Among the many paradoxes in America’s international relations today, one stands out. It has to do with America’s self-conception, and therefore with religion. On the one hand, America is clearly the most religious nation in the modern West and the most powerful. On the other, American policy has been unable to understand, let alone cope with, the religious passions dominating contemporary world politics. Given Americans’ collective recognition of religion’s legitimacy in a modern political order, one would think that we would be better able to adapt ourselves to the current situation than other, far more secular Western nations. This is not the case, and we need to understand why.

The toleration trap

Considered with even a little historical perspective, contemporary American debates over religion and politics are astonishingly provincial. Whether our arguments take place in the press, in seminar rooms, or on the stump, we keep coming back to the same basic themes: toleration, church-state separation, freedom of assembly, conscience, values, community, and a few others. These terms reflect the way we see religious phenomena at home and abroad and also shape how we see them. Having read our Tocqueville, we understand how deeply rooted in American experience these concepts and categories are. Many of the first settlers were fleeing religious intolerance and persecution at home, and for them establishing a constitutional framework guaranteeing toleration and church-state separation was the first order of political business. Nothing goes deeper in American collective consciousness.

What we seem to have forgotten is how unique the circumstances were that made possible the establishment of the American compact on religion and politics. Perhaps now is the time to restore the much needed concept of American exceptionalism and remind ourselves of some basic facts. The most important one that set our experience apart from that of Europe was the absence of a strong Roman Catholic Church as a redoubt of intellectual and political opposition to the liberal-democratic ideas hatched by the Enlightenment – and thus also, the absence of a radical, atheist Enlightenment convinced that l’infâme must be écrasé. For over two centuries France, Italy, and Spain were rent by what can only be called existential struggles over the legitimacy of Catholic political theology and the revolutionary heritage of 1789. (Though the term “liberalism” is of Spanish coinage, as a political force it was weak in the whole of Catholic Europe until after the Second World War.) Neither side in this epic struggle was remotely interested in “toleration”; they wanted victory.

Looking beyond Europe, we note other things missing from the American landscape, quite literally. For example, there were no religious shrines to fight over, no holy cities, no temples, no sacred burial grounds (except those of the Native Americans, which were shamefully ignored). There also was a complete absence of what we would today call diversity: America was racially and culturally homogeneous in the early years of the republic, even if there were differences – in retrospect, incredibly minor – in Protestant affiliation. Yes, there were a few Catholics and Jews among the early immigrants, but the tone was set by Protestants of dissenting tendencies from the British Isles. The theological differences among them were swamped by the fact that everyone spoke the same language, cooked the same food, and looked to a shared history of persecution and emigration. It was a homogeneous country, and what comes with homogeneity, along with some troubling things, is trust.

It was this trust, bred of homogeneity, that allowed the ideal of toleration to be actualized. People feel comfortable when they are with their own, and it is only in an atmosphere of mutual trust that norms of acceptance and openness can develop. Because the early Americans seemed familiar to each other, at a certain point it no longer seemed far-fetched that a white male who followed one Protestant preacher and cut his hair in one way, could eventually learn to tolerate another white male who followed a different Protestant preacher and cut his hair in another – or, later, that this same principle might be applied to people who were not white, male, or Protestant. Tocqueville begins the first volume of Democracy in America with these geographical and sociological givens, which he saw as the necessary conditions of establishing a successful democracy in a large continent. If toleration is the great achievement in American political and religious life, the road to it was not paved with toleration alone. It was the by-product of many other factors that had to be in place before the deeply rooted human urge to distinguish, discriminate, and fear could be snuffed.

But now the principle of toleration has been rooted in the United States and, at least since the Second World War, is formally recognized in the democracies of Western Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia. This is a great success for democracy and, insofar as we have helped things along, for American foreign policy. But it has also bred fantasies about the easy spread of democratic institutions and the norms necessary to support them in other parts of the world, most urgently in Islamic nations. Toleration seems so compelling to us as an idea that we find it hard to take seriously reasons – particularly theological reasons – for rejecting the democratic ideas associated with it. For example, in May 2006 Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent an open letter [pdf] to President George W. Bush, which contained the following sentences:

Liberalism and Western style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the Liberal democratic systems….Whether we like it or not, the world is gravitating towards faith in the Almighty and justice and the will of God will prevail over all things.

This letter was the subject of a few ironic comments from the White House and a few jokes on late-night television, but otherwise was not taken seriously. For a religious nation, we are strangely unwilling to consider the importance of theological ideas to explain the contemporary rejection of democracy and toleration.

What is political theology?

In a sense this is understandable, given that the United States has no established tradition of political theology. Yes, we have had our share of preachers who supported and attacked slavery, supported and attacked wars, supported and attacked prohibition, fluoridation, communism, socialism, women’s liberation, gay liberation, free-love, abortion, genetic research, and everything else. But rare instances like the Civil War apart, they have all agreed to abide by the outcome of democratic procedures. Except for Joseph Smith in his last days and a few other colorful exceptions, no serious American religious thinker ever developed a full-blown theology of government throwing the basic legitimacy of American democracy into question. It is something of a miracle. But whatever its source, it is exceptional and we need to recognize its consequences. Though the long tradition of Christian political theology eventually died in twentieth-century Europe, memory of it is still strong and laced with fear. But the American founding took place as a self-conscious break with Europe’s traditional political theologies and so memory of the world we left behind is somewhat vague. We were born, so to speak, on the other shore.

So successful has our passage been to this other shore that it is sometimes difficult to remind Americans that political theology is the primordial form of political thought. Virtually every civilization known to us began with an image of itself as set within a divine nexus of God, man, and world, and based its understanding of legitimate authority on that theological picture. This is true of all the civilizations of the ancient Near East, and of many in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Political theology seems to be the default condition of civilizations as they try to articulate how their political order relates to the natural order, and how both stand under a divine order. It is a rational construct with its own concepts and terms, and a long history of intellectual debates that are still alive for those who believe. In it, arguments about authority and legitimacy, or rights and duties, travel up and down a ladder connecting human reasons to divine ones. Making those connections and developing a comprehensive account of God, man, and world simply is what it is to think politically for political theologians.

