prayer, subjectivity, and politicstradition of canon law to which such liberal fathers as Hugo Grotius
and John Locke are likewise connected.^2 This does not necessarily
mean that any contemporary reference to human rights is a religious
reference in disguise, but it means that the history of democratic
politics is a much more complicated history than the positing of a mere
dualism between religion and politics will allow. Some philosophers,
such as John Gray in his recent book Black Mass (2007), goes so far as
to claim that “modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion.”^3
There are a lot of variations on this theme and different ways of telling
this story, but for my purpose here it will be enough to say that this
more complex history does not, in itself, do away with the understanding
of religion as something inherently violent.
Consider, for instance, Mark Lilla’s interesting but still problematic
book The Stillborn God (2007) where the American intellectual
historian claims that Thomas Hobbes stood for an intellectual revolt
against all Christian political theologies with his “Great Separation”
between religion and politics, which is the most distinctive feature of
Western political life today.^4 This great separation amounts to “a way
of separating claims to religion from our thinking about the common
good” (90). Politics could then be a matter of human experience rather
than divine authority, and through this differentiation between the
different spheres of religion and politics, politics became autonomous
and, thereby, free. Philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume
then developed Hobbes’s “Great Separation” in a more liberal manner.
In essence, their contribution was the attempt to extinguish, not
religion as such, but rather all political theologies. Lilla recognizes the
Christian roots of Locke’s idea of tolerance, for instance, so it is not a
matter of denying that there might be theological ideas that were
helpful for putting this great separation to use, but it means that such
a theological help is no longer needed.
- Cf. Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural
Law, and Church Law 1150–1625, Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2001. - John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, London: Allen
Lane, 2007, 1. - Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.