The politics of God

Important cover story in the NYTimes Magazine today ("It's Rod Dreher crack," I told my wife this morning). Here's how it's sold on the cover itself:

We in the West find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men, stirring up messianic passions that can leave societies in ruin. We had assumed that this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that political theology died in 16th-century Europe. We were wrong. It's we who are the fragile exception.

The piece, by Mark Lilla, is quite long, but well worth your time. I"m going to outline the story below, and quote some passages, before I comment on it. If you want to comment on it, by all means do, but I strongly urge you to read the whole thing first, and not to rely on my outline alone. I am outlining it, though, in the hope that everyone will be inspired to read the whole story for the purpose of discussion.

Here we go. Remember, what follows is not my argument, but Mark Lilla's. My commentary comes at the end:

In almost all of human history, people the world over have conceived of politics in theological terms. About two centuries ago in the West, we achieved a great separation of religion from politics. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that this is the natural and inevitable state of mankind, and that all modernizing societies will follow in our wake. That they haven't we chalk up to things like poverty and colonialism. This fundamental error on our part has kept us from serious intellectual engagement with the Other on its terms; instead, we busy ourselves trying to explain the Other in terms that we accept. We must urgently try to understand Islam in terms of political theology, if we are to understand it at all.

We begin by looking into our own past. And when we do, we confront the frightening prospect that our own political settlement is very fragile, vulnerable to "political messianism" -- even secular messianism (e.g., Nazism, communism).

From a purely naturalistic point of view, belief in God arose as a way to explain the world. The way we imagine God to be determines our own metaphysics and morals, and the way we organize our societies (i.e., politics). The authority of our own systems derives from the Deity and His commandments, but also because a culture's religion is believed to explain the ultimate order of reality.

Christianity is not an explicitly political religion, and Christians have argued over the political implications of their faith for a long, long time. Then came the Reformation, and the Wars of Religion that decimated Europe. Out of the carnage came the thought of Thomas Hobbes, who was the first to try to understand why religion made men turn on each other, and to think about how the violence could be contained.

According to Lilla, Hobbes taught that fear was the primary human emotion, and that religion was not so much what God had to say to man, but man's way to cope with the overwhelming fear he faced every day. Hobbes was not a democrat -- he was actually an authoritarian -- but he was the first to begin thinking about building a political system not based on divine revelation, so as to secure peace among men who could not agree on God's nature and commandments. ...

Oh hell. I stepped away from the computer to go see a movie (more on which momentarily), then came home to spend over an hour summarizing this article and commenting on it -- and lost it all when my computer bugged out. I'm not going to do it again. Let me rush through it: According to Lilla, Rousseau realized that the religious instinct was innate to human nature, and that it was responsible for some of mankind's noblest and most humane gestures. Mankind is psychologically unable to do without religion. While English political philosophy, via Locke, managed to work out a system of separating politics and theology, on the Continent the reaction to the French Revolution and the Terror caused people to wonder if religion might be reinterpreted to serve social goods, and ameliorate the excesses of radical secularism.

The 19th and early 20th century liberalization of Christianity, which reached its high point in Germany, made Christianity into an ideology that served bourgeois respectability. Kierkegaard saw right through that sham from a Christian perspective, while Nietzsche demolished it from an atheistic perspective. Lilla says that liberal Christianity (and Judaism) was unable to provide a credible answer to the question, "Why should I become a Christian? Why should I become a Jew?"

The First World War annihilated bourgeois Christianity, and opened the way up for religious and political messianism, which was fulfilled for many in National Socialism and communism, which promised another kind of redemption. Lilla says the hunger for redemption is ineradicable from the human spirit, so we will just have to learn to live with it as best we can. He goes on to say -- and I'm simplifying here -- that despite fierce arguments over important issues, America has worked "a miracle" by managing to maintain a vibrant religious sphere without it bleeding over unduly into public life. In his view, we should protect that, but also have to realize how rare and historically unprecedented it is.

Therefore, we have got to get over our notion that liberalization along American lines is historically inevitable, and that in time, everyone will come to accept the separation between church and state that we in the US have. It's just not true, and it leads us down blind alleys, especially the idea that religious fundamentalism is caused by material deprivation or social pressure. We should start trying to understand Islamic culture on its own terms. Within Islam, there is no separation of religion and politics. Islam has a highly developed theological and political system, and the hundreds of millions of Muslims the world over see theocracy as the natural order of things. We happen to have invited a significant number of them to live among us, and it's unrealistic to expect them to easily adapt to our way of seeing the world. Now is the time, says Lilla, for "coping," not defending grand principles.

We should also not expect Islam to modernize as Christianity did. Liberal Muslim reformers will confront the same problem that Christian and Jewish reformers did: work too hard to conform the faith to modernity, and you will rob the faith of its power to attract and to bind. If Islam is to reform, it's going to have to be done from within, on its own terms. We can do nothing about it. But we can at least stop living in false consciousness about the nature of the challenge facing us.

