This important volume offers a much needed foray into Hegel’s engagement with the challenging nexus of religion and politics. While global events of the past two decades have highlighted religion’s ongoing impact in the world, especially in relation to politics, remarkably little English-language scholarship has taken up Hegel’s nuanced engagement with these themes. This collection both addresses this lacuna and points to the need for more work to be done. As the essays demonstrate, Hegel has much to contribute to our comprehension of these topics.

Together, the ten essays offer an important and complementary array of perspectives on Hegel’s views—particularly his mature views—of the complex relations between religion and politics. Hegel holds that religion cultivates dispositions that are crucial for ethics and politics and in some sense foundational for political life. Yet he rejects theocracy, attributes to the state significant authority over religious institutions, and stresses the importance of freedom of conscience. Politics cannot do without religion or stand in radical separation from religion; and yet religion neither determines public policy nor functions as a trump card in political conflicts. Hegel thus challenges many conventional views about the relation between religion and politics. The essays work through various dimensions of this complex picture.

Following a brief introduction that highlights the topic’s ongoing importance as well as its imbrication with many aspects of Hegel’s thought, the first three chapters provide the broadest treatments of Hegel’s account of the relation between religion and politics. Focusing on Hegel’s later thought, Mark Tunick frames the analysis in terms of similarities and differences between Edmund Burke’s and Hegel’s notions of a ‘consecrated state’. For Tunick, the key to Hegel’s account of the state as ‘consecrated’ lies in the idea that both the consummate religion—Protestantism—and the modern, Hegelian state have at their core the same principle of subjectivity. This commonality, however, does not entail that religion ‘hold[s] the reins of government’, since such an arrangement would fail to respect the principle of subjective freedom (24). While much of the essay treats ‘religion’ in unqualified terms, Tunick highlights a crucial issue by noting that, for Hegel, ‘the Protestant Reformation produced a religious spirituality of the right sort’ (29). The implication is that Hegel champions a particular conception of religion over against others, but this point could have been further developed.

Rachel Bayefsky’s excellent ‘The State as a “Temple of Human Freedom”’ focuses on Hegel’s concern with the kind of religion that is able to play an appropriate role in the modern state (41). She stresses that church and state stand in a ‘symbiotic’ relationship and highlights the state’s role in supporting the forms of religion that themselves express and manifest freedom. In the case of minority groups, for instance, their inclusion in the state is conceived partly to prod them to develop in a more free, rational direction. Importantly, then, for Bayefsky, ‘Hegel does not see religions as static entities either supportive of, or opposed to, the state; religions can evolve in response to social and political configurations’ (53). Some may find Bayefsky overly generous on this point, but she places in relief an issue that is crucial for the interpretation of Hegel and for contemporary discussions of religion and politics.

In ‘Religion and the Dialectic of Enlightenment’, William Maker focuses on what he sees as Hegel’s view of religion’s ongoing threat to a free political life. Commenting principally on the Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right but attending briefly to the later Berlin lectures on religion as well, Maker contends that Hegel remained sceptical of religion’s becoming more rational and more thoroughly supportive of freedom. Whereas Bayefsky highlights Hegel’s account of the transformation of religion, Maker emphasizes what he sees as an enduring tension between religion and reason, and gives little attention to Hegel’s mature account of the immanent development of cognition from religious representations to philosophical thought.

In the fourth essay, Timothy Brownlee argues that Hegel’s concern with subjective freedom underwrites a more accommodationist view of religious toleration than that of John Locke. Whereas Locke argues against any special accommodations for those who resist general laws on the basis of religious convictions, Hegel contends that in cases where the state is not threatened by these acts it should tolerate them out of respect for subjective freedom. For Brownlee, Hegel provides a non-contractarian defense of liberal values which supports a more robust notion of toleration than Locke’s more classically liberal defense.

The following two essays take up Hegel’s treatments of Islam. Despite recognizing Islam’s global import, Hegel gives it astoundingly little attention in a system that addresses so many other religions, cultures, and ideas at such length. Particularly given Islam’s prominence today, the minimal direct discussion it receives in Hegel’s thought merits attention. Kevin Thompson, in ‘Hegel, the Political, and the Theological: The Question of Islam’, begins with a fascinating analysis of Hegel’s response to charges that associated his thought with Sufi mysticism. While such claims were integral to accusations of pantheism, Hegel reverses the charges by arguing that it is his accusers who, in their Pietism, come closer to a mysticism that subsumes all determinacy into an abstract universal. Thompson then turns to a broader range of Hegel’s discussions about the relation between religion and politics. Stressing what he sees as a major development from a diarchic model of religious and political authority in the 1820 Philosophy of Right to a more integrated model by 1830, Thompson argues that

Christianity and Islam are thus ultimately rivals competing within the same sphere. Thompson’s argument is powerful and important, yet to further develop it will require greater precision regarding the specificity of Hegel’s account of the consummate religion. This may highlight the distinctiveness of Hegel’s account of Christianity in a way that embeds critiques of Islamic thought more deeply within Hegel’s systematic project than Thompson suggests.

