The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West | 
| Author: Mark Lilla
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 130846
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.3 x 5.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 1400043670
Dewey Decimal Number: 201.72
EAN: 9781400043675
ASIN: 1400043670
Publication Date: September 11, 2007
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Product Description
Religious passions are again driving world politics. The quest to bring political life under God’s authority has been revived, confounding expectations of a secular future. In this major book, Mark Lilla reveals the sources of this age-old quest—and its surprising role in shaping Western thought.
The story could not be more timely. Most civilizations in history have been organized on the basis of a political theology – a myth or revelation about the correct ordering of society. Yet due to a crisis in Western Christendom nearly five hundred years ago, a novel intellectual challenge to political theology arose in Europe. By portraying religion as an expression of human nature, not a divine gift, modern Western thinkers found a way to free politics from God’s authority and build barriers against destructive religious passions.
But the temptations of political theology are always present, even in the West. As Lilla vividly shows, the urge to reconnect politics to religion remained strong and took novel forms in modern European thought. By the Second World War a forceful political messianism had arisen, justifying the most deadly ideologies of the age.
Making us question what we thought we knew about religion, politics, and the fate of civilizations, Lilla reminds us of the modern West’s unique trajectory and what is required to remain on it.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 The Tenuous Rope of Political Thelogy August 19, 2008
Nicole Loew
I'm a huge reader of religious critisim. Purchasing this book, with a title like "The Stillborn God," I assumed that it was more along the ilk that found in "The God Delusion" and "God is not Great." That being said, I was still very happy with "The Stillborn God" and its through discussion of the development of politics from a religous standpoint, from the Hebrews to The Great Depression. Granted, a few more years of philosophy in college would have done me well before reading this book, but I was still blown away by the emensitity of Lilan's study and the realitve ease for a memeber of the "laity" like myself to read. If only for dificulty that I experienced not having better knowlege of Hobbes's "Leviathian", Rousseau's "Emile," or Locke's various essays. But, the fact that I now have some sort of idea of how revolutionary Hobbe's, Rousseau's, or Locke's works were is entirely a tribute to "The Stillborn God." Four out of Five stars....
Two Undying Worlds Forever in Conflict: The Stillborn God by Mark Lilla February 15, 2008
M. JEFFREY MCMAHON (Torrance, CA USA)
Written in the straightforward tone of a lucid history lecture, Lilla's 310-page book argues that complacency and chauvinism, the idea that our country has paved the way for secular enlightenment and that all other nations will soon follow, have made the great nations allow for religious fanaticism to dangerously creep into political life. Secular political philosophies are the best but they don't have the appeal of religious political philosophies and that appeal is assurance and comprehensiveness. To wake us from our complacency, he wants to "reenact the tension" or conflict between religion and politics." I think he overstates this complacency; the conflict has always been evident, since its inception 400 years ago, to many of us at least.
Lilla does a good job of showing how the age of science or The Enlightenment began "The Great Separation," with theocentric view of the world at conflict with a scientific one. One scientific view, which Lilla describes in detail (and he becomes more excited and passionate than the rest of the book), stems from the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, an Epicurean, who believes the cosmos were not created by God for our benefit but rather nature is indifferent to our plight and we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control. Lilla argues that Hobbes' Leviathan "contains the most devastating attack on Christian political theology ever undertaken . . ." Religion is not from God; its springs from the confused mind of man, a helpless creature overwhelmed by "the rush of experience." Man has created religion to gain pleasure and to avoid pain and he is "stubbornly ignorant." The creation of a monotheistic god is, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a perversity that becomes a Fearful Monster, a "capricious" god stripping man of the very solace and comfort he wanted to derive from his god in the first place. Clearly, for Hobbes, a political philosophy built on the foundation of such an irrational, self-destructive religious psychology is doomed to fail. It's apparent by the sudden passion of Lilla's tone that he has a special fondness for Hobbes and I daresay he could written an entire explication of Leviathan.
As an aside, I take issue with the unfortunate title, which, taken from his final chapter, doesn't do justice to this carefully-written book. His second chapter is titled The Great Separation. I'll let readers decide which title is better.
 The Stillborn God December 21, 2007
K (Irvine, CA USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
A very insightful and provocative introduction to Western political philosophy, which is also helpful for understanding today's political conflicts in both domestic and international contexts. The first part of the book that characterizes Christian orthodox in contrast to other religious doctrines might be deemed as an over-generalization. However, as you proceed to the later part of the book, you will see that the seemingly rough characterization of Chritianity is a reflective frame which has emerged out of author's backtracking effort to pin down the origin of the early 20th century German intellectual fiasco.