What to make of all this? Well, I wrote and wrote and wrote about it, and it was all lost. I'm too mad about that to recap here. I'll say quickly, and for now, that I am glad to see this essay appear in such a prominent mainstream media outlet. I have been deeply frustrated for a long time over the inability of so many Americans, especially in the media, to understand that the American way of seeing God is not universal. Muslims are not Episcopalians in hijabs. For better and for worse, they follow their own powerful creed, and their creed is deeply incompatible with Western secularism, and with modernity. And we've got to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it were.

Secondly, I don't really agree with Lilla that we've maintained a vibrant religious sphere in the US. There's a lot of religiosity, of course, but the religion itself has been hollowed out from within (see Philip Rieff's "The Triumph of the Therapeutic"). American Christianity has a lot in common with the Christianity in Kierkegaard's Copenhagen, insofar as it has become more of an ideology justifying middle-class living. Anyway, as America moves into the post-Christian era, I see the state moving further and further away from a recognizably Christian ethic. We didn't have to talk about teleology for a very long time, because America was a country that broadly subscribed to Christian ethics, however terribly we failed to live up to them. But the dogmatic claims of religion are being challenged in the realm of law and public policy dramatically, and as the gay marriage issue shows, absent a shared social commitment to traditional Christian ethics, it's hard to articulate a persuasive case against certain moral and social innovations, particularly in a therapeutic individualistic culture. I incline to Alasdair MacIntyre's view that in the absence of a shared teleology, it becomes ever more difficult for us to carry out normal politics, such that our politics becomes a form of civil war. How long we can carry on this way, I don't know.

To be sure, I don't want to live in a theocracy, in part because there's no telling whose Theos will be the source of authority. Theocracy is utterly inappropriate for a pluralist culture like our own, and certainly impossible. But absent a strong religious grounding for the mores and customs of the people in a democracy, I don't have a lot of hope that we can hold it all together (see my column today, on David Klinghoffer's great new book about the Ten Commandments, with some Rieffan riffing). I'd love to be proved wrong. Anyway, when I said the other day that I expected Islam will inevitably succumb to modernity, I meant not that it would liberalize, but that the tectonic cultural impacts of economic and informational globalization would create within the Islamic world the same sense of homelessness that permeates the West. But that in itself could create a lot more violence, at least in the short run, as Muslims cling more tightly to messianic Islam as a psychological bulwark against the anxieties of modernity. In fact, contemporary Islamic radicalism is a product of modernization as much as a reaction to it. As Lilla points out, the hunger for redemption and deliverance is deep within all of us, and in time of great crisis, we will be susceptible to it. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt's slogan -- "Islam is the solution" -- is laughably simplistic, but when you are beset by problems that seem unsolvable, that kind of thing sounds a lot more appealing than it otherwise might.

Anyway, I hope you'll read the entire Lilla piece, and share your thoughts below. Of course I'm not going to keep anyone from commenting even if you haven't read the Lilla piece, but I do hope that you'll not rely on my inadequate summary.

UPDATE: Spengler has a different take, and rips into Lilla today in his column. Excerpt:

Does Professor Lilla seriously believe that nothing has changed since the 17th century, when religious wars killed off half the population of central Europe? Christian America confronted the atheistic Soviet Union during the 1980s, and without a shot fired in anger, the Soviet Union collapsed. Where was the fanaticism, the rancor, the bloodlust on the part of the West? The greatest danger to central Europe today, which over the next century will suffer population declines comparable to those of the 17th century, is the absence of a notion of redemption. Secular Europe has lost its will to live and its desire to reproduce, a malady most prominent in the former communist countries where religious faith was most suppressed.

For that matter, where has Lilla uncovered a streak of religious fanaticism in the West? The previous pope did penance for the murder of the 15th-century Protestant rebel Jan Hus, and worshipped at the synagogue in Rome as well as the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Except for Northern Ireland, the Europeans long have ceased to quarrel about religious issues; in the US, the biblical religious always got along, more or less, and get along today better than they ever have. Toward what end does this messianic urge for redemption manifest itself, and what danger does it pose to the West? Again, there is not a line of argumentation, let alone a shred of evidence, to support the charge that man's desire for redemption has taken us to the brink of religious wars.

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. The adept readers of Professor Lilla's essay, the diehards of liberal secularism, know that Christianity is the enemy, no matter how docile, peaceful, quiescent and non-threatening it might appear. Christianity is guilty until proven innocent; the peaceful intentions of all Christian denominations toward one another and to non-Christian religions merely disguise an irrepressible urge toward violence, in the perverse view of the Lilla-Putans.

I had no idea who Mark Lilla was before reading this essay, though I've been told this morning by a couple of friends who do know his work that he's deeply hostile to Christianity. FWIW. I do believe that the conclusion of Lilla's essay, in which he puts faith in Tariq Ramadan (!) to save Islam from itself, is by far the least persuasive part of the piece. Rethinking Lilla's essay in light of Spengler's comments, two thoughts occur: 1) if I had a dollar for every time I heard a liberal speak of Christian conservatives as a threat equal to or greater than Islamic radicals, I'd be drinking Dom Perignon for dinner every night; and 2) a prominent British journalist once mentioned to me, cold-eyed and resigned, that Britain was going to have a religious war this century, whether the elites wanted to admit it or not.