Pierre Manent, likely the greatest political philospher of our time, has a new book out, The Religion of Humanity: The Illusion of Our Times.
Normally, I’d say there is a new translation out of an existing Manent book, but in this case, even though this collection includes several essays translated from French to English for the first time, I don’t believe it has been released in France. Published by St. Augustine’s Press (South Bend, Indiana), it is the joint work of Manent, and the leading scholar and translator of his work, my and Pomocon’s good friend Paul Seaton.
The unifying topic is the “Religion of Humanity,” a phrase/concept that comes from the positivist 19th-century thinker August Comte, but which has been developed a great deal by Manent. Older American readers will recall how in the 70s and 80s a certain of kind of Christian would speak darkly of the threat of “humanism,” or sometimes, “secular humanism,” but the Manentian idea of “the religion of humanity” is more interesting—it makes room for a religious-like use of theoretical ideals. Manent’s follower and co-thinker on this topic, Daniel Mahoney, describes it in the introduction he supplies here as a “psuedo-religion.” In turn, in Manent’s foreward to Mahoney’s own (also excellent) recent book on this, The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity, he describes the heart of the religion as a “ruling opinion” which holds that “peace and unity belong to the natural condition of mankind.” That might sound like a fairly harmless yet misguided optimism, but Manent says this opinion also regards mankind’s “fragmentation into separate political bodies solicitous of their independence” as “the toxic fountainhead of everything that is wrong in human circumstances.” This religion is not just for world goverment if perchance we can acheive; it is scandalized by anything short of it.
As early as 1993, in the immediate wake of the Maastricht treaty which established the contemporary EU, the general drift of Manent’s thinking on this was signalled by his asking, “Is not modern democracy the finally-found form of the religion of Humanity?” The religion replaces the worship of a transcendent God with one of mankind’s humanitarian moments and sentiments, and of certain aspects, the most form-dismissive and culture-dismissive ones, of modern democracy. For a sense of what Manent means by this religious significance given to elements of democratic ideology, one might think of the Fukuyama-stirred talk in the aftermath of 1989 of the “end of history,” or of Chantal Delsol’s worried chapter titles from her (still-essential) book from that era, Icarus Fallen, such as “The Sacralization of Rights,” “The Good without the True,” and “Is Democracy Unsurpassable?”
Like Delsol, Manent belongs to the Roman Catholic remnant in France, although in his case, he was a convert from a communist family. Thus, a primary concern for him regarding the religion of Humanity is its ability to mimic authentic Christianity, which in the era of Pope Francis suggests it could come to replace Catholicism from within its own institutions. As Mahoney puts it,
When progressives, whether Christian or secular, equate dogmatic egalitarianism, “social justice” that is coextensive with collectivism, and glib talk about acheiving “global fraternity” with the demands of the Gospel, they engage in the sloppy thinking and lazy sentimentality that characterizes the softer forms of the religion of Humanity. Sadly, we’ve come to expect such talk from bishops and clerics who barely speak of Jesus Christ, who confuse good intentions with good judgments, and who are more concerned with “social justice” and “global fraternity” than with the salvation of souls. No matter who espouses it, the religion of Humanity is a corrupting falsification of true faith and reason. The fact that many believe it is compatible or even coextensive with Christianity is a sign of the depth of the crisis that confronts us in and outside the church.
I hope in a subsequent post to provide some more guidance for those interested in exploring Manent’s thought through his various books, but I should note that of the sixteen essays and book excerpts in this one, seven were published previously in English, and nine are either brand new to English-speakers, or were only previously available in a journal. Those who already own 1) the essential Manent volume of political philosophy, A World without Politics?, 2) the recent topical consideration of the place of Islam in contemporary France, Beyond Radical Secularism, 3) the incisive recapitulation/development of his important theory of political forms, Democracy without Nations?, and 4) the early essay collection Modern Democracy and Its Discontents, will find that they already have six of the pieces of this book, including the chapter that gives it its title.
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The readers this book will be particularly useful for will be those Christian leaders, clerical and lay, who are not that familiar with Manent as a political philosopher, but who recognize that this topic is becoming important for them, whether they want it to or not, and that he is one of those who has most thoroughly laid the groundwork for thinking about it. I can think of no better corrective to the common fault of so many Christians of the last several decades, of becoming too apolitical, or more precisely, too dismissive of (and ineducable by) political insight and leadership; this often is characterized by a putatively neutral contempt for the current-events concerns of both the left and the right.