The History of the Great Separation November 28, 2007
R. Hardy (Columbus, Mississippi USA)
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
With books about atheism doing well in bookstores (like Christopher Hitchens's _God is Not Great_ or Richard Dawkins's _The God Delusion_), believers might worry that a book titled _The Stillborn God_ (Knopf) offers more of the same. This is not the case. The book's subtitle, _Religion, Politics, and the Modern West_, gives a bit better picture of its subject and theme, but does not make its content completely clear. Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University and frequent contributor to the _New York Review of Books_, has written a book about the separation of church and state, but you won't find here references to Thomas Jefferson or the U.S. Constitution. This is a broader and generally Eurocentric view of how theology became pried apart from politics, a process that has taken many centuries. We take for granted now that there is something inherently wrong with a government that imposes or favors one church's belief system, and we are aghast at governments who imprison or suspend rights of citizens simply because of their religious beliefs, but that was, at one time, the way all governments operated. There are plenty of Americans who feel that church and state are too separated now, but there are fewer who would insist that the government ought directly to sponsor particular church movements. The concept of what Lilla calls "the Great Separation" was long in coming, and as he tells the story, it was brought about by influential thinkers; if they had not taught in just the way they did, perhaps we would not have managed the separation at all. It wasn't inevitable. Lilla's is a serious tome which will be enjoyed by anyone who appreciates a historic explanation of this particularly important way we have come to regard both religion and politics.
Lilla explains that different conceptions of the Christian God and of the Trinity caused conflict and even bloody religious wars in Europe through the 1500s, so that theologians, and more especially philosophers, began to question whether there should even be a political theology. Lilla nominates 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes as the most important questioner of the issue. He insisted that questions about God could more practically be viewed as questions about human behavior, and that if there were any religious revelation, it had to be filtered by the human mind, perceptions, and passions, including the search for power. The intellectual separation of politics and religion had begun. John Locke and David Hume took Hobbes's ideas and built many of the concepts on which liberal democracies are founded, including that the power of government be limited and shared, and government be unable to interfere or advocate religious ideas or practice. There was reaction against this sort of thinking from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hegel, and Kant. The German liberal theology promoted Protestant bourgeois society as the highest type of moral life to which humans could aspire. The Bible was symbolic, not inerrant, and the German Protestantism derived from it was held to be essential to public life.
World War I destroyed the bourgeois smugness. Advocates of liberal Protestantism (and liberal Judaism, too) supported the initial German war effort. This led to disillusionment afterwards, the "stillborn God" of the title. It also led, after the war, to a theology that could be incorporated into totalitarian states, both Nazi and Communist, and thus again to religion bound up in worldly battles, the sort of cycle that Hobbes was trying to get us to emerge from. Lilla's is a limited history. He does not mention America's Christian conservatives, many of whom want the nation to support Christianity more openly, and some of whom are interested in turning the country over to an overt theocracy. He also does not mention the lack of church-state separation that such Christians find horrifying within some Islamic countries. Lilla's book is, however, a lucid reminder that despite the clamor of fundamentalists, the separation of theology from politics (however partial it might be) was a process that began centuries ago, not with the formation of the ACLU or "activist judges". It also is a welcome recognition that we are the fortunate heirs of philosophers and societies which understood that neither citizens nor government nor religion prosper when politics and religion are officially combined.
Excellent Summary of Political Theology and Theological Philosophy November 18, 2007
Ana Sedai (LaPorte, IN United States)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I'll admit straight away that I'm not formally trained in philosophy or theology. I would've liked to have at least minored in the former, but life had other plans. I absorbed what I could, at any rate.
That being said, I had very little trouble following the flow of Lilla's narrative. He was dead-on in his assessment that we in the West have made the common (and often fatal) error of forgetting where we came from and how we got here. We needed this reminder. It was quite enlightening to read his analysis of the progression of political theological thought over the course of 400 years. For such a dense subject, it's remarkable that he was able to condense it down to only 300 pages. I'm sure a great deal of nuance was lost along the way, but that doesn't really matter. What matters is that he showed how people took the ideas of reasonable, intelligent men and twisted them into things that those men would be disgusted by.
I devoured this book the first time I read it. The consequences of the contradictions inherent in Christianity, as well as the history of the Great Separation itself, are fascinating to me. I'll have to read it again in order to pick up what I missed before. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of philosophy, as well as the history of religious thought.
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