The Stillborn God

Tuesday I started reading the book A Stillborn God by Mark Lilla. Lilla is professor of humanities at Columbia University. Lilla's basic argument is that we in the United States are unequipped to understand the challenge posed to western civilizations by the political theology of Islam because our own political traditions developed in a relatively secular atmosphere. Here he is laying out the thrust of his book in an online forum at the Cato Institute:

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....

If you read the responses, all of them interesting, on the Cato sight you well see that he gets quite a bit of pushback about whether America has really been so free of political theologies. It is certainly true that many of the early settlers established colonies with a strong political theology. And it is true that we have a long history of religiously based politics, from Prohibition to anti-abortion effort today. But on the whole I think Lilla is correct to argue that because we never had the centuries long, deeply rooted religious history that Europe had, the political theology in America has never been as deeply rooted.

And the founders, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Franklin, etc. knew their European history, a history bathed in the the blood of horrendous religious wars, and were intent on establishing a political framework based in natural rights and not on explicitly religious grounds. We were not founded as a Christian nation. We are a secular nation that happens to have a majority Christian population. And it is probably true that we don't "get" the political theology that informs much of the Islamic world. Although, I haven't read far enough into his book to see if he takes any account of Turkey, which is a secular democracy which happens to have a majority Muslim population.

In any case the book is an interesting read so far and I will probably post more on it as I get back to reading it. And the online discussion at Cato is also quite good.