Will Dudley’s contribution offers an outstanding analysis of Hegel’s treatment of Islam in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. In his account of determinate religion, Hegel portrays Islam as another instance of the religion of sublimity, of which Judaism is the paradigmatic instance. Unlike Judaism, however, Islam—for Hegel—universalizes the religion of sublimity. Dudley then considers the connection that Hegel draws between Islam and fanaticism, which for Hegel entails an enthusiasm for something abstract and hence a rejection of determination. One of Hegel’s central models of this pure formalism that rejects all particularity is the French Revolution and its devolution into the Terror; but Islam provides another important example for Hegel. Interestingly, Dudley both rather approvingly quotes language from Hegel that seems to claim a necessary connection between Islam and fanaticism and links these same characteristics to the French Revolution, the paradigmatically modern Western political event. Dudley concludes by making the invaluable point that it is an empirical question to what extent contemporary groups who understand themselves as Jewish, Christian or Islamic correspond to the entities Hegel describes under these rubrics. In itself, this point opens the way towards appreciating Hegel’s analyses of particular religious groups without engaging in the generalizations that Hegel makes. Nonetheless, given the political stakes of contemporary discourse about ‘Islam,’ this point might have been significantly more prominent in an analysis that largely associates Islam with fanaticism.

The most theologically engaged piece in the collection, Robert Williams’s ‘The Inseparability of Love and Anguish: Hegel’s Theological Critique of Modernity,’ argues that Hegel develops a theological position that incorporates a sense of tragedy and anguish while critiquing modernity’s inability to overcome poverty and its devastating consequences. In this reading, Hegel rejects what Williams refers to as a ‘traditional’, ‘monarchic’ conception of God in favour of one in which God suffers (135–8). The result places Hegel ‘between atheism and theism’ (140). In developing these points, Williams leans heavily on interpretations that cannot be fully defended in this context and leaves central notions—e.g., atheism—abstract and underdeveloped. Focusing on the 1821 manuscript of Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion and drawing connections with Hegel’s early writings, Williams’s Hegel presents Christianity as standing in judgment of Enlightenment and modernity. Christianity preserves a sense of anguish that modernity too easily abandons. Poverty, in this account, is not simply a minor shortcoming of modernity but rather has devastating material and spiritual consequences that preclude the possibility of a thoroughgoing defence of modernity (150–1). While Williams seems to allow Enlightenment to represent modernity more generally for Hegel—and thereby to overlook a Hegelian account of a modernity that surpasses the Enlightenment—his attention to the vastness of poverty’s impact, as well as to the preservation of anguish over modernity’s failures, is powerful.

Nicholas Mowad, in turn, examines the relationships among nationality, religion and the state to defend Hegel against charges of nationalism and racism. Central to this project is a conception of the nation as a social group that shares ‘a common culture and religion, that is, a shared understanding … of the fundamental nature of reality’ (158). Mowad seeks to give a sympathetic reading of Hegel’s ‘deduction’ of the plurality of nations in the first part of subjective spirit. Because spirit at this stage is not clearly differentiated from nature and because nature itself is varied, there must be a plurality of distinct nations whose conceptions of spirit, whether implicit or explicit, are marked by their geographies of origin. Though Mowad asks some of the obvious questions raised by such an account, he leaves unasked crucial questions regarding how thoroughly spirit’s subsequent development transforms this relationship to nature (164). Each nation, in this reading, is a particular, limited nation, with a correspondingly particular and limited or determinate religion. There is, however, an exception: a nation that is not a nation and a corresponding religion that is not a determinate religion—i.e., the ‘Germans’ and ‘Christianity’. Mowad argues that Hegel’s use of these terms is very different from their more conventional usages. The ‘Germans’ cannot be identified with the peoples who long ago or today have inhabited central Europe; it is a grouping ‘beyond race and nationality’ that includes all ‘modern’ people (169). Similarly,

One wonders, however, whether this ‘defence’ will placate many critics as well as whether Mowad’s manner of distinguishing the consummate religion from determinate religions has led him to sacrifice too much of the determinate content that Hegel elaborates in his account of Christianity in the Berlin lectures.

