Picking up the New York Times Magazine yesterday, we were surprised to read on the cover that “We in the West find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still inflame the minds of men.” It was the headline over an article by a professor at Columbia, Mark Lilla, who reports that “A little more than two centuries ago we began to believe that the West was on a one-way track towards modern secular democracy.” He writes that “In order to escape the destructive passions of messianic faith, political theology centered on God was replaced by political philosophy centered on man.” He goes on to say, “We have wagered that it is wiser to beware the forces unleashed by the Bible’s messianic promise than to try exploiting them for the public good. We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated by divine revelation.”

It’s unclear who the “we” is, but count “us” out. The account doesn’t describe the majority of Americans we know, nor American history as we know it. The Declaration of Independence described men as “endowed by their creator” with rights. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” said, “Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid … We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights.”

More recently, another inspired American leader, President Bush, has repeatedly justified his foreign policy by reiterating that freedom is “God’s gift.” It’s one thing to prohibit Congress from making any law respecting an establishment of religion and to prohibit a religious test for any office of trust under the United States, as the Constitution does; it’s another thing to say that Americans politics are unilluminated by divine revelation. To many religious Americans, including many of America’s greatest political and spiritual leaders, the idea of theology inflaming passions is hardly, as the Times article suggests, “incomprehensible.” It is, in fact, quite readily comprehensible. Yet another example of the Times’s editors misunderestimating their readers.