The ideas and problems of Christian political theology are what shaped the West. Unlike the Hebrew or Muslim God, who delivered a comprehensive law governing all aspects of individual and collective life, the Christian God was a trinity that ruled over a created cosmos and guided human beings by different means: revelation, inner conviction, and the natural order. The Christian picture of the divine was magnificent and allowed a magnificent and powerful civilization to flower. But it was difficult to apply to politics: God the Father had given commandments; a Redeemer arrived, reinterpreting them, then departed; and now the Holy Spirit remained as a ghostly divine presence. Were Christian supposed to withdraw from a corrupted world that had been abandoned by the Redeemer? Were they called upon to rule the earthly city with both church and state, inspired by the Holy Spirit? Or were they expected to build a New Jerusalem that would hasten the Messiah’s return?

Throughout the Middle Ages Christians argued over these questions, and by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries doctrinal differences fueled by political ambitions led to a deadly vicious cycle that lasted a century and a half. In the wars of religion Christians addled by apocalyptic dreams hunted and killed Christians with a maniacal fury once reserved for Muslims, Jews, and heretics. The world had seen exterminating violence before between peoples committed to different gods, but not the self-immolation of a civilization divided over how to picture a god they all worshipped. Only Christians managed that feat, and it was the death knell of Christian political theology.

The Great Separation

As we know, this crisis of Western Christendom prepared the way for modern political thought, and eventually for modern liberal democracy. And it seems to follow from this fact that modern liberal democracy, with its distinctive ideas and institutions, is a post-Christian phenomenon. I want to insist on this formulation as a way of stressing the uniqueness of Christian revelation and its theological-political difficulties – and therefore the uniqueness of the philosophical response to the civilizational crisis those problems triggered. Though the principles of modern liberal democracy are not conceptually dependent on the truth of Christianity, they are genetically dependent on the problems Christianity posed and failed to solve. Being mindful of this should help us to understand the strengths of our tradition of political thought, and perhaps also its limitations.

Its strengths have to do with the art of separation it developed in the wake of the wars of religion. And the most important figure here is Hobbes. Hobbes’s great achievement in Leviathan was to have changed the subject of European political thought from theology to anthropology – specifically, the anthropology of the religious passions. All political theology interprets a set of revealed divine commands and applies them to social life. Hobbes ignored the substance of all such commands and talked instead about how and why human beings believe God revealed them. If we can think about that, he reasoned, we can begin to understand why religious convictions so often lead to political conflicts, and then perhaps how to contain the potential for violence. Hobbes planted a seed, a thought that it might be possible to build legitimate political institutions without grounding them on divine revelation. His new thinking would begin with obvious, observable facts about human nature – like the omnipresence of fear – rather than with a fanciful picture of the nexus between God, man, and world. The hope was that we would develop a new habit, so that whenever we talked about the basic principles of political life we would simply let God be. Hobbes’s wager was that such a habit, once formed, would withstand the onslaught of any political revelation.

This was the Great Separation. We speak frequently of the separation of church and state as being fundamental to any modern democratic system of government. But for it to be successful, a prior, and much more difficult, separation needs to be made in a society’s habits of mind. Letting God be is not an easy thing to do, and cannot be induced simply by drawing a line between church and state institutions within a constitution, or dictating rules of toleration. For many believers in the biblical religions, today as in the seventeenth century, sundering the connection between political form and divine revelation seems a betrayal of God, whose commandments are comprehensive. Intellectual separation is difficult to accept and requires theological adaptation to be spiritually plausible; God must be conceived of more abstractly, as having imposed upon himself a certain distance from the mechanics of political life. Such a theological transformation is unimaginable in many religious traditions, and difficult in all of them – not just Islam, but Judaism and Christianity as well. But it does seem to be a necessary condition of political liberalization and democratization as we understand them.

The enduring difference

So there is, in American thinking about religion and politics, a hidden separation that makes possible all the institutional separations we enjoy. On the one hand, religious Americans believe in the absolute truth of their faiths, even (among fundamentalist Protestants) in the literal truth of scripture. On the other, due to the humanistic turn of modern political thought, they believe that those revealed truths should not affect the rules of the democratic game making it possible for them to practice their faith. To be clear: Americans are more than comfortable with expressing their religious views about particular policies and even symbolic matters like the Christmas crèche, but hardly any harbor religious doubts about the legitimacy of a process that does not recognize the revealed truth of those views. There are the loner exceptions, withdrawn into their communes or hiding outside abortion clinics with guns. But that there are so few is astonishing. For 1,500 years the Christian Bible was the source of a powerful tradition of political theology for which people were willing to kill and be killed, but Americans have rarely read the Bible as a call to political battle, “Onward Christian Soldiers” notwithstanding. It is not even a sourcebook for American government: Americans do not argue about the wisdom of federalism by referring to Holy Scripture.

This is good news, and it should put in perspective some of the worries expressed in recent decades about the political influence of organized religious groups in the United States. Again, considered historically, our problems are relatively minor so long as they are about policy, not about the basic legitimacy of our constitution. Those disturbed by the religious right should keep this in mind. Vigilance is important, not only in protecting the church-state separation but in maintaining the deeper separation between political theology and the humanistic principles of liberal democracy. There is nothing illegitimate about appealing to elements of faith or church doctrine to militate for a particular policy regarding abortion, home schooling, censorship, or any other controversial subject – so long as the legitimacy of the outcome is not thrown into question. Some may argue that it is only a matter of time before those who draw on Biblical revelation to shape their views of policy will eventually question democratic procedures that consistently frustrate God’s will. There are countless historical examples of this happening – but not, so far, in the United States, despite the messianic tenor of our political rhetoric. We should be aware of the threat, but not exaggerate it at home.

