by Mark Lilla
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Product Description
Religious passions are again driving world politics. The quest to bring political life under God’s authority has been revived, confounding expectations of a secular future. In this major book, Mark Lilla reveals the sources of this age-old quest—and its surprising role in shaping Western thought.
The story could not be more timely. Most civilizations in history have been organized on the basis of a political theology – a myth or revelation about the correct ordering of society. Yet due to a crisis in Western Christendom nearly five hundred years ago, a novel intellectual challenge to political theology arose in Europe. By portraying religion as an expression of human nature, not a divine gift, modern Western thinkers found a way to free politics from God’s authority and build barriers against destructive religious passions.
But the temptations of political theology are always present, even in the West. As Lilla vividly shows, the urge to reconnect politics to religion remained strong and took novel forms in modern European thought. By the Second World War a forceful political messianism had arisen, justifying the most deadly ideologies of the age.
Making us question what we thought we knew about religion, politics, and the fate of civilizations, Lilla reminds us of the modern West’s unique trajectory and what is required to remain on it.
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Average Customer Review:
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 A Fair History of Political Theology, 2008-11-04
Mark Lilla's "Stillborn God" is a book about politcal theology, and more particularly, the gradual "evolution" of ideas about how and whether the State should be founded on religious precepts. There are two major problems, though: first, Lilla deals more with the history of theology than the history of its relationship to political thought; secondly, Lilla focuses so much on the history of ideas that he ignores how theology has influenced the ACTUAL world of politics in favor of dealing with how the PHILOSOPHY OF religion has influenced the PHILOSOPHY OF politics.
Before I elaborate, here are the positives. Lilla is a very knowledgable scholar who dissects and explains various thinkers religious philosophies very well. He explains the gradual progression of religious thought, from the Aristotle-informed writings of Augustine, to the atheistic rationalism of Hobbes, to the more emotionalistic view of religion espoused by Rousseau. Through LIlla's evocations, we see how religion and the philosophy of theology's relationship to politics has gradually "secularized" (meaning that, through the years, it became more p ossible to form a poltic governed less by revalation and more by appeals to the human condition).
Here are the two things Lilla did not do, though, and they are very important. First, Lilla gets so swept up in his exegesis of thinkers' theologies and religious philosophies that the book seemed more to be a history of theology than of political theology. (For instance, Lilla tells us much about Kant's theology but doesn't say much on whether or if it had an effect on the politics of Germany.)
The second problem is related to the first. As with many 'histories of ideas,' the ideas are focused on almost to the exclusion of the world of practice. To be honest, I care less about how x thinker affected the world of academic thought than I do about how x thinker affected the world of POLITICAL PRACTICE. Lilla, though, focuses almost solely on the former. We talk about Rousseau, Locke, Kant, and Hegel's religious philosophies, and how various theologians concieved of the proper relationship between church and state. We do not really talk about Madison, Jefferson, and Paine, and my suspicion is that it has much to do with an intellectual not wanting to get his thoughts dirty by talking about the practitioners. Best to talk about the philosophies of church and state, rather than the actual practice of it.
I don't want to be so hard on Lilla, but this book really does focus so much on the ideas that the practical consequence of them is either glossed over or ignored. For those who want an interesting and informative summaative history of our attempts to puzzle out philosophies on what religion can offer the state, this is a very good book. For those who want a book on the history of how we put those ideas into practice, I urge readers to look elsewhere. (For a good book on the competing ideas on religion/state relations in US History, read Gary Wills's "Head and Heart."
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
The Tenuous Rope of Political Thelogy , 2008-08-19
I'm a huge reader of religious critisim. Purchasing this book, with a title like "The Stillborn God," I assumed that it was more along the ilk that found in "The God Delusion" and "God is not Great." That being said, I was still very happy with "The Stillborn God" and its through discussion of the development of politics from a religous standpoint, from the Hebrews to The Great Depression. Granted, a few more years of philosophy in college would have done me well before reading this book, but I was still blown away by the emensitity of Lilan's study and the realitve ease for a memeber of the "laity" like myself to read. If only for dificulty that I experienced not having better knowlege of Hobbes's "Leviathian", Rousseau's "Emile," or Locke's various essays. But, the fact that I now have some sort of idea of how revolutionary Hobbe's, Rousseau's, or Locke's works were is entirely a tribute to "The Stillborn God." Four out of Five stars....
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Two Undying Worlds Forever in Conflict: The Stillborn God by Mark Lilla, 2008-02-15
Written in the straightforward tone of a lucid history lecture, Lilla's 310-page book argues that complacency and chauvinism, the idea that our country has paved the way for secular enlightenment and that all other nations will soon follow, have made the great nations allow for religious fanaticism to dangerously creep into political life. Secular political philosophies are the best but they don't have the appeal of religious political philosophies and that appeal is assurance and comprehensiveness. To wake us from our complacency, he wants to "reenact the tension" or conflict between religion and politics." I think he overstates this complacency; the conflict has always been evident, since its inception 400 years ago, to many of us at least.
