ARTICLE: "The Politics of God," by Mark Lilla, New York Times Magazine, 19 August 2007, p. 28.

Brilliant piece. Vonne, please get me this guy's upcoming book ("The Stillborn God"), which describes the Great Separation of church and faith that America (but you could add Canada, Australia and New Zealand too), in its political and economic uniqueness, managed to achieve organically over its history, while Europe has managed it only since the end of WWII.

Islam, meanwhile, is just beginning to explore such a possibility (overwhelmingly in Asia, I would argue, as opposed to the politically theocratic Arab/Persian universe).

Lilla offers a lot of fascinating religious overlay to the political theorizing of Hobbes and Rousseau, reminding me of the true intent of their work (Hobbes, to free people from religion with his Leviathan; Rousseau, to justify religions as an essential human-derived need).

Two excerpts:

As for the American experience, it is utterly exceptional: there is no other fully developed industrial society with a population so committed to its faiths (and such exotic ones), while being equally committed to the Great Separation. Our political rhetoric, which owes much to the Protestant sectarians of the 17th century, vibrates with messianic energy, and it is only thanks to a strong constitutional structure and various lucky breaks that political theology has never seriously challenged the basic legitimacy of our institutions. Americans have potentially explosive differences over abortion, prayer in schools, censorship, euthanasia, biological research and countless other issues, yet they generally settle them within the bounds of the Constitution. It's a miracle.

That's going a bit far. I don't consider it a miracle, but rather a pathfinding accommodation of faith and freedom that America, as the world's oldest and most successful multinational economic and political union, achieved over many long decades and with a ton of dedicated effort--plus one nasty civil war. This is no miracle, but a deliberate effort, from founding to future, and we owe it to the world to not only continue this great experiment, but to encourage and defend the sort of economic connectivity and freedom globalization imparts on a planetary scale, just as our own mini-globalization once afforded us on merely our continental/frontier scale.

This evolution is repeatable but amazingly tricky, not something we can impose but only enable by focusing on that economic connectivity and freedom and not its political counterparts, which must be derived locally and from the people upward.

Next excerpt:

... a number of Muslim thinkers around the world have taken to promoting a "liberal Islam." What they mean is an Islam more adapted to the demands of modern life ... The history of Protestant and Jewish liberal theology [covered earlier in this well-written essay] reveals the problem: the more a biblical faith is trimmed to fit the demands of the moment, the fewer reasons it gives believers for holding on to that faith in troubled times, when self-appointed guardians of theological purity offer more radical hope. Worse still, when such faith is used to bestow theological sanctification on a single form of political life--even an attractive one like liberal democracy--the more it will be seen as collaborating with injustice when that political system fails. The dynamics of political theology seem to dictate that when liberalizing reformers try to conform to the present, they inspire a countervailing and far more passionate longing for redemption in the messianic future. That is what happened in Weimar Germany and is happening again in contemporary Islam.

The complacent liberalism and revolutionary messianism we've encountered are not the only theological options. There is another kind of transformation possible in biblical faiths, and that is the renewal of traditional political theology from within. If liberalizers are apologists for religion at the court of modern life, renovators stand firmly within their faith and reinterpret political theology so believers can adapt without feeling themselves to be apostates. Luther and Calvin were renovators in this sense, not liberalizers. They called Christians back to fundamentals of their faith, but in a way that made it easier, not harder, to enjoy the fruits of temporal existence. They found theological reasons to reject the ideal of celibacy, and its frequent violations by priests, and thus returned the clergy to ordinary family life. They then found theological reasons to reject otherwordly monasticism and the all-too-worldy imperialism of Rome, offering biblical reasons that Christians should be loyal citizens of states they live in. And they did this, not by speaking the apologetic language of toleration and progress, but by rewriting the language of Christian political theology and demanding that Christians be faithful to it.

Today, a few voices are calling for just this kind of renewal of Islamic political theology ...

Then he names Khaled Abou El Fadl and Tariq Ramadan and quickly summarizes their approaches.

This guy can really write well, so his stuff is a joy to read. It's also very revealing, making my mind wonder over a lot of stuff.

But I find it wonderfully reinforcing of the notion that Steve DeAngelis and I push with Development-in-a-Box(TM), which is that the Core needs to focus on the connectivity and let the political and theological renovation takes its course without outside interference or badgering (though hectoring over human rights is laudable so long as it does not take precedence over the goal of economic connectivity). To me, this is how we lead by example (our continuing experiment in the Great Separation) but likewise act proactively (by defending and expanding globalization's advance). We do God's work by balancing the two, and trusting that people will eventually take advantage of each.

Does that speak to a long struggle? Sure. Globalization's penetration of traditional societies is highly disruptive, so don't expect less fundamentalism in response but more. The Great Separation is a refuge from the nastiness of religious wars, but we can't expect people to pre-emptively make that leap of logic without first indulging their wars of the spirit (Fukuyama's point).

Again, that's why I called it "The Pentagon's New Map." I have no illusions about the inevitable violence ahead. I just want people to understand our best strategies for the long haul so they can keep their eyes on the prize.