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

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By Mark Lilla (Knopf, 2007) 352 pp.; $26.00

IF HUMANISTS AND OTHER progressives are baffled by the continuing influence of religion in the modern political realm, Mark Lilla offers at least a partial explanation. His new book, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, reminds us that political questions have historically always been met with answers that are at least partly theological, and that the notion of separating religion from politics is very much a modern phenomenon, a rare exception to the usual rule.

This explanation may be less than assuring to those who value church-state separation, but Lilla's intent is not to comfort the reader with optimistic rhetoric about the inevitable advancement of human social progress. But, thankfully, neither does he offer gloomy predictions of the downfall of modern Western values of human rights and civil liberties.

Instead, Lilla soberly reviews the history of "political theology,' paying particular attention to the philosophers whom he sees as most relevant to the modern divorce of religion from politics--Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel--while also offering some thoughts on how and why that trend has reversed in recent times. His thesis in the end is a modest and cautious one, with no grand predictions, really just a simple reminder: never assume that politics has advanced beyond the influence of religion.

The Stillborn God is a compact book considering the breadth of material that it tries to cover. Lilla, a Columbia University humanities professor, is attempting to reach an audience beyond his professional peers, and he has succeeded in producing a volume that will appeal to a typical intelligent reader with an interest in politics, religion, and political philosophy.

Lilla achieves this compactness and readability by keeping quotes and excerpts from the aforementioned great philosophers to a minimum, instead filling his pages mainly with his own conclusive statements about what the philosophers said and meant. Readers lacking an in-depth familiarity with the writings of Hobbes, Hume, et al., are forced, more or less, to accept Lilla's interpretations and conclusions.

Still, so long as the reader is willing to go for this ride, Lilla embarks on an intriguing, if selective, survey of modern philosophy filled with insights into both religion and politics. Pointing out that Christianity is perhaps the most apolitical of the major modern religions, a religion that found political power almost accidentally centuries after its birth, Lilla shows how it nevertheless quickly adapted to its newfound position.

But more importantly, Lilla focuses on what he calls "The Great Separation" the modern trend to downplay the importance of religious revelation (or at least reliance upon the actual truth of claimed religious revelation). His first major protagonist in this campaign is the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

Hobbes is certainly not considered one of modern philosophy's great civil libertarians, but Lilla sees him as the foundation upon which later thinkers could construct important arguments for civil liberty and particularly religious freedom. This is because Hobbes, while supporting a strong central government where a monarch could dictate religious practice, nevertheless did so by aiming to "attack and destroy the entire tradition of Christian political theology," according to Lilla.

Hobbes recognized not any actual religious truth, Lilla says, but a human need for religious authority. His solution was to have secular rulers "take control of Christianity and treat it as a merely civil religion calibrated to meet the demands of the state."

Lilla proceeds to visit the writings of Locke, who of course took a different view of the role of government that was more in line with the eventual founders of America. And he also considers Hume, who was skeptical of religious superstition but nevertheless convinced of the cultural and political superiority of Protestantism over Catholicism.

What one finds when one reviews the history of political theology, Lilla seems to conclude, is a drift away from superstition towards the pragmatic use of religion as a political tool. Religious myths are seen as just that--stories and metaphors. Lilla sees Rousseau, for example, as one who "recognized the psychological and political benefits of religion, properly conceived." Kant, Lilla says, was loyal to this modern tradition by "rejecting all public claims of Christian revelation as inimical to human freedom:' This is nothing more than a "backdoor justification of Christianity."

With Western thought having drifted so far from religious orthodoxy hundreds of years ago, one might be justifiably puzzled to see that traditional Christianity is still relevant at all, politically or otherwise. But indeed, as we all know, religion remains not just relevant but also quite powerful, and Lilla offers some explanations, though nothing approaching a comprehensive analysis.

The Great Separation, Lilla speculates, can be seen as an odd turn of history, but not a great and irreversible trend that leads inevitably (or permanently) to a higher plain of human social organization. That is, the human religious inclination is too strong to be dismissed merely because of a quirky movement towards Enlightenment secularism in the West. In fact, the secularist trend can be easily explained historically, just as the subsequent return towards messianic, religiously fueled politics can also be explained.

To Lilla, we shouldn't be at all surprised that a historical development such as Nazism could arise in the West, even after enlightened thinkers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Hume had influenced Western thought generations earlier. In fact, Lilla speculates that perhaps it was the dismantling of the ancient faiths, which produced a modern view of God that was insufficient for real human needs, that contributed to the resurgence of messianic politics in the last century.

It is probably too simplistic to conclude that progressive thinking about religion produced the backlash of reactionary religious-political phenomena that arose in the twentieth century. In fact, even Lilla's own speculation about such a connection is done more as an afterthought than as part of a central thesis. Such speculation aside,/he Stillborn God is a worthwhile read simply for the interesting, if incomplete, overview of political theology offered.

David Niose, a lawyer in Massachusetts, is a board member and the treasurer of the American Humanist Association and facilitator of Greater Worcester Humanists.