Understanding the challenge abroad is another matter, and here Americans have a tendency to underestimate it. We focus too much on the institutional separation of church and state and professions of toleration, too little on the intellectual separation needed to keep political theology at bay. Historically speaking, the Great Separation is a departure from the way most civilizations have thought about themselves, and there are revivals of political theology even in nations we recognize as democratic today. In Israel the radical settlers movement Gush Emunim has been fueled by the messianic writings of Rav Avraham Yitzhak Kook (1865-1935) and the political machinations of his son Zvi Yehuda Kook (1891-1982), who recast modern Zionism in terms of a redemptive political theology independent of the norms of democratic governance. In India the nationalist Hindu party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has taken inspiration from the writings of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya (1916-1968) and others, who argued that the only legitimate sources of Indian laws and institutions are the principles of divine “Dharma,” not those of democratic consent.[1] Neither Israeli nor Indian democracy appear fundamentally threatened by these political theologies, but the nature of the challenge should be recognized.

The challenge in the Islamic world – and in those Western nations that have large Muslim populations – is much greater. Our working assumptions – that democracy is the only legitimate form of government, that the institutional separation of church and state is necessary, that religion is essentially a private matter, that one should be free to enter or leave a religious congregation at will – are simply not the assumptions of millions of Muslims across the globe. This is not because they do not want good government, or decent societies, or that they are utterly intolerant of other faiths. It is because the political theology of the shari’a is still intact and commands the respect of all pious Muslims – just as the Torah is intact for ultra-orthodox Jews, many of whom reject the legitimacy of the Israeli democratic state. Torah and shari’a are comprehensive laws, and those who believe in their comprehensiveness are obliged to look to them for guidance in everything, including politics. Given the statelessness of diaspora Jews for two millennia, the political-theological potential of the Torah lay dormant, except for occasional outbursts of messianic dreaming, as in the case of Shabbtai Zvi (1626-76). But the political theology of shari’a is highly developed and has been put into practice in Muslim nations for over a thousand years. The Great Separation that eventually extinguished Christian political theology in the West has no counterpart in the Muslim world.

What conclusions are we to draw from this fact? The most important is how little our American assumptions about religion and politics, deriving from the post-Christian Great Separation, will apply to a civilization with a strong, intact tradition of political theology. This is not to say that the Muslim tradition lacks political concepts akin to ours, such as justice, toleration, separation of religious and governmental power, accountability, and the like. How could it, given that all societies face the same basic set of political problems? But the bases of these concepts are wholly different: Muslim political theology derives them from the revelation of the Qur’an, the traditions of the hadith, and the decisions of the community of legal scholars who look to these sources; modern political philosophy derives them from a reading of human nature alone. However much overlap there may be in terms of particular “values” and principles, we are deriving them from completely different sources. And that must be recognized if we are to understand each other.

Notes

[1] See Upadhyaya’s 1965 set of lectures on Integral Humanism at www.bjp.org/philo.htm

I am delighted to have the opportunity to debate the provocative ideas in Mark Lilla’s wise and beautifully written book The Stillborn God, from which “Coping with Political Theology” is largely drawn. I agree with Lilla about many of these ideas—about the gulf that separates political theology and political philosophy, about the crucial importance of Thomas Hobbes in understanding the birth of liberal government, about the severe challenges involved in Western interactions with the Muslim world. Still, there are important differences between us.

Interestingly, Lilla and I are furthest apart when we come closest to home. In Lilla’s telling, the United States was “born, so to speak, on the other shore,” by which he means on the opposite shore from the one occupied by political theology. With very few exceptions, “no serious American religious thinker ever developed a full-blown theology of government throwing the basic legitimacy of American democracy into question.” And this shows that Americans have a deeply ingrained habit of practicing the art of separation—not merely the separation of church and state, but also the separation of political thinking from theological premises. In this sense, the theory and practice of politics in the United States are secular, all the way down, no matter how many American citizens happen to be devout religious believers.

There is much truth in Lilla’s approach to understanding the place of religion in American politics and history. And he is surely right to urge us not to exaggerate the threat of an emerging theocracy at home, when, as he points out, hardly any believers question the legitimacy of the country’s Constitution or basic democratic procedures. Yet I wonder whether Lilla’s conceptual schema is capable of capturing the complexities of America’s political-religious reality. No, American Christians are not, for the most part, “willing to kill or be killed” in the name of their beliefs, as Christians of earlier eras sometimes were. But is it really common for devout believers in the United States to accept that the principles underlying American government are “humanistic,” as Lilla asserts? And is it really accurate to say, as Lilla does, that one of “our” working assumptions in the United States is that “religion is essentially a private matter”? I know that I make that assumption, as does Lilla, and as do many millions of broadly secular (and a good many religious) Americans. But it is also true that many (other) millions of religious Americans explicitly reject this assumption—as they do the secular-liberal interpretation of the Constitution that Lilla assumes.

There are, then, more categories of American citizens than Lilla presumes. In his view, one is either standing shoulder to shoulder with such practitioners of political theology as Rav Avraham Yitzhak Kook, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Christian Reconstructionist R. J. Rushdoony (who advocated replacing the U.S. Constitution with “Bible law” derived form the Old Testament)—or else one is a believer in the secularist reading of our history and political institutions. But if the rise of the religious right over the past thirty years has taught us anything, it is that there is a third category of citizens in the contemporary United States: those who passionately defend American constitutional principles and political institutions but who also interpret these principles and institutions in explicitly theological terms. According to this theological interpretation, the American constitutional framers were religious believers out to create a political system based on the Christian idea of equal human dignity. The appeal to God in the Declaration of Independence, the theological rhetoric invoked by presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush, religiously inspired popular crusades from abolitionism to the civil rights and pro-life movements of recent decades—these and many other examples stand as indisputable evidence for millions of believers that the United States, along with its democratic habits and institutions, is a fundamentally Christian nation.

In the view of these citizens—let’s call them theoconservatives—Lilla and Rushdoony are mirror images of each other, falsifying the truth about the United States in identical ways. Both wrongly assume that America is a secular nation and that bringing the country into line with Christian political theology would require the overthrow of the Constitution and its replacement by the rule of clerics. That Lilla would decry such a transformation and Rushdoony would applaud it is beside the point. Neither writer grasps the truth about America, which is that (as Lincoln so eloquently expressed it) the United States has been an “almost chosen” nation from the beginning.

