prayer, subjectivity, and politicsThere are good arguments both from defenders of the differentiation
and from those who, today, view it with more suspicion. But what is
striking with Lilla’s book is that it still subscribes to a (contemporary)
version of the Enlightenment story of secularization which suspects
religion of being inevitably authoritarian and inherently violent, al-
though his account is more nuanced than many others. One of the
reasons for this suspicion might be that Lilla, for all his philosophical
sophistication, collapses at least three different levels of religion into
each other: the individual experience of religion, its institutional form
in a church, synagogue, or mosque, and its theoretical self-reflection
in the form of religion. Especially the second level, that of the institu-
tions, is largely missing from his account. This is an unfortunate lack,
as I hope to show, since it makes religion void of its embodiment, but
still understandable, since understanding religion as, in essence, some-
thing mental or disembodied has been a quite common story in the
modern period. And this, in a nutshell, is also one important reason
that religion so often is regarded with suspicion from a secular politi-
cal philosophy.
The story of the gradual disembodiment of religion deserves a
longer elaboration than this article allows, but let me provide the bare
outline of such a story. It is a story about inner-ecclesial developments
as much as broader political movements, but essentially it has to do
with the (mostly, but not only) Protestant urge to find the essence of
religion that underlies all different historical manifestations of religion,
as well as the increasing disciplinary power of the nation-state which
strives to reduce religion to a private sentiment so as to cause no
competing social body within the body politic of a particular nation-
state. The essence of religion then became something universal but
also something private. Leading authorities were such philosophers or
theologians as Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and G. W. F. Hegel,
but the different pietistic movements and theologies contributed to
these understandings of religion as in essence not dependent on any
set liturgies, buildings, or practices, becoming more popularly
embraced. A definition from the famous psychologist William James,
although distinctly later (1903), sums up the result of this development
Todd, 2007.