The final two essays consider relations between Hegel and subsequent thinkers—Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Weber. Todd Gooch’s excellent essay seeks to illuminate both how much Hegel and Feuerbach share in their conceptions of Bildung and to identify the precise character of their disagreements. The essay begins with a lucid overview of Hegel’s account of Bildung, understood in terms of culture and education. In highlighting the role that Hegel attributes to religion in cultivating appropriate ethical and political dispositions (Gesinnungen), Gooch provides a strikingly clear account of a theme that runs through a number of essays in the volume. In tracing the developments in Feuerbach’s conceptions of Bildung, Gooch shows that Feuerbach shares with Hegel the view that human Bildung initially occurs principally through religion. However, ‘Whereas Hegel emphasizes the cognitive component of religious consciousness, … Feuerbach insists that the fundamental concern of the religious believer is not truth but salvation’ (195). These contrasting claims regarding the essence of religion generate conflicting judgments about whether a free, modern political life can be reconciled with Christianity or requires moving beyond religion. In doing so, the essay raises important questions regarding how we can judge claims regarding the essence of religion or of particular traditions. For Feuerbach, the dispositions cultivated by contemporary German Protestantism were inimical to a genuinely free political life. Through a brief but illuminating discussion of the different historical experiences of Hegel and Feuerbach, Gooch suggests these differences go some way toward explaining their divergent judgments.

Finally, Andrew Buchwalter concentrates on Hegel’s account of civil society—especially corporations—as ‘shaped by and illustrative of the principle of Christianity, Protestantism in particular’ (216). In emphasizing the importance of corporations and Hegel’s broader attention to poverty and its dire implications for freedom, Buchwalter concludes that Hegel ‘may be characterized, however qualifiedly, as a Christian socialist’ (221). He offers a brief comparison to Weber and notes that the two have overlapping views regarding Protestantism’s role in the emergence of modern bourgeois society. Despite these commonalities, Weber views the egotism and evisceration of freedom that can characterize this society as ‘a by-product of the unfolding of the Protestant ethic, [while] Hegel invokes Protestantism as their antidote’ (227). Though Buchwalter’s piece raises a number of questions, it is to be regretted that he does not discuss the relevance of the difference between Hegel’s Lutheranism and Weber’s frequent focus on Calvinism.

While the essays themselves do much to signal directions for further work, I will conclude by noting certain limits to the volume that indicate issues on which future scholarship might productively focus. Notably, the essays engage remarkably little with recent German-language literature on the topic (see, for example, Arndt et al. Reference Arndt, Bal and Ottmann2003; Arndt et al. Reference Arndt, Iber and Kruck2009; Wendte Reference Wendte2007). Also, with a few exceptions, the essays focus on the Phenomenology of Spirit and later works. This is in no sense a shortcoming; but particularly with the recent publication of a new edition of many of Hegel’s writings from the 1790s, there is much work to be done on Hegel’s early views on religion—which generally stand in complex relations to his later thought (Hegel Reference Hegel2014). Moreover, only a few of the essays (e.g., those by Bayefsky, Maker and Thompson) examine or raise the question of shifts in Hegel’s views on these issues even during the 1820s.

The latter point connects to another issue raised by the volume: the importance of carefully situating Hegel in the historical context of his tumultuous times. Gooch’s contribution demonstrates most clearly what may be gained by careful attention to the rapid historical changes of this period, but Thompson, Williams and Buchwalter also take important steps in this direction. As a number of the essays—especially Dudley’s—suggest, this attention to history is vital in dealing with Hegel’s account of religion and politics. In particular, judgments about whether the form of Christianity dominant in a particular moment cultivates the dispositions that support a modern, free state are substantially empirical judgments.

The final cluster of issues raised but only partly addressed in the essays concerns some of the central concepts of the analysis itself. Much recent work in the academic study of religion has problematized and historicized the category of religion, powerfully demonstrating the stakes of contestation over this concept. To a large degree, however, the essays take for granted the sense of this key term. More explicit attention to Hegel’s attempts to reconceptualize religion itself would provide greater purchase on issues central to the volume: the cultivation of dispositions, the relation between religion and philosophy, and the relative authority of religious teachings and of the state, for instance. Moreover, it is frequently unclear whether discussions are meant to concern religion in general or the consummate religion in particular. The difference is crucial for many questions at issue in this collection. While Tunick, Bayefsky and Williams, in different ways, attend to Hegel’s concern with the precise form of religion that is appropriate in modernity, Thompson’s relative inattention to the specificity of Hegel’s account of the consummate religion detracts from an otherwise excellent contribution. Despite these shortcomings, however, the volume makes major contributions to a pressing field of inquiry.