This—and not abortion or feminism or gay marriage or euthanasia or stem-cell research or vulgarity in movies and on television—is what the culture war, at the deepest level, is all about: America’s theological identity. Is the United States a Christian nation, with a Christian form of government, in which a small number of secularist elites have continually tried since the 1960s to foist their corrupt and inaccurate understanding of the country’s history and institutions onto its citizenry? Or is the United States a largely secular nation, with a secular form of government, in which a relatively small number of unsophisticated Christian fundamentalists foolishly attempt to persuade the rest of the country to adopt their atavistic theological fantasies?

For those in the first group, who believe America is a Christian nation with a Christian form of government, political theology is not something “we” have abandoned for the sake of securing social peace. And neither is it something that, were “we” to begin practicing it again, would plunge us back into the proverbial dark ages, before Thomas Hobbes put pen to paper and taught us to “let God be” in our political deliberations. For these devout Americans, who practice and acknowledge no “intellectual separation” between “political form and divine revelation,” political theology is something very much alive, in our time, in our country, right now. Yes, it is a distinctively American form of political theology, very different—tamer, more democratic and tolerant—than the earlier forms that sometimes led Christians to “kill and be killed” in its name. And yes, its easy compatibility with liberal political institutions and traditions testifies amusingly to the remarkable capacity of even the most pious Americans to think well of themselves and their country. But however parochial it might seem to a non-believer like Lilla or myself, the political outlook that prevails on the conservative side of the culture war is a form of political theology. Unless, of course, the authenticity of a political-theological view is determined entirely by its willingness to challenge by force of arms the legitimacy of all governments that fall short of complete conformity to divine law, as Lilla sometimes seems to imply.

Lilla appears to have been led to this extreme and unconvincing position by his desire to place the United States, along with the world’s other liberal democracies, firmly on the opposite shore from political theology. Doing so gives his book’s historical narrative a certain dramatic urgency, with nations still dominated by political theology squared off against—and nearly incapable of understanding or being understood by—those who have decisively left it behind (for now). The reality, however, is more complicated than this. Not only does the United States need to cope with the political theologies that dominate the Islamic world. Americans who engage in political reflection without reference to religion also need to come to grips with the presence of political theology right here at home—with the fact that millions of their fellow citizens are perfectly comfortable making theological assumption about the political foundations of the nation, its principles, and its institutions.

—

Damon Linker, the author of The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege (Anchor), is a Senior Writing Fellow in the Center for Critical Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

“For a religious nation, we are strangely unwilling to consider the importance of theological ideas to explain the contemporary rejection of democracy and toleration.” If Mark Lilla had written nothing else, he would still have performed an immense service to public debate by pointing to this basic paradox. Fortunately, he has written a great deal more, and much of it is equally challenging, and demands close consideration, not least by our diplomats and public servants. My problem concerns the historical framework that is fundamental to his argument at every stage. Yes, of course, the past has baked our loaf, but I do not begin to recognize the past(s) that he offers. And that caveat is not just a matter of academic nitpicking: Lilla’s argument is fundamentally grounded in cultural and intellectual history, and if that history is wrong, so is the overarching argument, and so are the implications for other societies around the world.

Let me begin with his basic argument about American exceptionalism, the idea that the lack of a powerful established church in American history meant that the country never developed a political theology. Certainly, Lilla concedes, preachers and religious figures have often advocated particular causes, but with a couple of rare exceptions, they have not challenged the basic legitimacy of American democracy. To the contrary, I would be hard pressed to point to an era in American history in which politics were not characterized by basic political theologies, often in fervent competition with each other. When Lilla opines that “Americans have rarely read the Bible as a call to political battle”, the rumbling sound you hear in the distance is the massed stirring of tens of thousands of normally placid historians searching for their pitchforks and torches before marching en masse to Columbia University to remonstrate personally with the author. His sentence is accurate, provided we replace “rarely” with “always.”

Sometimes, the radical political content was explicit, as when opponents of slavery challenged the whole basis of the Constitution in the decades leading up to the Civil War. More commonly, such a direct assault was not necessary because parties and governments accepted those religious themes as central to their policies, and the argument was how best to implement them. It was President U. S. Grant who complained that he had three political parties to handle, the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Methodists. Of course religious groups have agreed to abide by the outcome of political debates, because in American history they have usually won them. Look at the religiously-inspired moral crusades of the late nineteenth century, which culminated in the triumph of the Social Gospel, the era of Progressivism and Prohibition.

Just when did political theology cease to drive American politics, reshaping legal and constitutional values in the process? Certainly not in the 1920s, when political/religious anti-Catholicism fueled a revived Ku Klux Klan which, at six or seven million strong, was the largest political movement in American history. (The main competitor for this title was the American Protective Association of the 1890s, which was entirely a manifestation of anti-Catholic bigotry). Political theology still burned brightly in the 1960s, when African-American pastors drew passionately on Biblical and revivalist sources to orchestrate that Fourth Great Awakening which secular historians recall as the Civil Rights movement. The best known American speech of the twentieth century, “I have a dream”, was in equal measures evangelical, charismatic and prophetic, drawing mainly on Amos and Isaiah.

Other examples abound. So much of modern American liberalism has its roots in the Catholic social justice tradition, exemplified in the labor movement, and later in movements for peace and human rights. And the pervasive Jewish presence in movements for reform and social improvement is thoroughly based in the distinct but closely related visions of justice founded in the Law and the Prophets. That’s not a political theology? In each case, of course, one could object that these movements were “really” political, and merely dressed in the convenient garb of evangelical or Biblical rhetoric; but the same argument could be made about any of the Islamic movements that Professor Lilla sees as marking such a stark contrast to American examples.

By the way, nothing that Lilla says about the colonial roots of American exceptionalism makes sense to a historian of that era. No, society then was not overwhelmingly composed of “Protestants of dissenting tendencies from the British Isles.” Indeed, the colonies had their share of Congregationalists and Presbyterians. On the eve of the American Revolution, though, the largest organized church groups included English Anglicans, German Lutherans, German and Dutch Reformed, each the faithful offshoot of a state church that exercised a thorough hegemony in the mother country. And if he really believes that the various churches and sects lived in fair cultural and religious homogeneity, he needs to start looking at the quite abundant religious histories of the era, starting with the struggles of Baptists and Anglicans in Virginia, Quakers and Presbyterians in Pennsylvania.

