On “The Politics of God, Part 3

Humans, thinking, and consciousness all evolve — and our religion and politics must evolve with it. Time to examine the other side of the “political theology” debate and check in with Rousseau and The Savoyard Vicar.

Section III: The Inner Light.

My favorite quote from this section of Professor Lilla’s essay goes like this:

“There is much we cannot know about God, and for centuries the pretense of having understood him caused much damage to Christendom. But, for Rousseau, we need to believe something about him if we are to orient ourselves in the world.”

— Professor Mark Lilla, from his essay in The New York Times.

In this installment, the argument swings back to discussing the human need for God and religions in political discourse. In tracing out the history of this long debate Lilla, through Rousseau, raises questions which cannot be answered with standard Hobbesian thought. These questions were being raised in the 19th century, in the very heart of the Enlightenment era by those who had seen purely secular governments breed the nightmarish aftermath of the French Revolution. If man divorced from God and religion also bred monsters (as it surely did) then with what recourses was man left?

The answers began emerging in Germany, where first Protestant Christians (and later, Jewish reformers) envisioned a religion, enlightened by rationality, intellectualism, and philosophy, that could play an integral role in modern governance. Since it was not possible for man to govern rationally without religion, it became necessary to determine how he might govern himself rationally using religious and moral principles to guide him.

As Lilla aptly points out, this came to a fine point with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Émile (1762) and the character of the Savoyard Vicar, Rousseau elegantly reframed the discourse. Instead of dwelling on the horrors man committed in name of religion he talked about the good it also brought forth in humanity. Among these, Lilla lists “of conscience, of charity, of fellow feeling, of virtue, of pious wonder in the face of God’s creation” and that ” Human beings, he thought, have a natural goodness they express in their religion.”

Rousseau was roundly reviled by devout Christians in Europe for suggesting that religion could be framed in terms of human needs rather than divine truths — and yet, for a humanity struggling to evolve from its own bestial and savage roots, Rousseau was the necessary answer and successor to Hobbes. In any evolutionary development, integration must follow differentiation (here spoken of as the “Great Separation). Where there is no integration of what has been learned pathology follows — differentiation becomes dissociation and all that was true and great and beautiful about evolution derails and is lost.

Has humanity descended into a pathological dissociation of God and Government? In the United States of America, the “wall of separation” between church and state is understood to be all that protects its citizens’ religious freedom, but is it? We believe humanity is capable of separating politics and God, but is that true?

Professor Lilla suggests that we were wrong to think so and points out that the political theologies of the Middle East and South Asian countries continues to shape mankind’s present and future. It is upon us and we must somehow learn to integrate an evolved theology back into our (hopefully likewise evolved) politics before the Bin Ladens and Ahmadinejads and Bushes of this world drag us back into darkness.