Making God political

The Sunday New York Times magazine carried this long reconnaisance mission into the subject of religion, and the intensifying public debate about the place of God in society. It’s interesting, and consumes a chunk time to get through, especially with the care and thought the subject requires of citizens today. But like other big media, the Times is using its considerable weight (though diminishing) to frame the issue as a sweeping picture of moral equivalence between things that are not equivalent, and lead people to view them with suspicion, and fear.

This essay is based on the concept, repeated throughout, of “political theology.” Mark Lilla sets up his argument with this opener:

For more than two centuries, from the American and French Revolutions to the collapse of Soviet Communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity — these were the questions that divided us. Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.

He then quotes the letter Iran’s president Ahmadinejad sent to president Bush last year, which cited biblical prophets, and forecast the death of “liberalism and Western-style democracy”, invoking the justice of God as its ultimate slayer.

This is the language of political theology, and for millennia it was the only tongue human beings had for expressing their thoughts about political life. It is primordial, but also contemporary: countless millions still pursue the age-old quest to bring the whole of human life under God’s authority, and they have their reasons. To understand them we need only interpret the language of political theology — yet that is what we find hardest to do.

At length, it goes through the beliefs and behaviors of Muslims, Jews and Christians. And how, or whether, we can live together peacefully.

Like Orthodox Jewish law, the Muslim Shariah is meant to cover the whole of life, not some arbitrarily demarcated private sphere, and its legal system has few theological resources for establishing the independence of politics from detailed divine commands. It is an unfortunate situation, but we have made our bed, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Accommodation and mutual respect can help, as can clear rules governing areas of tension, like the status of women, parents’ rights over their children, speech offensive to religious sensibilities, speech inciting violence, standards of dress in public institutions and the like. Western countries have adopted different strategies for coping, some forbidding religious symbols like the head scarf in schools, others permitting them.

Now look at the rest of that paragraph: 

But we need to recognize that coping is the order of the day, not defending high principle, and that our expectations should remain low. So long as a sizable population believes in the truth of a comprehensive political theology, its full reconciliation with modern liberal democracy cannot be expected.

This makes for a compelling debate, one that has to be engaged and by all people of goodwill. Is coping the best we should strive for? Should we not be defending high principle at the risk that groups see that principle differently? The culture is already suffering enough from “low expectations”, why call for that as public policy in such tense and confused times? Low expectations don’t elevate and ennoble people to higher behavior, or their inherent dignity.

Here is Lilla’s conclusion:

We have wagered that it is wiser to beware the forces unleashed by the Bible’s messianic promise than to try exploiting them for the public good. We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated by divine revelation. All we have is our own lucidity, which we must train on a world where faith still inflames the minds of men.

Who’s the “we”? Why cast this in language like “beware of the forces unleased by the Bible’s messianic promise”? Why the proposition that the alternative to that caution is exploiting the Bible’s promise for the public good?

If all we are left with is our own lucidity – following ‘our own lights’ – it is dire straits ahead. I’m wagering that, though some radical versions of a faith are inciting violence, true faith in the God of Abraham still inflames the hearts of men and women of goodwill with radical charity and right reason. And that’s far brighter than our own lights.