As I have suggested, the historical context is so important because it shows that nothing we see around us today is terribly new. American politics, liberal and conservative, is and will continue to be grounded in religious allegiances, framed in religious language. Moreover, that spiritual rhetoric is likely to grow with the rapid swelling of evangelical and Pentecostal churches, bolstered substantially by mass immigration from Latin America, Asia and Africa. If you want to see the continuing evolution of political theology, just observe the emerging activism over global climate change, an issue already suffused with religious and apocalyptic rhetoric, and (often) the demonization of one’s unrighteous opponents. In the future, as the past, political theologies will continue to play a central role in American political discourse.

But let’s move away from the United States. Professor Lilla suggests that, following the Wars of Religion, Christian Europe experienced a Great Separation between “political form and divine revelation,” a movement towards privatized religious experience that effectively marked the end of political theology. He connects this trend with the innovative work of Thomas Hobbes, though as any historian of England would have told him, very few people actually cited Hobbes in political discourse for the century or so after his death, and his impact on toleration debates was nil. When he was quoted, it was in the context of contract theory, not religious toleration.

But assume that such a Separation occurred: why in Europe, why after 1648? Why there, why then? Lilla connects this with the peculiarities of Christian theology, “the uniqueness of Christian revelation and its theological-political difficulties,” which led to the unparalleled and unprecedented savagery of the Wars of Religion, “the self-immolation of a civilization divided over how to picture a god they all worshiped. Only Christians managed that feat.” Well yes – but of course, Muslims performed very comparable feats. Everything said here about Christians also applies to the rival sects of Islam, which also spent long centuries killing each other, but somehow without the effects that Lilla finds in Europe. Historically, contemplating the very different schools of thought contesting within each religion, any reasonable observer would surely have forecast that Islam, rather than Christianity, would have been far more likely to evolve the kind of tolerant rationalism that lies at the center of Lilla’s argument. Often such tolerant or rationalist movements, such as the Mu’tazilites, did emerge, only to suffer ultimate defeat.

So why the West, and why not Islam? My fundamental problem with Professor Lilla’s work is that he is a historian of political and cultural thought, who ably studies how ideas breed and feed other ideas, but who pays insufficient attention to just why they have the impact they do at particular times. In contrast, I believe that ideas and intellectual movements may emerge at many different points in history, but they will have little influence unless they appeal to social and political constituencies, unless they become grounded in social and economic realities. In the case of toleration and “Separation,” it is easy to find individual thinkers through the centuries presenting attractively liberal-sounding notions, but these never reached a mass public or influenced political debate. Insofar as toleration and liberalism did reshape Western society, the change has nothing to do either with the alleged theological contradictions of Christianity, nor with the sustained horrors of the Wars of Religion (which actually were no worse than many medieval conflicts), nor any of Professor Lilla’s proposed interpretations.

Let me instead propose a wholly different explanation, one that I believe fits far better with the evidence. Ideas of toleration grew in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because of changes in the material life of Western societies, changes that at once created vastly greater diversity of lifestyles and cultures and (more important) gave unprecedented opportunities to express and debate ideas. Initially in Great Britain and the Netherlands, vastly expanded trade, entrepreneurship and commercial sophistication were buttressed by predictable, impartial systems of law and property. Rising economic power produced sustained prosperity, and a vastly diversified society. High literacy rates provided the market for frenetically active publishing industries, centered in the hothouse societies of London and Amsterdam. Newspapers and magazines disseminated metropolitan ideas, including the fashion for science. In such an environment, it became impossible to enforce religious or cultural orthodoxies, and diversity, pluralism and toleration grew apace. Far from renouncing their religious-political activism, people found new opportunities for it, but they also became much more selective about the issues on which they were literally prepared to go to war.

So fractious and fragmented did the new society become that when geography sufficiently separated a colony from the imperial center, that land broke away to form a new independent society. That is what the American colonies did, and what Ireland tried to do about the same time. That story has nothing to do with the intricacies of Christian theology, and was only marginally connected with Enlightenment political theory.

If that interpretation is right, that has very different implications for our understanding of the intolerance and religious militancy of non-Western and especially Islamic societies. In fact, this has little or nothing to do with anything in Muslim theology or culture. Change depends on economic development, the creation of free institutions and free media. Social pluralism is the prerequisite, not the consequence, of religious toleration. And given the right economic, legal and cultural circumstances, both the tolerance and the pluralism can flourish in any religious context. The problem lies in a stillborn modernization, not a stillborn God.

—
Philip Jenkins is professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University.

I confess in this debate to siding more with Mark than Damon and Philip. This is not because, as Damon and Philip amply demonstrate, political theology has been absent from American politics and history. It is because that American political theology has not challenged or destroyed the profoundly secular achievement of the Founding Fathers in stark contrast to the experience of Islam in the Muslim world and Christianity in Europe for many centuries.

America is substantively and experientially a deeply religious country, and its political discourse has always been saturated with religious rhetoric and imagery. I don’t think Mark or I would dispute this. It is a country whose politics is experientially creedal. It doesn’t incubate the kind of high Tory pragmatism that I admire in the English experience; or even the kind of atheist secularism that helped spawn socialism in other developed countries in the twentieth century. But the power of that religious presence — I call it “Christianism” and describe it at length in The Conservative Soul — is in many ways a testament to the strength of the secular constitution that resists it. In fact, I think that without the kind of secularism that Mark detects in the founding documents and Constitution, America would long since have succumbed to some version of theocracy or another.

Mark’s basic point is that this is the natural and historical state for humankind. The achievement of keeping God at arm’s length in the ordering structure of a polity is very, very rare. Very few countries have achieved it in the history of the world. America’s genius is to have sustained it, even while fostering an intensely religious, roiling, and often apocalyptic culture. So Damon is right to worry about theology’s political claims — especially in the last few years, and during various spasms of the past. But he is wrong in thinking, I believe, that this will lead to a collapse of the American system as such. It could lead to disastrous social policies, civil dissension, social conflict, and what we have come to call a “culture war.” But even then, the impulse to junk the Constitution as a whole, and the ability even to amend it, is limited. In fact, it is remarkable how modest many Christian fundamentalists have been in addressing the Constitution’s core secularism. Whether out of national pride or simply denial, it remains a fact that the main policy goals of Christianists in American history has been in amending the Constitution or bypassing it, rather than attacking it frontally.

