Int J Polit Cult Soc (2008) 21:81–85

DOI 10.1007/s10767-008-9034-8

BOOK REVIEW

The Still Born God: Religion, Politics and the Modern

West. By Mark Lilla. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).
Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice
of Toleration in the Early Modern Europe. By Benjamin Kaplan.
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Yuri Contreras-Vejar

Published online: 20 November 2008

# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008

In a post-September 11th world, the relationship between politics and religion has become a
challenging socio-political reality. Two recently published books address the complex and
conflictual relationship between politics and Christianity from different perspectives. The
Stillborn God is Mark Lilla’s attempt to elucidate the philosophical efforts of European
thinkers to overcome and move beyond the mental, political, and social boundaries of
Christianity. Benjamin Kaplan, in his book Divided by Faith, strives to explain the rise and
development of confessionalism and its role in the rise of religious intolerance in Europe,
using an analysis of the historical conditions of early modern Europe.
Within European societies, the relationship between Christianity and politics was the
central intellectual concern from which modern political thought arose. Modern political
thought seemingly broke, as the name alludes, with the medieval mindset trapped by the
multi-formed creature of Christianity. Lilla’s The Stillborn God is the story of how modern
political thought was able to escape the tentacles of this creature that fueled wars,
intolerance, and madness. The book is lucid, intelligent, and ambitious. However, human
history is not the history of human thought. There is a relationship between ideas and
human action, but we do not have a clear understanding of that link. Lilla is aware that
there are and have been multiple factors in the political and human calamities of history,
especially during the past century. However, throughout the book, he claims that Hobbes
and Rousseau provided the theoretical ground for overcoming the traps of political
theology. In the final chapters of the book, Lilla concludes his essay with an analysis of the
works of Karl Barth and Franz Rosenzweig who, according to Lilla, undid and destroyed
the great separation that Hobbes strenuously fought to create. As a result, Lilla claims that
religious madness propitiated the rise of the German Third Reich. The Stillborn God is an
admonition against the temptation of transgressing the boundaries between theology and
politics.
Lilla argues that, in the beginning, there was a contradictory and incoherent religion—
Christianity—which proclaimed the existence of a god who was simultaneously

Y. Contreras-Vejar (*)
The New School for Social Research, New York, NY, USA
e-mail: conty435@newschool.edu
82 Contreras-Vejar

transcendental and immanent. This god incarnated in a man, Jesus, whose last earthly act
was to die in the cross. After his resurrection, the god-Jesus left his followers in despair and
anguish, looking for signs that might announce the second coming of the Messiah. This
tension between a transcendental and immanent God created an irresolvable and intrinsic
contradiction that was reflected in European politics and fomented intolerance, political
conflict and war:
“Withdrawal into monasticism, ruling the earthly city with the two swords of church
and state, building the messianic New Jerusalem—which is the true model of
Christian politics? For over a millennium Christians themselves could not decide, and
this tension was the source of almost unremitting struggle and conflict, much of it
doctrinal, pitting believer against believer over the very meaning of Christian
revelation. The number of oppositions to be found in medieval political life and
thought is bewildering in the extreme. The City of Man was set against the City of
God, political citizenship against monastic withdrawal, the divine right of kings
against the right of resistance, church authority against radical antinomianism, canon
law against mystical insight, inquisitor against martyr, secular sword against
ecclesiastical miter, prince against emperor, emperor against pope, pope against
church councils. All politics involves conflict, but what set Christian politics apart was
the theological consciousness and intensity of the conflicts it generated—conflicts
rooted in the deepest ambiguities of Christian revelation.” (Lilla, Mark 51–52).
The very nature of the Christian god, incarnated in a human being and transfigured and
absent from earthly conditions after his resurrection, invited his followers to succumb to a
futile search for certainty. The Christian god defended and simultaneously rejected the
goodness and worthiness of this world. This contradiction, for Lilla, is at the center of a
political theology that trapped European societies in a labyrinth of senseless conflicts and
wars.
Following a tradition philosophically established by Leo Strauss, Lilla elevates Thomas
Hobbes as the modern political thinker who paved the way for the great separation of
political and theological discourses. Hobbes is the modern Epicurean thinker who
successfully challenged the basic assumptions of Christianity. In Lilla’s interpretation,
Hobbes is an anti-Christian thinker who surpassed and overcame the futile Christian ideal
of searching for immortality. In Lilla’s account, Hobbes was able to move beyond Christian
thought through the simple strategy of changing the subject. Indeed, Hobbes did not start
his masterpiece, Leviathan, with a disquisition on the nature or attributes of God, but
instead articulated a crude vision of human beings. Haunted by fear and an irresistible
intellectual curiosity, in Hobbes’s narration, humans have created fabulous creatures—
gods—in order to make sense of their brutal and precarious existence. Hobbes impugned
the Christian assumption that human beings in the state of nature were capable of hearing
the voice of God. For Hobbes, human beings in the state of nature were ignorant. The
possibility of divine revelation is radically put into question. In this manner, Hobbes has
changed the subject. The subject is man and his nature. For Lilla, this is the decisive
contribution of Hobbes’ philosophy. But did Hobbes really change the subject? Clearly,
Lilla favors an interpretation of Hobbes’ thought as the intellectual manifestation of an
atheist who wanted to demolish the Kingdom of Darkness. Hobbes’s destructive arguments
were crucial in the future development of Western Liberal democracies; he resituated the
center of Western societies. Instead of debating the divine attributes of the Godhead,
Hobbes moved toward an understanding of human beings as they are, with their petty
passions and egoistic desires. Certainly, Hobbes was essential in the transformation of
The Still Born God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West. By Mark Lilla. (New York: Alfred... 83