Lilla does a good job of showing how the age of science or The Enlightenment began "The Great Separation," with theocentric view of the world at conflict with a scientific one. One scientific view, which Lilla describes in detail (and he becomes more excited and passionate than the rest of the book), stems from the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, an Epicurean, who believes the cosmos were not created by God for our benefit but rather nature is indifferent to our plight and we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control. Lilla argues that Hobbes' Leviathan "contains the most devastating attack on Christian political theology ever undertaken . . ." Religion is not from God; its springs from the confused mind of man, a helpless creature overwhelmed by "the rush of experience." Man has created religion to gain pleasure and to avoid pain and he is "stubbornly ignorant." The creation of a monotheistic god is, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a perversity that becomes a Fearful Monster, a "capricious" god stripping man of the very solace and comfort he wanted to derive from his god in the first place. Clearly, for Hobbes, a political philosophy built on the foundation of such an irrational, self-destructive religious psychology is doomed to fail. It's apparent by the sudden passion of Lilla's tone that he has a special fondness for Hobbes and I daresay he could written an entire explication of Leviathan.
As an aside, I take issue with the unfortunate title, which, taken from his final chapter, doesn't do justice to this carefully-written book. His second chapter is titled The Great Separation. I'll let readers decide which title is better.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 The Stillborn God, 2007-12-21
A very insightful and provocative introduction to Western political philosophy, which is also helpful for understanding today's political conflicts in both domestic and international contexts. The first part of the book that characterizes Christian orthodox in contrast to other religious doctrines might be deemed as an over-generalization. However, as you proceed to the later part of the book, you will see that the seemingly rough characterization of Chritianity is a reflective frame which has emerged out of author's backtracking effort to pin down the origin of the early 20th century German intellectual fiasco.
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
The History of the Great Separation, 2007-11-28
With books about atheism doing well in bookstores (like Christopher Hitchens's _God is Not Great_ or Richard Dawkins's _The God Delusion_), believers might worry that a book titled _The Stillborn God_ (Knopf) offers more of the same. This is not the case. The book's subtitle, _Religion, Politics, and the Modern West_, gives a bit better picture of its subject and theme, but does not make its content completely clear. Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University and frequent contributor to the _New York Review of Books_, has written a book about the separation of church and state, but you won't find here references to Thomas Jefferson or the U.S. Constitution. This is a broader and generally Eurocentric view of how theology became pried apart from politics, a process that has taken many centuries. We take for granted now that there is something inherently wrong with a government that imposes or favors one church's belief system, and we are aghast at governments who imprison or suspend rights of citizens simply because of their religious beliefs, but that was, at one time, the way all governments operated. There are plenty of Americans who feel that church and state are too separated now, but there are fewer who would insist that the government ought directly to sponsor particular church movements. The concept of what Lilla calls "the Great Separation" was long in coming, and as he tells the story, it was brought about by influential thinkers; if they had not taught in just the way they did, perhaps we would not have managed the separation at all. It wasn't inevitable. Lilla's is a serious tome which will be enjoyed by anyone who appreciates a historic explanation of this particularly important way we have come to regard both religion and politics.
Lilla explains that different conceptions of the Christian God and of the Trinity caused conflict and even bloody religious wars in Europe through the 1500s, so that theologians, and more especially philosophers, began to question whether there should even be a political theology. Lilla nominates 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes as the most important questioner of the issue. He insisted that questions about God could more practically be viewed as questions about human behavior, and that if there were any religious revelation, it had to be filtered by the human mind, perceptions, and passions, including the search for power. The intellectual separation of politics and religion had begun. John Locke and David Hume took Hobbes's ideas and built many of the concepts on which liberal democracies are founded, including that the power of government be limited and shared, and government be unable to interfere or advocate religious ideas or practice. There was reaction against this sort of thinking from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hegel, and Kant. The German liberal theology promoted Protestant bourgeois society as the highest type of moral life to which humans could aspire. The Bible was symbolic, not inerrant, and the German Protestantism derived from it was held to be essential to public life.
World War I destroyed the bourgeois smugness. Advocates of liberal Protestantism (and liberal Judaism, too) supported the initial German war effort. This led to disillusionment afterwards, the "stillborn God" of the title. It also led, after the war, to a theology that could be incorporated into totalitarian states, both Nazi and Communist, and thus again to religion bound up in worldly battles, the sort of cycle that Hobbes was trying to get us to emerge from. Lilla's is a limited history. He does not mention America's Christian conservatives, many of whom want the nation to support Christianity more openly, and some of whom are interested in turning the country over to an overt theocracy. He also does not mention the lack of church-state separation that such Christians find horrifying within some Islamic countries. Lilla's book is, however, a lucid reminder that despite the clamor of fundamentalists, the separation of theology from politics (however partial it might be) was a process that began centuries ago, not with the formation of the ACLU or "activist judges". It also is a welcome recognition that we are the fortunate heirs of philosophers and societies which understood that neither citizens nor government nor religion prosper when politics and religion are officially combined.
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