Hence our difficulty in understanding the power of the theocratic temptation. Because we have come to take the Constitution for granted. We mustn’t. But neither must we ignore its resilience, or the unique American balance between the theological saturation of its politics and the austere secularism of its founding documents.

In this, of course, I share Mark’s view of the real import of the Constitution and am unpersuaded by the attempts of some to portray it as an essentially Christian achievement. It is a secular achievement that was brilliantly masked by some Christian window-dressing. Yes, as Mark shows, it is impossible to explain or understand the American constitutional achievement without understanding the long historical interaction between politics and Christianity in Europe and England in the preceding centuries. But once you understand that, the radicalness and newness of the American secular idea is what looms large.

I think this is what Mark is emphasizing: not that America is a secular country or that Americans are secular people — but rather that their religious life and nature are framed and made possible by a deeply secular constitution. American politics is very religious; American foundational politics is very secular. This combination is what makes this country different; and its blessed exception to most historical rules can blind us to the fragility of the achievement and the strength of its ideological and political enemies.

Vigilance at home; and realism about the deep threats abroad, especially from Islam. This is what Mark’s splendid book evoked in me. I hope more people read it.

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Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor of The Atlantic, and author of The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back. His widely read and influential blog, the Daily Dish is published at The Atlantic.com.

Damon Linker and Philip Jenkins put forward serious challenges to my article, and I’m grateful to Andrew Sullivan for formulating the first response I myself would have given, especially to Damon’s concerns. To elaborate on it, I would only say that the key distinction in my mind between political theology and modern political philosophy concerns whether human beings legitimately govern themselves. I think this is deeply engrained in the American psyche, even among those who think vaguely that this is a Christian nation, rather than a nation full of many Christians. I avoid the word secular for just this reason, because it is usually taken in a wide sociological sense rather than a narrowly political one. I just don’t see many people who think, as Damon suggests, that we have “a Christian form of government,” though there are many who think we are, as Lincoln said, “almost chosen.”

How do Americans put these two ideas together: self-rule and chosenness? I’m not sure they do, intellectually. One can make a theological argument (something like Niebuhr’s) that man has to rule himself because he is fallen; politics, on this view, is about protecting sinful people from each other, not realizing heaven on earth. Stated that way, a kind of political theology would be awfully close to Hobbes’s humanistic anthropology. But how many Americans actually share that view? My guess is that a great number wish that our public policies and political rhetoric better reflected their Christian “values,” but values-talk is humanistic, it is not political theology as I see it. They don’t want a different system of government. Of course, Damon is, alas, completely right to worry that there has been an erosion of American self-understanding in recent decades, in no small part because of the rise of the theoconservatism he documents in his excellent book. I worry myself, and I probably could have expressed that more clearly and urgently in The Stillborn God. (I am very concerned, for example, about the long-term consequences of home schooling on civic education in this country.) But by any measure our formal barriers between church and state are more formidable than in most Western countries, and we should maintain a sense of proportion about that. Though Western European societies are far more “secular” than our own, church and state are more intimately connected at the institutional level.

Philip Jenkins’s challenge is of a different nature, and goes to the heart of the intellectual assumptions behind a book like The Stillborn God. He is right that I have written an intellectual history, but I fear my short synopsis may have given him an inaccurate impression of the story it tells. It is the story of an argument: over the nexus of God, man, and world, and how (or whether) that nexus should have any bearing on political legitimacy. Arguments are funny things; they course over centuries, and often the most significant intellectual moves do not have immediate or large effects. It is certainly the case that Hobbes was more vilified than read in the seventeenth century; it is also the case that Leviathan made a decisive intellectual move – from theology to religious anthropology – that permitted other moves, even by those who rejected most of Hobbes’s political doctrines. No Hobbes, no Locke: you do not get the Essay on Human Understanding without Leviathan, no matter what the conditions of “economic development,” and without the Essay you do not get the Letter on Toleration, no matter how much dissenting Protestant literature you read.

But these are intellectual debates; how do and did they shape political institutions? Philip is certainly right to warn that ideas “will have little influence unless they appeal to social and political constituencies, unless they become grounded in social and economic realities.” And it is one of the déformations professionelles of intellectual historians to be maddeningly vague about this connection. But The Stillborn God makes no argument about any necessary connection; it is a retrospective account of an intellectual debate that found echo at certain times and places (mainly Europe) for reasons I don’t explore. My working assumption, I suppose, is that intellectual developments touch on events when people feel the need to understand what is happening to them, and then they turn to whatever is at hand. For example, with the self-immolation of Europe in the First World War, a number of Protestant and Jewish thinkers saw it in terms of the liberal theological tradition in which they were raised, and which they then rejected in favor of political messianism. Was liberal theology a significant cause of the war? No. But ideas about it did shape how important people thought about their present, and about their future, which they in turn did help to shape. This may be where Philip and I really disagree, since he seems to believe in spontaneous intellectual generation out of changes in social conditions. How else could he suggest that “given the right economic, legal and cultural circumstances, both tolerance and pluralism can flourish in any religious context”? I don’t think that’s how societies tick or history moves – or how ideas affect us all.

As for America, he is certainly right to remind me and our readers that our early history was a great deal messier than I suggested, that the established churches had a large role, and that there was inter-confessional strife. Here I can only plead for a sense of proportion and certain basic distinctions. As I suggest in the book, American political rhetoric is shot through with the messianic energy of the Bible, but somehow that energy has never posed a serious challenge to the idea of American self-government (not even during the Civil War), nor has it set off the kind of religious Kulturkämpfe that Europeans historically specialized in (which is what I meant by “political battle”). I do not believe that “religious groups have agreed to abide by the outcome of political debates, because in American history they have usually won them.” The Prohibitionists did not think they won, nor did William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes trial, nor do our theoconservatives today (as Damon’s book documents). They think of themselves as beleaguered, outnumbered, and swamped by the anonymous forces of secular modernity. Yet they generally play by the rules of the game. By any historical standard, that’s a miracle.

