The Long View 2007-08-20: God's Politics

This is an amazing line:

When you see an argument developing a vector as surprising as the vector this argument manifests, you know that it is under the gravitational influence of some ideological dark body.

Also:

Yes, the US has a "strong constitutional structure." In part, that is because American culture is "biblicist": it ever seeks to return to the original meaning of the founding text. More important, though, is the fact that government, in American political culture, is a divine institution (or, if you prefer, an institution with a transcendent basis), which is by no means the same as saying it is implicitly theocratic.

John was a pretty strong critic of those who feared an imminent theocracy in the early 2000s. I can only imagine his amusement at how The Handmaid’s Tale [Amazon link] has become definitive of the current day for so many. For John, theocracy did not equal any sacral element of politics whatsoever.

The author uncritically accepts the urban legend that the early modern Social Contract theorists invented the separation of church and state. The language of the Declaration of Independence about the relationship of the transcendent to the political is not quite what Hobbes says, but it is very near to what Aquinas says about the autonomy of the political. As the principle of the Two Swords, this distinction between religion and politics is one of the insistences of Western civilization.

I am enjoying John J. Reilly’s turn away from reacting to the events of the day. That mode of blogging moved to Twitter, which has a shorter half-life than blog posts. I don’t think I would bother reposting a decade of John’s tweets.

God's Politics

One Mark Lilla, who teaches at Columbia University, enjoyed the distinction on August 19 of publishing a 7,700-word ad for his upcoming book in the New York Times Magazine and being paid for the privilege. The article The Politics of God (that link is to the Times site; try this one when the Times becomes stingy about free access). It will facilitate the explanation of the article if we glance first at the book, which is called The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West [Amazon link]. The moribund deity in question is the god of liberal Protestantism. As we see from this review in Publisher's Weekly, however, the work is apparently not a call to a revival of orthodoxy:

...This searching history of western thinking about the relationship between religion and politics was inspired not by 9/11, but by Nazi Germany, where, says University of Chicago professor Lilla (The Reckless Mind), politics and religion were horrifyingly intertwined....[The thesis seems to be that liberal theologians facilitated the resacralization of politics.]...If Lilla castigates liberal theology for its naïveté, he also praises America and Western Europe for simultaneously separating religion from politics, creating space for religion, and staving off sectarian violence and theocracy.

The article is an application of the book's thesis. To put it concisely, the author counsels us to favor Muslim supremacists like Tariq Ramadan, who favor tactical appropriation of elements of modernity, rather than Muslim liberalizers who offer to do for Islam what the Higher Criticism did for Christianity. Why? Because to favor the liberalizers would be to offer aid and comfort to Rousseau. Rousseau spurned the austere exclusion of religion from politics favored by Hobbes. Instead, Rousseau encouraged a religion of sentiment, with considerable success in Germany, where liberal theologians preserved the hope of redemption until it could escape as Fascism, Communism, and every other ill in the 20th century.

Yes.

When you see an argument developing a vector as surprising as the vector this argument manifests, you know that it is under the gravitational influence of some ideological dark body. That Spengler at Asia Times waxes wroth at Mark Lilla's article to a degree quite impossible to a person of my irenic character, but he does mention that the author is a Straussian of a sort. I imagine that there is some secret writing at play here; an ad for Geico, perhaps, or maybe just a Straussian critique of Rousseau of classical German liberalism that has escaped my notice.

Be that it may, the most notable characteristic of the argument on the exoteric level is that it incapacitates its author from seeing this age and, once suspects, from foreseeing the next. For instance, we are told:

As for the American experience, it is utterly exceptional: there is no other fully developed industrial society with a population so committed to its faiths (and such exotic ones), while being equally committed to the Great Separation. Our political rhetoric, which owes much to the Protestant sectarians of the 17th century, vibrates with messianic energy, and it is only thanks to a strong constitutional structure and various lucky breaks that political theology has never seriously challenged the basic legitimacy of our institutions. Americans have potentially explosive religious differences over abortion, prayer in schools, censorship, euthanasia, biological research and countless other issues, yet they generally settle them within the bounds of the Constitution. It’s a miracle.

As a rule, if something lasts a long time, you will be better advised to look for persistent forces in its favor rather than to attribute the persistence to a string of good luck. That is certainly the case with American political culture. Yes, the US has a "strong constitutional structure." In part, that is because American culture is "biblicist": it ever seeks to return to the original meaning of the founding text. More important, though, is the fact that government, in American political culture, is a divine institution (or, if you prefer, an institution with a transcendent basis), which is by no means the same as saying it is implicitly theocratic. The author uncritically accepts the urban legend that the early modern Social Contract theorists invented the separation of church and state. The language of the Declaration of Independence about the relationship of the transcendent to the political is not quite what Hobbes says, but it is very near to what Aquinas says about the autonomy of the political. As the principle of the Two Swords, this distinction between religion and politics is one of the insistences of Western civilization.

Again, there are one or more dark bodies at work here whose influence I am not qualified to judge. It seems to me that the most eccentric thing about the author's argument is his conflation of "religious" with "apocalyptic." Certainly there is a millennial streak in the mind of the West in general and of United States in particular. It shows up in the revolutionary tradition and, in a vastly more important way, in the principle of progress. The author remarks now and again that "believers have their reasons," but he seems to have gone to little trouble to determine what those might be, or how they have affected real societies in history.

I am afraid this just will not do.

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