Mark Lilla's New York Times Magazine article has garnered some attention on this blog and elsewhere. I recently received the following helpful response to the piece from Dean Brackley, SJ, of the Universidad Centroamericana in San Salvador. Have a look:

Mark Lilla's essay "The Politics of God" in the New York Times Magazine (Aug. 19) left me with mixed feelings--and major reservations.

Lilla is scared of "political theology," which slides for him into messianic fanaticism, especially of the Islamist sort. I can understand that, but let's make some distinctions. Lilla celebrates the Great Separation of religion and politics that followed the seventeenth-century religious wars in Europe. This helped give us the modern democracies and lay states. Good. But is separating church and state the same as separating religion and politics? Is it the same as privatizing religion? Is a public role for religion always intolerant and destructive?

Lilla seems to see only negative consequences to mixing religion and politics and, to my mind, simplifies history. One crucial example is the way he presents "political theology" (Christian and Jewish) in the twentieth century. Although the liberal-theology movement of the nineteenth century had many virtues, I agree with Lilla that its proponents were generally naive and superficial about the human weakness and egoism that later blossomed with a vengeance in two world wars and fascist and communist tyranny. What Lilla overlooks is the twentieth-century reaction to liberal theology by another very significant theological movement usually called neo-orthodoxy. It was not just one theologian of this current, the democratic socialist Karl Barth, who "acquitted himself well" in the face of Nazism. Barth had plenty of company, including some of the greatest theologians of the century, people like Paul Tillich (another democratic socialist) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who led the Confessing Evangelical Church in resisting Hitler, and paid the ultimate price. Their political theology was sophisticated and anything but theocratic. One of their number, Reinhold Niebuhr, remains the most influential political theologian in U.S. history. They were Lutherans and Calvinists.

Because of antimodern resistance in the Catholic hierarchy, this "style" of political theology did not emerge in Roman Catholicism until a little later, although Jacques Maritain's interpretation of Catholic social thought in the 1930s was indeed social-democratic (Integral Humanism). The Second Vatican Council represents a real break, not just theoretical but also practical, with Constantinian aspirations and heralds a new kind of presence of the church in society--although such a momentous change will take time, especially in Catholicism. Even so, Catholic social teaching has matured greatly since World War II, with the church turning into an important defender of human rights. That teaching inspired the social democracy of Konrad Adenauer and others who helped rebuild Western Europe after the war.

One of my pet peeves is the frequent abuse of principles of Catholic social teaching to justify inequality and free-market capitalism. For a better reading, consider what then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said in his 2004 speech to the Italian Senate: "In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.

During the same postwar period, the World Council of Churches was an important advocate of decolonization and human rights and a signal opponent of apartheid in South Africa.

In recent decades, and especially poor countries, church leaders rediscovered the prophetic vocation of the church in defense of the poor. Think of Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Oscar Romero and Christian base communities. Think of how liberation theology has developed the social meaning and political implications of Christian faith from the standpoint of the victims. (If you suppose that liberation theology is a form of theocratic fanaticism, youve been taken in by its more irresponsible critics.)

Pardon me if I do not regret the public role of the Quakers and other peace churches and the Catholic Worker movement, with their radical critique of war-making and capitalism. As Jim Wallis has pointed out, the churches have been crucial players in reform movements in the United States, from the abolition of slavery to the civil-rights movement.

A public role for religion is not itself the problem. The challenge is to discover the proper public role. Of course, if you believe that all religious faith is simply irrational--as many intellectuals do today--I can see why you would fear such a role. But genuine faith is not simply irrational. Although it leaps beyond the immediate evidence, it leaps toward where that evidence points, and it does so because not leaping has become less rational and less human. (By evidence here, I mean not just the data of the empirical sciences but also beauty and meaning and moral and religious experience.) Genuine faith is a pathway through life that leads into greater light and produces fruit.

The political problem is not theology and religion in themselves, but misguided religion and bad theology. Christianity, Judaism and Islam, too, cannot be reduced to privatized commodities with no public role without betraying themselves. Historically, privatized religion is not really religion at all.

Reasonable religion and good theology defend the weak and the innocent and nurture commitment to the common good. We have nothing to fear from that. Reasonable religion also points out our moral weaknesses and the limitations of self-serving reason. We have to suspect that without a public role for reasonable religion and good theology, our enlightened democracies will descend further into Hobbess war of all against all, with lives that are even nastier, more brutish and even shorter.

--Dean Brackley, SJ