An X thread from 2/21/25, explaining that the “post-war consensus” is much older than the post-World War 2 era:
The so-called postwar consensus that sought to weaken religious, civic, and familial loyalties as a peace-keeping measure in the aftermath of WW2 was really nothing new. Indeed, this tactic might be considered a post-Reformation consensus, as the same strategy was used to try to quell the so-called “wars of religion” that rocked Europe in the aftermath of Luther’s ecclesiastical and theological revolution.
America’s founding fathers were already pushing for “weak gods” in the very sense that Reno points to in his book on the postwar consensus. According to George Will, the founding fathers “wished to tame and domesticate religious passions of the sort that convulsed Europe . . . [Jefferson] held that ‘operations of the mind are not subject to legal coercion, but that ‘acts of the body’ are. ‘Mere belief,’ says Jefferson, ‘in one god or 20, neither picks one’s pockets nor breaks one’s legs.’”
William Cavanaugh describes it this way: “As the story is told, the separation of religion and politics was necessitated by the violence between Catholics and Protestants following the Reformation. Religious passion and coercive power is a dangerous mixture. Their differentiation with the creation of the modern state would be the only way to secure peace.”
While Cavanaugh challenges certain aspects of that standard reading, it is obvious why it has plausibility. The privatization of religion, in particular, was already on the table in the 18th century. And of course, the privatization of religion means the secularization of public life, and secularization means the ties that normally bind people to one another in churches and families must be weakened. Just like the post-WW2 situation, religious dogmatism was viewed by Enlightenment rationalists as a socially dangerous and politically divisive force that needed to be quelled.
Facile, overly simplistic accounts of the post-war consensus are misleading. WW2 is not the sole mythology behind the rise of the weak gods; the process had been unleashed long before.
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Peter Leithart provides a summary:
“Modern politics was born, in a more than chronological sense, in the aftermath of the wars of religion. Wolfhart Pannenberg has pointed out that until the seventeenth century it was assumed that uniformity of belief was a prerequisite for orderly social life. After decades of bloodshed, violence, and terror in the wars of religion, however, many came to something like the opposite conviction that, in Pannenberg’s words, ‘religious passion destroys social peace.’ Given a violently divided Christendom, the only sensible solution appeared to be to excise from political life the cause of these horrors — namely, particular theological claims — and to replace them with universally acceptable principles derived from human nature and natural law. Modern politics was thus founded on the principle that religion is a private concern, useful insofar as it inculcates socially approved virtues of toleration and honesty, dangerous if vigorously pressed into the political arena. Under the circumstances, it is difficult to fault those who arrived at this solution; they were, after all, desperate for peace. Yet, understandable as it may be, the solution is impossible to implement. The notion that politics can function in a religious and theological vacuum is a myth. Politics is concerned with justice; justice is inescapably a moral concept; morality in turn is inescapably religious; and true religion, in the Christian perspective, inescapably includes particular theological commitments. Christianity entails the invariably political announcement that Jesus Christ, not Caesar, is Lord; to concede that political actors may legitimately ignore this highly specific theological claim is nothing less than an abandonment of the Christian position.”
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Leslie Newbigin addresses the same issue:
“The nation-state, replacing the old concepts of the Holy Church and Holy Empire, is the center-piece in the political scene in post-Enlightenment Europe. After the trauma of the religious wars of the seventeenth century, Europe settled down to the principle of religious coexistence, and the passions which had formerly been invested in rival interpretations of religion were more and more invested in the nation state. Nationalism became the effective ideology of the European peoples, always at times of crises proving stronger than any other ideological or religious force.”
If there is any difference bewteen what Newbigin describes here and the postwar consensus, it is this: The post-Reformation Enlightenment period allowed a strong loyalty to the state to survive. The state would supercede the family, and most especially the church, in the hierarchy of loyalties. The loyalty to the state, of course, could arguably be what led first to WW1 and then to WW2, which were not wars of religion, per se (at least not explicitly), but wars of nationalism. Nazism was certainly a form of post-Enlightenment statism, as was communism. But it cal also be argued that America and Britain were flirting with statist ideologies in the first part of the twentieth century.
After WW2, even loyalty to the state (whether in its patriotic or nationalistic forms) had to go, replaced by a new globalized and multicultural order in which the autonomy of the deracinated individual would be the only thing that matters. But this was just an extension of a logic that was released into the West long, long before WW2, tracing back to the post-Reformation Enlightenment.
Note that in no way am I blaming the Reformation for the rise of secularization and the weak gods Reno describes. The Reformation itself was a good and proper response to the failure of the papacy and the medieval church. Had the West aligned itself behind the Reformation, and had the Reformers been able to unite more deeply with one another, the history of Christendom could have been extended long into the future and much of the heartache and bloodshed of the last few centuries could have been avoided.
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The postwar consensus has much deeper roots than the “never again” of the post-WW2 victors. It actually traces back to the post-Reformation period. Perhaps it could be best be called the post-Enlightement consensus. It was the Enlightenment that planted the seeds of the secularization of Western culture, finally culminating a generation or two after WW2. It was the Enlightenment that paved the way for the detached autonomous individual, governed by his reason and feelings alone, with social peace maintained through a mythical “social contract.”
In another place, I have summed it up this way: “In Europe, the so-called religious wars rocked society at its foundations. Religious dissent in the wake of the Reformation put a tremendous strain on culture throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 supposedly brought the age of religious warfare to an end, but in the process also did something else significant: by removing religion from the sphere of public truth, the modern secular state was birthed. To greatly simplify, the logic ran something like this: somehow, peace between various warring religious factions in the post-Reformational situation had to be maintained. The newly formed secular state, theoretically religiously neutral and ecclesiastically uncommitted, would take over this role. This newly created state would in turn be governed by another Enlightenment creation, namely, universal reason.”
For more: http://trinity-pres.net/essays/THECHURCHANDHERRIVALSversion3.0.pdf…
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