Religion and Politics, Home and Abroad

by Andrew Sullivan, Mark Lilla, Philip Jenkins

Americans are among the most religious people in the wealthy, democratic West. Yet we are not only comfortable, but proud, of the independence of church and state. Are we bound to fumble in our foreign policy if we cannot understand why the politics of equality, liberty, toleration, and democracy fit so uneasily with the explicitly religious politics of the Middle East? Closer to home, evangelical Christians remain one of the most powerful forces in American politics, and perhaps a dominant force in the Republican Party. Will they bring down the "big tent" if the GOP nominates a cosmopolitan pro-choice New Yorker or a Mormon? Is there, perhaps, a place for religious ideas on the American left?This month's Cato Unbound explores these questions and with a stellar lineup of deep thinkers about God and politics. Leading off this month, Columbia University's Mark Lilla, author of The Stillborn Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, offers a learned meditation on the trouble Americans have grasping the "political theology" of much of the world. Joining Lilla, we have the prolific Penn State professor of history and religion Philip Jenkins; Damon Linker, author of The Secular America Under Siege; and The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, author of recent The Conservative How We Lost It; How To Get It Back.

61 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 8, 2007

About the author

Andrew Michael Sullivan is a British blogger, author, and political commentator. He is a speaker at universities, colleges, and civic organizations in the United States, and a guest on national news and political commentary television shows in the United States and Europe. Born and raised in England, he has lived in the United States since 1984 and currently resides in Washington, D.C. and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Sullivan is sometimes considered a pioneer in political weblog journalism, since he was one of the first prominent political journalists in the United States to start his own personal blog. Sullivan wrote his blog for a year at Time Magazine, shifting on 1 February 2007 to The Atlantic, where it received approximately 40 million page views in the first year. He is the former editor of The New Republic.