ola sigurdson
Or almost. Lilla’s book is also the story of how political theology
returns in liberal theology and then in dialectical theology. The reli-
gious impulse in human beings is too strong not to be acknowledged,
and the return of religion to politics was almost inevitable. Sometimes
it takes different forms than institutionalized religion, as in revolu-
tionary France, and sometimes it is an expression that comes from
within traditional religion, as in different suggestions about how to
reform Christianity from Immanuel Kant to Karl Barth. In his last
chapter Lilla also recognizes that this interconnectedness between re-
ligion and politics is actually the norm, globally, and the Western great
separation the exception. So the “Great Separation was never a fait
accompli, even in Christian Europe where it was first conceived” (299)
but nevertheless Lilla regards it as a fortunate experiment, since it
opened up at least the possibility of a political sphere independent
from all claims of religious authority. The challenge for modern lib-
eral democracies today, according to Lilla, is to recognize the continu-
ing force of religion for human beings, without giving up the ideal of
the great separation. For Lilla, there is nothing inevitable in the di-
mension of secularization that concerns the differentiation between
spheres, and so there is no grand force of history that moves in a lin-
ear direction from religion to modern politics. The great separation is
today as much as ever an ideal and not a historical law. The distinction
between religion and politics is not a description of some a-historical
essence of religion or politics as such, but a normative and political
ideal that was made possible in our part of the world by a fortunate
historical accident, and if we would like to keep the separation, it must
be actively cultivated.
Lilla’s version of the narrative of Western secularization is interest-
ing not only because it is aware that the differentiation between reli-
gion and politics in the West is a political ideal (for some) rather than
an inevitable outcome of history, but also because it is well aware that
the awakened interest of religion for politics “is not a tale about the
children of darkness rising up against the children of light” (302) — as
for instance Dawkins and other right-wing atheists would have it.^5
- On the new missionizing right-wing atheism, see Tina Beattie, The New Atheists:
The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion, London: Darton, Longman and