As for political Islam, this is where things get interesting. Here we see starkly the fundamental distinction between the religious political activism of Americans worried about climate change, which Philip mentions, and a radical political theology that denies the fundamental right of human beings to govern themselves. We also see the importance of making these kinds of conceptual distinctions, even for historians.

But that would take us into a separate debate, and this response is already overly long. My thanks to all the respondents for this stimulating exchange.

I offer this initial contribution, focusing on the essays by Damon and Andrew.

I wholeheartedly agree with most of Andrew’s analysis, not least when he says that “America is substantively and experientially a deeply religious country, and its political discourse has always been saturated with religious rhetoric and imagery.” Historically too, he may well be right in stressing the role of a secular Constitution in preventing the establishment of unsavory theocratic regimes. If he will excuse the phrase, God bless the Constitution. Damon is also right to stress the religious quality that pervades the thought-world of many Americans, educated or otherwise: “millions of their fellow citizens are perfectly comfortable making theological assumption about the political foundations of the nation, its principles, and its institutions.”

Where I disagree with both, perhaps, is in their portrayal of the religious politics of the past few years as anything unusual or sinister, even as the irruption of some kind of alien force. Debate about American religious politics concentrates on images of the Religious Right, Moral Majority, Theocons etcs, when it should more properly try to comprehend the whole spectrum of political theologies, left, right and center.

Let me suggest this: we complain about the influence of religion in politics only when that leads to ideological conclusions that we do not like. In the 1960s, for instance, I don’t think there were too many complaints about the massive religious content of the Civil Rights movement. In the 1980s, when people complained about “religion in politics”, even incipient theocracy in the United States, what they had in mind was the Moral Majority and its like, and not the political theologies of the Left. I am thinking of the potent strain of Catholic liberalism and pacifism that was so evident in campaigns against nuclear weapons, and against U.S. intervention in Central America. When I say that, I am not complaining about the right of Catholic authorities to speak out on issues they believe to be morally critical. However, that intervention was neither more nor less proper than the activities of the Falwell-Robertson crowd. Americans are a deeply religious people, and it is only natural that they should frame their political and social ideologies in religious terms.

In other words, the verb conjugates as follows:

I speak from moral concern.
You drag religion into politics.
He is a theocrat.

I’m reluctant to say much in response to Mark’s reply. With courtesy and patience, he spells out the areas in which we disagree, and where, I suspect, we will continue to differ.

Let me confine myself to one specific point. Mark comments how prohibitionists, anti-evolutionists, etc. lost on specific issues, and thereafter “they think of themselves as beleaguered, outnumbered, and swamped by the anonymous forces of secular modernity.” That is a precisely correct description of their self-perception. But I wonder how badly they really had lost? It is a myth that the Scopes trial dealt a massive blow to anti-evolutionism: as Stephen Jay Gould and others have shown, threats of legal challenge basically kept evolution out of most high school textbooks for forty years. As Joel Carpenter argues, the Scopes defeat led to a major reorganization of evangelical political life, but was nothing like a disastrous defeat. Inherit the Wind has left a powerful, but misleading, historical legacy.

Meanwhile, prohibition and temperance come and go in American life. The prohibitionists lost in 1933, largely through their over-reach, but temperance ideas came back wholesale in the late 1970s, via the DUI movement among other things. Prohibionist zeal certainly motivates our social crusades against other pleasurable substances.

Mark is so right to say that the political Islam issue would get us into whole different territory. Are we ready for a second debate in Cato Unbound II: Political Theology Strikes Back?

I appreciate the thoughtfulness of everyone’s comments, as well as the civility with which they have been presented. I have a handful of comments, first for Andrew and Mark, and second for Philip.

Andrew and Mark: In my experience working, for a time, among the leading intellectual lights of the (Catholic) religious right, I learned that there are indeed many Americans who deny that we (in Mark’s words) “legitimately govern ourselves.” This doesn’t mean that they deny the legitimacy of American democracy as a form of government; it means, rather, that they emphatically believe that American democracy stands under divine judgment. In that sense, then, we don’t really “govern ourselves” at all; we are a Christian nation “under God,” and it is He who rules.

But to repeat a point I tried to make in my initial response to Mark’s essay on political theology, the religious right’s emphasis on God’s ultimate sovereignty does not mean that the religious right (aside from a few nuts on the extreme fringe) aims to install a different “system of government” (Mark) or intends to attack the Constitution “frontally” (Andrew). On the contrary, the religious right believes that such radical actions are thoroughly unnecessary because the Constitution is already on their side — and that it is secular liberals who have had to engage in violent and ahistorical misreadings of constitutional law in order to make their interpretation of our founding documents sound even remotely plausible.

Do I worry that this theological way of understanding the Constitution will prevail — meaning that a substantial majority of Americans will come to accept its truth and then seek to rule politically in its name? Not really. What worries me far more is the fact that a significant number of Americans accept it at all, because that means that a significant number of Americans live, as it were, in another America from the rest of us. (This is where I think we should all take heed of Mark’s concern about the civic consequences of the home schooling movement.) The culture war, as I previously noted, is fundamentally about America’s theological identity. As long as the American people are divided about the theological (or rather, non-theological) character of the country, its history, and its political institutions, the culture war will go on, and perhaps deepen.

Philip: There is, I think, something unique — and uniquely threatening (politically speaking) — about the theoconservative approach to religion. For most of our history, American Christianity has been riven by discord — not enough, for the most part, to spark outright theological conflict among groups, but enough to keep a large number of groups from working together in concert to achieve common political ends. There are exceptions, of course, the foremost being Prohibition. But in most other cases (e.g., abolitionism, civil rights), one denomination, or small numbers of like-minded believers in several denominations, engaged in protest that eventually made a political difference, but only once large numbers of people who were not especially motivated by religious conviction added their support to the cause. Conversely, when large numbers of Christian groups have come together to work for common goals (as the Protestant “Mainline” did in the middle decades of the twentieth century), they have tended to downplay their theological motivations, precisely because of the difficulty of finding theological consensus among believers from different denominations. All of this has been very good for American politics, contributing significantly to our nation’s stability over the past 231 years.

