By John Davis
Special to THE DAILY

A “Great Separation” happened with the Enlightenment of the 18th century. Political theology was separated from Political philosophy. Revelation as a motivating force for good government was replaced by secular reason. We in the Western world have been balancing between the two ever since.

Professor Mark Lilla, of the Humanities Department at Columbia University in New York City, as well as an essayist and author, provides this insightful reflection upon where this theorizing has brought us today, and what modern liberal Protestantism offers for the future of Western political enterprise.

With the Enlightenment, no longer were kings to be seen as divinely guided. No longer was the purpose of government to protect the Church. Redemption was discarded for civil virtue that required no religious basis. The age of reason replaced the age of belief.

This concept was challenged in a host of ways, but in our Western world it sufficed for the day. Through the modern age of industrialization, religious thinkers were able to offer little more than a bland bourgeoisie sentimentality as the norm by which all are saved, or at least given the most chance of happiness.

Karl Barth, Tillich, Bonheoffer and a host of other Protestant thinkers were alert to this colorless worldview, and posited a more robust Christianity that could somehow counter this emptiness, which sought a presence of God to validate political action for good here on Earth.

For heaven on Earth became the norm, once the concept of salvation in the next life ceased to inform political thought.

All the great theologians saw the danger of the very normalcy, the lack of power, of the Protestant religious message to a political world changed by major industrial challenges.

A new god seemed to arise, foreseen by such as Hegel and Marx. He might not be divine, but he functioned as did a heavenly one. God was not the Savior of Bethlehem, or the God of Moses, but rather the people, more specifically the working class.

Adolph Hitler showed god could be “das Volk,” the race of Germans. Compared to the passions these political movements set off, liberal Protestantism represented indeed a stillborn god.

Lilla offers much to think about here. This is an age when our beliefs about our democratic liberalism are challenged by those driven by other beliefs about God. We must reflect on where we are in our experiment in secular government, where faith is left to the individual, for this is clearly, as Lilla notes, an experiment. It is perhaps not an experiment the rest of the world wants to follow.

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