Sept. 2, 2007

This Side of Theocracy: Warding Off the Dangers of Political Theology

By Harry T. Cook

A clear-eyed reading of current events pretty strongly suggests that the two most potent forces at work in the world of 2007 are politics and religion. And when they intersect, all hell is likely to break loose.

Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University, in a forthcoming book entitled The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West, accounts for the bloody history that has flowed from the times and places in which religious politics – or political religion – drove nations and peoples to unbelievably violent ends in the name of gods perceived to have been the sponsors of both sides of the conflicts.

Lilla says that such a situation is a one-way ticket to oblivion. He cannot and does not say that either politics or religion will go quietly any time soon. However, he does insist that both must find among their constituencies and adherents a kind of mutual entente that will prevent radical messianic movements in either politics or religion from spilling over into holy wars in which there are seldom winners in any good sense of the word.

The only victorious party in Iraq today is the faceless apostolate of terror, which wages its holy war on its own terms for its own murky motives – all to give glory to the deity whose will its adherents claim fully to know.

Lilla’s scholarship seems to me unassailable, and his conclusions undisputable. The good news is that with proper adjustments in political analysis and religious philosophy, the two 800-pound gorillas can find ways of working together or, at the least, staying out of each other’s hair.

A really good friend of mine – and one of the smartest people I know – mused with me the other day about the human condition. We agreed, not triumphantly but with some sadness, that the biggest mistake Homo sapiens ever made was to invent “god.” It was inevitable that diverse cultures would produce different gods out of different perceived necessities, aspirations and resentments.

If your answer to any problem or inquiry is “god,” you haven’t asked enough questions.

Because gods are inevitably products of special revelation inaccessible to objective investigation, it was likewise inevitable that People A. would feel free to envision their god as being supportive of their necessities, aspirations and resentments and could be counted on to bless their aggression against People B. in the pursuit of whatever necessities, desires and vengeance for whatever resentments.

Whenever revealed religion had hopped into bed with messianic politics, the result has been altogether predictable. In the history of any people whose society was marked by economic dislocation or other social anxiety, traditional beliefs about a savior or messianic intervention came to the fore as a future golden age presaged by violent upheavals became a perverse and perfervid hope.

Human beings from the beginning of what we make bold to call civilization have organized clan, kith and kin along political lines with divisions of labor, authority and privilege. Over time the race has progressed from tribal chiefs, to warlords, to fiefs, to local and regional hegemons and finally, thanks to the Greeks, democracy and now to what is, in theory, representative democracy.

Where and when enough such governmental structures have stuck to what today we call “domestic policy” and reasonable security of borders as their obvious tasks on behalf of their citizens, the world has enjoyed a relative kind of peace. It’s when what Lilla calls “political theology” is allowed to infect the workings of a nation or society that trouble comes.

The imams and ayatollahs of militant Islam have convinced themselves that Allah is counting on them to re-make the world into a Muslim theocracy. George W. Bush has convinced himself (or been convinced by his own viziers) that America is the Christian god’s instrument of bringing “freedom” to the Middle East, under which, not incidentally, is most of Earth’s petroleum resources.

The in-bed-ness factor that Bush & Co. have enjoyed with the flag-waving honchos of the Christian Right is the very sorcery that brews up the cocktail whose consumption leads to such drunken rampages as the Iraq war and what will surely be its dread and enduring aftermath.

America’s founding parents got it just about right with the First Amendment proscription against the government’s establishment of religion and of its interfering with the free exercise thereof. Thomas Jefferson some years later referred to that arrangement as “the separation of church and state.” The founders, of which Jefferson was one, understood pretty clearly what Lilla is saying today, viz., that church and state, religion and government can co-exist when each tends to its own knitting.

Government has clear tasks set forth in the Constitution and the statutes of the several states. The various communities of organized religion have their beliefs and rituals. The key is for their adherents to understand that “god” is, at best, an invention of human imagination, and that human beings and their behavior toward one another are the proper concern of religion.

I think the abolitionist preachers of the 19th Century understood that, at least in part. For them it wasn’t so much that their god could be proven to be against slavery; it’s that the preachers themselves found it an abhorrent practice. Martin Luther King, Jr., employed biblical images and languages to undergird his call for racial justice but largely refrained from saying he was speaking for any god.

The word “religion” derives from the Latin religare that means “to restrain oneself.” The word “politics” derives from the Greek politika – the art and science of governing. Let religion be what its name implies. Let government cultivate its art and pursue its science. And, please: no would-be messiahs need apply for work in either entity.

 © Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.