European thinking, and Lilla recognizes that Hobbes’s exaltation of the absolute sovereign,
an earthly Good, implies the destruction of the separation between miter and crown (Lilla,
86–88). How then was Hobbes the real champion of modern freedoms? Hobbes is a
complex thinker whose ideas are part of a current and ongoing intellectual confrontation
and disagreement, and unfortunately, Lilla’s book does not provide a broader intellectual
context about this academic debate. Moreover, Lilla sees only a difference of tactics
between the nineteenth century liberals and Hobbes; for the former, only a constrained
government could achieve a civilized and peaceful co-existence. Lilla argues that Hobbes
disagreed with nineteenth century liberals only on the means to achieve a liberal society.
But how can the earthly God, the absolute sovereign, be the forerunner of a polity
characterized by separation of powers and a constrained executive power? In nineteenth
century England, historians like Thomas Babington Macaulay created the myth that religious
and political freedoms were finally achieved as the culmination of the Protestant Reformation
and the struggles against Hobbes’s Kingdom of Darkness, the Catholic Church.
The relationship between the Protestant Reformation and the institutionalization of
freedom of consciousness was not linear and direct. In his recent book on the religious
conflicts in Europe, Benjamin Kaplan challenges the mainstream interpretation that
religious conflict and warfare were limited phenomena of early modern Europe. Kaplan
contends that chronologically religious violence continued in many nation states far into the
eighteenth century. During this century, religious toleration did arise in some nation states,
but the phenomenon was uneven. In some European countries, religious toleration
continued to be viewed as the devil’s artifice to divide the body of Christ. Divided by
Faith is an exceptional historical analysis that warrants the intuition that religious conflict
required specific socio-political conditions to become violent. Kaplan masterfully
demonstrates that religious violence in Europe was closely related with the process of
state formation.
The Protestant Reformation shattered the idea of Christian unity and changed the socio-
political dynamic of communities throughout Europe. It was hardly the dawn of religious
toleration. Luther initially defended the separation of civil and religious spheres. Using the
famous metaphor of the “two swords,” Luther was against the imposition of the Gospel by
coercion. However, once an important number of nation-states adopted Protestantism as
their official religion, Luther, the champion of ‘Christian freedom,” became an intolerant
religious zealot who believed that the true religion had to be imposed by all means on the
non-believers. Kaplan refutes the simplistic idea that the Protestant Reformation opened up
a modern realm of toleration and freedom. This idea was a nineteenth century historical
interpretation that projected its own ideological preferences (Kaplan, Benjamin 2007, 23–24).
No religion is static, Kaplan contends, and the Catholic Church and its Protestant
counterparts underwent profound transformations throughout the sixteenth and the
seventeenth centuries. A common pattern of that period of religious transformation was
that every church, either Protestant or Catholic, issued official statements of orthodox faith.
The most famous is the Lutheran Augsburg Confession of 1530. According to Kaplan, this
process of codification and systematization of beliefs defined three basic trends in
Christianity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: “the internalization of church
teaching, the drawing of sharp dichotomies, and the quest for “holy uniformity.” Each
fueled intolerance.” (Kaplan, Benjamin 2007, 29).
What was the cause of the emergence of confessional Christianity? Kaplan argues that
there were multiple factors that contributed to its rise. Since its inception as a distinctive
religion, Christianity was inclined to demonize those who rejected its beliefs and rituals.
Jews were paradigmatic; but the most dangerous were the Christian heretics. Heresy was
84 Contreras-Vejar

