the Huntington school of thought. Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, is singularly well-placed to write on the intersection between religion and politics. He was an editor for the (now defunct) journal The Public Interest and a professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University Chicago, but he is probably best known for his essays in the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the New Republic. Several of those essays were collected into 2003’s The Reckless Mind, a book that in some ways prefigures The Stillborn God.
The Reckless Mind took as its subject the disturbing phenomenon of 20th century European intellectuals supporting tyrannies. Lilla told the story of how Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Jacques Derrida and other thinkers supported the world’s most murderous regimes, regimes that spat upon all the humanistic ideals a scholar should stand for. This story had been told before, by Paul Hollander, Raymond Aron and others, but Lilla brought a unique historical and moral seriousness to the task, an intellectual engagement with the ideas themselves. Lilla has been compared to the great British political theorist Isaiah Berlin, but his thoughtful liberalism equally recalls the mid-century New York intellectuals such as Irving Howe and Seymour Martin Lipset.
In The Stillborn God, Lilla tells of how and why European intellectuals came upon the idea of separating church and state. “The Great Separation” between religion and politics in Western societies occurred, first and foremost, because of Christianity’s inner ambiguities, according to Lilla. The center of Christianity—the Trinity of God, the Son and the Holy Spirit—is comprised of three equally vital but ultimately irreconcilable depictions of God. “The Christian God,” Lilla writes, “is transcendent. But by sending his Son, God condescended to enter our world, compromising his transcendence. The Messiah became flesh, much like an immanent God. But he did not remain with us on earth; he departed . . . with the promise to return at the end of time.” Lilla believes the story of the Trinity leads to three competing interpretations of God’s role in human affairs, precluding easy theological prescriptions. Unlike its cousins Judaism and Islam, then, Christianity provides no direct political direction to its followers. Opposed to traditional historians who emphasize the wars in Christian Europe forcing a truce among warring Christian sects, Lilla believes that at the level of ideas
Christianity was uniquely susceptible to being separated from politics.
He brings an astonishing knowledge of intellectual history to the task, resurrecting such minor thinkers as Franz Rosenzweig and Karl Barth. His understanding of Hegel and Hobbes, among others, is original and insightful. But his analysis brings to mind a line from Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America: ”Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as ‘History,’ harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable.” The human tendency, especially powerful among the historian, is to impose artificial order on history, to detect patterns where they don’t exist, to simplify events in order to make the unexpected seem expected.
Rather than being a consequence of the complexity of the Christian myth, the split in Western societies between religion and politics was just one of many of the period’s intellectual development. Lilla credits English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (almost solely) with hitting upon idea of The Great Separation. But preceding Hobbes’s ideas were the Magna Carta, the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, Machiavelli’s The Prince and The Discourses, the essays of Sir Francis Bacon and the formulations of Copernicus and Galileo, among other secular landmarks. Lilla’s isolating Hobbes’s thought from this world-changing context consequently obscures more than it reveals.
The problem stems from Lilla’s insistence on seeing intellectual debates as events operating independently of politics and culture. Though The Stillborn God is subtitled ‘Religion, Politics, and the Modern West,’ the book contains little discussion of the political climates in which theological arguments were made. Most of the book recounts religious arguments among a dozen or so German philosophers across several hundred years. But except for a few references to the First World War, Lilla writes as if history never happened. There is no Freud, no Darwin, no Einstein and no Marx, to say nothing of the Russian Revolution and the rise of American power. Had he included history, Lilla might have found that the Great Separation was just one among many novel Western ideas, albeit a crucial one. To be fair, Lilla says in the introduction that he is not telling the entire history of Christianity’s internal theological debate, and admits his recollection is “highly episodic.” But Lilla’s tunnel vision leads him not just to providing incomplete history—it leads him to false interpretations.
From a certain perspective, it appears that Islam would be much more likely to lead to a secular society. The permanent schism between Shiism and Sunnism is the most important split in Islam, and dates back to early in Muslim history. It revolves in large part around the Shiias’ rejection of the Prophet’s successor, and his functions as a ruler. Each sect views itself as the original orthodoxy, and as Iranian-American political scientist Vali Nasr points out in his 2006 book The Shia Revival, “Their split somewhat parallels the Protestant-Catholic difference in Western Christianity,” but predates it by about a thousand years. Like Protestantism, Sunnis have a spiritually egalitarian notion that all believers are capable of understanding religious truth in a way that renders religious intermediaries between God and man unnecessary. The Sunnis’ fundamental differences from their fellow Muslims could lead one to hypothesize that Islam, not Christianity, is the religion susceptible to important differences of interpretation. Christianity only appears uniquely elastic with hindsight’s benefit.
The larger troubles with Lilla’s thesis can be seen by observing that non-Christian civilizations have also separated church from state. Lilla says, “we are the exceptions” (italics in original), but Japan, India, Israel, and South Korea are also privy to the church-state separation. While Christianity certainly got the secular ball rolling, what is striking is not how persistent theocracies are, but how quickly some other non-Christian countries have followed suit. Iran is perhaps the most salient example of a country dominated by theocrats but which contains, by virtually all media accounts, a sizable pro-modern, largely-liberal populace.
And, undoubtedly, Islam is what The Stillborn God has in mind. “We find it incomprehensible,” Lilla writes, “that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that leave societies in ruin.” It is obvious which ideas he is referring to. Lilla’s book was adapted to essay form in the August 19 New York Times Magazine, wherein he was much more explicit about what remains just a subtext in the book. “[M]illions of people, particularly in the Muslim orbit, believe that God has revealed a law ordering the governing of human affairs. This belief shapes the politics of important Muslim nations, and it also shapes the attitudes of vast numbers of believers who find themselves living in Western countries — and non-Western democracies like Turkey and Indonesia — founded on the alien principles of the Great Separation. These are the most significant points of friction, internationally and domestically,” read the essay.
This is an almost exact restatement of Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis. And while there is a great deal of truth to it—the essential differences between Osama bin Laden and the West are theological, not political—it overstates the gulf between the Muslim world and the Western democracies. America and Canada have been mostly successful in integrating their Muslim minorities, owing, of course, to their smaller Muslim populations, but also to their inclusive, assimilative national ideals and myths. Western Europe is a different story, but even there it is not clear that the majority of Muslims want to replace their respective national constitutions with the Shariah (though, frighteningly enough, many do). Lilla’s Times essay holds that “the Muslim Shariah is meant to cover the whole of life, not some arbitrarily demarcated private sphere, and its legal system has few theological resources for establishing the independence of politics from detailed divine commands.” But, if this is true, how does one explain the tens of millions of Muslims living in Western countries who harbor no desires to overturn their secular laws? Or the even greater number of Canadian Muslims who eschew religious and political violence and embrace liberal ideals? One could argue that Tarek Fatah and Irshad Manji are not really Muslims, but this argument not only discourages moderate Muslims by declaring them heretics, it denies Islam the opportunity for, and the existence of, different dominations. The approach is both ahistorical and strategically unwise, a curious combination for the Westerner to employ vis-à-vis Muslims living alongside him.
In its own way, Huntington’s thesis is as simplistic and black-and-white as Fukuyama’s utopian predictions. Trite and equivocal though it may sound, the conflict between theocrats and democrats is going to land us somewhere in the middle between conflicting homogenous civilizations on the one hand, and peaceful, diverse democracies on the other. We are likely to see a world comprised of states containing different forms of government, as Huntington would have it, but a world in which the Western states will be able to manage their minority Muslim populations, as Fukuyama’s pacific theories predict. Wherever we fall, though, it is unfortunately unlikely that Lilla’s book will have illuminated the way there.
