We were talking about religion and politics at lunch one day. The rise of Christian nationalism in the United States. The role of the church in a divided political context. The confusion between the two kingdoms that is reflected in some of our people. How should the seminary speak to church-state issues and guide our students.
One distinction that kept coming up in the conversation was the distinction between political philosophy and political theology. I did not know the difference, but it sounded important, and so I read this book to find out. I learned a lot.
Basically, political theology is a way of thinking that assumes that human beings live in the middle of a divine nexus connecting God, man, and the world. And therefore, political theology assumes that the political affairs of human beings, questions of how society should be ordered, how power and authority should be exercised, how disputes should be settled, should be addressed considering divine revelation. Near the end of his book, Lilla writes, “We and our world are bound to him [God] in a divine nexus; he is our creator, our guide, our judge, our redeemer. And because he is, we must know how he wants us to live.” Political theology is theocentric.
Political philosophy, on the other hand, is anthropocentric. It is a habit of the mind that believes that the political affairs of human beings, questions of how society should be ordered and how power should be exercised, can be addressed without reference to divine revelation. Political philosophy tries to attain the political good without reference to God and his commands.
It is important to note that political philosophy does not expect us all to become atheists. Rather, the goal of political philosophy is to cultivate the mental habit which separates political discourse from theological discourse. Political philosophy seeks to keep separate the basic questions of politics from questions of theology. “The Great Separation,” as Lilla calls this distinction, has taught us to distinguish questions about the basic structure of society from ultimate questions regarding God, the world, and our spiritual destiny.
The Stillborn God is an episodic history of both the creation and the success of the Great Separation (most contemporary liberal democracies can accommodate religion without sectarian violence or urging a theocracy). But it is also a history of how and why the Great Separation is continually being undermined. There is always a temptation to break the self-imposed limits of the Great Separation and absorb political life into a larger theological or historical drama. For reasons Lilla describes in detail, political theology has been and will always be, a viable option to political philosophy.
My take-away: I enjoyed reading The Stillborn God for what it taught me. Lilla provided me with a framework that made me more self-aware, of how and why I think about the relationship between politics and religion as I do. It also provides a framework for understanding contemporary politics and political rhetoric which is often filled with religious themes and language.
However, in the course of reading this book, I also discovered that The Stillborn God is much more provocative than a novice like me can detect. Lilla is critiqued and challenged on many points, and each of the numerous reviews that I read taught me something else that I didn’t know and gave me an opportunity for further investigation. But maybe that’s to be expected. After all, there is a proverb that there are three things you should not talk about in a bar. Religion and politics are two of them.*
* The third is money.
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