Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West Book

For much of our history, humankind has pursued good government through religion. Government was thought to be good when it was in harmony with the religious teachings of the community. Lilla believes that this began to change after the arrival of the British empiricist philosophers. He emphasizes Thomas Hobbes, in particular. Led by them, there arose acceptance of the idea that religious belief is a private matter and that public life should be conducted without resort to religion or the transcendent. Lilla calls this "The Great Separation" and it enabled a new toleration of religious diversity ending more than a hundred years of religious warfare in Protestant western Europe.

The principles of the Great Separation have been institutionalized in the United States, France and adopted piecemeal and incompletely in the UK. But philosophers on the continent of Europe (and the governments they influenced, particularly in Germany) were not persuaded by the Great Separation. That is the subject of this very fine book, which is based on the Carlyle Lectures that Lilla delivered at Oxford University early in the 2000s.

In the first part of THE STILLBORN GOD, Lilla offers an explanation for the emergence of the Great Separation. He ties the Great Separation to Protestantism and the failure of Christianity, in contrast to Judaism and Islam, to develop a stable political theology. This failure he attributes to the instability inherent in the Christian notion of the Trinity. Lilla has to carve out Roman Catholicism, which after Aquinas had a very robust political theology, in order to make the argument work. Lilla explains in a footnote that it would require a second book to tell the Roman Catholic story.

In the second part of THE STILLBORN GOD, Lilla describes Rousseau, Kant and Hegel's response to the empiricists. Doubting that humans can keep religion out of political thinking, Rousseau argued for a natural religion, that required no God, based on the "inner light" of our moral conscience. Lilla describes it thus: "[the empiricists] taught a new art of thinking about politics without reference to [divine matters] so that we could conceive, discuss and then build a political order free from religious violence. But if Rousseau is right, that kind of mental separation may not be sustainable . . . . [Rousseau] had grave doubts about the possibility of suppressing religion or even banishing it to a compartment of one's inner life. Religion is simply too entwined with our moral experience ever to be disentangled from the things touching on morality".

Kant took Rousseau a step further. For Kant, we need the notion of God for our psychological and moral health. For Kant, humans despair that goodness and happiness are in conflict. To resolve that conflict, we must posit a God who dispenses happiness in accordance with virtue. Though Kant agrees with the empiricists that we can never know whether such a God exists, he concludes that we must choose Christianity as the most rational choice for coping with our inner turmoil.

Hegel rejects Kant's view that religion is merely a way of coping. For Hegel the historical development of the consciousness of society mirrors the development of higher consciousness in an individual. This shift links the reconciling power of philosophy in the individual to the reconciling power of religion in society. Thus, no ethics or political life is possible without religion. Religion is not an expedient for Hegel. It carries a deep truth about man and society. Hegel works a complete reversal of the Great Separation. He does not envision a pluralistic society of many religions co-existing peacefully. His vision is of a society where everyone is a Protestant Christian, which for him is the ultimate religion. For Hegel, Protestantism is as far as religion can reach in reconciling the contradictions of the human mind. Of course, he does not believe that Protestantism is the terminus of our development. But for his time, practicing government without referencing Protestant Christian values would be unimaginable.

In the final sections of THE STILLBORN GOD, Lilla describes the writings of the 19th century liberal theologians in Germany and the reaction to those writings in Germany after the Great War. Lilla argues that because Germany did not embrace and institutionalize The Great Separation, there was no check built into its political institutions against the "messianic impulse" that can lead to the sort of political fanaticism that so worried the empiricists. Lilla seems to believe that the failure to adhere to the principles of the Great Separation contributed to the rise of National Socialism in 1930s Germany. He does not contend that the separation of church and state is a guarantee against fanaticism in politics. But he does remind us that the Great Separation is an important experiment in conducting government that has served us well and deserves our renewed commitment.