Reason, Revelation, and American Theocracy Rightly Understood

Ivan Kenneally, an assistant professor political science at the Rochester Institute of Technology and blogger at Postmodern Conservative , reviews Remi Brague’s The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea for Modern Age :

In The Law of God, Brague never specifically mentions American intellectual discourse, but he does observe that generally today there is “constant talk about the distinction between the religious and the political.” In an essay entitled “Are Non-Theocratic Regimes Possible?” in the Spring 2006 Intercollegiate Review, he does directly speak of the “struggles that constitute the contemporary American ‘culture wars’” in this vein. There, Brague marshals powerful evidence to demonstrate that our central notions of individual conscience and democracy are fundamentally Christian in nature and that further, even our understanding of political life is fundamentally theocratic, if that is taken to mean that it is based “upon assumptions that are theological in character.” While Brague does concede that within modernity the “idea of a divine law did not totally disappear,” the typical modern analysis “empties it of all content, which is perhaps worse than simply being forgotten.”

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