defined as the action of causing division among the believers. The Greek origin of the term
“devil” highlights this dimension of evil. The heretic is a divider. Early modern Europe
conceived of intolerance as the mark of a true piety and, in this sense, served to define
personal and social identity. To reject deviant religious practices and beliefs was a sign of
belonging to the community. At the time when most cities did not number more than 2,000
families, people were obliged to interact with each other daily. These inter-connected social
relationships determined political, economic, and social dependency. The distinction
between public and private almost had little significance, and religion was viewed as the
necessary social bond that kept the community alive. In this manner, uniformity was an
ideal for order and harmony; identical beliefs and practices created a sense of social order,
communal life, and spiritual unity. For most Christians, toleration was the devil’s stratagem
to destroy the true Church. However, Kaplan contends that this intolerant culture did not
automatically cause violence. Violence against religious enemies required specific
conditions and factors.
Kaplan masterfully identifies two crucial social developments that changed the basic
social organizations of European society. First, the division of Christendom into competing
religious confessions became a fact that every individual and European ruler had to face.
Secondly, the rise of early modern nation-states profoundly altered social identities and
organizations throughout Europe. These two powerful forces did not change the
particularistic mentality of early modern Europeans, but they essentially redrew the
European map, creating new political borders and fueling religious violence among
neighbors. The fusion of confessionalism and state formation was the catalyst for violence.
Driven by the need for more efficient forms of social control, the process of state
formation created stronger centralized bureaucratic organizations, states, and more cohesive
political communities. However, the early modern rulers could not eliminate their
dependency on the consent of their subjects. After the Protestant Reformation, every
European ruler had inevitably to face competing religious beliefs. It was a challenge, but it
was also a unique opportunity to assert political and social control and to exercise their
religious duties of securing the salvation of their citizens’ souls. The principle cuius regio,
eius religio summarizes the new political principle that the sovereign had the right to
impose his faith on his subjects. Nevertheless, rulers faced peril in doing so. To impose a
faith against the wishes and consent of their subjects was a gamble for which some rulers
paid dearly. Inherited from his father Charles V, the 17 provinces of the Habsburg
Netherlands proved to Phillip II that the power was not in his hands to decide which faith
would be dominant in those territories. A devout Catholic, Phillip II followed the common
practice and strove to “reform” the Dutch provinces. He miscalculated: The Dutch revolted
and they abjured their allegiance to Spain and created the Dutch Republic. In the process,
Calvinism was associated with patriotism and became the official religion of the new
Republic. Catholics became a minority, and they had to learn to find arrangements to
practice their faith. The reverse was true for Poland. Throughout the book, Kaplan
illustrates how the process of creating new national identities used religious beliefs and
practices to create socio-political borders.
Borders could be external, between nation-states, or internal, between competing
churches. Living in and between these borders was the crucial challenge for early modern
Europeans. They had to create strategies to live with these social, political, and religious
demarcations. They created arrangements to live together. In some cases, they had to cross
national borders in order to practice their faith; in other circumstances, they created private
churches, in attics or private houses, hidden from the visual scrutiny of the religious
majority. In some places, in France for instance, mixed communities had to share the same
The Still Born God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West. By Mark Lilla. (New York: Alfred... 85

church. This arrangement was the product of inconclusive stalemates. In the case of
infidels, especially Jews, the strategy was to isolate them. Jews were secluded in the ghettos
in order to avoid possible interaction with Christians. Among multiple purposes, these
arrangements were designed to avoid open and violent conflict between conflicting
religious communities. Some arrangements were successful, and in other conditions, they
triggered violence. The key factor for violence was the public display of religious devotion.
Kaplan shows that three types of religious performances triggered violence: processions,
holiday celebrations, and funerals. In Kaplan’s words: “All heresy did not offend equally,
beliefs did not offend people as much as behavior, and the more blatant and conspicuous
the behavior—in other words, the more public the act—the greater the “offense” or
“scandal” it caused” (Kaplan, Benjamin 2007, 78–79). Despite the scandalous nature of
some public religious events, Kaplan highlights, many European people strove to live
together peacefully. In this sense, the daily practices of early modern Europe paved the way
for the practice of religious toleration.
The Enlightenment as an intellectual phenomenon consolidated the tolerant practices of
Europeans through a modification of the attitude of the elite. Around the late seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, magistrates and government officials began to perceive toleration
as the basic condition for a prosperous society and a powerful state. In the nineteenth
century, historians and intellectuals, especially in England, retrospectively reinterpreted the
religious past of their society as the anteroom for a tolerant and secular liberal society.
In the history of Europe, religious fervor and nationalism were an explosive
combination. The process of state formation of European nations continued far into the
nineteenth century. Only in 1871, after the consolidation of the German Empire, did
Germany become a unified nation state. The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed
the struggles among competing political groups that vied with each other for control and
dominance over the German state. Religion, again, became an important actor and, as in the
past, a source of violence and bigotry. But, as in the past, religion alone did not provoke
these tendencies. The rise of the German Third Reich was the result of a broken state and
the intellectual effort of ideologues who, in their nationalistic fever, wanted to reestablish
the glory and unity of the German state.
The predicament is not between religion on the one hand or reason on the other. The
work, Divided by Faith, establishes that—even in a time when religious intolerance was the
sign of religious fidelity—religious people struggled to live peacefully together. They were
not violent fanatics who wanted to impose at all cost their particular religious worldview.
Those people, among them Thomas Hobbes, did not feel that there was a contradiction
between religion and reason:
“Nevertheless, we are not to renounce our Senses, and Experience; nor (that which is
the undoubted Word of God) our natural Reason. For they are the talents which he
hath put into our hands to negotiate, till the coming again of our blessed Saviour; and
therefore not to be folded up in the Napkin of an Implicite Faith, but employed in the
purchase of Justice, Peace, and true Religion. For though there be many things in
Gods Word above Reason; that is to say, which cannot by natural reason be either
demonstrated, or confuted; yet there is nothing contrary to it; but when it seemeth so,
the fault is either in our unskilfull Interpretation, or erroneous Ratiocination.”
(Hobbes, Thomas Leviathan XXXII [195]).