Manent is a prolific essayist, and thus, even those already engaged with his work will find a number of pieces here new to them. Highlights on that score include “Migrations and Christianity: What Message?” and a (too-brief!) Manentian excursion into Biblical intepretation, “Who Is the Good Samaritan?” There is also a particularly fine essay on the limitations of the sociological approach to “religion.” Readers newer to Manent should also find the sections on Charles Péguy, the modern nation of Israel, and the title chapter “The Religion of Humanity,” quite striking. Seaton provides helpful introductory notes to every piece, and as for the actual book excerpts (from Beyond Radical Secularism and Thinking Politically) he and Manent chose, they always fit the flow of the book, and work to develop the main themes. I haven’t seen this method of thematically anthologizing a contemporary thinker utilized before, and I must say, it works quite well.
It is the case, however, that the student of Manent who feels she already understands his main points on the religion of Humanity, given her reading from several of the four books mentioned above, might regard this book as belonging to the unessential side of his works. I would agree that his teaching on this topic is not among the three or four most ground-breaking of his findings and teachings.
And I will also share a more elusive reservation, one which I hesitate to share given my near boundless-respect for Manent, and for my two friends, Seaton and Mahoney, who did the most to help me grasp his greatness.1
Manent’s (and Mahoney’s) teaching on the religion of Humanity, while quite necessary to lay out in our age, and characterized by precisely calibrated judgments and a fruitful orderliness, seems somehow over-obvious to my mind, or at least, to my mind’s tastes. Of course, it wasn’t always so for me. Manent’s thought, taken as a whole, is perhaps the best curative for the literary-politics and moral-law-as-politics tendencies that the Christian, especially the younger one, is apt to fall into; I exhibited these tendencies as a young man in the 80s and 90s, taken with the blending of the progressive and the Christian symbolized by artists like U2, and over-impressed by the stern judgments upon both political houses by writers like Tony Campolo or Wendell Berry. Do you remember that initially-annoying young cleric in the film Gran Torino? I was a lay evangelical “Pro-Life Democrat” version of him, and would have benefitted from reading Manent a good deal earlier; still, I did benefit even from the second-hand exposure of reading about one of his very best books, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, and we can hope that with this unique anthology, Seaton and Manent can break through the too-apolitical, and thus the too-religion-of-Humanity-accomodating, stances of some of the confused Christians of our day.
Nonetheless, my taste these days on matters of religion and politics veers toward the bolder, the wilder, the more speculative. If you aren’t trying to grapple with things like why Transgenderism became elevated in a way that has a religious feel to it, why David Bowie’s death drew forth such strong public emotions and declarations, or how in the world so many “respectable” types, especially among the Boomer generation, and even among much of the clergy, so captitulated to the mad group-think coercions of the Covid/Vax Disaster and the related “Summer of BLM,” or why so many millenials fell for a charlatan-thinker like Zizek, I tend to lose interest. Books by Dostoevsky (Demons), Solzhenitsyn (November 1916), Walker Percy, Peter Augustine Lawler, Tom Wolfe (Acid Test), James Poulos, Chantal Delsol, and Ross Douthat and Joseph Bottom seem to have more to say to me about the religious undercurrents of our times, as do songs by various artists, such as Weyes Blood, Cate Le Bon, and John Lennon.2 And obviously, more of the specifics about the interactions of politics and religion in our time are reported by a certain kind of thinker: Douthat, Bottom, George Mardsen, Rod Dreher, and James Patterson come to mind. What Manent and Mahoney teach about the religion of Humanity, in a fairly general and philosophically precise manner, seems a piece of the larger picture we need, and seems particularly relevant to addressing stances often taken by religious officials or the supposedly-respectable politicians, but it doesn’t do the subterranean poking around which I prefer, amid the soul-kindling which might spark, and the damp rot of the spirit which might prevent, the next revival.
Even though I am reporting something of personal prediliction here, I'm sure both Manent and Mahoney would largely understand what I'm talking about...Mahoney himself has given us one of the better reflections on Demons in recent years. And I do hope my little riff here doesn’t detract our readers’ interest in this fine new volume; again, I hope to provide a guide to reading his books if you’re unfamiliar with them, in a coming post.
The increasingly prolific Mahoney has a new book out—only six months after his important Stateman as Thinker! It’s essays of his on Manent and Roger Scruton.
My piece on “Imagine’s” attack on religion became the longest Carl’s Rock Songbook number, and is the best resource for understanding the Tocquevillean and artistry-attuned features of own thinking on religion-and-politics topics.
I'm interested in critiques about the religion of humanity and will have to track down this book. Thanks for writing about it.
It's clear from your post what the book is against, and I'm curious if you have a sense about what it's *for*. Put another way, I'm assuming that these thinkers are for "the salvation of souls," as Mahoney puts it, but I'm not quite sure what that means. Conversion to one particular strain of Christianity? Or is it more about living wisely inside any faith tradition?