Mark Lilla’s Political Theology

our times. Revisiting the faith of our Founders is a crucial exercise in that process. However, their faith is only one facet in the total “spiritual identity” of our nation (and the individual and collective identities of the Founders), as they knew full well. They believed that a lively multiplicityoffaithperspectives (aswellasthose of no faith) in the public square would insure against any one perspective gaining tyrannical power over the rest. More crucial even than remembering their faith stanceistoremembertheirconvictionthat freedom of conscience is a human right thatprecedesanyotherright,includingany thestateitselfwouldclaim.Inthewordsof the Williamsburg Charter of 1988, “Rights are best guarded and responsibilities best exercised when each person and group guards for all others those rights they wish guardedforthemselves.”■ MarciaBeauchampistheformercoordinatorof ReligiousLibertyProgramsfortheFirstAmendment Center, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. atCaliforniaInstituteofIntegralStudiesinSan Francisco. [BOOK] MARKLILLA’S POLITICALTHEOLOGY THESTILLBORNGOD:RELIGION,POLITICS, ANDTHEMODERNWEST byMarkLilla,Knopf,2007 ReviewbyEugeneB.Borowitz T wo forces have long contendedforsupremacyinsocie ty : religion and politics. Monotheism exacerbated this struggleintheWestasitintensified the power of faith and sporadically engendered zealotry and fanaticism. Mark Lilla’s stimulating new book The Stillborn God retells the story of thinkers’ efforts to understand andtamethesecontestingdominions.Lilla deftly yet deeply reviews the critical books and abstract arguments that have guided discussion of the topic over the years and often still do. His concern is theory, but he bringsahumantouchtohisanalysisof the grand ideas that have proposed—but 66 T I K K U N W W W. T I K K U N . O R G J U LY / A U G U S T 2 0 0 8 CULTURE with it, but he does not explicitly connect thisfailuretotheirpracticalityandbeliefin progress. Unfortunately, even after a bloody Civil War that ended slavery as an institution, it took the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to demand that the time was now, over the well-meaning advice of many white liberals to wait for a better time, to address the legacy of inequity that still existed for Blacks in America in the 1950s and 1960s. It is interesting to note that Gandhi inspired King’s activism, and the success of the movement he led was in large part thanks to the organizational strength of the Black Churches. Rather than Enlightenment principles such as Reason, King, according to his wife, believed that “love is the eternal religious principle.”King’scontributiontothehistoryofourcollectivespiritualidentityreveals the deeply important role that emotional religious expression has played in making real the promise of freedom that was writtenintotheConstitution . Each generation should take George Mason’s advice and return to our fundamentalprinciplestoassesstheirimportfor culture.qxd:MA 2007 6/11/08 12:18 PM Page 66 getglimpsesofthechasmofNazismopeningahead . In contrast to the many writers who make bumbling reference to the Hebrew Bible or its rabbinic development, Lilla’s occasional comments about premodern Judaism are quite sure-handed. That, however, hardly prepares us for what now follows.Lillabreathtakinglyinsiststhatthe German rationalistic effort to move beyond Kant and Hegel, and the subsequent postWorld War I collapse of the old adoration of the mind importantly involved two Jewish theoreticians, Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig. (He also briefly discusses a third Jew, though one of a later period, Ernst Bloch, author of The Principle of Hope, an unrepentant Stalinist who had no use for Judaism .) Lilla turns to Cohen and Rosenzweig becausehebelievestheyremediedwhathe considerstheultimatesourceofreligionas asocialpathogen,itsnotionofrevelation— specifically its faith that we can know verbatim what God wants us to do—what he more expansively terms the “nexus” between God and “man” (Lilla unapologetically uses sexist language throughout the book). That is, the One, Absolute Power of the Universe relates to people by speech— revelation. Closely related to this teaching is the notion of redemption—that this revealed teaching instructs us how to bring humankind to a trans-historic realm of goodness. The combination of the two ideas has critical consequences. Knowing what God absolutely wants people to do authorizes us to do Whatever-is-Required forwearethenactingonthebasisofunimpeachable Authority. Moreover, the goal of suchactionisthegreatestpossiblegood,for Goddemandsthatwebringabouttherealization of God’s rule in all human affairs. Either of these doctrines might well precipitate fanaticism but, particularly when united and catalyzed by the human satanicwilltopower,theycanbeexplosivelylethal .ThusthecriticalproblemofWesternpoliticaltheologymaybesaidtobehow to “people-proof” the biblical religions’ viewsofrevelationandredemption. Cohen’s pre-World War I revival of Kantianism reversed the traditional nexus between God and people.Withmodernityequatedwithra tionality...