Theoconservative ideology is meant to overcome this confessional pluralism, precisely because its leading theorists understand that such pluralism has tended to stand in the way of orthodox Christians working together to set the nation’s agenda and influence its self-understanding. Building on trends already underway in American religious life over the past several decades, the theocons have worked to develop a new theological-political consensus — a consensus that in my book I call “mere orthodoxy” — on which all devout Christians, Catholic or Protestant, can agree. The motivation for building this interdenominational coalition of traditionalist Christian believers is blatantly partisan — the theological counterpart of Karl Rove’s ambition to create a Republican governing coalition that will last for a generation or more.

Now, it may well be that the current disarray on the religious right is an indication that the theocon program has failed; that is a judgment we will be unable to make for many years. But regardless of its long-term prospects, it is clear, I think, that the theoconservative strategy for overcoming confessional pluralism, and the theocons’ ambition to use a new theological consensus to influence the country’s political culture at the national level, is something new in American history and thus something worthy of special attention and even concern.

Where I disagree with Damon is in his basic concept of “Theo-conservatism.” It’s a lovely term, but what does it really mean? I am surprised to see someone like Rushdoony cited as the representative of anything. Despite the claims of his disciples, the man was a marginal flake whose Reconstructionist ideology had no influence I have ever been able to trace on any serious political cause or movement. (His influence on the early phases of home-schooling was more palpable). Just look at the sales figures on his books. Since I don’t accept the existence of theo-conservatism as a significant force, or a real movement, I’m not sure how useful it is to analyze “the theo-conservative approach to religion” or “the theocon program.” Does Theo-conservatism exist — has it ever existed — except as a pejorative term for religious activism with which one does not sympathize?

I would also repeat that historically, political theology/religious politics are as likely to be found on the left as the right.

Where I thoroughly agree with all the other participants in this debate is in celebrating the success of American constitutionalism and pluralism in creating the extraordinarily healthy and indeed booming state of the nation’s religious organizations today. I very much hope that as Islam comes of age in the American environment, that it will share in this boom, and that American Muslims will export some of their insights back to the Islamic heartland.

One of the strengths of Mark Lilla’s writing is that it makes us explore and confront our assumptions. In some cases, though, I honestly question the basic roots of his argument. I wonder how many historians of Christianity would recognize a characterization like the following:

The ideas and problems of Christian political theology are what shaped the West. Unlike the Hebrew or Muslim God, who delivered a comprehensive law governing all aspects of individual and collective life, the Christian God was a trinity that ruled over a created cosmos and guided human beings by different means: revelation, inner conviction, and the natural order. The Christian picture of the divine was magnificent and allowed a magnificent and powerful civilization to flower. But it was difficult to apply to politics.

I suspect he is retroactively applying post-Enlightenment re-thinkings of Christianity, such as the Anglican “Trinity” of reason, tradition and revelation. If I look at the pre-Enlightenment period though — that is, about 85 percent of Christian history — I see no difference whatever between orthodox, standard, Christian thought and the portrait he offers of Jewish and Muslim doctrine. Christianity too received ” a comprehensive law governing all aspects of individual and collective life” although of course believers argued about the content of this divine law — just like Jews and Muslims, in fact. Historically, Christians were far less potentially “rational” than Mark says, and Muslims and Jews were much more open to arguments from reason and natural law. The fact of being Trinitarian simply did not make Christians more likely to seek a “tripod” of authority — revelation, inner conviction, and the natural order — than people of other religions.

In short, I suggest that his picture of the distinction between the three faiths is seriously exaggerated, and that their commonalities were far more striking at any given period than their differences. The theological differences, in turn, were far too slim to account for “Western distinctiveness”.

My point is that Muslim societies and regimes today may indeed operate from very different assumptions from those of the West, but I would seek quite different causes, and thus different solutions.

Some scattered responses to my interlocutors:

On the Trinity: having tried to compress the argument of The Stillborn God to a couple thousand words, I see now how even good readers like Philip could be misled. The argument I make there is that the strange theological dynamics of the trinitarian idea made it difficult for Christians to agree on the proper attitude to adopt toward the world in general. God the father was like the transcendent deity of the Hebrew; the Christian Messiah then arrived, only to leave again; but the Holy Spirit remains. From Hegel to Hans Blumenberg, observers have seen this ambiguous picture of the divine’s relation to the world as the source of Christianity’s long struggle with both gnostic withdrawal and apocalyptic messianism. In the book, I also try to suggest it is at the root of Chritianity’s difficulty in establishing a consensus view about church-state relations. But readers will have to examine the book to see if they are persuaded by that.

On “comprehensive law”: here I really don’t understand Philip, for surely he agrees that there is nothing remotely approaching shari’a or halacha in Christianity. The New Testament does not provide detailed rules governing all aspects of human life, nor does canon law or even Aquinas’s Summa. In fact, it is for just this reason, as Philip rightly says, that Muslims and Jews were much more open to arguments from reason and natural law: both faiths developed complex systems of jurisprudence that were the loci of those discussions, long before Christianity did.

On theocons: I was very interested by Damon’s response to Philip regarding theological pluralism, which they are trying to overcome. That’s an important point, one I hadn’t thought about before. As for whether the theocons deny that human beings legitimately rule themselves, I defer to Damon’s intimate knowledge of them and their works. I am puzzled, though, how they could think that the Constitution was “on their side” and that “He [God] rules.” How does the theology work here? Has God subcontracted to us, and the Constitution is the paper we signed implicitly with him? More detail on this would interest me, if Damon can provide it.

On Habermas: A reader has asked what I think about “Jurgen Habermas’ recent and striking comment that democracy is dependent on Christian culture and theology.” I still haven’t been able to make sense of Habermas’s recent writings in this area, and how (or whether) they can be reconciled with his earlier writing. The argument I make in The Stillborn God is that Western democracy is indeed dependent on its Christian past, but most decisively in trying to offer an alternative to Christian political theology. Our greatest dependence is always on our adversaries.