This is a crucial point, as well for for the incredible assumption that “understand[ing] political society in purely human terms…is [or was] foreign, even unthinkable, in other cultures”. This seems to be an assumption that is to some extent held, but not rigorously examined or defended in the Stillborn God. And who has ever rigorously defended this? What is the theological content of Confucian political thought, for example? Even the most rudimentary attempt to verify it reveals it for a canard, if a disappointingly persistent one.

The crucial point raised in this response is that Lilla defines a position, the rejection of scriptural and ecclesiastical approval as a necessary condition of political legitimacy, in terms of questions that are meaningless, or at least do not have clear parallels, outside of a Protestant context. It is not unlike Bernard Lewis’s claim that Islam never had a Reformation. Lewis can be absolutely certain no-one will never contradict him on this point, since there was never even a Church for Muslims to stage a Reformation against.

The reason why The Stillborn God invites the criticism of Western exceptionalism (or, from some quarters, praise for this) is that it frames the discussion of secularism in terms of texts and categories that are less than ideal, if not irrelevant, outside of a certain European (or even a certain European Protestant) context. This reads as an appeal to a canon, implicitly reassuring the reader that they are in a privileged position to understand the world by means of certain texts and issues. The allegedly crucial, salvific developments of modern thought are defined in terms of questions or categories that are specific to a western European intellectual and historical context (e.g. the Reformation, the novel, autobiography defined in a certain sense). As a result, the adherent, the reader versed in this canon, need never doubt that it has a monopoly on answers to them. This is comforting for some people, and disconcerting to others, who, compelled by the ubiquity of these arguments, are left to fill in these holes that have been dug–ideally by pointing out the overly specific, highly contextual nature of these “dilemmas”, but also, sometimes, by writing contrived intellectual histories designed to show how “other civilizations” have (in fact) responded to them.

The kind of culturally and geographically broader claim that The Stillborn God does not (rigorously) make, but which many readers (rightfully) expect, must be based on a broader selection of texts and issues which is meaningful outside of such a limited historical and intellectual context; one which does not suggest (as Lilla has) that we should use Hobbes and Rousseau to understand the politics of contemporary Iran, with no reference whatsoever to the many cogent, articulate attempts to explain the Iranian situation in more proximate, relevant terms.

I gather you don’t intend this merely as a term of political opprobrium, like some kind of religious equivalent of “hippies and communists”. Nor do you mean: “Anticlerical idealists…many times they have had to be put down by force.” As if violence came from the Albigensians, for instance, and not from the crusade against them.

Possibly the veneer covering a conservative Catholic apologetics is wearing a little thin here.