religious revolution now 231romanticism) that prevent its development, or to criticize the institu-
tional arrangements that make the social order a prison- house of the
embodied spirit.
Th e coexistence of educated half- belief with barbaric pop u lar devo-
tion prevents the salvation religions from reforming themselves, in the
light of ideas as well as of experience, as they have done many times in
the past. Th e failure of the marriage of ideas with experience prevents
religious reformation. Th e absence of religious reformation helps set
the stage for religious revolution.
- Th e need to combine the criticism and re orientation of personal expe-
rience with the criticism and reconstruction of institutional arrange-
ments, as well as with the radical changes of conception, attitude, and
practice that such a combination requires.
Any revolution in human aff airs must, as Tocqueville observed, be
both religious and po liti cal. It must be both change in consciousness
and change in institutions. In the most comprehensive projects of world
transformation, no simple division exists between the religious and the
po liti cal spheres of life.
Every ambitious religious change seeks to change society, even if it
professes to discount the reality of time and the weight of history. It
has special reason to want social reconstruction if, like the Semitic
monotheisms, it sees history as a setting for the enactment of God’s plan
of salvation. Every large project of po liti cal transformation must be
more than a program of institutional change. It attempts to infl uence
our ideas about the possible and desirable forms of human association
in each domain of social life. Such ideas, living in our practices and in-
stitutions, rather than relegated to books, are expressed in law, the insti-
tutionalized form of the life of a people. Th ey are also in de pen dently
important as an aspect of our experience. Th e prophet will not leave
them unchallenged.
How could he? Th e ideas that we act out in our relations to one an-
other must, more than the ones that we profess, be the object of his con-
cern. Th ey become the more powerful when bound to institutions and
practices. Our ideals and interests are nailed to the cross of the institu-
tions and practices that represent them in fact. Th e law is the site of this
crucifi xion.