REVIEW: A Political History of Religion
by James W. Skillen
French intellectual historian, Marcel Gauchet, published an intriguing book in 1985 that was translated into English in 1997. The English version is titled, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (Princeton University Press). It is a dense, abstruse work that tries to account for the continuing hold of religion on human society.
We live in the most religious and the most secularized of times. Religions are on the rise throughout the world, including the United States. All kinds of religions flourish and compete, many of which are dedicated to nothing more than the feeling of spirituality. At the same time, however, in Western political, academic, economic, and entertainment arenas people work systematically to make sense out of life in terms that are wholly this-worldly. Religion is treated as nothing more than a phase in the historical movement from myth to rationality, a prop for neurotic selves, an opiate to ease human suffering.
Marcel Gauchet has an explanation of this apparently contradictory reality. On the one hand, he argues that religion is more enduring than most have acknowledged. The emergence of our secularized societies cannot be ac-counted for apart from the long history of religion. Religion has defined all of life through and through, from the beginning. In fact, we have not yet escaped its embrace. Gauchet makes this argument, however, on the basis of the most radical of secularist assumptions. How does he do it?
The author takes for granted the modernist idea that to be fully human is to be autonomous, by which he means that humans should be radically self-possessed, without any external indebtedness. He assumes that human dependency on an "other"—an outside reality or superior authority—is an indication of constraint or burden. Yet Gauchet is bold enough to ask why, even in secularized Western societies, people show themselves to be so thoroughly dependent and anxious about their freedom. His answer is that our human origin in a primitive mythical past was so formative that even today, when societies have broken with dependence on a transcendent other, they perpetuate habits of dependency. The "residue" of religion is still with us.
Gauchet's political history of religion goes like this. In the beginning, humans were completely dispossessed—the opposite of self-possessed. Their entire experience was one of dependence on an originating myth over which they had no power and which allowed them no creative initiative. However, at a certain point in history, centuries before Christ, political authority emerged and was seized by a few who claimed divine sanction for their power. This placed the gods and those in authority above society as a whole, changing power from something "received" to some-thing "willed" or imposed. This helped create the sense in those who were subject to authority that they also could act, either to acquiesce in or to resist what was being imposed on them. With the rise of Christianity, humans took giant steps toward recognizing themselves as independent and active agents in this world. Consequently, Christianity, became the religion that led to the departure from religion. Within about 1500 years, it became possible for humans to think of life in this world as entirely independent of God.
Nevertheless, the habits formed during several millennia of religious dependency have not yet been shaken off. Gauchet describes our present world as one in pain, because humans appear not yet ready to face the fact that they are entirely alone. "Post-religious society," he writes, " is also a society where the question of madness and everyone's inner unease experiences unprecedented growth."
Gauchet gets Christianity wrong because he can only interpret it through the eyes of another faith—faith in the ultimacy of human autonomy. If he had been able to grasp the Bible's truth that humans are most completely free when they are fully dependent on the God who commissioned them with real responsibility, he might have understood why "mad-ness" and "unease" are entirely appropriate for humans who try to live as if they are completely autonomous. They are not. The movement of history is not from a mythical past of dispossession to a culminating era of self-possession. Rather, history moves from God's garden of blessing, in which the image of God receives real authority over the earth, to God's culminating city, in which, through Christ, human labor will receive its full reward and humans will experience the true meaning of freedom and self-possession in God's presence.
